Swan Peak Read online

  “It’s been nice, everybody. Oops, who just tilted the floor?” the woman in purple lipstick replied.

  She and her companion started to leave just as a man in a Mercedes pulled into the parking lot and entered the saloon. The scar tissue that constituted his face, and the eyes that seemed to laugh inside the burned shell of his head, made the woman in purple lipstick involuntarily clench her companion’s arm. In fact, she seemed suddenly drunk, unprepared to deal with unpleasant realities that her rhetoric had kept at bay.

  “My husband was a legionnaire. He was in a tank. In the French Sudan,” Jamie Sue said.

  “What? What did you say?” the woman in purple lipstick said, unable to look away from the handicapped man.

  “His tank burned. He was trapped inside it. That’s why he looks that way. Don’t stare at him. What’s the matter with you?” Jamie Sue said.

  Leslie Wellstone grinned broadly. “Don’t run off. Would you like to have another drink? Or maybe a dance or two?”

  The couple from Malibu were out the front door like a shot.

  “Why do you have to act like that?” Jamie Sue said, her eyes wet.

  “They probably got a kick out of it,” her husband replied, fitting his arm around her shoulders. “Harold, what do you have that’s good and cold?”

  EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING, one day later, the sheriff of Missoula County, Joe Bim Higgins, called me at the cabin. The caller ID indicated he was using a cell phone. “Can you and Mr. Purcel come down to my office?”

  “What’s up?” I replied without enthusiasm.

  “It’s in regard to the college kids who were killed and to the little wood cross Mr. Purcel found on the ridge behind Albert’s house.”

  “I don’t see how we can help you, Sheriff.”

  “It also has to do with another double homicide. This one happened two nights ago at a rest stop west of town.”

  “Same answer,” I said.

  “I’m about seven miles from you right now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your time.”

  I walked down the road to Albert’s house and knocked on the downstairs door. Clete was still in his skivvies, cooking breakfast in the small kitchen that was part of the accommodations Albert had given him. I told him about the call from Joe Bim Higgins.

  “You’re pissed off at me because I found evidence at a crime scene and reported it to Higgins?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Then get that look off your face.”

  “You go out of your way to get us into it, Clete.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, you do. No matter what the situation is, you can’t wait to put our tallywhackers in the hay baler.”

  His back was turned to me as he flipped a pork chop inside a skillet. I could see the color climbing up the back of his neck. But when he turned around, his face was empty, his green eyes on mine. “You want to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He sat down at the table and ate out of the skillet, pumping ketchup all over his meat and eggs. He stared at a documentary on the History Channel, then got up and shut off the TV set with the heel of his hand. “A kid got smoked on his knees up on that hill. Two of the Wellstones’ gumballs rousted me because I strayed onto a posted stream. The same two dudes came here and made threats. I found a cross at the crime scene that was probably torn from the victim’s throat. Can you explain how I caused any of those things to happen?”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the signal you send. Now, how about we give it a rest?”

  He was right. I had wanted to believe that somehow our journey into the northern Rockies, what some people call “the last good place,” would take us back into a simpler, more innocent time. But trying to re-create the America of my youth through a geographical change was at best foolish, if not self-destructive.

  “You have any coffee?” I said.

  “In the pot, big mon,” Clete said.

  Ten minutes later, Joe Bim Higgins’s cruiser pulled into the driveway. While hawks floated over the pasture and the sun broke across the mountain crest on fir and pine trees limned with frost, Joe Bim told us of the double homicide in a rest stop on Interstate 90.

  “A trucker saw the smoke coming out of the women’s side of the building and thought somebody had set fire to a trash barrel. He said by the time he got his extinguisher out of the rig, he smelled the odor and knew what it was. He kicked open the stall door and sprayed her with the extinguisher, but she was already gone.

  “We found the man out in the trees. A dead joint was lying in the grass. The entry wound was right behind the ear, muzzle burns all over the skin and the hair. From the blood pattern on the ground, the coroner thinks the vic was forced to lie on his face before he was shot.

