Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“You brought the girl here and didn’t worry about him coming back unexpectedly?”

“She just came here to swim.”

“You told Bertha Phelps where he was, didn’t you?”

“No,” he replied, clearly forcing himself not to blink.

“You know what a professional liar never does?” she said. “Blink. His eyelids stay stitched to his forehead. It’s a sure tell every time.”

“I survived, just like you. You know the edge I got on Wyatt Dixon? I don’t care whether I live or die.”

“Dixon is like your father. He’s a self-made man. I don’t think you’re anything at all. You’re a condition, not a man. I feel sorry for you.”

“Tell me that when I take a shit on your chest, because that’s what I’m going to do when I get out of here.”

She tapped him lightly on the tip of the nose with the pliers, then stood up. “Go wash your face. Come around me again for any reason, and I’ll blow your head off.”

She went out the front door and left it open behind her. There were squirrels playing overhead in the trees. She watched them for a moment, then started her pickup and drove away. She tried to think of all the things he had just said to her. Two words stood out in bold relief and were not in harmony with his self-congratulatory statements about being mobbed up in Vegas. What were the words?

Flathead Lake? Why that choice of location for his metaphor about getting rid of Clete Purcel?

IT WAS 4:48 P.M. when Clete and I starting knocking on doors at the end of the hollow, up the road from Albert’s ranch. The first place we stopped was a remodeled barn that a young couple from California had rented for the summer. They said they taught at Berkeley and knew Albert and his work and sometimes hiked along the ridge above his house but hadn’t seen any other hikers there. They were nice people and invited us in for coffee. I did not want to tell them that Surrette was somewhere in the neighborhood. “Do you all have children?” I asked.

“No, we don’t,” the husband replied, trying not to show offense at the personal nature of the question. “Can you tell me what you guys are looking for?”

“A man named Asa Surrette has been around here. He’s a serial killer who escaped from a prison van in Kansas,” I said. “He may be long gone, or he may be close by. Have you seen any vehicles that don’t belong here? Or somebody up in the rocks above your house?”

The wife looked at the husband, then they both shook their heads. “This is a little disturbing,” the husband said. “Nobody else has told us about a serial killer.”

“He’s the guy who abducted the waitress up by Lookout Pass,” Clete said.

“There’s a minister who lives in that two-story house with the cedar trees in front,” the wife said. “He has his congregation there on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. His name is Ralph, I think.”

“Did you see anybody unusual over there?” I asked.

They shook their heads again. “Sometimes after their services, they throw a football back and forth in the yard,” the wife said. “I saw Ralph chopping wood earlier. I think his church friends come and go. This serial killer is probably gone by now, isn’t he?”

“Probably,” I replied.

“By the way, I saw the girls’ car pull into the driveway earlier. I’m pretty sure somebody’s home,” she said.

I wrote my cell number on the back of my departmental business card and left it with the couple.

Clete and I knocked on the doors of two more houses in the hollow with the same results. The four houses in the natural cul-de-sac were spaced a considerable distance apart, all of them

set in the shadows of the mountains, and the people in the houses apparently had amiable but not close relationships. In effect, it was a community where insularity came with the property deed.

Our last stop was at the minister’s house. An old Toyota Corolla was parked in the driveway and a Bronco in the garage. The window shades were down, the front door shut. The glider on the porch rotated slightly on its chains in a mild breeze blowing down the canyon.

“It doesn’t look like anybody is home,” Clete said.

I looked at my watch. “Maybe they’re eating dinner,” I said.

I tapped on the door. I could hear no sound inside. I tried again. Nothing. I tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked. “Let’s walk around back,” I said.

We went through the side yard. The shades on the dining room windows were pulled halfway down. There were no place settings on the table or any sign of movement in the house. In the backyard, there was a pole shed attached to the side of an old barn where firewood had been stacked neatly against the barn wall. The grass was scattered with freshly split chunks of pinewood; the woodcutter’s ax had been left embedded on the rim of the chopping stump, the handle at a stiff forty-five-degree angle. Clete looked up at the sky. A bank of thunderheads had moved across the sun. “You’d think a guy this neat would want to get his wood under the shed before it rained,” he said.

He went up the back steps and banged on the door. No response. He held up one hand to keep the reflection off the glass and attempted to see inside. Then he went up the rear stairs to the second floor and tried the door and pressed his ear against the glass. “I can’t hear a thing,” he said. He went around the side of the house and came back. “Maybe they went off somewhere.”