Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Where’d you go Sunday night?” I asked.

  He kept chewing, his gaze fixed on a group of homeless people sitting under the trees on the courthouse lawn. “I think some of those homeless guys are Rainbows,” he said. “They used to follow the Grateful Dead around. When I came back from Vietnam, I got stoned in Oakland with the Merry Pranksters. At least the girl I woke up with said she was a Merry Prankster. She introduced me to Hunter Thompson. I ever tell you that?”

  Clete had gone into his old mode of slipping the punch and talking about every subject on earth except the one at hand. “You were with Felicity Louviere Sunday night?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m getting it on with a married woman? I can’t keep it in my pants?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I went to meet her at the stone cabin the Youngers own on Sweathouse Creek. I went to tell her I’d made a mistake, that I didn’t want to hurt her and maybe not her husband, either. I went there to tell her I was wrong.”

  “What happened?”

  He had put down his biscuit and was staring at his plate. “She said she and her husband had just visited their daughter’s grave. She said he was full of grief. She said maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.”

  “That should have been it, right? I mean, she was admitting the mistake, and so were you. That’s all people can do.”

  “It didn’t work out that way. She said she’d fallen in love with me and she didn’t want me to go away. She didn’t care if I was old or fat or a drunk or a guy who’s done some stuff he won’t ever talk about.”

  “You got it on with her?”

  “Why don’t you put it up there on the blackboard so the customers can read about my sex life while they check out the daily special?”

  “Clete, what are you doing?”

  “Getting my daughter out of the can. I thought that’s why we came to town.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound judgmental.”

  “Except you are judgmental, and it makes me feel like somebody poured liquid pig flop in my shoes.”

  “Is she going to leave her husband?”

  “We didn’t talk about that.”

  “This is going to tear you up, partner.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it? Rip out my genitalia? Kill myself?”

  “Bail out of it.”

  “That’s why I met with her at the cabin Sunday night. Except things didn’t work out as planned. I didn’t get home till two in the morning.”

  I started to tell him I didn’t need any more details, then realized how cruel that would be. Across the street, the homeless people were out on the sidewalk sailing a Frisbee. “We’ve been in worse trouble,” I said.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Gretchen didn’t do Zappa. That’s all we have to keep in mind right now. We get her out of jail, and we get rid of this bogus murder beef,” I said.

  “How?”

  “I saw an antique Winchester inside the camper shell on Wyatt Dixon’s truck. It looked like an 1892, the one with the elevator sight. It wouldn’t be unlikely for him to own a couple of smoothbore black-powder pieces. Montana has a primitive weapons big-game season that opens in the early fall. It’s the kind of gig Dixon would be up for.”

  “You think Dixon capped Zappa?”

  “He told me an eye for an eye. I think he meant it.”

  “I got something else bothering me, Dave. You think Gretchen might have a thing for Dixon?”

  “She has better judgment,” I replied.

  “But it’s a possibility?”

  “Give her some credit.” I tried to sound convincing. I doubted if anyone knew what went on inside the head of Gretchen Horowitz.

  “This is a crock, isn’t it?” Clete said.

  “We need to get to the heart of the problem. Elvis Bisbee isn’t going to be much help.”

  “Asa Surrette is at the center of it all?”

  “Yeah, the guy who probably wants to do things to Alafair that most people can’t imagine. I can’t sleep thinking about it. We’ve got to put this guy out of business.”

  “To what degree?”

  When I didn’t reply, he picked up his fork and started eating. His food had grown cold; he was chewing and swallowing it as he would cardboard. He drank a glass of water and looked at me, his face round and flat. “Answer my question, Dave. How do we play this one?”

  “We wipe him off the planet,” I said.

  “That’s more like it, big mon.”

  No, it wasn’t. Grandiosity is always the mark of fear and uncertainty, and as soon as I’d spoken those words, I knew they would come back to mock me.

  ASA SURRETTE WAS officially dead, even though he had left a note under Alafair’s windshield wiper outside the Lolo post office. I wanted to be angry at the authorities in Kansas and also at the FBI for concluding that he had died in the collision of the prison van with the tanker truck. Unfortunately, I had been guilty of the same obtuseness when Alafair told me she was sure Surrette was stalking her.

  After we returned from the jail with Gretchen, I sat down with a legal pad and a felt-tip pen by our bedroom window and began writing down as many details as I could about Surrette. Any detective who has investigated serial killings, or any psychiatrist who has spent time interviewing psychopaths such as the cousins Angelo Buono, Jr., and Kenneth Bianchi or the satanist Richard Ramirez or the BTK killer, Dennis Rader, will be the first to tell you that behavioral science tends to fall apart when you probe the souls of men like these. It’s not unlike an attempt to fathom the origins of the universe. At a certain point, the laws of science lose their applicability.

  When it came to motivation, misogyny was often in the mix. So was pedophilia. These two forms of psychosis did not explain the level of violence and savagery the perpetrators inflicted on their victims. I have my speculations, although they are founded on personal experience and not the results of any study I’m aware of. I have known many cruel people in my life. Their cruelty, in my opinion, was the mask for their fear. It’s that simple.

