Swan Peak (29 page)

When the couple parked the SUV by the side door, Albert was writing a short story in longhand, his thoughts deep inside the Texas City disaster of 1947. In his mind, he saw a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame rise from the Monsanto chemical plant, generating heat so great that the water in the harbor boiled. He saw liquid flame rain down in umbrella fashion on an oil field, setting off wellheads and natural-gas storage tanks like strings of firecrackers. Then the man and woman from the SUV knocked on the French doors, peering at him through the glass, the man shading the glare with one hand so he could see more clearly into Albert’s office. When Albert didn’t rise from his writing desk, the man tapped a knuckle on the glass.

“What do you want?” Albert said, getting up and opening the door.

“My name is Troyce Nix,” the man said. “We’re looking for a man by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Albert said.

“Can we come in a minute?” the man asked.

“What for?”

“I just told you,” Nix said.

“It’s obvious I’m busy.”

“It’s important, Mr. Hollister.”

Albert hesitated, glancing at the woman, looking back at the man, the western clothes, the grainy skin, the long sideburns, the mirrored sunglasses protruding from his shirt pocket. The man’s physical stature and his posture and manner conjured up memories in Albert that were like someone scratching a match across his stomach lining.
Deal with it now, not later. Don’t let a guy like this get behind you
, he heard a voice say inside his head.

“Go around front,” he said, and closed the door. A moment later, he let Nix and the woman into the living room, both of them a bit awed by the elevated view of the Bitterroot Mountains, massive and blue-green and strung with clouds.

“You got you a nice place,” Nix said.

“Who sent you out here?” Albert said.

“I’m looking for this man here,” Nix replied, handing a photograph to Albert, ignoring the question.

“What makes you think I know him?” Albert said, not looking at the photo.

“Folks here’bouts say you help out guys on the drift or people that’s down and out.”

“The bottom of this photograph has been cut off,” Albert said.

“Have you seen Greenwood? He’s a breed. Wiry guy with a soft voice.”

“Why is the bottom of this picture cut off?”

“It had more information on it than people need to see. I just want to know where the man is at and talk with him.”

“I don’t know him,” Albert said, returning the mug shot to Troyce Nix.

“You didn’t look at it.”

“I don’t have to. I don’t know anybody named Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”

“You want to know what he did?”

“It’s not my business.”

“I guess we disturbed you in your work. Sorry about that,” Nix said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Say again?”

“If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have come out without ringing me first.”

Nix grinned. “I heard you were a crusty one. Can Candace have a glass of water?”

Regardless of the transparency of Nix’s attempt at manipulation, Albert filled a glass at the kitchen tap for the woman and put ice in it and brought it back into the living room.

“That’s maple in your floor?” she said.

Albert said it was.

“The way it catches the light is pretty,” she said. “Did your wife put all the flowers on the mantel?”

“My wife died three years ago. She used to put flowers there, in front of the mirror and on the breakfast table, too. So now I do it for her.”

Candace Sweeney lowered her eyes, her cheeks coloring. Then she looked out the window at the mountains again, the long slope of the meadow dipping into the distance. “This valley is a paradise. Are there a lot of wild animals here?”

“Elk and white-tail and some mule deer.A few cougars up on the ridge.A few wild turkeys. A moose comes down occasionally.”

“You hunt the animals?” she said, a line creasing across her brow.

“I don’t allow hunters on the property. Not any kind, not under any circumstances,” Albert said, shifting his eyes onto Troyce Nix.

“I read a couple of your books. I thought they were pretty good,” Troyce said.

Albert nodded but didn’t reply.

“You never asked me what I do for a living,” Troyce said.

“I already know what you do.”

“Oh?”

“You’re not a lawman, or you would have rolled a badge on me. But you’re connected to the law, at least in some fashion. From the look of you, I’d say you’re a gunbull, or you used to be. Maybe you were an MP or a chaser in the Marine Corps. But you’ve been a hack someplace.”

“Not many people use terms like ‘hack’ or ‘gunbull,’” Troyce said.

