Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  Alafair sat down at the table and placed her notebook and a pen and a recorder next to one another. Through the oblong windows in the door and the wall, she could see two correctional officers monitoring the hallway and the rooms that were usually reserved for lawyer-client meetings. “You have a degree in administration of justice?” she said.

  He watched her pick up her pen. “I took writing courses, too.”

  “But you were a criminal science major?”

  “Yes, but I never wanted to be a policeman. I thought about it, but it wasn’t for me.”

  “You had aspirations to be a writer?” When she tried to smile, her face felt stiff and unnatural. Also, there was a pain in her chest, as though someone had pressed a thorn close to her heart. She tried not to bite the corner of her lip.

  His eyes shifted sideways, the manacles tightening against the waist chain. “I studied with a professor who claimed he was a friend of Leicester Hemingway, Ernest’s brother. Maybe he was just bragging. He wouldn’t read one of my stories in front of the class.”

  “What was in the story?”

  “I forget. Something that bothered him. He took it to the head of the creative writing program. I thought he was a silly guy. He said he’d published some novels. I think he was probably a fake.” He stared into her face as though waiting for her to confirm or deny his perception.

  “What would you like to talk about?” she said.

  “I’m waiting for you to ask the question they all ask.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Don’t lie. You know what the question is. It’s not a question, either. It’s the question. It’s the only reason any of you come here.”

  “Why did you torture and kill all those people, Mr. Surrette?”

  “See?” His eyes were dark brown and contained a greasy shine, like rainwater in a wood barrel that never saw sunlight. His teeth were widely spaced, the back of his tongue visible when he breathed through his mouth.

  “Are you asthmatic?” she said.

  “Sometimes. I was asthmatic when I needed to get out of the navy.”

  “I want to clarify something. You’re operating under a misconception,” she said. “I have no expectation that you will ever tell me or anyone else why you tortured and killed all those innocent people. In all probability, you will never deliberately reveal your secrets. You’ll refuse to tell family members where the bodies of their loved ones are buried. Your legacy will be the suffering you leave behind, and you’ll leave as much of it as you can.”

  “Not true.”

  “What you don’t understand, Mr. Surrette, is your deeds and your motivations are scientifically inseparable. A cause has an effect. An effect has a cause. Nothing happens in a vacuum. A physical act is the consequence of an electrical impulse in the brain. It’s like watching a moth in a windstorm. The outcome is immediately demonstrable. It’s not a complex idea.”

  His eyes seemed to dull over, as though for a few seconds he had slipped sideways in time and was no longer in the room. She could see a piece of food in his teeth and dried mucus at the corner of his mouth. “Who was it that said don’t try to understand me too soon?” he asked.

  She tried not to show any reaction to the confident gleam in his eye and his apparent sense of self-satisfaction.

  “It was Proust,” he said.

  “Your first victims, or the first anyone knows about, were a mother and father and their two children south of Wichita. You strangled and/or suffocated all four of them. You saved the children for last. The little boy was nine. The girl was eleven.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “You killed the parents first. Was that because you wanted to take more time with the children? Did you feel great anger toward them?”

  “I didn’t know them. Why should I feel anger at them?”

  “So your feelings toward them were primarily sexual? After you strangled the little girl, you ejaculated on her legs. I don’t think you mentioned that in your allocution. You want to say anything about that now?”

  “All I have to do is signal the CO and this is over.”

  “Then call him.”

  The heat in the room had intensified. She could smell his odor, and she remembered the correctional officer saying Surrette was allowed to shower only three times a week. His whiskers looked like emery paper. “In your letter you said your father was a police officer,” he said.

  “He’s a sheriff’s detective in Louisiana.”

  “That’s where you learned this stuff about people with my kind of history?”

  “I have a degree in psychology from Reed.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Why did you ejaculate on the little girl?”

  His face was slanted away from her, as though a bitter wind had struck his cheek. “I can’t think about that right now. I can only think about that in sessions with the counselor here. I will not talk about that now.”

  “Why is that? Do you think I can harm you?”

  “You’re trying to embarrass me. You want me to feel bad about what I am. You remind me of that creative writing professor I had at WSU. You know what I told him on the student evaluation? I said it wasn’t his fault he didn’t like stories about boys chewing on each other’s weenies. I don’t think he liked my evaluation too much.”

  Her stomach constricted, and she had to hold her breath and look into neutral space to hide the revulsion she felt. “Excuse me, I have hay fever,” she said. She took a Kleenex from her purse and blew her nose. “In your allocution, you said you did a ‘John Wayne’ on another victim. He was nineteen. This was before you stabbed and strangled his wife to death. What did you mean by a ‘John Wayne’?”

  “I shot him. He grabbed my pistol and tried to kill me with it. He pulled the trigger twice, but it didn’t fire. So I shot him.”

  “You were acting in self-defense at that point?”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  “Does that seem like a rational point of view?”

  “Your face is a little red. Is it too hot in here for you?”

