Light of the World (13 page)

T
HE RIVERS WERE
blown out by the spring runoff and the constant rains, but Clete knew a creek high up on a logging road in the Bitterroots where there was a long stretch of white water that boiled over into the trees, then above it a chain of beaver dams and deep pools and undulating riffles sliding so clear over the gravel bed that you could count each pebble five feet below the surface. He had loaded his ice chest with beer and canned fruit juice and ham-and-onion sandwiches and had put it on the backseat and his waders and fly rod and fly vest and net and creel in the trunk. He had put on his canvas coat and porkpie hat and was ready to go. There was only one problem. He couldn’t get his mind off his daughter.

He went back into the cabin. “Come with me,” he said.

“I have things to take care of,” she said. She was sitting at the breakfast table, her food cold on her plate, her laptop open.

“What’s bothering you, kid?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw the Airweight under your pillow.”

“I have nightmares sometimes. It’s the way I am.”

“Did you meet a guy last night?”

“No.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I just did.”

“Then what is it?”

“I have to work some things out.”

He took off his hat and sat down at the table. She closed the laptop. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what it is,” he said.

“I used some bad judgment.”

“With a guy?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking about.”

“Who or what are we talking about?” he said.

“I’ll handle it, Clete.”

He put a hand on her arm and saw her flinch. “I’m getting a bad feeling here,” he said.

“So butt out.”

“Is it those cops who wised off to you?”

“Stay out of it.”

“You went after them, didn’t you?”

“I acted like a fool. Everything that happened to me is my own fault.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I went to Bill Pepper’s house. I was going to tear him up. Then I saw a swing set in his yard and a basketball hoop over the porte cochere. When he opened the door, I saw pictures of him with his grandchildren on the wall. He pretended not to recognize me. He asked if I was a church lady.”

“A what?”

“He said this lady was going to enroll his granddaughter at Bible camp. He said he thought I was her. He’s a very convincing guy.”

Clete felt a shortness in his breath, a watery sensation in his heart. “Tell me what happened.”

“I think he put Rohypnol or maybe some sleeping pills in a glass of Pepsi he gave me.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t remember all of it. He put his hands on me first. Then he did some other things.”

Clete saw the blood go out of her cheeks, the blank stare in her eyes. “Get it all out at once,” he said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re going to deal with this together.”

“He rubbed his penis on me. All over my skin. He kept saying things with his mouth close to my ear. I couldn’t keep his breath off my face.”

Clete felt his scalp tightening, his hands forming into fists on his knees under the table.

“He drove me to a place on the Blackfoot,” she said. “For a long time he let me think he was going to kill me. Then he cut my clothes off with a knife and poured whiskey and weed on me and rubbed it all over my body and left me to walk naked back to town. Two kids gave me a raincoat and took me to my truck.”

The whites of her eyes had turned pink, although she had not shed any tears. Clete had to cough into his hand before he spoke. “You’re not going to report him?”

“He scrubbed me with bleach. There’s no DNA on me. My clothes are gone. I have nothing to prove my story.”

“What were you doing on the Internet?”

“He told me he had terminal cancer. Some people I know in Miami hacked into his medical records. He was lying. I know what you’re thinking. I want you to stay out of it.”

“He’s going down.”

“I don’t let other people carry my water, especially you.”

“Because I wasn’t there to defend you when you were a kid?”

“It’s the other way around. You’ve been there for me in every way you could, and I’m not going to let you take my weight now.”

“You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, kid. You’ve made a documentary on music, and now you’re going to make one on the damage these shale-oil companies are doing. You can’t throw that away because of a bum like Pepper. Leave him to me.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Clete. When a man molests a woman, he steals her identity. You don’t know who you are anymore. You feel like you don’t have an address or a mailbox or a name. You’re nothing.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“See what I mean? You don’t want to hear it. No man wants to know how painful it is. It’s like a stain you can’t wash out of your soul. I want to kill him, and I want to do it in pieces. I want him to suffer as much as possible.”

He picked up her hand. “I don’t blame you for not dime-ing him. He’s probably done it before and gotten away with it. The system chews up sexual assault victims. But I’m going to get him, and when I do, it will be for both of us.”

“I knew this was a mistake.”

“What is?”

“Telling you. You’re going to end up in prison.”

He started to speak, then gave it up and stroked her hair. His head had filled with images from her account that he knew would pursue him night and day, no matter where he went or how he tried to occupy himself. As he realized the magnitude of the theft that had been perpetrated on his daughter, he felt a sensation in his stomach that was like a flame punching a hole in a sheet of paper and spreading outward until it blackened everything it touched.