“I know them because I served time on a Florida road gang when I was eighteen. Most of the gunbulls weren’t bad men. They’d work the hell out of us, but that was about all. A couple of them were otherwise, men who were cruel and sexually perverse.”

Troyce Nix had never looked into a pair of eyes that were as intense as Albert Hollister’s. He took a business card from his pocket and wrote on the back of it. “I’m leaving you my cell number in case Jimmy Dale Greenwood should knock at your door. I’m putting down the name of our motel, too.”

“Give it to somebody who has need of it.”

Nix twirled his hat one revolution on his index finger, then his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks for the glass of water,” he said. He set his business card down on a table.

“You don’t need to thank me for anything,” Albert replied.

He opened the heavy oak door for Nix to leave. Without saying goodbye or shaking hands or watching Nix and the woman leave, he walked back into the kitchen, hoping that somehow the world that his two visitors represented would exit from his life as easily as they had walked into it. He heard the lock click shut in the jamb, the wall vibrate slightly with the weight of the door swinging into place. He propped his arms on the marble counter and stared at the mountains at the south end of the valley, wondering why his age seemed to bring him neither wisdom nor peace. A moment later, the door chimes rang. He opened the door again and looked into Candace Sweeney’s face. With her tattoos and her jeans that were too tight, the pant legs stuffed in a pair of cowboy boots, she reminded him of the girls he had known years ago when he was on the drift, riding flat-wheelers, sleeping in oil-field flophouses, bucking bales and harvesting beets and hops.

“We’re sorry we bothered you,” she said. “Troyce got hurt real bad down in Texas and almost died. His wounds still bleed, and he has trouble sleeping. Sometimes he gets an edge on.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked.

She looked over her shoulder at the driveway, then back at Albert. “I told Troyce I just wanted to apologize for disturbing you at work. But that’s not why I came back.”

Albert waited for her to go on.

“If that fellow Jimmy Dale Greenwood comes around here?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Forget we were here. Forget you heard about any of this. You don’t need to pass on any information to Troyce or me. Maybe you won’t believe this, but Troyce is a good man.”

Albert continued to look at her without replying. Her hair was tousling in the wind, her black cowboy shirt with purple and red roses sewn on it puffing with air.

“You’re not going to say anything?” she said.

“With a gal like you, he’d damn well better be a good man,” Albert said.

Her face suddenly went soft, like a flower opening in the shade.

AS SOON AS
I got back from my run, I showered and walked up to Albert’s house. He was behind the back steps, a tank of Tordon and 2,4-D strapped to his back, spraying leafy spurge and knapweed on a grassy slope that led into shade and fir trees. The air smelled like it had been rinsed in a chemical factory. I tried to find out why Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney had come to his house. Albert’s response to my questions was to widen the circle of his spray, whipping the applicator back and forth, hosing down everything in sight, letting the mist drift back into my face.

“Will you stop that?” I said.

“I have to finish this before the wind comes up,” he replied.

“When I first saw Troyce Nix, he was showing a photo to people at the revival on the res. He was about to show it to me until his girlfriend mentioned I was a cop. What’s that tell you, Albert?”

“Nothing.”

“It tells you he’s here on a personal mission, and the mission is to do the guy in the photo some serious damage.”

“That might be.”

“Does this have something to do with J. D. Gribble?”

“A man’s past ends at my front gate, Dave.”

“Good way to get your throat cut.”

Albert’s eyes looked like small blue lights inside the softness of his skin. “Would you kindly take yourself someplace else?” he said.

“Is Gribble a fugitive?” I asked.

“Don’t know and don’t give a shit.”

“Is Gribble the man in that photo?”

“I gave Nix back his photo without looking at it. I suspect Nix is up to no good. The woman seems like a good person. Why she’s with the likes of him is beyond me. Case closed, conversation over.”

How did Albert Hollister remain functional inside an academic bureaucracy? Why was he not beaten to death by his colleagues?

You got me.

