by Peter Bowen
Madelaine looked once at it and she looked away. Her lips moved a little. Hail Mary.
“First off,” said Pidgeon, “this guy may have been doing this for as long as twenty years.”
She was pointing to the crop of x’s stippled up the Front Range of the Rockies. The old Great North Trail.
“And this one,” she said, pointing to the trail that began near Puget Sound, “may have been doing this for fifteen. Ten, more likely. Hard crimes to solve. That bastard Bundy may have killed ninety women. We’ll never know.”
Green River Killer. Ted Bundy. Hi-Line Killer. What they call this asshole come out from Seattle?
Bastards. They die some, soon.
Du Pré was getting angry looking at it.
“They are not all him,” said Du Pré. “Not all them two.”
“No,” said Pidgeon. “Of course not. But enough of them are. The Bureau has been on this for three years. Before that, we weren’t welcome. The killer spread the damage across so many jurisdictions and we can’t in law come in on this sort of thing till we’re asked. Nobody asked. When they did ask—Sheriff down in southern Colorado, in fact—the crimes led both directions. Christ, what a mess. This guy knew what he was doing. He’d drop bodies in places where jurisdictions overlapped. Then nobody wanted the cases.”
Madelaine got up and she took the coffee cups and she went into the house with the tray.
“I’m going to Sheridan,” said Pidgeon, “soon’s we wangle a request from the cops there. Could you come?”
“What I do there?” said Du Pré.
“Think,” said Pidgeon.
“Take the guy in there,” said Du Pré.
“Hmm,” said Pidgeon. “I’ll think about that.”
“Me,” said Du Pré, “I live here, I know here, what I can maybe do I do here. Don’t want to go, you know.”
Pidgeon nodded.
“What else can you tell me, maybe, about this guy,” said Du Pré.
“Oh,” said Pidgeon. “I don’t favor getting too cute and specific. Trouble with that is that then that’s what you are looking for. Profiles are pretty good up to a point. After that, they can blind you.”
Pidgeon got up and went into the house.
Du Pré smoked.
The sun was warm. He looked up for the eagle but he couldn’t see it, he scanned the sky for a black speck.
Nothing.
Pidgeon came back out.
“He left,” said Pidgeon.
“Huh?” said Du Pré.
“Yup,” said Pidgeon. “Told Madelaine that the little girl was the work of one man and that the other three were the work of another.”
Du Pré nodded.
“That there is witchcraft around the killer of the little girl.”
Witchcraft? What the fuck he mean by that? Du Pré thought, we got green-skinned hags boiling up lizards here? Witchcraft.
“You’re going to Sheridan,” said Pidgeon.
OK, thought Du Pré, my Madelaine is in this.
“Day after tomorrow, I guess.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Bart’s flying us down and back,” said Pidgeon.
My Madelaine she has been on the telephone. World is cranking around all right, she has seen to it.
“That OK,” said Pidgeon, “with you?”
Du Pré nodded.
“Good,” said Pidgeon. “I guess I’ll be staying here.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Du Pré!” Madelaine yelled through the kitchen window. “You got a phone call here!”
Du Pré got up and he went to the steps and he tripped and fell going up, catching himself on the jamb.
Madelaine was looking sad.
She handed him the phone.
“Du Pré?” said Benny Klein.
“Yah,” said Du Pré.
“Another.”
“Shit. Where are you.”
“Blaine’s Cut.”
Years ago some crazy old man had cut a road through rock.
Charged a quarter to use it. The only way to get up to the top of a dry riverbed, left over from when the glaciers melted.
And men up into the Wolf Mountains, so the miners paid.
It was maybe fifteen miles away.
Right next to Bart’s land.
“I be there,” said Du Pré.
Pidgeon was sitting in his cruiser when he got there.
CHAPTER 20
NOW I SPEND THE rest of my life looking at crosses in the earth and remembering, Du Pré thought. I ever find this guy I kill him what he has done to what I see every day.
