Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

Again he went silent.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Go to her house.”

“Whose?”

“You know whose. Up by Lookout Pass. There’s a flowerpot on the back porch. You’ll find something interesting under the pot. I put it there at daybreak, just for you.”

“You shouldn’t jerk me around.”

“I’m smarter than that. I’ve done a lifetime study of people. I know their secret fears and their desire for forbidden fruit. I see the weaknesses they try to hide from others. You’re different. You’re strong in the same way I am.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“What is your opinion of the cowboy?”

“Which cowboy?”

“The one who might be a player in our film.”

“Are you talking about Wyatt Dixon?”

“Is that his name? Have a nice drive up to Lookout Pass.”

“No, what are you telling me about Dixon?”

“Nothing. Someone doesn’t like him, that’s all. I thought we might cast him. There’s a tautness about him that I’d like to investigate. They all break, you know. It’s like a dam bursting. I can’t tell you how pleasurable that moment can be.”

She wadded up a napkin and pressed it to her mouth, her stomach roiling. “I want to ask a favor of you,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Don’t hurt the waitress.”

“You’re a tease,” he said. The connection went dead.

GRETCHEN DROVE UP the long grade that led to Lookout Pass and the high mountains that often disappeared into the clouds on the Idaho border. During the night, a storm had come down from Canada and left the sky dark at sunrise and the tops of the trees stiff with snow that had frozen on the branches. She turned off the highway, snow flurries spinning off the hillsides into her windshield, and followed a dirt road to the small frame house where Rhonda Fayhee had lived.

The house was isolated, a cracker box in the midst of a windswept landscape that didn’t seem intended for human habitation. She parked in back and stood in the yard and gazed at the rock slides that bled down the sides of the mountains, the thin stands of pine that could barely find root, the sharpness of the peaks and crags, as though they had never been affected by the erosive forces of wind and water. Higher up, on an old logging road, someone had gouged a gravel pit into the side of the mountain, leaving an environmental wound that, in these surroundings, seemed natural.

She knew Surrette could be anywhere, watching her with binoculars or framing her inside the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. The storm clouds rolling across the mountaintops were bluish-black and forked with electricity, and she heard thun

der boom in a distant canyon. She realized her skin was prickling, even though the cold usually did not bother her, and she got her canvas coat off the truck seat and tied a bandana on her head.

Like most people with meager incomes who live up the drainages in the high country, Rhonda Fayhee had winterized her house by nailing sheets of clear plastic over the windows. Now the plastic, along with the yellow crime scene tape, was broken and flapping in the wind. On the back step was a large ceramic pot with half a dirt ring next to the drain dish. Gretchen set the pot and the dish on the grass and picked up a conventional envelope with a sheet of folded paper inside. On it was a map drawn with a felt-tip pen that showed the house, the dirt road, a mountain two miles away, and a place designated as “old mine.”

The note at the bottom read, I’m not jerking you around—You mustn’t say that about me again—Go see the mine—You’ll like what you find—Our cast is growing, even though our cast members don’t know it yet.

The slash-mark calligraphy was the same as in the letter Surrette had written to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. Surrette was either getting careless or starting to accept Gretchen as a kindred spirit. His allusion to their conversation indicated he had written the note that morning. She was convinced he was somewhere up on a hillside, wetting his lips, enjoying the fact that his words were reaching inside her, stirring her imagination, while he watched from afar. She forced herself not to look up and got back in the pickup and drove up the road toward a mountain furrowed with slag and carpeted with miles of trees that had been denuded by a forest fire.

She turned off her engine in front of the mine and got out of the truck and stuck her Airweight .38 in her back pocket. The wind was colder and drier and smelled like ash or charred wood or smoke from an incinerator on a winter day. In her left hand, she carried a flashlight that used a six-volt battery. Down below, she could see Rhonda Fayhee’s house and the tiny lot on which it had been built and the dirt road winding away into the distance. She could see the vast emptiness in which one young, thin-boned poor woman had lived and struggled and eked out an existence until the day she met Asa Surrette. Gretchen walked up to the mine’s entrance and shone the light inside.

It didn’t go deep into the mountain. It probably was dug during the Depression, when the West was filled with unemployed men who saw a vein of quartz in an outcropping of metamorphic rock and knew that gold and silver were often wedged inside the same seam. She moved the flashlight beam along the floor and against the walls. At least half a dozen photographs were taped to the walls, all of them eight-by-ten, all of them showing a bound woman with a drawstring cloth bag over her head. In two photos, the woman was in an embryonic position on a rock floor, a blanket pulled over her. In another photo, she was sitting upright, the bag on her head, wrists tied behind her, knees drawn up, bare ankles showing above tennis shoes.

On a flat rock at the back of the mine was a bubble-wrapped thumb drive. The note on it read, She was here the first night—No one thought to look—It’s like the other places where I’ve hunted on the game reserve—What do you think of the images—I think a before-and-after presentation of our subjects will give the film more shock value—I can’t wait to work with you, Gretchen.

When Gretchen got back to the cabin on Albert’s ranch, she inserted the thumb drive into her laptop. The scene taking place on the screen was no longer than a minute. The lens had been pointed through a leafy, sun-dappled bower on the bank of a creek. A man and woman were broiling frankfurters on a grill, backs to the lens. A girl was turning somersaults in the background. Another girl was watching her. They were both blond. The lens never focused on their faces.