  We all agree that anyone who is cruel to animals is a moral and physical coward and undeserving of the air he breathes. This same person, however, has a way of working himself into a position of authority over others, often children, even though all the warning signs are there. I’ve never understood our collective unwillingness to question the authority of a predator who happens to acquire a badge or an insignia or a clerical collar or who carries a whistle on a lanyard around his neck. Without our sanction, these pitiful excuses for human beings would wither and die like amphibians gasping for oxygen and water on the surface of Mars.

  The motivations of a psychopath are almost irrelevant in an investigation. Psychoanalytical speculation about a moral imbecile makes for great entertainment, but it doesn’t put a net over anyone, and you do yourself no favor by trying to place yourself inside his head. The methodology of the psychopath is a different issue, one that frequently proves to be his undoing. In all probability, the perpetrator’s pattern will repeat itself, primarily because he’s a narcissist and thinks his method, if it has worked once, is fail-safe; second, the psychopath is not interested in the hunt but, rather, in assaulting and murdering his prey, unlike a professional thief, who is usually a pragmatist and considers theft an occupation and not a personal attack upon his victim.

  Asa Surrette’s pattern in Kansas was not imaginative. He used his job as an electrician to enter the victim’s home and lie in wait. He bound and tortured and suffocated most of his victims and ejaculated on the women and girls but did not penetrate them. He posed them and took trophies home—purses, underwear, costume jewelry, wedding rings, driver’s licenses. If he took money from the crime scene, it was coincidental.

  I had created two columns on my legal pad, one detailing the characteristics of Surrette’s crimes and the other a list of his jobs, the uniforms he might have worn, his travels, and his known friends.

  I compared the inf
ormation I had written on the legal pad with what I knew about his crimes in Montana, if indeed Asa Surrette was the same man who had shot an arrow at Alafair and left the message on the cave wall and murdered Angel Deer Heart and Bill Pepper and perhaps the pilot whose twin-engine Cessna had exploded west of Missoula.

  The murders in Wichita were aimed at women and girls with whom he had no known prior contact. Was the same true of Angel Deer Heart? Why would a seventeen-year-old girl leave a biker nightclub full of music and excitement and go off with a seedy old man who had the social appeal of a soiled litter box?

  Unless she knew him.

  There was another troubling issue. To anyone’s knowledge, with the exception of the farmer from whom he possibly stole a truck, Surrette had never attacked a lone male. If Surrette was our man, why would he go after Bill Pepper in the cottage up at Swan Lake, and why would he sexually mutilate him?

  I had only one answer: Surrette had planted the bug in Clete’s cabin and learned that Pepper had kidnapped and sexually abused Gretchen Horowitz. He murdered Pepper, knowing there was a good chance Clete or Gretchen would be blamed for his death.

  Why go to all this trouble to do injury to Clete and Gretchen, neither of whom had done him any harm? It wasn’t adding up. Also, what was Surrette living on?

  Crime is about money, sex, or power. I had a feeling all three were involved with our visitor from the land of the Yellow Brick Road. As I stared down at my legal pad, I realized there was one element missing from all the forensic evidence gathered by authorities during the twenty-year period Surrette had been torturing and murdering people. He had not left messages with biblical or messianic overtones. Even when he called the authorities or the news media to tell them where they could find a body, he made no grandiose claims. Where and when had he taken on his new persona? In prison? Or had the transformation not been of his choosing?

  Some people in A.A. say a recovering drunk should not go inside his own head without an escort. I was beginning to think they were right.

  I went into Alafair’s room. She had worked all night on her new novel and had eaten breakfast while the sky was dark, then had gone to bed. She was sleeping on her side, her long black hair scattered on her face, her mouth slightly parted. She had grown into a tall and lithe young woman who spoke with a South Louisiana accent and whose posture was always erect and whose eye was clear and whose sense of principle governed every aspect of her life. Even in sleep, an aura of peace and strength seemed to radiate from her face. The window was open, and up the hillside I could see the darkness of the pines and cedars and fir trees, and I knew that inside the deep shade on the hillside was the tiger William Blake had written about, burning brightly in the forests of the night, his brain dipped from a furnace and forged with a hammer and chain. The tiger was Asa Surrette, the bane of us all, the trees lighting when he padded through the undergrowth, his guttural sounds a prelude of things to come.

  Where are you, sir? How brave and fearsome would you be on a level playing field? Do you swell with pride when you remember the child you hung from a pipe in a basement? I wonder how well you would fare if you were faced with the prospect of eating eight rounds from a 1911-model .45 auto?

  Alafair’s eyes opened and looked into mine. She lifted herself on one elbow and pushed her hair over her forehead. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “It’s fine,” I replied.

  “That look on your face.”

  “Let’s stay close together until this stuff with Surrette is over.”

  “I’m not afraid of him. I wish he would come around.”

  “Caution and fear aren’t the same thing.”

  “You don’t know him, Dave. I do. He’s a frightened, pathetic little man.”

