DR17 - Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
Most poor neighborhoods didn’t have fences, he thought. The porches had gliders on them and sometimes stuffed couches. On one corner there was a small grocery store with a neon bread ad in the window. An ancient brick firehouse, painted lead-gray, stood on another corner. Unlike in subdivision neighborhoods, sidewalks connected the houses. A kid was flying a kite emblazoned with the image of the comic-book hero Captain America, the kite stiffening in the wind, rising higher and higher into a perfect blue sky.
How had he, Troyce Nix, ended up in both the Abu Ghraib prison and this working-class neighborhood in the northern Rockies? He was the same man and had the same hair, skin, eyes, bone, and sinew that had defined him in the mirror many years ago. How had he gone from the winter-green palm-dotted alluvial floodplains of the Rio Grande Valley to an Iraqi prison whose floors during the regime of Saddam Hussein had been stained by fluids that had become part of the stone and could not be scrubbed out? And from there to a contract jail where, in many ways, he had stacked time inside the machinations and perversity he had helped create and to which he had given legitimacy?
Now, on a breezy, warm afternoon in a town that was ringed by mountains and traversed by three rivers, he was eating by himself at a picnic table carved with names and initials and hearts and arrows, like petroglyphs left by ancient people on a cave wall, while one hundred feet away a woman he had come to love sat among junkies, ex-prostitutes, and petty boosters, waving at him, her face full of joy and expectation, her faith and belief in him like that of a child.
Beyond the baseball diamond, a gas-guzzler was parked in the shade, its paint pocked with blisters. Had he seen the same vehicle at Bob Wards or at Costco? There were shadows on the windshield, and Troyce could not tell if anyone was behind the steering wheel. A city groundskeeper was driving a mower along the swale, the discharge from the blades firing sideways against the parked vehicle, pinging the metal with chopped-up pinecones, blowing a cloud of dust and grass cuttings through the open window.
Troyce bit into a drumstick and turned his attention back to the dancing kite emblazoned with the shield and winged helmet and masked face of Captain America. For some reason, backdropped by a blue sky, it seemed the most beautiful piece of art he had ever seen.
THE GRINDING AND pinging sounds of the mower were like slivers of glass in Jimmy Dale’s ears. He waited until the driver had threaded his machine around a couple of trees and had turned onto the swale on the park’s far side, then he got into the backseat and slid the Remington pump from the duffel bag.
Now he was in a perfect shooter’s position. His vehicle was inside dark shade, the rifle easily concealed below the level of the passenger window, his target lit by spangled sunlight on the other side of the ball diamond. By propping the rifle over the right front seat, he could fire at an angle out the passenger window, hiding the muzzle flash, perhaps even muffling the report. He could probably get off two shots before anyone realized what had happened.
He pumped a round into the Remington’s chamber and sighted on Troyce Nix’s yellow-tinted aviator glasses. Even if he missed, the round would strike the side of a parked truck, so he was not endangering an innocent person. There was no excuse for not taking Nix out. He’d be doing Nix a favor, pocking one right through the lens, following it up for good measure with a second one in the forehead, putting him out of his perverted misery, maybe saving somebody else from being raped at another contract prison.
Then a kid pulling a kite string ran across Jimmy Dale’s line of vision. The wind had dropped, and the kite was dipping precariously close to the tops of the maple trees that bordered the park. Jimmy Dale lowered the rifle, easing the hammer down on the firing pin with his thumb, and watched the kid coiling up his string, running backward, lifting the kite’s tail across the top branches of a maple. Jimmy Dale let out his breath and felt his heart slow and his pulse stop jumping in his neck, as though someone had declared a temporary truce in his war with Troyce Nix, just so everyone could watch a young boy save his kite from crashing into a treetop.
Then the wind gusted across the baseball diamond, blowing a cloud of fine dust from the base paths, and the kite rattled against its stick frame again and rose steadily into the sky. Now the kid and his kite were safely out of the way, and Jimmy Dale’s view of his target was unobstructed, his choices clear. He raised the rifle, thumbed back the hammer, and sighted on Troyce Nix’s face, his pulse beating in his throat.
The mowing machine was headed down the swale toward Jimmy Dale’s vehicle, the engine roaring louder and louder, rocks splintering sideways off the blades. Jimmy Dale looked through the back window, the rifle balanced across the top of the passenger seat. The groundskeeper was turning the mower around, cutting a clean swath through blue fescue back toward the far curb. Jimmy Dale threw the rifle stock to his shoulder, put Nix’s mouth squarely in the steel notch on the rifle barrel, and slowly tightened his index finger on the trigger.
I’m gonna blow your cranberries, Cap. This is for every guy you sodomized back at the joint. Hope you find a shady spot in the flames.
Then something snapped inside his head, like a wound-up rubber band breaking behind his eyes. His breath exploded from his chest. He jerked his hand free of the trigger guard and jacked open the chamber, ejecting the unfired round on the car seat. Outside the car, the mowing machine scotched the top of a tree root into pulp.