  “You took the body of one woman to your church and posed and photographed her. You put the body back in your van and then dumped it on the roadside. No one has ever figured that out. Do you want to talk about that?”

  “Why I took her and not somebody else to the church?”

  “The question is why you would kill your victim in one place and transport her to the church where you’re a parishioner. Why would you take a risk like that? Why would you photograph her in your church?”

  “Maybe that’s just part of my dark side. Everybody’s got one.”

  “I can’t write a book about you unless you’re honest with me.”

  “I think you ask questions you already know the answers to. I think you ask questions that are supposed to degrade me.”

  “My opinions mean nothing. The publisher and the reader are interested in you, not me. A large number of people will read whatever you tell me here today.”

  His head was tilted on one shoulder, as though he were drowsing off or imitating a hanged man. “You’re a manipulator, but that doesn’t mean you’re smart.”

  “Could be,” she said.

  He straightened in his chair and shouted at the door, “On the gate, boss man!”

  “You took the woman to the church to mark your territory,” she said. “Every animal does it.”

  His eyes narrowed, and she saw his nostrils whiten around the rims. When the correctional officer escorted him out of the room, his eyes were bright and hard and receded in his face and still fastened on hers.

  IT WAS NINE P.M., and rain was falling heavily on the trees and the pastures and the hillsides and cascading down Albert’s roof when I got the call from the sheriff, Elvis Bisbee. “We found the missing Indian girl in a barn about two miles west of where you’re at,” he said. “She was tied up in the loft with a vinyl garbage bag taped around her head. The magpies probab
ly got to her five or six days ago.”

  “You’re talking about Love Younger’s granddaughter?” I said.

  “Her name was Angel Deer Heart. She would have turned eighteen next month. I just came back from her grandfather’s house. That’s the part of this job I never get used to.”

  “You’ve got to excuse me, Sheriff, but I’m not sure why you’re calling me.”

  “One of our detectives interviewed Wyatt Dixon at the Wigwam, the same place the girl was drinking the night she disappeared. Evidently, Dixon is a regular there. He didn’t deny being there the night she disappeared.”

  “You think he might be your guy?”

  “I got to thinking about that biblical message in the cave above Albert’s house and Dixon’s run-in with your daughter. The more I thought about it, the more I had to admit Dixon is a five-star nutcase who needs looking at real hard. Can you break down that quote for me?”

  “The allusion to the bended knee refers to Christ’s statement that eventually all of mankind will accept his message of peace. The alpha and omega allusion refers to Yahweh’s statement in the Old Testament that He existed before the beginning of time.”

  “So the guy who wrote this has a little problem with ego?”

  “It’s called the messianic complex. It’s characteristic of all narcissists.”

  “I want to get a forensic team up to that cave in the morning.”

  Through the window, I could see water pooling in the north pasture and the green-black sheen of the fir trees when lightning leaped between the clouds.

  “The victim was raped?” I said.

  “We don’t know yet. Her jeans were pulled off. Her panties were still on. Have you worked many like this?”

  “More than I want to remember.”

  “Dixon is supposed to come in tomorrow at eight. If he doesn’t, we’ll pick him up. Does your daughter still have that arrow?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “If Dixon’s prints are on it, I’m going to owe you and her an apology.”

  “No, you won’t. I think you’re doing a good job.”

  “In the last two years we’ve had ten sexual assaults on or near the university campus. A couple of the victims claim that university football players raped them. Sometimes I wonder if the country hasn’t already gone down the drain.”

  I had grown up in an era when a black teenage boy named Willie Francis was sentenced to die by electrocution in the St. Martinville Parish jail, nine miles from my home. In those days the electric chair traveled from parish to parish, along with the generators, and was nicknamed Gruesome Gertie. The first attempt at the boy’s electrocution was botched by the executioners, one of whom was a trusty, because they were still drunk from the previous night. Willie Francis screamed for a full minute before the current was cut. Later, the United States Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, and the governor who wrote the song “You Are My Sunshine” refused to commute the sentence. Willie Francis was strapped in the electric chair a second time and put to death.

  I did not speak of these things to the sheriff, nor do I mention them to those who pine for what they call the good old days. “See you in the morning,” I said. “Be careful on our road. It looks like it’s about to wash out.”

  THE EARLY DAWN was not a good time of day for Gretchen Horowitz. That was when a man with lights on the tips of his fingers used to visit her room and touch her with a coldness that was so intense, it seared through tissue and bone into the soul, in this case the soul of a child who was hardly more than an infant.

  When Gretchen woke from her first night’s sleep in Montana, the rain had stopped and the cabin was filled with a blue glow that seemed to have no source, the windows smudged with fog or perhaps even the clouds, which were so low they were tangled in the trees on the hillside. She put water on her face and dressed and, while Clete was still asleep, eased open the door and got into her pickup and followed the two-lane along a swollen creek into Lolo.

