Light of the World Read online

  “It wasn’t Dixon?”

  “I would have said so if it was.”

  “I was just asking. You couldn’t see the tag?”

  “No.”

  “Alafair, are you sure the truck parked across the street was the same one that tailgated you? You couldn’t see the driver’s face, right?”

  I saw a light in her eyes that I had seen in the eyes of many other women who had reported stalkers or obscene callers or voyeurs or violent and dangerous men who made their lives miserable. Sometimes their complaints got lost in procedure; sometimes they were trivialized and conveniently ignored. In most homicides involving female victims, there’s a long paper history leading up to the woman’s death. If someone feels this is an overly dour depiction, I recommend he visit a shelter for battered women.

  “I wish I hadn’t said anything, Dave.”

  “I didn’t explain myself very well. A homeless or deranged man was up on the old logging road behind the house. I’m just trying to put that guy together with the guy in the skinned-up truck. The two don’t fit. Why would some guy in Montana single you out as the object of his obsession?”

  “I didn’t say he did. I told you what happened. But it didn’t sink in. So forget it.”

  “The sheriff is going to pick up Dixon and talk with him. I’ll call him and tell him about the guy who tailgated you.”

  “He didn’t just tailgate me. He was following me. For seven miles.”

  “I know.”

  “Then stop talking to me like I’m an idiot.”

  “The sheriff said a seventeen-year-old Indian girl disappeared six days ago. He thinks she may be dead. Maybe there’s a very bad guy operating around here, Alafair.”

  She rubbed her temples and widened her eyes and closed them and opened them again, as though revisiting an experience she couldn’t get out of her head. “I know who he is. I know, I know, I know.”

  “The abductor of the Indian girl?”

  “The man who followed me today. I thought his face was in shadow because he had his visor down. I don’t think that’s what I saw at all. I think he was unshaved and had a long face like a Viking’s. I think I sat across a table from him three years ago and talked to him while he breathed through his mouth and tried to slip his finger on top of my hand. I remember his hair in particular. He put gel on it once so he could slick it back and impress me.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “It was him, Dave. I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “Asa Surrette is dead. He’s not only dead, he’s probably in hell.”

  “I knew you would say that,” she replied. “I just knew it.”

  THREE YEARS EARLIER, Alafair told me of her plans to write a nonfiction book about a psychopath who for years had tortured, raped, and murdered ordinary family people in the land of Dorothy and the yellow-brick road, making his victims suffer as much as possible before he strangled or suffocated them. She told me this at the kitchen table in our home on East Main in New Iberia, on the banks of Bayou Teche, while the sun burned in a molten red orb beyond the live oaks in our yard, the moss in the limbs black against the sky. Her research would begin with an interview at the maximum-security unit east of Wichita, where the killer was kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown.

  I told her what I thought of the idea.

  “Why drizzle on the parade when you can pour?” she said.

  She had a degree in psychology from Reed, didn’t she? She was a Stanford law student who would probably clerk at the Ninth Circuit Court, wasn’t she?

  I told Alafair not to go near him. I told her every horrible story I could remember about the serial killers and sadists and sex predators I had known. I told her of the iniquitous light in their eyes when they tried to tantalize listeners with details about their methods in stalking victims, and the obvious pleasure they took when they suggested other bodies were out there. I told her of their inability to understand the level of suffering and despair they had imposed upon others. I told her how they picked at themselves while they talked and how their eyes reached past you and settled on someone who did not know he or she was being watched. I told her of their thespian performances when they made the big score in custody—namely, finding a defense psychiatrist who would buy into their claims of multiple personalities and other psychological complexities that gave them the dimensions of Titans.

  They saw themselves as players in a Homeric epic, but what was the reality? They were terrified at the prospect of being transferred into “gen” or “main pop,” where they would be shanked in the yard or the shower or lit up in their cells with a Molotov.

  I compared them to the moral cowards who sat in the dock at Nuremberg. I told her that Jack the Ripper’s name was used today with an almost comic-book connotation because his victims were the poorest and most desperate and vulnerable of women in London’s East End. I told her I doubted Jack would have been given the sobriquet “Ripper” by the newspapers of his time if the victims were the wealthy female members of Victorian society. I told her of his final victim, an Irish prostitute who slept every night in either the workhouse or an alley. Her name was Mary Jane Kelly. The last words she spoke to a friend on the evening she died were “How do you like me jolly hat?”

  “If you go inside the mind of a guy like Surrette, you’ll never be the same,” I told her.

  “I can’t handle it, but reporters from the Wichita Eagle can?”

  “People ‘handle’ cancer. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with.”

  “I’ve already made the arrangement. I’m driving to Wichita tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You will not be happy until you do just that.”

  “You worry too much. I’ll be fine.”

  “Alf—”

  “Stop calling me that name.”

  “Be careful.”

  “He’s just a man. He’s not Lucifer. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not your little girl anymore.”

  “Don’t ever say that again. Never.”