Once again, Jimmy Dale had failed. But this time he didn’t care. He wasn’t a killer, no matter what Troyce Nix or the world or the prison system had done to him. Then he realized all the sound had gone out of his ears. The entire park seemed empty of voices or birdsong or the rattle of a kite in the wind or the roar of a grass-cutting machine. He opened and closed his mouth as though he were inside the cabin of a plane losing pressure at high altitude.
The problem was not with his hearing. The groundskeeper had hit the kill button on his machine and was staring through the back window of Jimmy Dale’s vehicle. “That man’s got a gun!” he shouted, his finger pointing frantically.
Jimmy Dale piled into the front seat, fired up his stolen gas-guzzler, and left a cloud of blue smoke behind him.
When Candace Sweeney got to Troyce Nix’s side, he was staring at the now empty street and the elevated interstate the street fed into.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” she said.
“That boy just don’t learn. He’s a real hardhead is what he is.”
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “We’re leaving tonight, though?” she said. “Right, Troyce? Nothing has changed.”
“I think we might have to put things on hold a little bit,” he replied. He removed his shades and pinched his eyes, as he always did when he did not want her to see the thoughts he was thinking.
CHAPTER 22
THURSDAY MORNING I made an appointment to meet with Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans in the federal building on Broadway in Missoula. I had many things to say to her, or to ask her, some of it about Clete, some of it not. Unfortunately, because of my desire to protect Clete, my relationship with her had become adversarial when it should not have been. Regardless, I needed her help, and as a visitor to Montana with no legal authority in the state, I was taking on the role of a beggar inside the legal system. If she wanted to rub my face in it, now was her opportunity.
When I entered her office, her hands were folded primly on her desk blotter, her lean face turned upward like a blade. The last time I had seen her, she had told me she would not forget that I had deceived her regarding my suspicions about J. D. Gribble’s identity and the fact that he was an interstate fugitive. The truth was, I could not forget her accusing me of duplicity.
“Before you say anything, Mr. Robicheaux, please be aware that I’m speaking to you only because you’re an officer of the law in the state of Louisiana,” she said. “I’ve spoken to your sheriff, and she tells me you’re an honest man. But so far that hasn’t been my impression of either you or Clete Purcel. I don’t like being lied to
I felt a wave of heat bloom in my chest. I started to speak, but she raised one finger. “No, it’s time for you to listen,” she said. “You and Clete Purcel seem to think you can decide what other people need to know or don’t need to know. Does that strike you as a bit arrogant?”
“If you put it that way, I guess it does.”
“If I put it that way?”
“No, as you say, it’s arrogant,” I replied.
“Why are you here?”
“May I sit down?”
Her face was tight and white around the mouth. I could see her nostrils dilating when she breathed. I sat down without waiting for her to give me permission. “What did you guys find out about the mask in Quince Whitley’s truck?”
I could see the pause in her eyes, as if she was deciding whether or not she should continue our meeting. “It probably came from a store in Denver or Seattle or Salt Lake,” she said. “Actually, it could have come from anywhere. It’s no help. There were no prints on it at all, not even Whitley’s.”
“But y’all are still looking at him for the attack on Clete?”
“We know Whitley filled a two-gallon gas container at a convenience store near Swan Lake on the day of the attack. Whitley worked as a truck driver over the years. We can put him in the general area where a number of homicides remain unsolved, all of them similar in some way to the homicides we’re dealing with here. I think I’ve probably told you enough.”
But I could tell she had not told me enough and that she was bothered in the same way I was about elements in the case that were not getting looked at squarely, for whatever reasons. “We’re talking about a lot more here than just the death of a possible serial killer, aren’t we?” I said.
“I looked at the bodies of those two college kids in the morgue,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting I have nightmares about them. I think the day you can say you sleep well in this job is the day you should leave it. I think those kids had information or evidence of some kind that someone wanted from them. I don’t think the primary motivation for their deaths was simply sadistic, although that was clearly part of it.”
I thought back upon the burglary of Seymour Bell’s house. “After Bell was killed, an intruder took a throwaway camera from his room. The camera was in full view. But the intruder tore up the whole house. So he was after something else as well,” I said.
“Go on,” she said.
“I think the Wellstones are big players in this. But I don’t know what a kid could have in his possession that could endanger people as powerful as they are.”
Her eyes were glued on mine, fraught with both meaning and conflict. She had just lectured me on the arrogance of an individual deciding what others should or should not know. I believed she was caught inside her own admonition. Her stare broke, then she knitted her fingers and swallowed and looked at a place just to the right of my face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“When Sally Dio’s plane crashed into a mountainside, it exploded in a ball of flame. Everybody inside was badly burned. Some of the identification was speculative in nature. But maybe one man survived. The Indians found him and took him to a hospital in Kalispell. Then he disappeared.”
“Who was he?”
