Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “I told you I could read your thoughts,” he said, sinking his fingers a little deeper into her upper arm, a flicker of lust and anticipation lighting on his mouth. “Be a good girl. Don’t do something rash. If you’d like to stay and have a good time, I’d say all sins are forgiven, including your father’s.”

  Jack Boyd’s grin would not go away. “I wouldn’t argue with sloppy seconds,” he said.

  “You’re asking me to get it on?”

  Caspian raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You can tell me about your documentaries.”

  “Can I ask you a question before we go any further?” she said. “Do you really believe you can go up against a guy like Wyatt Dixon?”

  “It’s what’s under the hood that counts,” he said. “I’ll let you have a test drive upstairs.”

  He worked his thumb deeper into the muscle of her arm, inching his fingers up on her shoulder, kneading the flesh along her collarbone, his mouth coming closer to hers.

  Her reaction was not emotional, nor could it be described as vengeful. She didn’t consider it of much consequence and wondered that either man could have expected a different outcome.

  “What do you say, babycakes?” Caspian asked.

  “Say about what?”

  “Going upstairs. You’ve got beautiful arms,” he said. “If the Venus de Milo had arms, they’d look like yours.”

  “That’s a great come-on line. If I ever go trans, I think I’ll give it a try.”

  “Are we on or not?” Jack Boyd said.

  “You sure you guys want to do this?” she asked.

  “Say the word,” Caspian said.

  “What the fuck,” she replied.

  “You won’t regret it,” Caspian said.

  “But you will,” she said.

  She ripped her elbow into Jack Boyd’s face and drove her fist between Caspian’s eyes. Then she pulled her blackjack from her side pocket and whipped it across the back of Boyd’s head and backstroked it across Caspian’s jaw, knocking the spittle from his mouth. She hit him on the collarbone and the points of his shoulders and shoved him through the open French doors onto the floor. Behind her, she heard Jack Boyd trying to rise to his feet. “Run,” she said.

  “Do what?” Jack Boyd replied, barely supporting himself on the back of a chair. She brought the blackjack down on top of his hand. He cradled his arm against his chest, the color draining from his face.

  “Run! Don’t come back. You’re finished here.”

  She stepped toward him. He bolted through the yard, looking back once, knocking the concrete bowl of a birdbath off its pedestal. She turned to Caspian Younger and slid a pair of needle-nosed pliers from her back pocket. He was sitting up on the floor, pressing his palm against his mouth, looking at the thick red smear on his hand. She got down on one knee. “Do you know what I’m about to do to you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know where Surrette is,” he said.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Start what?”

  “Pulling off your parts.”

  “Please. I didn’t have a choice. He’s not human. You may think he is, but he’s not. He’s what he says he is.”

  “So what is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She bent down closer to him, the pliers extended in front of her. His eyes were tightly shut. There are always lines, she heard a voice say.

  He was probably telling the truth, she told herself. If he gave up Surrette, the feds would take him off the board, and no matter how the legal implications played out, Caspian Younger would be free of the man who had probably extorted him for years.

  There was a problem, and it didn’t have to do with Surrette. Caspian had said he didn’t know where his father was. This was after his father had left him a note of endearment, one that should have made him conclude he was of some value to someone. Would he have brought a teenage girl onto the property, with the intent of debauching her, if he had no idea of his father’s whereabouts or the approximate time of his return?

  She touched the point of the pliers to his cheek, just below his eye. “Where did your father go? You do not want to give me the wrong answer.”

  “He has a place on Sweathouse Creek. He goes there because it reminds him of growing up in East Kentucky. Clouds of fog in the hollows and all that hillbilly crap he’s so fond of.”

  “You brought the girl here and didn’t worry about him coming back unexpectedly?”

  “She just came here to swim.”

  “You told Bertha Phelps where he was, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he replied, clearly forcing himself not to blink.

  “You know what a professional liar never does?” she said. “Blink. His eyelids stay stitched to his forehead. It’s a sure tell every time.”

  “I survived, just like you. You know the edge I got on Wyatt Dixon? I don’t care whether I live or die.”

  “Dixon is like your father. He’s a self-made man. I don’t think you’re anything at all. You’re a condition, not a man. I feel sorry for you.”

  “Tell me that when I take a shit on your chest, because that’s what I’m going to do when I get out of here.”

  She tapped him lightly on the tip of the nose with the pliers, then stood up. “Go wash your face. Come around me again for any reason, and I’ll blow your head off.”

  She went out the front door and left it open behind her. There were squirrels playing overhead in the trees. She watched them for a moment, then started her pickup and drove away. She tried to think of all the things he had just said to her. Two words stood out in bold relief and were not in harmony with his self-congratulatory statements about being mobbed up in Vegas. What were the words?

  Flathead Lake? Why that choice of location for his metaphor about getting rid of Clete Purcel?