  “There was one bullet hole in the door to the stall where the female died. With luck, she got it before her killer soaked her in gasoline.”

  “Who were the victims?” I asked.

  “The female had two arrests for solicitation in Los Angeles. The man was an independent film producer of some kind. LAPD says he may have been hooked up with some porn vendors. They were traveling on his credit card. From the charges, it looks like they were bar-hopping their way from the Swan Valley back to Spokane.”

  “I don’t see how we figure in to this, Sheriff,” I said.

  “They were in a saloon in Swan Lake. According to the bartender, they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone, the sister-in-law of Ridley Wellstone.”

  “I still don’t get the tie-in,” I said.

  “Maybe there isn’t one. But when Mr. Purcel called in about the little wood cross he found up on the hill, he mentioned two thugs who work for the Wellstone family, guys he had trouble with. Maybe that’s all coincidence. What’s your opinion?”

  “We don’t have one,” I replied.

  “Let me be honest here,” Joe Bim said. “Sometimes I like to believe that the victims of violent crime invite their fate. Maybe this porn dealer and his hooker girlfriend were killed by their own kind. But the thought of what happened to those two college kids doesn’t give me any rest. They were taking a stroll on a beautiful summer evening behind the school they attended, and a degenerate sodomized and raped the girl and snuffed out her life and made her boyfriend beg or commit oral sex on him before the perp blew his head off.

  “We lifted Seymour Bell’s thumbprint off the wood cross. There were no other prints on it, so the cross probably belonged to the boy. Why would somebody rip it from his throat? Why deny a kid about to be murdered a symbol of his religion? It’s thoughts of that kind that make me want to blow somebody out of his socks. Did you guys ever feel like that? Did you ever want to blow the living shit out of certain people and drink a beer while you did it?”

  Clete and I looked at each other and didn’t reply.

  JOE BIM HIGGINS was not an inept lawman or administrator and probably didn’t need my help in his investigation. But an execution-style murder had been committed within sight of the cabin where Molly and I were living, and to pretend an act that evil had no relationship to our own lives, to wait for the authorities, with their limited resources, to assure us that our environment was safe, is the kind of behavior one associates with someone who relies on the weatherman to protect him from asteroids.

  Clete and I drove to Missoula and went into the big stone courthouse where the sheriff kept his office. We explained that we wanted to ask questions of some people who had known the two murdered college students, that we did not intend to impose ourselves on his investigation, that we would report any meaningful discoveries immediately to him, that, in effect, we would not become an unwelcome presence in his life.

  He was sitting in a swivel chair with one booted foot on the wastebasket. He chewed on a hangnail and stared out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “How would you describe your relationship with the FBI?” he said.

  “We don�
��t have one,” I replied.

  “That’s what you think,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “An FBI woman was in here an hour ago asking questions about Mr. Purcel. You worked for a greaseball up at Flathead Lake?” he said.

  Clete was standing in front of the sheriff’s desk, looking into dead space, his face impassive. “His name was Sally Dio. His private plane nose-dived into the side of a mountain.”

  “Really?” Joe Bim said.

  “Yeah, I heard ole Sal looked like marmalade hanging in one of the trees. All the whores in Vegas and Tahoe were really broke up about it,” Clete said.

  “This FBI agent thinks maybe you had something to do with it,” Higgins said.

  “Funny none of them told me that,” Clete said.

  The room was quiet. Joe Bim let his eyes linger on Clete’s face. “I got a shitload of open files in that metal cabinet. Don’t make me regret what I do here today,” he said.

  “You won’t, Sheriff,” I said, trying to preempt any more of Clete’s remarks.

  Joe Bim removed his foot from the wastebasket. “I think the homicide of the two college kids is a random act. If that’s true, we’ve probably got a serial killer operating on the game reserve. A connection with the double homicide at the rest stop is anybody’s guess. The FBI says the male, the porn producer, was Mobbed up, so maybe it was a contract hit, an object lesson of some kind that has nothing to do with the college kids.