“We don’t know. But the Wellstones had ties with casino and hotel interests in Vegas and Reno. They’ve also been tied up with casinos on Indian reservations, particularly in your home state. Are you following my drift here, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Maybe.”
“The Bureau has hit a giant dead end on this case. It’s not because we’re inept or corrupt or arrogant or any of the things our critics like to say about us. It’s because we spend most of our time following around foreign students who are thinking about math tests and getting laid and not hijacking airplanes so they can fly them into the administration building.”
“You’re saying maybe Sally Dio survived the crash?”
“No, I’m saying don’t ever lie to a federal agent again. Anything else on your mind?”
“Yeah, Clete Purcel is outside in my truck. He’s the best cop I’ve ever known. He’s a recipient of two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Navy Cross. He also happens to have enormous affection and respect for you. Why don’t you give him a break?”
AT A CERTAIN time in your life, you think about death in a serious way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy receptacle for water leaking through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky, a plain of brown grass with tumbleweed bouncing across it. Inside the mound, if your ears could hear, they would tell you the shovel that raises you into light again will do so only for reasons of scientific curiosity.
When you see these images in your sleep or experience them in your waking day, you know they do not represent a negotiable fate. The images are indeed your future, and no exception will be made for you.
During these moments, when you try to push away these images from the edges of your vision, you have one urge only, and that is to somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here and that you tried to make the world a better place.
The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people’s anger.
What does this have to do with the murder of the two college kids and the attack on Clete and perhaps the murder of the Los Angeles tourists west of Missoula?
Everything.
Because anger is what I felt that afternoon when I looked at the television monitor attached to the StairMaster I was working out on in the health club on the Bitterroot highway. Reverend Sonny Click was evidently moving up in the world and had become the host of a televangelical daytime show featuring — guess who — the Reverend Sonny Click.
The aggressiveness of his overture to the audience was as naked as it was meretricious. “Out there right now someone is debating whether they should send in that one-thousand-dollar seed-of-faith gift to our crusade. I can hear your thoughts, the fury of the debate raging inside your heart. ‘Is it worth it? Is this what God wants me to do?’ I’ll tell you what Our Lord has told me to tell you.”
He looked earnestly into the camera, handsome in his tailored dark suit and starched white shirt and luminescent pink necktie. “If you pledge your seed-of-faith one-thousand-dollar gift, you will immediately be joined with God in all your endeavors. Your adversaries will become His adversaries. Your economic burdens will become His economic burdens. The physical illnesses in your life, the turmoil in your home, the unkindness with which the world has treated you will all be transferred into His hands.
“You will not become God’s partner. God will become your partner. That’s what the seed of faith does. It allows God to take every hardship and every enemy in your life from you and to reduce them to dust in His palm.”
The camera panned on a choir of college-age kids who looked like they had been scrubbed with wire brushes, all of them clapping and singing, their faces seemingly lit by ethereal forces.
I showered and changed into fresh clothes at the health club, then drove out to the home of Reverend Sonny Click, east of Rock Creek. His Mercury was in the driveway, and his twin-engine plane was on the runway he had mowed in the pasture. His house was built of logs that had never been debarked. With its shady front porch and riparian backdrop, it should have resembled a sport fisherman’s rustic cottage in an advertisement for western real estate. But to my mind, the yellow lawn and the dead flowers in the window boxes and a cluster of plastic cups under the steps told a different story about Sonny Click. He was one of those who did not have geographical ties. He floated on the wind, as all predator birds do, searching out his prey, the bead of light in his eyes as steady and unrelenting as the sun, his hunger never quite satiated.
When he answered the door, I could hear a teakettle whis
“Is that college girl with you?” I asked.
“No, she’s not. Now get out of here.”
“Not a smart answer,” I said, and pushed him in the chest as I stepped inside.
His mouth dropped open. “Are you crazy?”
“No, I often experience visions of mortality,” I said, pushing him in the chest again, back toward the kitchen. “Know what that means? I don’t give a rat’s ass what people do to me or think about me. If I can hose a skid mark like you off the bowl before I catch the bus, I figure I’m way ahead of the game.” I glanced through the open door of the bedroom. “Where’s the girl I met here before?”
“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of her.”
“There’s a woman’s nightgown on your dresser.”
“I’m not going to put up with this,” he said.
From the counter, I picked up an empty tin pot by the handle and swung it against the side of his head. His face quivered with both shock and disbelief. I hit him with it again, this time harder. A small cry broke from his throat, and he cupped one hand over his nose, blood leaking down his wrist.
“I don’t have any mercy on a man like you, Mr. Click,” I said. “The last time I was here, I told you I’d shove you into an airplane propeller if I caught you sexually abusing that young woman. I’m not sure if that’s the case here or not. But I do know you lied to me about Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw. You held their pictures in your hand. You studied them. Then you looked me straight in the face and told me you’d never seen them before. Those kids died terrible deaths. But when they needed you to speak up for them, to help us find their killers, you put your own interests first and denied knowing them. It takes a special kind of coward to do that, Mr. Click.”