  WYATT DIXON SAW no great puzzle at work in the universe. You got yourself squeezed out of a woman’s womb; you got the hell away from home as soon as you could; and you enjoyed every pleasure the earth had to offer and busted up any man who claimed he had authority over you. You rodeoed and got bull-hooked and stove in and stirrup-drug and flung into the boards and whipped like a rag doll when you tied yourself down with a suicide wrap, but you wore your scars like the Medal of Honor, and you took the women you wanted and drank whiskey like soda water and doffed your hat to no man and in effect said to hell with the rest of the human race.

  Then one day, way down the line, on a morning you thought might last forever, you heard a whistle blow unexpectedly, and minutes later, against all your wishes, you climbed aboard a passing freight and sat on the spine and rode through a canyon alongside a river that had no name, wondering what lay in store on the far side of the Divide. Was it the end of the track? Or was the party just getting started?

  He didn’t study on his childhood. He wasn’t sure he’d had one. He knew he was born in a boxcar not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. He also knew he and his family lived in a tenant shack up in Northeast Texas and picked cotton and broke corn close to the birthplace of Audie Murphy. Sometimes he had dreams about his father and would see him sitting by the window, dressed in strap overalls without a shirt, his dugs like those of a woman, drinking from a fruit jar and staring at a railroad track on which a train never passed. For the young boy, the father’s silence could be like a scream. Wyatt would wake from the dream and sit for a long time on the side of the bed, waiting for the light to break in the east and burn all the shadows from the room.

  He had learned long ago not to walk too far through the corridors of his soul. Whenever he allowed himself a moment of reverie, the scene was specific and controlled and always the same: He was in the bucking chute at a fairgrounds, his thighs clamped down on the horse’s sides, the
haze and dust from the arena iridescent in the lights blazing overhead, a Ferris wheel rotating against a salmon-colored sky, the audience in the stands waiting breathlessly for the moment when Wyatt would say, “Outside!”

  Then he would be borne aloft by a horse named Bad Medicine, a piece of corkscrewing, sunfishing black lightning so wired and mean that some riders said he was one step short of a predator. In the first three seconds, Wyatt thought his buttocks would be split up the middle. A violent pain arced through his rectum into his genitals, his teeth jarred, and the discs in his spine fused into a bent iron chain that set his sciatic nerve aflame. He leaned so far back with each thud and jolt of the twelve hundred pounds between his legs that the rim of his hat touched Bad Medicine’s rump. All the while Wyatt kept one hand pointed high in the air, raising his knees, slashing down his spurs, the rowels spinning and glittering like serrated dimes, his red-fringed butterfly chaps flapping, his silver-plated championship buckle biting into his navel, his scrotum tingling with the thrill of victory, the buzzer as loud in his head as a foghorn, the crowd going crazy.

  He had a house and nine acres up on the Blackfoot, all of it sandwiched between the riverbank and an abandoned railway grade up on the mountain. Half of the wood house had been crushed by a winter flood and ice jam and was never repaired, but Wyatt lived comfortably in the remaining half, cooking his food either on a Dutch oven in the yard or on a woodstove inside, and fishing with worms for German browns and rainbow trout at sunset. The access to the house was by an old log road no one else used, or by a pedestrian swing bridge that was not for the faint of heart.

  Wyatt liked his life. What he did not like was people messing with it. He provided rough stock at rodeos from Calgary to Cheyenne, and sometimes he still put on greasepaint and football cleats and fought the bulls for riders who had been thrown into the dirt. He paid his bills, gave witness at revivals on the rez, and filed a 1040 each year. He called it “taking care of my side of the street.”

  Just that afternoon, his neighbors across the river were having a party on the lawn, the stereo blaring rap music that was the equivalent of broken glass in his ears. Wyatt’s solution? He waded barefoot into the stream, the cold numbing his feet, rocks cutting the soles. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Shut up that goddamn racket before I have to come over there!”

  Stereo off. People leave the yard and disappear into the house. All quiet on the Blackfoot. End of problem.

  Then he got into his pickup and drove up the dirt road to the two-lane and headed for a bar called the Wigwam, on the edge of the Salish Indian reservation.

  It was sunset when he arrived, and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of the Jocko River and the wheel lines blowing water in a fine mist across the fields, electricity leaping inside a bank of thunderheads in the north. Rows of motorcycles were parked in front of the bar, and booted guys in leather vests and chaps, with road tans and jailhouse tats and a lot of body hair, were outside smoking and chugging beer, enjoying the breeze and the view of the Jocko Valley and the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the clouds, the rock face of each mountain so high above the floor of the valley that the waterfalls stay frozen year round.

  As Wyatt stepped up on the porch and went inside, the bikers tried not to look directly at him or let their tone of voice change or their words catch in their throats. Each man was left wondering if anyone had detected the few seconds of uncontrolled fear that had gripped his heart.

  Wyatt sat at a table in the back of the saloon and ordered, and soon an enormous Indian in a floppy black hat and jeans whose cuffs were stained with green manure sat down with him, his face as expressionless as a skillet. Wyatt wrote out a check and tore it loose from his checkbook and handed it to the Indian. The Indian folded the check and buttoned it into his shirt pocket and shook hands and left, hardly speaking a word. Then a second and a third Indian came to the table and sat down with Wyatt and received a check and left. When Wyatt looked up again, two large men, one in a deputy’s uniform, the other in a baggy suit, were standing in his light.