  At the McDonald’s next to the casino she bought a breakfast to go of sausage and scrambled eggs and biscuits and scalding-hot coffee, then drove back to the ranch and walked up the hillside and spread her raincoat on a flat rock and began eating, the first glimmer of sunlight touching the tops of the trees far down the valley.

  She heard sounds, up on the logging road, and only then noticed the cruiser parked behind Albert’s house. Down by the south pasture, a second cruiser was coming slowly up the road, as though the driver were looking for an address. The driver turned under the archway and parked by the barn and got out. He was a heavy man who wore a suit and street shoes and a rain hat; in his left hand he carried a pair of cowboy boots. He opened the back door and pulled out a man dressed in skintight Wranglers and a long-sleeved snap-button red shirt and a straw hat. The man was barefoot, and his wrists were handcuffed behind him.

  The man in the suit fitted his hand under the cowboy’s arm and began to muscle him up the slope past the rock where Gretchen was sitting. The cowboy had a profile like an Indian’s and a dimple in his chin and eyes that looked prosthetic rather than real. He slipped in the mud and slid down the incline, trying to stop himself with his bare feet, his clothes slathering with mud and fine gravel and pine needles.

  “Get up!” said the man in the suit, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, twisting the cloth in his fingers. “Did you hear me, boy?”

  The cowboy tried to get up and fell again. The man in the suit ripped the straw hat off the cowboy’s head and began whipping him with it, striking him across the ears and eyes and the crown of his skull, again and again. “You want to get tased? I’ll do it.”

  “I think you might have what they call anger-management issues,” the cowboy said, squinting up from the ground. “I heered you ran into your ex at the Union Club and asked if her new boyfriend wasn’t disappointed by her poor old wore-out vag, and she said, ‘Soon as he got past the wore-out part, he liked it just fine, Bill.’ Is that true, Detective Pepper?”

  The detective dropped the boots he had been carrying and picked up the cowboy by the shirtfront and sent him crashing through the pine saplings and into a tree stump. All of this was taking place thirty feet from where Gretchen Horowitz was sitting with her Styrofoam container balanced on her knees. She pushed the tines of her plastic fork through a small piece of sausage and a bit of egg and placed them in her mouth, chewing slowly, her eyes lowered. She heard the cowboy fall again, this time grunting. When she raised her head, the cowboy was sitting with his back against a boulder, sucking wind, his mouth hanging open, his face draining as though he had been kicked in the ribs or stomach. The detective removed a Taser from his coat pocket and activated it and leaned down and touched it to the back of the cowboy’s neck. The cowboy’s head jerked as though he had been dropped from the end of a rope, his face contorting. The detective stepped back and turned off the Taser and glanced down the slope at Gretchen. “What are you looking at?” he said.

  Gretchen closed the top of the Styrofoam container and set it on the rock and got up and walked up the incline toward the detective. The trees were wet and motionless in the shadows, strips of thick white cloud hanging on the crest of the ridge. “What am I looking at? Let me think. A guy in cuffs getting the shit kicked out of him?”

  “You better mind your business.”

  “I am. I’m a guest here. I was eating breakfast. What’s your name?”

  “What’s my name?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He stared at her without answering.

  “My name is Gretchen Horowitz. You don’t give your name out while you’re on the job?”

  “Horowitz?”

  “It’s Jewish.” She picked up her gold chain and religious medal from her throat and held them in her fingers for him to see. “This is Jewish, too. It’s called the Star of David.”

  “You’re interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

  “Say my name again?”
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  “What?”

  “I want to hear you pronounce my name. You accented the first syllable. You think that’s funny?”

  “No. You sound like you’re from New York.”

  “Try Miami. That’s in Florida. New York is north of Florida. Why not let the cowboy put on his boots?”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “You don’t want to find out, bacon. Where’s your boss?”

  I HAD GONE INTO Missoula with Albert early that morning to buy a fishing license, and until we pulled into the driveway, I didn’t realize the forensic team was up on the hill.

  “Waste of tax money,” Albert said.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out of biker saloons or shoot at people with hunters’ bows.”

  “Some of them are deranged and dangerous, Albert.”

  “There’s nothing like fearing a man with a hole in his shoe.”

  I didn’t feel like arguing with Albert’s proletarian views. “I’m going to walk up on the ridge. I’ll see you inside.”

  “Tell that bunch I’d better not find their nasty cigarette butts on the property,” he replied.

  As I worked my way up the slope, I could hear people talking on the far side of the trees. Then I saw a deputy in uniform, a second man in a baggy brown suit, a man in a checkered shirt I figured for a crime scene technician, and Wyatt Dixon, who was barefoot and hatless and sitting against the hillside, wrists manacled behind his back, clothes mud-streaked and sticking wetly to his skin. Gretchen Horowitz had just started back down the slope, her face as hot as a woodstove.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Don’t ask,” she said. She went past me as though I were a wood post.

  I gained the road and looked down at Dixon. His teeth were red when he grinned. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.