  I pulled up a chair next to her bed. “So was Hitler,” I said. “Don’t underestimate the power of evil. Sometimes I think it finds a vessel to operate in, then discards it and moves on.”

  “I think you’re giving Surrette too much credit.”

  “About fifteen years ago, a twenty-one-year-old kid broke into a home in the Blackfoot Valley and tied up the husband and wife in chairs and butchered them alive. The husband had a seventh-degree black belt in karate. When the kid was awaiting execution in Deer Lodge, some inmates got out of lockdown and took over the cell house for three days. The kid killed or helped kill five more people. On the day of his execution, he had to be awakened from a sound sleep.”

  Alafair went into the bathroom and washed her face and came back out. “Want to go back to Louisiana?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Because we don’t run away from problems. That’s what you always taught me. And we never allow ourselves to be afraid. You said it over and over when I was growing up.”

  “I didn’t say close your eyes to reality.”

  “Where’s Gretchen?” she said.

  “At the cabin with Clete.”

  “None of this is her fault. Don’t put it on her, Dave.”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “You were thinking about it.”

  “She’s a lightning rod, Alf.”

  “Let’s get something straight, Pops. I’m the one who stoked up Asa Surrette, not Gretchen.”

  “It’s not all about you. He has other reasons for being here. I just don’t know what they are.”

  She put her hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. “You worry too much. We’ll get through this. What is it Clete always says? Good guys über alles?” She took her hand away from my neck. “You’re hot as a stove. You have a fever?”

  “Like you say, I worry too much,” I replied.

  HE HAD HIS hair barbered by a stylist and his suit dry-cleaned and pressed and checked into a motel under the name of Reverend Geta Noonen, way up a long mountainous slope next to a river, almost to Idaho, in an area where people still lived up the drainages and off the computer. Inside his room, he threw away his pipe and tobacco and dyed and blow-dried his hair a sandy blond and, for twenty minutes, used a brush and washrag in the shower to scrub the smell of nicotine off his skin and nails. He shaved his chest and armpits, pared and clipped his nails, and layered his body with deodorant.

  When he was tempted to retrieve his pipe from the wastebasket and core it out and refill it with the dark mix of imported tobaccos he had loved for years, he put a piece of licorice in his mouth and sucked it into a tiny lump and did push-ups in front of the television and then ate another piece until the craving passed. He showered again and kept the cold water on his face and head and shoulders so long that he was numb all over and had no desire other than to get warm and to put hot food in his stomach.

  Yes, he could do it, he told himself. The sacrifice of his only vice was small compared to the reward that awaited him west of Lolo, on the ranch owned by Albert Hollister. He took a print shirt from a box of eighteen he had bought at Costco and put it on with his beige suit and a pair of new loafers and looked into the mirror. Clean-shaven and blond, he hardly recognized himself. He looked like an aging sportsman, a sun-bleached fellow strolling along a beach in the Florida Keys, his mouth effeminate in an appealing way, the palm trees lifting against a lavender sky, a woman at an outside bar glancing up at him.

  Not bad, he thought.

  He ate supper at the counter in the café attached to the motel. Through the back window, he could see the river flowing long and straight out of the hills, the rocks protruding from the riffle, the surface dark and glistening with the last rays of a red sun. A man in hip waders was fly-casting in the shallows, working the nylon line into a figure eight above his head and laying the fly onto the riffle as gently as a butterfly descending on a leaf. Except the man who had registered as the Reverend Geta Noonen was not interested in fly-fishing. He could see a swing set on the motel lawn, down by the water, and a little girl throwing rocks in the current while the mother watched. He put a forkful of meat loaf in his mouth, blowing air on it as he chewed, as though it were
too hot to swallow.

  “The food okay?” the waitress asked. She was young and uncertain, her bones as fragile as a bird’s. Her pink uniform was splattered on one side with either grease or dishwater, and she kept looking away from the man’s face as she waited for him to answer.

  “It’s perfect,” he said.

  “I thought it might be too hot. I put it in the micro because you were in the washroom.”

  “You have a nice place here.”

  “It’s out of the way, but we like it,” she said, refilling his coffee cup, her face filling with pleasure because the customer had complimented the place where she worked.

  “It’s a family-type diner. That’s the best kind. I bet it’s American-owned,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  He gazed out the window, his eyes sleepy and warm with sentiment. “Salt of the earth,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I was talking about those people out there. Mother and child. That’s the salt of the earth.”

  “You talk like a preacher.”

  “That’s because I am.”

  “Which church?”

  “The big one, the one that doesn’t have a name.”

  She seemed to think a moment. “Meaning Jesus doesn’t belong to just one denomination?”

  “That pretty much says it all. Watch yourself.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re about to spill that hot coffee on your foot.”

  “I know better than that.”

  “I bet you do. I bet you know plenty.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “About the restaurant business and public relations. About the people who come in here. You’re a good judge of people, I bet.”

  “I can tell the good ones from the bad ones.”

  “Which am I?”

  “You’re a preacher, aren’t you? That speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”