  “Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.

  “The sheriff wants to see you,” the man in the suit said.

  “How’d y’all know where to find me?”

  “Your neighbors across the river,” the uniformed deputy said, smiling. He was an auxiliary and hardly more than a boy and had a mouth like a girl’s.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Funny place to drink soda pop, Wyatt,” the man in the suit said. He glanced up at the stage, where three girls were gyrating and twisting on chromed poles. “I’d think you’re too old for eye candy.”

  “I do business with a bunch of feed growers and cutting-horse breeders up the Jocko. This is where I meet them at.”

  “That’s interesting. We didn’t know that,” the man in the suit said, jotting something on a notepad. He was a plainclothes sheriff’s detective by the name of Bill Pepper whose manner and way of doing business seemed to come from an earlier time. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and wore his hair in a buzz cut and spoke with a Deep South accent, although he had been with LAPD many years and never mentioned where he’d grown up. His eyes were recessed and as dead as buckshot, his lips gray, his coat slightly askew from the lead-weighted blackjack shaped like a darning sock that he carried in the right pocket.

  “Is this about that girl who says I shot an arrow at her?”

  “She’s not a girl. She’s a grown woman. Grown women are sensitive about that these days.”

  “So that’s what this is about?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “I left a business card in your door. I left one in your mailbox, too.”

  “People stick trash in my door and mailbox every day.”

  “Want to sit in a cell tonight?” Pepper said.

  Wyatt folded his hands on top of the table, his face tight. He blew his nose on a bandana and stuck the bandana in his pocket. “I ain’t shot an arrow at nobody. I told that to your deputy. I told it to the girl and her father. Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Lot of people say you’re a mean motor scooter. Is that what you are? A mean motor scooter?”

  Wyatt stared straight ahead, his pupils like small black insects frozen inside glass.

  “Let me ask you another question. You come in here a lot?” Pepper said.

  “When I’m of a mind to.”

  The plainclothes detective’s pen had gone dry. He clicked the button on it several times, then took another pen from his shirt pocket. “You know what ‘fortuitous’ means? In this instance it means we might be looking at you in a new light. Were you in here about a week ago?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you know an Indian girl by the name of Angel Deer Heart?”

  “A little bitty thing, about seventeen or eighteen, her britches hanging off her seat?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “She’s the granddaughter of a big oilman. Yeah, I saw her in here. A couple of times.”

  “You see her last Thursday night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But you were here?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, you did.” Pepper wrote again in his notebook. “You feel protective toward young girls?”

  “I don’t get around them long enough to be protective.”

  “Seems only natural, a rodeo man like you. You see a young thing at the bar with her panties showing, and you cruise on over and buy her a drink and tell her you’ll drive her home because she shouldn’t be hanging in a snatch patch full of guys who’d love to tear her apart. Did something like that happen?”

  “If y’all had tended to your job, she wouldn’t have been drinking in here in the first place.”

  “Does the court still make you take those chemical cocktails?”

  “I took them of my own free will.”

  “I hear they cause blackouts.”


  “Is the sheriff still at his office?”

  “No, you’ll see him tomorrow.”

  “You taking me in?”

  “I’m not sure. Is it true you speak in tongues?”

  “It’s common up on the rez. Some do, some don’t.”

  “Sounds to me like you need to visit the hospital at Warm Springs again, see if your batteries need charging.”

  “I got two other feed growers waiting on me. Hook me up or get out of my face.”

  “We’ll see you at the courthouse at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow, Wyatt. The reason I’m not taking you in is I don’t think you’re worth shooting, much less wasting a cell on.” The detective put away his notebook and pen and stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He leaned over and raked a kitchen match across the tabletop, even though state law prohibited smoking in the bar. His coat touched Wyatt’s shoulder, an odor of dried sweat wafting off his body. He blew out the match and dropped it in Wyatt’s soda can. “I think we’re gonna have to do something about you, boy,” he said.

  After Pepper had walked away, the uniformed auxiliary said, “I’m sorry about that. He’s had a bad day. Everybody has.”

  Wyatt looked up at him. “Y’all found that Indian girl?”

  “Six hours ago,” the auxiliary said. He glanced toward the front door, then at the women dancing on the runway. “Wyatt?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “You know. With the girl, I mean. You didn’t have anything to do with—”

  “Get out of my sight,” Wyatt said.

  THERE WAS EITHER a malfunction in the furnace or someone had turned up the register too high, but when Alafair stepped through the door of the interview room at the prison east of Wichita, she felt a surge of superheated air that was like damp wool on her skin; she also smelled an odor that made her think of an unventilated locker room and pipe-tobacco smoke that had soaked into someone’s clothes. Asa Surrette was seated at a metal table, his wrists manacled to a waist chain, his khaki shirt buttoned at the throat. He had wide, thin shoulders, shaped a bit like a suit coat hanging on a rack, and a sharp bloodless nose that gave him the appearance of a man breathing cold or rarefied air. His eyes looked pasted on his face.