Du Pré was about six feet up the left wall of Blaine’s Cut, looking at what at first glance seemed to be a tree root sticking out of a wide cleft in the fragile rock. It was a human foot, with dark brown skin, dried and mummified. The toenails were dark yellow-brown.
There was a vertical cut in the rock about ten feet to Du Pré’s right.
Left arm of the cross, right hand of Christ.
Du Pré looked in the cleft. He squinted. The body had been in a duffel bag. The canvas had rotted and the edges of the tears were white. Insects crawled over the dried corpse. It didn’t look like anything human.
Du Pré dropped back down to the ground.
“No telling how long that’s been there,” said Benny.
“Years,” said Pidgeon. “Who found it?”
“Kid out shooting his .22,” said Benny. “Shot at the foot. Toenail fell off. Smart kid. He took one look at the toenail and he ran like hell. Got his dad and the old man come and crawled up there and then he called me. No telling how many people just walked right by this, you know.”
“I dunno how I’ll get the body out of there,” said Benny.
“You’ll have to hook it out,” said Pidgeon, “and it’ll probably break up. Pretty dry and brittle. Where’s the toenail?”
Benny handed her a glassine envelope. Pidgeon looked at it for a long time.
“Got a little red polish on it,” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded.
Pidgeon was looking up at the top of the cut. The sagebrush hung over the sheer edge a little. She made a clicking sound with her tongue.
“What’s up there?” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded and he started up the cut so he could get up top and look. Pidgeon was wearing lady penny loafers with little gold chains over the arch of the foot.
Du Pré found a steep path that cut back and forth twice in rising ten feet to the top of the limestone shelf. He went up it. He had to grab a sagebrush at the top and hoist himself over the crumbling lip of yellow-gray rock and earth.
Du Pré looked off to the west. A rutted track looped and meandered back and forth through the dry tough benchland, one that avoided the rocks that stuck up high enough to grab a transmission. Grass grew in the ruts. Sparse yellow blades. They had been flattened. Someone had driven up here recently. He walked back along the lip toward the vertical cleft that split the formation.
Water. Du Pré rolled a smoke. Water and mountains fight, water it always win. Takes a long time, though. People, we don’t got that much time. Old stories.
Du Pré stood and thought of dead women lying alone in the dirt, eyes pecked out by birds, skunks chewing their faces.
He went to the cleft and he looked down. Pidgeon and Benny were looking up at him.
Du Pré glanced around.
“No more bodies up here,” he said, spreading his hands, palms up.
Benny called him a son of a bitch.
This is not funny, Benny, thought Du Pré. No, it is not funny.
One spur of the rutted track came to within fifty feet of Du Pré. He walked over to it, a circle wide enough for a pickup truck to turn around in. He walked around it slowly. Couple old beer cans. Deer hunters, antelope hunters. Du Pré glanced up. A half dozen antelope were running up the long slope of the next short hill.
Them prairie scooters. Move some. Good meat.
Du Pré stopped and he breath
ed deeply and he set his mind to lock out sounds and the wind and all that was not in his first sight. To bring the ground up to his eyes, see what was on it that shouldn’t be there.
At the place he had begun, when he returned to it after a time spent walking slowly, he glanced toward the center of the loop and he saw something circular.
No circles out here but eyes.
Du Pré walked over to the small circle in the yellow earth. He bent down and he looked a long time.
Socket. From a socket wrench set. Expensive kind, that black metal. Little yellow mud on the top, hard to see.
Du Pré rubbed the dirt from the outside of the socket.
9/16.
Made in America.
Snap-On Tool Corporation.
Du Pré had seen their trucks. They went around to where mechanics worked and they had a huge assortment of tools. Gave credit till payday.
9/16.
Du Pré put the socket in his pocket and he went back to the lip of the cut and he looked down at Pidgeon and Benny.