  IT WAS 4:48 P.M. when Clete and I starting knocking on doors at the end of the hollow, up the road from Albert’s ranch. The first place we stopped was a remodeled barn that a young couple from California had rented for the summer. They said they taught at Berkeley and knew Albert and his work and sometimes hiked along the ridge above his house but hadn’t seen any other hikers there. They were nice people and invited us in for coffee. I did not want to tell them that Surrette was somewhere in the neighborhood. “Do you all have children?” I asked.

  “No, we don’t,” the husband replied, trying not to show offense at the personal nature of the question. “Can you tell me what you guys are looking for?”

  “A man named Asa Surrette has been around here. He’s a serial killer who escaped from a prison van in Kansas,” I said. “He may be long gone, or he may be close by. Have you seen any vehicles that don’t belong here? Or somebody up in the rocks above your house?”

  The wife looked at the husband, then they both shook their heads. “This is a little disturbing,” the husband said. “Nobody else has told us about a serial killer.”

  “He’s the guy who abducted the waitress up by Lookout Pass,” Clete said.

  “There’s a minister who lives in that two-story house with the cedar trees in front,” the wife said. “He has his congregation there on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. His name is Ralph, I think.”

  “Did you see anybody unusual over there?” I asked.

  They shook their heads again. “Sometimes after their services, they throw a football back and forth in the yard,” the wife said. “I saw Ralph chopping wood earlier. I think his church friends come and go. This serial killer is probably gone by now, isn’t he?”

  “Probably,” I replied.

  “By the way, I saw the girls’ car pull into the driveway earlier. I’m pretty sure somebody’s home,” she said.

  I wrote my cell number on the back of my departmental business card and left it with the couple.

  Clete and I knocked on the doors of two more houses in the hollow with the same results. The four houses in the natural cul-de-sac were spaced a considerable distance apart, all of them
set in the shadows of the mountains, and the people in the houses apparently had amiable but not close relationships. In effect, it was a community where insularity came with the property deed.

  Our last stop was at the minister’s house. An old Toyota Corolla was parked in the driveway and a Bronco in the garage. The window shades were down, the front door shut. The glider on the porch rotated slightly on its chains in a mild breeze blowing down the canyon.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody is home,” Clete said.

  I looked at my watch. “Maybe they’re eating dinner,” I said.

  I tapped on the door. I could hear no sound inside. I tried again. Nothing. I tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked. “Let’s walk around back,” I said.

  We went through the side yard. The shades on the dining room windows were pulled halfway down. There were no place settings on the table or any sign of movement in the house. In the backyard, there was a pole shed attached to the side of an old barn where firewood had been stacked neatly against the barn wall. The grass was scattered with freshly split chunks of pinewood; the woodcutter’s ax had been left embedded on the rim of the chopping stump, the handle at a stiff forty-five-degree angle. Clete looked up at the sky. A bank of thunderheads had moved across the sun. “You’d think a guy this neat would want to get his wood under the shed before it rained,” he said.

  He went up the back steps and banged on the door. No response. He held up one hand to keep the reflection off the glass and attempted to see inside. Then he went up the rear stairs to the second floor and tried the door and pressed his ear against the glass. “I can’t hear a thing,” he said. He went around the side of the house and came back. “Maybe they went off somewhere.”

  I wished I had asked one of the neighbors how many vehicles the minister’s family owned. “Could be. But the Bronco is in the garage. This doesn’t look like a three-car family.”

  “What do you want to do?” Clete said.

  I glanced at my cell phone. No service. A cat walked around the corner of the house and watched us. Its water and food bowls were empty. I stared at the house. Its quiet and dark interior was of such intensity that I could hear a ringing sound in my head. “There’s something wrong in that house,” I said. “Break the glass.”

  Clete knocked out a pane in the kitchen door with a brick and reached inside and opened the door, his shoes crunching on top of the shattered glass. I followed him through the mudroom into the kitchen. The oven had been left on, and the heat was enough to peel the wallpaper. Clete turned off the propane and took his .38 snub from his shoulder holster, letting it hang from his right hand, the muzzle pointed at the floor. The only sound in the house was the scraping of a tree limb on the eave.

  “This is Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux,” he called into the dining room. “I’m a private investigator, and Dave is a sheriff’s detective from Louisiana. We’re visiting at Albert Hollister’s place down the road. We think there might be a problem in this house.”

  His words echoed through the downstairs. We started moving through the house, Clete in front, his .38 held up at a right angle. We opened the closet doors and the door to a bedroom and the door to a pantry and a laundry room. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Clete started up the stairs one step at a time, his gaze fastened on the landing, his left hand on the banister. His back looked as wide as a whale’s, the fabric of his coat stretching across his spine.

  On the left side of the landing was another bedroom, its door open, the bed made, raindrops clicking on the windowpane. I went inside the bedroom and looked in the closet. It was full of clothes that probably belonged to a teenage girl. I came back out on the landing. Neither Clete nor I spoke. He opened the bathroom door and winced. I could smell the fecal odor without going inside. If I hadn’t known better, I would have concluded someone had just used the toilet.

