Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m from West Texas, myself. I’m looking for a guy. Haven’t had any luck, though.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  He put his fingers on the edge of the photo in his pocket as though preparing to show it to me.

  “You picked the right fellow, Troyce. Dave’s a cop,” Candace Sweeney said.

  “You vacationing in Montana?” Troyce said, his eyes flat, the way people’s eyes go when they have no intention of allowing you inside their thoughts.

  “Fishing, mostly,” I replied.

  I waited for him to hand me the photo. But his fingers didn’t move from his shirt pocket. Instead, he straightened the flap on the pocket and buttoned it. “I’m helping settle an estate down in Texas. I’ve got some money for this guy, but I don’t think he’s here’bouts. The money comes from a church trust the guy’s family was involved with. That’s why I was hanging around here. Big waste of time. I think the guy got drunk and fell off a freight-car spine outside Billings. Candace, I think we need to get us a chicken-fried steak and some Indian bread up at the café. What did you say your name was again?”

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux.”

  “It’s good meeting you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  We shook hands. His handshake was neither firm nor soft but neutral, just like his expression and his eyes.

  Candace Sweeney was staring over her friend’s shoulder at the aisle. “Troyce, there’s a guy burning holes in your back.”

  “Unshaved dude, greasy black hair, blue shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie?” he said without turning around.

  “You got it,” she said. “He walked past me a while ago. He’s got a serious gapo problem, like it’s ironed into his clothes.”

  “What’s gapo?” Troyce said.

  “Gorilla armpit odor,” she replied.

  “Good night, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “Good night,” I replied.

  But they didn’t get far. Just outside the apron of light that fringed the tent, I saw Jamie Sue Wellstone’s driver buttonhole them. I walked up behind the three of them. Quince, the driver, was planted like a stump, his arms pumped, his hands opening and closing at his sides. “Don’t lie to me, boy,” he said. “I saw you pestering people as soon as you come in.”

  “Boy?” Troyce said, smiling easily.

  “You answer my question.”

  “I didn’t hear you ask one.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “No sir, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Then state your goddamn business.”

  “I work for a faith-based foundation in El Paso. I was trying to find a man who’s inherited a lot of money. But I ain’t had no luck in that.”

  “The man on that photo you were showing around?”

  “Could be.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “It is if you want your evening to go on in a reg’lar way.”

  Troyce looked into the darkness, his forehead undisturbed by wrinkles or thought. He removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked at Candace rather than Quince. “I guess it cain’t hurt,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and slipped the photo from it. The image on it had been cropped with scissors, snipped clean of the jailhouse location and numbers under it. “Seen that fellow around?”

  Quince studied the photograph for a long time. Even in the shadows, I could see his scalp flex. “No,” he said.

  Troyce smiled again, his eyes tolerant, faintly amused. “Sure about that?”

  “I said it, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did. You’ve been a good little fellow. If I get the chance to talk to your mistress up yonder on the stage, I’ll tell her that myself.”

  Candace Sweeney and Troyce walked into the mist and ground fog, the vast silhouettes of the Mission Mountains stretched across the sky behind them.

  Quince turned around, noticing me for the first time. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  “Not a whole lot,” I replied.

  I walked to the end of the tent area and up the dirt road that ran by the Indian powwow grounds. A moment later, an SUV with Candace Sweeney behind the wheel and her friend Troyce in the passenger seat went past me, the taillights braking where the dirt road intersected with the state highway. I wrote down the plate number, then drove home in an electric storm that lit the Bitterroot River and the cottonwoods like pistol flares floating down from a forgotten war.

  CHAPTER 10

  CANDACE SWEENEY HAD never understood abstract concepts connected with death, geographical permanence, or what people called “planning for the future.” She associated those particular concerns with people who either lived in a different world from the one she knew about or who deluded themselves about the nature of reality. The kind of people who spent their time at garage sales, window-shopping at the mall, or watching the Business Channel. Like they were going to take any of that crap with them.

  The future didn’t exist, right? So what was the point of trying to control what hasn’t happened? The same applied with relationships. People came and went in your life, just like people entered turnstiles and exited them on the other side. In and out, right? Why place your trust in anyone who was just passing through?

  She didn’t remember her mother. Her father was nicknamed Smilin’ Jack. He claimed the mother had died of ovarian cancer up in British Columbia, where he had worked as a gypo logger and sometimes on commercial fishing boats. But others said Candace’s mother was a morphine addict and a prostitute who ran a brothel in Valdez. When Candace was thirteen, Smilin’ Jack left her with a cousin in Seattle and went into the Cascades to pan gold. He was never seen again. He didn’t abandon her. He wasn’t profligate or mean or selfish. He had simply walked off in the rain, just like he was entering a turnstile, and had been absorbed by the great green-gray mass of mountains east of Seattle.