“Nothing here much,” said Du Pré.
Socket probably rolled out of somebody’s pickup they open the door. That is how I lose mine. When I figure out how I lose my sunglasses, I will be better, you bet.
Du Pré walked back down to the narrow steep path and he dropped off the edge and he landed and flexed his knees to absorb the shock and he took tiny steps quickly till he was at the bottom and could lengthen his stride.
“Had some maybe antelope hunters, deer hunters up there,” he said, “Beer cans. Found this, it maybe roll out of somebody’s truck.”
Du Pré handed the socket to Pidgeon.
She looked at it and nodded.
“Shit,” said Benny. “I have lost more a them damn things, you know, the box bounces open and they fly out and roll out the door when you open it. And there goes another three, four bucks. For the good ones, anyway.”
“This is a professional’s tool?” said Pidgeon.
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “But you got, remember, all the ranchers here have to be pret’ good mechanics, pret’ good welders, pret’ good carpenters, all them things …”
“Pretty good psychics, too,” said Benny, “and gamblers. Cattle business is like a damn séance. Always has been, I guess, when you deal in live things you never know what’s going to happen.”
“OK,” said Pidgeon. “Now, you gonna drag the bones out of me rocks, there?”
Benny nodded miserably.
“I do it,” said Du Pré. “You got a something I can use?”
Benny went to his truck and he got a boathook out and a black body bag. He brought them back.
“I got a ladder, too,” he said.
He fetched it.
Du Pré put the ladder up against the rock, to the left of the dried corpse jammed in the horizontal cleft. He went up the ladder and he picked up the boathook and he reached in and jiggled the hook for a purchase and he pulled.
The whole bundle moved, and very easily.
Du Pré inched it toward him.
Smell of stale old corruption. Some startled mice scurried off from their nests under the rotted canvas bag.
Du Pré got the bundle out to the edge of the rock face. He dropped the boathook and he grasped the bundle and he slid it forward and let it fall.
He squinted and looked in.
Couple lumps of something there.
“Benny!” said Du Pré. “You hand me that boathook again, maybe?”
Benny did.
Du Pré pulled and scraped the lumps out.
Looked like old hide, all balled up.
One lump had some brown hair on it, fairly long.
An ear.
Christ, Du Pré thought, this is the skin of her face.
Du Pré dropped it over the side. And another brown gob.
He looked in. The rock floor of the cleft was clean. There were stains, dark ones, where the bundle had sat.
I wonder how that foot got out there.
Skunk shit there, a foot from my nose, all dried and black.
Coyotes could make it in here, too.
They chew and drag. Wonder they did not drag the whole thing off.
Du Pré went down the ladder. Benny was zipping up the black body bag. He carried it to his truck. Du Pré followed with the ladder and the boathook.
“Where,” said Pidgeon, “in the name of God did you find a boathook in this fucking desert?”
“Navy recruiter,” said Benny, solemnly. “Busted him for speeding. He didn’t have any money, so the judge took this.”
He is some better, now, thought Du Pré!
“Thanks,” said Benny.
“You send that to Helena?” said Du Pré.
“I drive it to Helena,” said Benny.
Du Pré nodded.
“The north–south guy,” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded.
CHAPTER 21
DU PRÉ DROVE INTO Toussaint past combine crews harvesting the hard red wheat. The giant machines marched slowly across the golden fields, trucks grinding along beside them, receiving thick streams of hulled grain. One combine, two trucks. When one truck was full it would pull ahead, the second would move up under the spout, and the first would head for the metal storage bins standing at the ranch houses.
Lotta damn noodles, Du Pré thought, wish I liked noodles better.
He drove into the little town and to the bar. He parked and walked inside. There were a lot of strangers in the bar, drinking beers and eating and playing the video poker machines.
The combines ran twenty-four hours when the weather was good. All night, with giant spotlights hung on the cabs focused on the wheat. The whole year’s work on the fields brought in, the bank’s notes paid off. Everyone hoped. Maybe something left over. Wheat was up.
