"You pulled in two other suspects for Maisey's rape. Their fingerprints were at the crime scene. But you didn't charge them."
"One guy was a part-time carpenter. He worked on that house before Dr. Voss bought it. The other man was at a party there. A couple of witnesses back up his story."
"You know they did it."
"Help me prove that and I'll lock them up. Look, you're mad because your friend is not easy to defend. The knife puts him inside Ellison's cabin. He stopped at a filling station a mile down the road and filled his tank with gas a half hour before the fire started. He had motivation and no alibi. When we picked him up and told him somebody had burned Ellison to death, he said, 'I should give a shit?' You were a police officer. Who would you have in custody?"
"I'd start with Wyatt Dixon. Why do you allow a psychopath like that in your town, anyway?" "Say again?" he said.
"Back home our sheriff is a one-lung cretin who couldn't go to the bathroom without a diagram. But he'd have Wyatt Dixon pepper-Maced and in waist chains five minutes after he hit town."
"Yeah, I heard about the way you do things down there. We sent a bunch of our convicts from Deer Lodge to one of your rental prisons. We're still paying off the lawsuits. Now, look, Missy-"
"Say that again?"
"Sorry. I mean Ms. Carrol. You and Mr. Holland aren't married, are you? You two seem to make a fine match," the sheriff said.
"I'll be back later."
"Oh I know. Yes, ma'am, I surely know," he said, two fingers pressed against one eyebrow.
Temple and I walked outside into the sunshine. The maples on the courthouse lawn were puffing in the wind, and a long procession of bicyclists in brightly colored Spandex outfits was threading in and out of the traffic.
"Who was the kid with Dixon? The one at the literary reading you told me about?" Temple said.
"You got me. Why?"
"We need to find a weak link. What's the deal on this Indian gal?" she said.
"Her name is Sue Lynn Big Medicine. I think she's working for the ATE"
"What's their interest?"
"Guns, maybe. Or the Alfred P. Murrah Building."
"The Oklahoma City bombing?"
"Sue Lynn asked me why the feds would want information on people who have been in Kingman, Arizona."
Temple widened her eyes.
"That puts a new perspective on things," she said.
"I don't buy it," I said. "This trouble is local, and it has to do with money."
"It always has to do with money. Or sex and power," she said. "Who's this woman you're involved with?"
It WASN'T HARD to get the name of the kid who had accompanied Wyatt Dixon to Xavier Girard's literary reading. The reading had been intended as a library fund-raiser, and everyone attending had been required to sign the guest book and give his mailing address at the door.
The name above Wyatt Dixon's was a woman's. The name below was Terry Witherspoon.
Temple used her cell phone to call a friend in the sheriff's
department in San Antonio. He ran the name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and called us back. Temple listened, then thanked him and clicked off her phone.
"If it's the same kid, he was in a juvenile facility in North Carolina," she said. "What for?" "His records are sealed."
Terry Witherspoon lived in a knocked-together shack on a dirt road notched out of a hillside high above the Clark Fork River.