  Now it was early Thursday morning in a budget motel not far from the Blackfoot River, downwind from a sawmill that smelled like the Pacific Northwest where Candace had grown up. The lights were on in a truck stop across the road, and log trucks were parked outside the café area, their diesel engines hammering. The rain had quit, and Candace knew it was going to be a good day. Or did she just want it to be a good day? The latter thought was disturbing to Candace, because wanting or needing anything, particularly when it had to be granted by other human beings, was an invitation to dependency and trouble.

  She had made a cup of instant coffee from the hot water in the bathroom tap, and she drank it in her pajamas by the window and watched Troyce sleep. She didn’t understand Troyce. He was not like any man she had ever known. He opened doors for her, waited for her to order first in a restaurant, and didn’t use profanity in her presence. He seemed to genuinely like being with her and gave her money for whatever she wanted to buy without her even asking. But their first night together in a motel, she had clicked off the television set with the remote and turned off the overhead bed lamp and pulled the blanket up to her chin, waiting in the darkness for his hand to touch her. When he fell fast asleep, his back to her, she attributed his behavior to the fatigue that the injuries in his chest caused him.

  In the morning she had felt his hardness against her hip, his breath touching her cheek like a feather. Then he’d opened his eyes and smiled at her like a man who wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d gone into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and shaved and combed his hair. When he came out, drying his neck with a towel, his cheeks ruddy, he was completely dressed. He asked her what she wanted for breakfast.

  She did not question him about his past, less out of fear of what he was than fear that he would lie to her. If he lied to her, she would know that in reality he was like other men, that he did not respect her and his attitude toward her had been dishonest and manipulative from the beginning. Her realization that she had stepped over a line and had made herself vulnerable to
a man she hardly knew – except that he reminded Candace of her father – filled her with trepidation and anxiety and a growing sense of distrust about herself.

  She had taken care of herself since she was thirteen. She didn’t need any more lessons in the school of hard knocks.

  But now she found herself residing in a canyon wet with dew, across from a truck stop whose neon signs smoked in the cold, wondering if all her experience on the ragged edges of America had adequately prepared her for the relationship she had entered with a six-feet-five man by the name of Troyce Nix.

  He pushed himself up in bed, his face flinching with the pain his wounds caused him. He had never been specific about the origin of his injuries. He had said simply, “A fellow tried to do me in. He dadburned near pulled it off.” He never denied he had been a cop of some kind. By the same token, he didn’t indicate he had been one, either. From the way he talked, she believed he had been in the army, maybe even to Iraq, and had encountered some kind of trouble there, maybe even in an army stockade. He always read the articles about the war first when he opened the newspaper. But wherever he had been or whatever he had done, he was a man’s man, and other men knew it. When she was with him, other men didn’t let their eyes wander as they would have if she had been alone. He seemed to find no fault in her, never criticized, and always laughed at her jokes and her irreverence. He had become the man who had always lived on the edge of her dreams, one who had chased float gold in the Cascades, believing rocks washing down from snowmelt could make him and his daughter rich.

  In short, she had fallen in love with a man who didn’t touch her under the sheets in the darkness. Ironically, he had become the elusive figure who had been absorbed on the other side of the turnstile.

  She sat down on the mattress and picked up Troyce’s hand in hers. She made circles with her fingers on the round outlines of his knuckles and brushed back the hair on his forearm. “I feel like I’m not being the friend I should be,” she said.

  “You’re real special. You just don’t know it,” he said.

  “Somebody hurt you, Troyce. Last night you didn’t want to tell that fellow Mr. Robicheaux why you were looking for the man in the photo. I didn’t talk to him about you, but because you don’t tell me what’s going on, I could have opened my mouth and said the wrong thing.”

  “Well, you didn’t, and that’s all that matters.”

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Sure, I do. Any man would. You’re heck on wheels, little darlin’.”

  “Is it something about the way I look? My tattoos or the pits in my face?”

  He lifted his hand from hers and touched his fingers on her cheek and around her mouth and eyes and behind her ears. The top of her pajamas was unbuttoned, and she saw his eyes drift to the tattoos of flowers on her breasts. His fingers grazed her nipples, his lips parting slightly. “I’m cut up too bad inside,” he said. “That fellow broke the shank off in me. I like to bled to death.”

  But she’d seen the lie in his eyes before he even spoke it.

  “It’s all right. You’ve been good to me, Troyce. I’m not complaining,” she said.

  “A woman like you is the kind every man wants. You’re loyal, and you’re not afraid. Background or schooling don’t have anything to do with what a man likes. You’ll give a man your whole person and stick with him to the graveyard. I know men better than you do. Believe me when I say that.”

  She searched his eyes, her heart twisting inside her, a terrible truth suggesting itself right beyond the edge of his words.

  “Don’t cry. I wouldn’t do anything to make you cry, little darlin’,” he said.

  THAT SAME THURSDAY morning Molly and I drove into Missoula and had breakfast, then went to the courthouse, where I told Joe Bim Higgins of my conversation with the Indian girl who had been wearing a cross similar to the one Seymour Bell had probably worn around his neck the night he was murdered.