  “The boy who was killed behind Albert’s house was shot with a forty-five. The killer at the rest stop used a nine-millimeter. But there are a lot of similarities just the same. The shooter picked up his brass at both scenes, and he made both males show submission to him before he shot them. He also enjoys hurting women. You ever investigate a torch murder?”

  “Both of us have,” Clete replied.

  “You saw the vic at the crime scene?” Higgins asked.

  “I’ve never stopped seeing the vics,” Clete said.

  Joe Bim removed two manila folders from his file drawer and opened them on his desk. The faces of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell stared up at us from their photos. Two of the photographs had been taken for school yearbooks. Two of them had been taken in the morgue. The disfigurement done to their features by their killer or killers was of a kind you hope no family member will ever be forced to look upon.

  “Jesus Christ,” Clete said.

  “We have other open homicide cases here in Missoula County, cases that have been total dead ends,” Joe Bim said. “One involves a guy we called the Mad Hatter. Some guy in a stovepipe hat went into a beauty parlor down in the Bitterroot Valley, made three women lie in a circle, then shot and killed all three of them. Then he cut off their heads. We don’t have a clue who he was, where he went, or why he did it.

  “Somebody out in Hellgate Canyon killed an eighty-year-old woman in a nursing home with a screwdriver. Maybe it was an inside job, maybe not, we just don’t know. We’ve pulled ten-to twenty-year-old human bones out of campgrounds, but we have no idea who the vics are or how they died. This is supposed to be a place where tourists roast hot dogs on their summer vacations.”

  “We’re going to start at Cindy Kershaw’s dormitory, Sheriff. We appreciate what you’ve told us,” I said.

  “I pulled a week’s worth of surveillance tape from the health club where the Kershaw girl worked. You want to check it out?”

  “What’s in it?” Clete said.

  “A kid who could be my granddaughter,” Joe Bim replied.

  We went into a separate room where the sheriff plugged an edited and synthesized cassette of the health club’s surveillance tapes into a VCR.

  Most cops and newspeople tend to use categorical names for both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, particularly violent ones that involve depravity and sadism. Why? The answer is simple: It’s easier to believe the perpetrator is a genetic aberration or the product of a subculture that is unconnected to our lives. By the same token, the victim is someone unlike us, perhaps a person who, like a candle moth, chose of his own accord to swim through flame, perhaps someone actually seeking an executioner.

  Then you look at a videotape of an eighteen-year-old girl wearing down-in-the-ass jeans, her baby fat exposed, vacuuming a rubber-matted floor with headphones on, the vacuum pack on her back swaying to music that only she heard.

  In the background, people in workout dress clanked iron and sweated on the vinyl padding of the Life Fitness and Hammer Strength machines and pounded along on the treadmills as though they were traversing great spans of topography. On the opposite side of a glass window, a man lay on a table while a physical therapist pushed his knee up toward his chest; his mouth opened wide with a muscle spasm.

  “Would you back it up a few frames?” Clete said.

  “You see something?” Joe Bim asked.

  “Yeah, the guy by the watercooler,” Clete replied. He waited a moment. “Hold it right there.” He studied the frozen image of a lean man with uncut hair who wore his shirt outside his slacks. The man was watching Cindy Kershaw, his arm propped on top of the watercooler. His face appeared only in profile on the screen. But there was something wrong with one of his eyes, as though a drinking glass had been cupped over it and pressed deeply into the skin, recessing the entire socket.

  Clete tapped a fingernail on the television monitor. “I can’t swear to it, but he looks like a dude by the name of Lyle Hobbs. He was a driver for Sally Dio. He also does security for Ridley Wellstone. He also has a sheet for child molestation in Reno.”

  “You’re fairly certain about this?” Joe Bim said.

