Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

She puffed out one cheek and tapped the heel of her fist on the fence rail. “I was parked down at Harvest Foods. I’d left my window partly down. When I came outside, this had been dropped on the seat.”

She removed an eight-by-ten photograph from the manila folder and handed it to me. It was probably taken without a flash. The interior of the room was gray, the walls concrete and without windows, like those in a basement. The lighting was poor. A woman dressed only in her undergarments was bound in a chair, a gag tied across her mouth. The eyes had been razored out of the photo, creating the effect of a mask, making any positive identification of the woman impossible.

“Here’s the note that came with it,” Gretchen said. “It’s a Xerox. You can bet it and the photo and the envelope are clean.”

Regardless, I held the sheet of paper by the edges. The note was typed, unlike the one sent by Surrette to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. If the sender was Surrette, he was a smart man. There was no way to compare the notes. Even the dashes between the sentences had been replaced with conventional punctuation. It read:

Dear Munchkin,

I have already started casting our film. I think this lady is perfect for the role of “the sacrificial queen,” don’t you? We can add others as we go. You have no idea how many “volunteers” are out there and how easily recruited they can be. Please bring your equipment to our first meeting and we’ll get started immediately. We’ll have some cherry pie.

Sincerely,

Your biggest fan,

A.

“This has to go to the sheriff and the FBI,” I said.

“That’s what he wants me to do,” she replied.

“How do you figure that?”

“Because Surrette will disappear and I’ll look like an idiot. In the meantime, we’ll go crazy thinking about what he’s doing to that girl.”

“I’ll go with you to the federal building in Missoula.”

“You can take the note and the photograph, Dave, and do whatever you want with them.”

She unhitched the chain on the gate and started through it.

“You’re the beloved daughter of my oldest and best friend, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “Do you believe I would deliberately hurt either of you? Do you honestly believe that?”

She rechained the gate and didn’t look back. I might as well have been speaking to the wind.

ON WEDNESDAY, WYATT Dixon was building a sweat lodge in his side yard with stones from the river, hauling them bare-chested uphill in a wheelbarrow, when he saw a chauffeured black Chrysler pull off the highway and park by the entrance to the steel footbridge on the opposite bank. Love Younger got out of the backseat and began walking across the bridge, his rubber-booted feet clanging on the grid, a straw creel hung from one shoulder, a split-bamboo fly rod in his right hand, a cork sun helmet on his head.

He stepped off the bridge and walked down to the water’s edge, where Wyatt was lifting a large stone into the wheelbarrow. “You mind if I fish along the front of your property?” he asked.

“Montana law allows you to go through anybody’s land, long as you’re within the flood line of the river,” Wyatt said.

“I heard there’s a deep hole under the bridge here. They say it’s full of German browns.”

“Have at it,” Wyatt said. He sat high up on the bank, a long-stemmed weed between his teeth, his straw hat slanted down on his forehead, and watched the older man wade into the water and thread his nylon leader through the eyelet of a woolly worm. What’s really on your mind, old man? he thought.

Wyatt could not reconcile the proportions of the older man with his wealth and status. Love Younger had the neck of a bull and the hands of a bricklayer. The few rich people Wyatt had known did not resemble Love Younger. Did Younger come up the hard way, racking pipe and wrestling a drill bit in the oil field? Or had someone bequeathed him money, a rich wife, maybe? Wyatt did not believe that great wealth came to people through hard work. If that were true, almost everyone would be rich.

He got to his feet. “You won’t catch none like that,” he said.

“Oh?” Younger said, turning around in the water, the current cutting across his knees.

“You have to face the opposite bank and throw the woolly worm at eleven o’clock from you. Then you let your line billow out in a big bell. As your worm sinks, it’ll swing past you and straighten the line. That’s when the hackle on your worm will start pulsing. By that time the line will be at two o’clock and the worm will be drifting right above the bottom. Them browns will flat tear it up. The best time is in the fall, when they spawn. They’ll knock the rod plumb out of your hand.”

Wyatt knew Younger was not listening, and he wondered why he was going to such lengths to explain a fishing technique to a man who probably cared little or nothing about it.

“I see you’re an expert,” Younger said, wading out of the stream. “Can I sit down?”

“Suit yourself.”