  There were no towels on the racks, no toilet paper on the spindle. An incense bowl rested on top of a dirty-clothes hamper. Clete felt the bathroom walls and rubbed his fingertips with his thumb. It was obvious someone had used adhesive tape of some kind to hang up pictures or pieces of paper all over the walls. I tried the door on the right side of the landing. It swung back from the jamb, revealing a small room furnished with a chest of drawers and a narrow bed without sheets or a mattress cover. On the floor was a dust-free rectangle where a footlocker might have rested. Clete turned in a circle and lifted his arms to show his puzzlement.

  We left the bedroom and closed the door behind us. Clete flicked on the light above the landing. The oak floor had been wiped clean in the center, but there were tiny hairlike traces of a dark substance between two boards. I squatted down and rubbed my handkerchief along the grain, then held up the handkerchief for Clete to see. I returned to the bathroom, holding my breath against the odor, removed the incense bowl, and opened the hamper. I had found the towels that were pulled off the racks. I tilted the hamper so Clete could see inside. He silently mouthed, The basement.

  We went back downstairs and through the hallway. When I opened the door to the basement, I smelled an odor that was like night damp and mildew and perhaps a leak from a sewage line, but nothing you wouldn’t expect in a basement that seldom saw sunlight. We waited at the open door for at least ten seconds, listening. Then I felt for the wall switch and clicked it on, flooding the basement with the harsh illumination of three bare lightbulbs. This time I went first. We had to lower our heads when we passed under some water and heating pipes; we found ourselves standing in the midst of what seemed a conventional setting beneath an early-twentieth-century farmhouse. There was a propane-fed furnace that had rusted out along the floor, a keg of nails and a wheelbarrow full of broken bricks shoved in a corner, two cardboard boxes filled with Christmas-tree ornaments and strings of colored lights under a window whose wood frame had rotted. Clete turned around and peered through the shadows at something no human being ever wants to see, an image that no amount of experience can prepare you for. “Mother of God,” he said.

  The two figures had been put in transparent garment bags, and the bags hung with baling wire from a rafter. The weight had stretched the bags into the shape and wispy texture of cocoons. One of the figures was a woman. Her hair was pressed in a bloody tangle against the plastic. She was probably dead when she went into the bag. The other figure was a man. His wrists were crisscrossed behind him with duct tape. One eye was half-lidded, the other popping from the socket. His mouth was attached to the plastic like a suction cup.

  Clete walked to the corner of the basement and retched, his big arms propped against the wall, hiding his face from me, the smell of whiskey rising from the concrete.

  THE RAIN SHOWER had already stopped when the first sheriff’s cruiser arrived, followed by the paramedics, the crime scene techs, the coroner, the sheriff, and the FBI special agent I’d had words with earlier, James Martini. He went down in the basement for five minutes. When he came back, his tie was pulled loose and his face had a winded look, although he was a trim, muscular man in his late thirties who probably worked out regularly. He seemed unsure of what he wanted to say. “Who got sick down there?” he asked.

  “My friend Clete Purcel.”

  He nodded, looking around, his gaze focused on nothing. “You ever work one like this before? Down in Louisiana?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Why is Surrette prowling this ridge?” he asked.

  “Part of it has to do with Albert Hollister.”

  “The writer?”

  “He owns a ranch just down the road. He was Asa Surrette’s creative writing professor at Wichita State University in 1979. Surrette has a grievance against him, something about an objectionable short story he turned in.”

  “That’s a new one.”

  “A guy like this doesn’t need much of an excuse.”

  “Your daughter interviewed Surrette in prison and got him stoked up?”

  “That’s close enough. Right now I’d like to keep her alive.”


  “You don’t think we’re doing our job?”

  “He means to kill her if he can. Surrette should have been gutted, salted, and tacked to a fence post years ago. That didn’t happen.”

  “The Bureau is at fault?” he said.

  “One time I pulled over a drunk driver, then let him go because he had no priors and was two blocks from his house. Three hours later, he killed his wife.”

  “The Bureau had limited reach on Surrette’s crimes in Kansas,” he replied.

  He was a company man and he wasn’t going to concede a point. I didn’t blame him for it. I had a feeling he wasn’t dealing well with the scene in the basement. No normal person would. The day you are not bothered by certain things you witness as a police officer is the day you need to turn in your shield. Martini removed a notebook from his coat pocket and opened it. He was a nice-looking man, with high cheekbones and a flush to his cheeks and a crew cut that had started to recede. He seemed to study the notebook, then gave up the pretense.

  “I don’t blame you for your feelings,” he said. “I have a teenage daughter. I don’t think I could handle it if she were abducted by a predator. I don’t know how any parent does.”

  “You’re sure the two girls are with him?” I said.

  “The older one, Kate, was scheduled to be at work at Dairy Queen at six. She didn’t show up. Lavern was supposed to go to a birthday party this evening. There’re some messages for her on the phone. Truth is, we don’t have a clue about this guy’s whereabouts. Why do you think he didn’t kill the girls inside, when he had the chance?”

  “A friend of mine thinks he’s going into meltdown and planning to take it out on the girls.”