  “I’m not real objective about this guy. Hobbs is a bucket of shit. That guy by the watercooler looks like him. That’s all I can tell you,” Clete said.

  “It’s Hobbs,” I said.

  Both the sheriff and Clete looked at me. “How do you know?” the sheriff asked.

  “That’s Ridley Wellstone on the therapist’s table,” I said.

  CINDY KERSHAW’S ROOMMATE at the university had graduated with Cindy from a high school on the other side of the Sapphire Mountains. Cindy’s father had died in a logging accident when she was five, and she had been raised by her mother, who cooked in a café and ran a small feed business with a man she sometimes lived with. The roommate’s name was Heather Miles. On her shelf were a half-dozen stuffed animals and three trophies she had won as a barrel racer. Her eyes were ice blue, her features Nordic, the anger in her face like a cool burn.

  “No, she didn’t have other boyfriends. She didn’t sleep around, either, because that’s what you’re talking about, right?” she said.

  “No, not at all,” I replied. “But when a woman is attacked in a ferocious manner, as Cindy was, the driving engine is almost always sexual rage. So if we exclude the people who knew her – old boyfriends, maybe somebody who felt rejected by her – we can start looking at what we call a random perpetrator. He’s a hard guy to catch, because usually he has little or no connection to the victim.”

  “Seymour Bell was her only boyfriend. Everybody liked her. It was the same in high school,” Heather Miles said.

  “Were she and Seymour intimate?” I said.

  “She didn’t talk about it. Why do you keep asking those kinds of questions? What do they have to do with her death?” Her bed was neatly made, the blanket tucked tight on the corners. She was sitting on top of the blanket, her face turned up at mine, her hands opening and closing on her thighs like those of someone who was trapped. “You’re making it sound like it was Cindy’s fault she got killed.”

  “Did she know a guy named Lyle Hobbs?” Clete asked.

  “I never heard of him. Who is he?” she said.

  “A geek and a child molester. He showed up on the surveillance tape at the health club where Cindy worked,” Clete said. “You know a guy by the name of Ridley Wellstone?”

  “No, I never heard of him, either.”

  “Did Cindy wear a small wood cross, one att
ached to a leather thong?” I asked.

  “No.” Heather glanced sideways. “I saw Seymour with one. Maybe a week ago. His shirt was unbuttoned, and it fell out. Seymour was a Pentecostal. Or at least he used to be. What about it?”

  “You know someone who might want to tear it off his throat?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about? Cindy was raped and beaten. I heard Seymour was shot through the face,” she said. I saw her eyes go out of focus; she looked like someone who has lost her footing and is not sure she will find it again. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Cindy and Seymour were taking a walk. They climbed up the mountain and never came back. Some sick fuck killed them. Why don’t you assholes go out and do something about it? Why do you keep asking me these sick fucking questions? I identified Cindy at the morgue. Did you see her face? God, I hate you people.”

  She started to cry, then beat her fists on her knees.

  WE DROVE UP the Clark Fork River to Bonner to interview the two roommates of Seymour Bell. They lived in a small rented house on a slope close to where the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot rivers formed a bay below a steel-girdered train bridge. The main residential street of the town was lined with willow and birch trees, shading the rows of neat sawmill houses on either side of the street. The yards of the houses were blue-green inside the shade, the flower beds bursting with tulips, the small porches dotted with cans of geraniums and begonias.

  It was a fine day, cool and scented with flowers and sawdust from the mill, but Clete had remained morose and had spoken little since we had left the sheriff’s office. At first I thought his mood was due to the nature of our errand. But Clete’s involvement with Sally Dio and the Mob still held a strong claim on his life, and I suspected the furrow in his brow meant he had taken another journey to a bad place in his head and he was sorting through it with a garbage rake.

  “I don’t think the sheriff took the FBI too seriously, Clete,” I said.

  “No, somebody spit in the soup. They’re going to try and hang a murder beef on me.”