Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I DROVE UP the Blackfoot, through lake country and meadowland and ghost ranches and humped, green foothills, then caught the two-lane highway on the east front of the Mission Mountains and entered the Swan Valley. John Steinbeck once said Montana is a love affair. If a person was going to make his troth with any particular place on earth, I don't think he could find a better one than the stretch of road I was now on. Every bridge crossed a postcard stream, every mountain tumbled into one higher and a deeper green than itself.

Through the pines I saw an enormous, elongated body of blue water glimmering in the sun and I turned off the highway and drove down a shady driveway into a collection of cabins that had been built during the Depression in a stand of birch trees. On the far side of the lake the mountains were thickly wooded with ponderosa and larch and fir, and the only boat on the water was a red canoe from which a man was fly-casting along the bank. Out of the north, a gust of wind blew the length of the lake, wrinkling the surface like old skin, carrying your eye with it to the southern shoreline and, in the distance, the Swan Peaks jutting up over nine thousand feet, gray and steel-colored and snow-packed against the sky.

It wasn't hard to find the Cherokee Jeep Sue Lynn had stolen from the ATF agents. It was parked in a carport attached to the caretaker's cottage, where her cousin lived and took care of the grounds. I knocked on the front door and waited. When no one answered, I walked around back. Sue Lynn had created another prayer garden by placing a circle of stones around a birch tree, with a cross made from strips of red and black cloth that met at the tree trunk. She was sitting on the back steps, in pink tennis shoes and a sleeveless denim shirt and cutoff jeans rolled up high on her thighs. Her face showed no surprise when she saw me.

"Lucas told you where I was?" she asked.

"You'd rather Amos Rackley get to you first?"

"He's not all bad."

"Are you in contact with him?"

"I take whatever help people offer me. I don't have a lot of choices right now."

I sat down on the step below her and removed my hat. A family was grilling sausages on the cement porch of the cottage next door and smoke drifted through the tree limbs overhead.

"You going to let Dr. Voss go down for Lamar Ellison's murder?" I asked.

The surface of the lake shimmered with blades of light.

"Ellison told you something in the tavern the night he died. Something you couldn't deal with," I said.

She paused before she spoke, as though she were about to explain someone's twisted mentality to herself rather than to me. "He said he was sorry about my little brother. His words were, 'I didn't know the kid was gonna get snuffed. I thought they'd turn him loose after a while. There's some real sick guys in the D.C. area, though.'"

I turned around. Her eyes looked like washed coal, bright and hard and filled with injury and an unrelieved anger that would probably never find release. "Ellison kidnapped your little brother?" I said. "He sold him to a deviate. On the East Coast. Him and some others."

"Who?"

"I don't know. Lamar was incoherent. When he finally stopped babbling he didn't know what he'd said."

"You followed him home?" I asked. She rose from the steps and squatted down by the prayer circle and began rolling up the strips of red and black cloth that intersected at the trunk of the birch tree.

"I thought I could find an answer. But there's no answer. I read that book you told me about, Black Elk Speaks. You know the ending. For Indians the Tree of Life is dead," she said.

"You listen to me, Sue Lynn. The right lawyer can get you off. Ellison was a sonofabitch and deserved what he got."

"I'm not going to say any more."

"You have to. Doc's going on trial for what you did."

"Somebody else was there. You leave me alone."

"Say again?"

"A guy was in the shadows. Outside Lamar's house."

"What guy?"

"I didn't stop to chat. But he could have saved Lamar's life and he didn't. Get that look off your face, Mr. Holland. Who hated Lamar as much as I did? Tell Lucas good-bye for me."

"Doc?" I said.

She bundled the strips of black and red cloth under one arm and went inside the cottage and dead-bolted the door behind her.

I USED a pay phone on the highway and called the sheriff at his home.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine killed Ellison," I said.