“He was tailgating me in a skinned-up Ford truck on the highway. He had his sun visor down, and I couldn’t make out his face. At one point he was five feet from my bumper. I had to run a yellow light to get away from him. When I came out of the tack store, he was parked across the street.”
“It was the same guy?”
“It was the same truck. The guy behind the wheel was smoking a pipe. I walked to the curb to get a better look, and he drove off.”
“It wasn’t Dixon?”
“I would have said so if it was.”
“I was just asking. You couldn’t see the tag?”
“No.”
“Alafair, are you sure the truck parked across the street was the same one that tailgated you? You couldn’t see the driver’s face, right?”
I saw a light in her eyes that I had seen in the eyes of many other women who had reported stalkers or obscene callers or voyeurs or violent and dangerous men who made their lives miserable. Sometimes their complaints got lost in procedure; sometimes they were trivialized and conveniently ignored. In most homicides involving female victims, there’s a long paper history leading up to the woman’s death. If someone feels this is an overly dour depiction, I recommend he visit a shelter for battered women.
“I wish I hadn’t said anything, Dave.”
“I didn’t explain myself very well. A homeless or deranged man was up on the old logging road behind the house. I’m just trying to put that guy together with the guy in the skinned-up truck. The two don’t fit. Why would some guy in Montana single you out as the object of his obsession?”
“I didn’t say he did. I told you what happened. But it didn’t sink in. So forget it.”
“The sheriff is going to pick up Dixon and talk with him. I’ll call him and tell him about the guy who tailgated you.”
“He didn’t just tailgate me. He was following me. For seven miles.”
“I know.”
“Then stop talking to me like I’m an idiot.”
“The sheriff said a seventeen-year-old Indian girl disappeared six days ago. He thinks she may be dead. Maybe there’s a very bad guy operating around here, Alafair.”
She rubbed her temples and widened her eyes and closed them and opened them again, as though revisiting an experience she couldn’t get out of her head. “I know who he is. I know, I know, I know.”
“The abductor of the Indian girl?”
“The man who followed me today. I thought his face was in shadow because he had his visor down. I don’t think that’s what I saw at all. I think he was unshaved and had a long face like a Viking’s. I think I sat across a table from him three years ago and talked to him while he breathed through his mouth and tried to slip his finger on top of my hand. I remember his hair in particular. He put gel on it once so he could slick it back and impress me.”
“Don’t do this.”
“It was him, Dave. I feel sick to my stomach.”
“Asa Surrette is dead. He’s not only dead, he’s probably in hell.”
“I knew you would say that,” she replied. “I just knew it.”
THREE YEARS EARLIER, Alafair told me of her plans to write a nonfiction book about a psychopath who for years had tortured, raped, and murdered ordinary family people in the land of Dorothy and the yellow-brick road, making his victims suffer as much as possible before he strangled or suffocated them. She told me this at the kitchen table in our home on East Main in New Iberia, on the banks of Bayou Teche, while the sun burned in a molten red orb beyond the live oaks in our yard, the moss in the limbs black against the sky. Her research would begin with an interview at the maximum-security unit east of Wichita, where the killer was kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown.
I told her what I thought of the idea.
“Why drizzle on the parade when you can pour?” she said.
She had a degree in psychology from Reed, didn’t she? She was a Stanford law student who would probably clerk at the Ninth Circuit Court, wasn’t she?
I told Alafair not to go near him. I told her every horrible story I could remember about the serial killers and sadists and sex predators I had known. I told her of the iniquitous light in their eyes when they tried to tantalize listeners with details about their methods in stalking victims, and the obvious pleasure they took when they suggested other bodies were out there. I told her of their inability to understand the level of suffering and despair they had imposed upon others. I told her how they picked at themselves while they talked and how their eyes reached past you and settled on someone who did not know he or she was being watched. I told her of their thespian performances when they made the big score in custody—namely, finding a defense psychiatrist who would buy into their claims of multiple personalities and other psychological complexities that gave them the dimensions of Titans.
They saw themselves as players in a Homeric epic, but what was the reality? They were terrified at the prospect of being transferred into “gen” or “main pop,” where they would be shanked in the yard or the shower or lit up in their cells with a Molotov.