I WALKED BACK
up to the cabin and tried to think. J. D. Gribble’s possible status as a fugitive was an issue between Albert and Gribble. Troyce Nix’s possible beef with Gribble was Gribble and Nix’s grief and none of my own. The only relevant issue for me was Clete Purcel and the decades he had invested in being my closest friend. A deviant had attempted to burn him alive and in all probability would take another run at it, possibly with different methods but with the same depraved intentions. Gribble had told the FBI he had heard a car or truck engine in the darkness, then the sound of the vehicle’s door slamming. Alicia Rosecrans, the FBI agent, had concluded that perhaps two perpetrators were involved, the driver and the man in the mask. But the man in the mask may have opened the vehicle’s door, started the engine, then slammed the door later. Or Gribble could have simply been mixed up.

I needed to concentrate on the man in the mask. I was convinced he was the same man who had abducted and murdered the college kids on the mountainside behind the university and killed the California couple in the highway rest stop. It wasn’t a matter of forensics; it was a matter of mathematical possibility. How many men like Clete’s tormentor could be living in the same sparsely populated area?

Unfortunately, there were precedents that went against the math. The Hillside Strangler was actually not one man but a team of two cousins, both of whom seemed to have souls that were fashioned in a furnace. What is the probability that two monsters, with little in their background that would explain the depth of their cruelty to innocent and trusting young women, could come from the same family?

Years ago, in a midwestern city whose collective ethos was heavily influenced by the humanitarian culture of abolitionists and of Mennonites, I attended twelve-step meetings with some of the best people I ever knew. Most of them were teachers and clerics and blue-collar workers in the aircraft industry. They were drunks, like me, but by and large their sins were the theological equivalent of 3.2 beer. The meetings were small, the content of the discussions restrained, the mention of sexual indiscretions infrequent. Two ex-felons, recently discharged from the state pen, were required to attend the meeting by their PO. They sat quietly in the back of the room, deferential, neatly dressed, and polite. They were well liked and gradually were considered twelve-step success stories in the making. I became accustomed to seeing one of them sitting in front of me at Sunday-morning Mass, his wife and two children next to him in the pew.

Then the two of them were busted ninety miles to the north of us, in a wheat-farming town where the biggest social event of the season was the John Deere exhibition at the high school gym. The charge was homicide, but that convenient abstract term didn’t come close to what these men had done to their victims. They had lain in wait for girls leaving bars by themselves at two A.M., offering them rides, maybe a toke or two of some Acapulco gold or a steak at an all-night café. Once the two ex-felons got their hands on their victims, they raped and tortured them for hours, degrading and humiliating them and putting them through every ordeal imaginable before snuffing out their lives.

The people at the meeting I had been attending were stunned. No one could deal with it, explain it, or reconcile himself to his own naïveté. What are the odds of two men like this finding each other at a small, family-oriented twelve-step meeting in a city associated with Toto, Dorothy, and the yellow brick road? What are the odds that all of us, including me, would be taken in by them? What are the odds that one of them would sit with his family in front of me at Sunday Mass?

The answer that presents itself is not a pleasant one: There are more of them out there than we think, and they recognize one another when we do not. If you doubt this, check the statistics on the number of children who disappear each year and are never seen or heard from again.

But the attack on Clete Purcel was not random. When people kill one another, it’s always for reasons of money, sex, and power. I suspected that whoever was behind the attack on Clete was driven by all three.

I called the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to patrolwoman at the NOPD, and later had become my plainclothes partner at the Sheriff’s Department in New Iberia. She was an attractive, enigmatic woman, and I was convinced several personalities lived inside her. She was the subject of an IA investigation after she had an affair with a confidential female informant. She also had an affair with Clete Purcel. She was the only cop in the area he allowed to bust and hook him up after he had destroyed a saloon in St. Martinsville and almost killed three outlaw bikers with a pool cue.

On occasion her eyes would turn warm and linger on mine, as though one of the women who lived inside her was having thoughts about straying. But I never questioned her integrity or challenged her authority, and I always respected her courage and the grace with which she conducted her life. I also learned that anyone who mocked or treated her disrespectfully did so only once. When our former sheriff retired and Helen took his place, Helen won the hearts of the entire community, and no one publicly discussed her sexual persuasion.