Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“I don’t mean this offensively, but I would gladly pay double my taxes if people like you and Albert Hollister could be paid not to think.”

“I want to tell you something else about my daughter. She survived a massacre in her village in El Salvador. She was kidnapped at age eight by an evil man who thought he could terrify her. She bit the hell out of him. I saw her kidnapper eat six soft-nosed rounds from a three-fifty-seven. The wounds looked like flowers bursting from his shirt. The last round virtually eviscerated him. I enjoyed watching him blown apart. I wished I had done it instead of someone else. What does that suggest to you?”

“That you’re an obsessed and sick man.”

“Here’s the point. Booze probably burned up fifteen or twenty years of my longevity. That means I don’t have a lot to lose. I think you’ve been getting a free pass with the sheriff’s department. You’re either in total denial about your situation, or you’re aiding and abetting a killer.”

“How dare you.”

“You have resources that even the federal government doesn’t have. Why aren’t your people looking for the man who killed your granddaughter?”

“Why do you think I’m not looking for him?”

“Because you seem uninformed. Surrette did it. The question is why and how. She was in a saloon full of outlaw bikers. Then, puff, she was gone.”

“I’m not convinced this man exists.”

“He tortured and killed people in his hometown for two decades, under the noses of the FBI. You don’t think he could escape a wrecked jail van and be killing people in this area? How about the waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“Which means none of your investigators bothered to look into it. Or they didn’t tell you about it.”

His gaze went away from mine. When he looked at me again, the confidence was not in his face. “What happened to the waitress?”

“She didn’t show up for

work. Her house was locked and dead-bolted from the inside. Her bracelet was placed on a rock in the middle of the St. Regis River. It’s all part of Surrette’s pattern. He feeds on attention and the confusion and angst he instills in others.”

“What does the sheriff in Mineral County say?”

“The sheriff will do everything he can. If Surrette is the abductor, that won’t be enough. Does it strike you as ironic that I have to explain these things to you, sir?”

He didn’t answer. He kept staring at me inquisitively, the way a clinician might.

“Do you want to ask me something?” I said.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re after.”

I couldn’t believe his statement. “I told you. I’m afraid it didn’t do much good.”

“Earlier you called me a son of a bitch. I don’t hold that against you, because you were speaking honestly about your feelings. But I think you have an agenda. You resent others for their wealth. Everywhere you look, you see plots and conspiracies at work, corporations destroying the planet, robbing the poor, that sort of thing, and you never realize these things you think you see are a reflection of your own failure.”

“Mr. Younger, if I harbor resentment toward anyone, it’s toward myself. I couldn’t prevent my daughter from interviewing Surrette in prison and writing articles about him that exposed him to a capital conviction. He won’t rest until he kills her.”

“You told her not to do it?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then it’s on her.”

I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a home governed by the value system of Love Younger.

I heard someone knock tentatively on the kitchen door. Through the glass, I saw a blond man in shades. Caspian was standing behind him, raising up on his toes to see inside the house. Love Younger opened the door. “What do you want, Kyle?” he said.

“Caspian thought I ought to see if you needed any help.”

“I don’t.”