  “The Indian gal is some kind of campus minister with this revival group?” he said.

  “That’s what she says. But she didn’t seem to know Seymour Bell or Cindy Kershaw.”

  “You think Bell was mixed up with Jamie Sue Wellstone somehow? Like a junior minister with her group?”

  “Could be.”

  “I think we have a random killer on our hands. I don’t particularly care for rich outside folks buying up the state, but I don’t make the Wellstones for killers.”

  “You were at Heartbreak Ridge, Sheriff?”

  “What about it?”

  “Places like that have a way of altering our views on our fellow man.”

  “I saw things I don’t talk about, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t believe in the notion that everybody is a potential killer,” he said.

  I didn’t pursue it. I told him about my encounter with Candace Sweeney and her friend named Troyce who had gotten the attention of Jamie Sue’s driver because he had been showing a photograph to members of the audience. “I got the guy’s tag number. I’d like to run it,” I said.

  “Who do you think he is?”

  “Not who he pretends to be,” I replied.

  “Come back in an hour.” He paused. The glare through his office window silhouetted his face, and I could not read his expression. “Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Call me Dave.”

  “Your friend Purcel is on a short tether.”

  “Clete’s a good man, Sheriff.”

  “So is my son-in-law. I just put him in jail for carrying a firearm into Stockman’s bar.”

  Molly and I walked to a religious store two blocks from the courthouse. It was a fine morning, the sunshine bright on the mountains that ringed the town, the wind smelling of the river, the streetlamps hung with baskets of flowers, the main thoroughfare filled with bicyclists on a run to Flathead Lake. I kept thinking about the sheriff’s words. He had said the deaths of the two college kids and the California tourists at the rest stop were probably random killings. I thought he was sincere, but I also believed his attitude was facile. In a sense, most killings are random. The causality of violence of any kind is more complex than we think, a homicidal act in particular. The latter is usually the conclusion of a long sequence of events and involves players who will never be brought to task for the actual crime. Rocky Graziano made a career out of bashing in his father’s face in prizefight rings while the crowds cheered. I knew a Navy SEAL who cut the throat of a sleeping Vietcong political operative and painted the dead man’s face yellow so his wife could find him that way in the morning. He told me it was his fervent wish that his own wife could wake by her lover in a similar fashion.

  The term “serial killer” is equally specious. I’ve known racists who I suspected participated in lynchings years ago. After the civil rights era passed and a general amnesia regarding their crimes set in, they found ways to position themselves in other situations where they could injure and even kill defenseless people. The irony is, after they ensconced themselves inside the system, their deeds were often considered laudable.

  My point is that when people use the term “random” or “serial” in referring to a type of homicide, they are leaving out the element that is central to pathological behavior. The motivation is not financial. It’s not even about power. The attack on the victim is almost always characterized by a level of ferocity that is out of proportion to any apparent cause. Its origins reside in the id and are sexual and perverse in nature. The perpetrator’s appetites are insatiable, and his desire to do more injury increases as he releases his self-loathing and fury on his victim. That’s why family newspapers don’t include details about the physical damage done to the victims of sociopathic predators, and that’s why defense attorneys try to suppress morgue photos, and that’s why a lot of cops drink too much.

  Molly walked with her arm in mine. “I think you’re on the right track. I think Sheriff Higgins is not.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Let’s see what we learn at the store,�
� she said.

  The bell rang on the door when we went inside the religious store. The owner was a very elderly woman, her back bent with bone loss, her eyes diffident over the top of her glasses. When I asked her about a wood cross attached to a leather cord, she removed a box filled with them from under the counter. “They’re made in India,” she said. “They’re three dollars apiece.” She waited, as though I were there to make a purchase.

  I showed her the deputy sheriff’s badge Joe Bim Higgins had issued me and told her I was conducting a homicide investigation. She tilted her head up when she comprehended the gravity of the subject; the angle caused her eyes to magnify behind the lenses.

  “Do you receive any large orders for these crosses?” I asked.

  “Once in a while. Not often. A young people’s group has used them,” she replied.

  “Which one would that be?”

  “Just a moment. I’ll look.” She went into the back of her store and returned carrying a shoe box packed with sales slips. It took her a long time to find the purchase order. “Here it is,” she said. “It was a phone-in order.”

  “From the Swan Valley?” I said.

  “No, in Spokane. A Baptist church there runs a summer Bible camp. The children are given these as rewards for learning their Bible lessons.”

  “Do you know the Wellstone family?” I asked.

  “I know a Blackstone family. They used to live here in Missoula. Mr. Blackstone worked for the Forest Service. Is that who you mean? Since the timber industry has gone down, a lot of old customers have moved away. Mr. Blackstone was such a nice gentleman.”

  I tried to hide my exasperation. I showed her the class yearbook photographs of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell that Joe Bim Higgins had given me. “You remember either one of these kids?”

  “I remember that one.” She pointed at the photo of Seymour Bell.