The off-duty crews were using part of their twelve-hour break to let off a little steam. They talked in soft Texas accents. They had started down in Texas three months before, working their way north with the ripening grain.
The pool table was busy. Quarters piled beside the coin slot. The players waited. Money was bet on these games, and on the poker games that went on round the clock, too.
Boomers. Make it, spend it right away.
Du Pré grinned. He liked these people.
They never caused much trouble, and anyway they would never fight in a bar. They needed that bar, and being 86’d from it would make life very hard indeed. They fought across the street in the parking lot.
Susan Klein was scurrying fast behind the bar, drawing beers, mixing drinks, and somehow getting hamburgers and french fries done right and on plates.
She got a good timer in her head, Du Pré thought. He went round the bar and he made himself a whiskey ditch and he dropped a twenty on the ledge of the cash register.
The owners of the equipment sat at corner tables, writing checks, lending money to crew members till payday, and then they’d leave a day or two ahead of the crews, on to the next place of work, and see to all arrangements. The owners were weathered men in their sixties, in light straw cowboy hats and custom boots with lone stars on the front of them.
Susan caught up for a moment. She ran a couple of bar napkins across her forehead. The place was hot. The day was hot and there were a lot of people there and the grill was going.
“Looks good,” said Susan. “If the weather lasts another week, the wheat will be in. No problems.”
Other years, it had rained, and the grain had to wait for the sun. Put up damp, it would mold. Running grain dryers was expensive. There weren’t enough of them. Not needed until they were needed, and then too much grain for the ones at hand.
The big parking lot across the street was filled with the motor homes that the crews lived in. In past years, the ranchers put the crews up in bunkhouses, but since farm and ranch hands had been replaced pretty much by machinery, the bunkhouses had rotted or burned down.
Combine gypsies.
Voyageurs.
Du Pré sipped his drink.
“Could you maybe do some music tonight?” said Susan. “Crews switch at nine or ten, so if you started at seven or so then both shifts could hear you.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Thanks,” said Susan.
Du Pré thought about who he could get to back him up.
Couple kids. Ranch kids, one played pretty good rhythm guitar and the other pretty good bass.
Wish my cousins were here, they got some music in them.
The kids are OK, just too young.
And they like the old songs. Guitar player he wants to fiddle, I give him one lesson, a tape of simple stuff, say, when you can do all this perfectly then I give you another. Me, I don’t listen to you practice at all. I listen to myself practice is bad enough.
Du Pré called the boys, who weren’t in but their mothers said they thought they would, which meant that they would.
These ranch women pret’ tough.
Du Pré laughed.
A young man in faded denims and worn boots and a battered hat yee-hawed. Du Pré glanced at the point register at the top of the video poker machine’s screen. Past five hundred and climbing, so the kid had hit a Royal Flush, Ordered. Ten to ace, left to right. That was eight hundred bucks.
Susan laughed and she went in the back to get the money. The young man brought the slip of paper to the bar and he waited, grinning.
Susan glanced at the little slip of paper. She handed over the eight hundred-dollar bills.
“Drinks for the house!” the young man yelled.
Everybody whooped, even Du Pré.
“Buy me a few new clothes and get my truck some new tires,” said the young cowboy. “Then I’ll put ten times this back into them damn machines figuring I am going to win big again. You don’t, I know, but it is some way to pass the time.”
Du Pré glanced at his hand. Wedding band. He was a long way from his wife. Probably missed her a lot.
Du Pré went out and he drove up to Madelaine’s. She was in the kitchen, kneading bread dough. Wednesday. Baking day. Madelaine had a baking day, two cleaning days, two sewing days, a day to relax, and one day she prayed more or less all day. Unless she went to bed with Du Pré, or he offered to buy her pink wine and dance to the music on the jukebox with her.