A
SQUALL HAD JUST
blown through Hellgate Canyon into downtown Missoula when we reached the tree-shaded neighborhood by the river where Bill Pepper lived. The limbs of the maple trees were in full leaf and shaking in great wet clusters in the wind, raindrops spotting the sidewalks, the flower baskets on Pepper’s porch whipping back and forth. It was only five-thirty, but he had turned on the lights inside. I had to knock twice before I saw him appear from the kitchen, wearing a fedora, a leather jacket on his arm. He looked through the glass straight into my face, then unlocked the bolt and opened the door. “What is it?” he asked.

Fear comes in many forms, most often as a sense of apprehension that soon disappears. What I saw in the face of Bill Pepper bordered on the kind of fear I’ve seen only in the faces of the condemned, men who had to sit in a cell and listen to the beating of their heart while awaiting the sound of a steel door swinging open and footsteps walking down a poorly lighted corridor. I’m talking about a level of fear that turns the skin gray and leaves a man’s hair soggy with sweat and his palms so stiff and dry he can’t close them.

“I met with Love Younger this morning,” I said. “I need to confirm a couple of things he told me.”

“You’re meddling in an investigation where you have no jurisdiction,” Pepper said.

“That’s not the case. My daughter was almost killed by an unknown assailant who’s still out there. Younger says you found a sporting goods salesman who sold a hunter’s bow to a guy who may have murdered Angel Deer Heart. This is information we have a right to know. Why didn’t you share it with us?”

“I’m on my way out of town for the weekend. You can come to my office Monday if you want to talk.”

“You nervous about something?” Alafair said.

“I’m in a rush. What right do you have to come to my house? To talk to me like that?” As though emboldened by his own rhetoric, he stepped out on the porch. Even in the wind, I could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Our request for information is a reasonable one, Detective Pepper,” I said. “I don’t understand why you’re upset.”

“I’m fine. I don’t know what you want or why you’re here. We’re still looking at Wyatt Dixon. To our knowledge, he’s the last person to see the girl alive.”

“We just ran into Dixon on the dirt road below Albert Hollister’s house,” I said. “He was on his way to see Gretchen Horowitz. He seemed perfectly relaxed talking to us. Does that sound like a guilty man to you?”

Pepper’s eyes looked from me to Alafair and back to me. “Are they cooking up something? Maybe claiming I abused Dixon?”

This time I didn’t respond. There was a tic below his left eye, a twitch by his mouth.

“Just tell us what you found out from the sporting goods salesman,” Alafair said. “What did the purchaser of the hunting bow look like?”

“Middle-aged. He paid with cash. It could be anybody,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“That’s not what you told Love Younger,” Alafair said. “You told him the purchaser was wearing the kind of bracelet Dixon sold the Indian girl.”

“I’m leaving now. I don’t have time for this,” Pepper said.

“I think your boat left the dock a little early today,” I said.

“Say again?”

“You’re ninety proof, partner. I used to start at lunchtime, too, particularly when I was warming up for the weekend. By Saturday morning I’d glow in the dark.”

I saw a strange light come into his eyes, as though he had shifted gears inside his head and was no longer thinking about any of the things he had just said. “You’re from down there. You know how they do business,” he said.

“From down
where
? Who is
they
? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“It’s got to do with Albert Hollister and the girl. They think I’m involved. I’m out. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Sir, you’re not making any sense,” I said.

“Mr. Robicheaux?”

“What is it?”

He seemed to collect himself, like a man wanting a friend. “I’m sorry for what I did. They’ve got me figured out wrong. I think I’m gonna go back to Mobile. I always liked it there, living by the salt water and pole-fishing with the nigras at sunset. It’s a peaceful life there on the bay.”

Alafair and I stared at him. It was like watching a man disappear before our eyes. “Sorry you did what?” I asked.

“For my actions. I’d undo them if I could.”

“I think you need some help,” I said.

He closed the door just as the clouds broke and started to pour down, the raindrops hitting the rooftop and sidewalks as hard as hail. If there is a charnel house for souls, I believed Bill Pepper had just found it.

A
LBERT WAS GONE
when we returned to the house. The rain had quit and the sky had turned into an ink wash, and Molly and I grilled steaks on the deck and took them inside and ate at the dining room table with Alafair and watched the moon rise above the Bitterroots.
Albert came in later, holding a FedEx delivery, his face ruddy from the wind. “This is for Gretchen. It was by the garage,” he said. “Where is she?”

“At the cabin, I think,” I replied. “Alafair and I had a talk with one of the cops who was up at the cave. Bill Pepper. Do you know him?”

“No more than I know any of them.”

“He was half in the bag and scared about something. He said it had to do with you and somebody he called ‘the girl.’ ”

Albert shook his head. “Isn’t he the one who beat up the cowboy?”

“Yeah, he knocked Wyatt Dixon around.”

“Why spend time talking with a man like that?” Albert said. He set the FedEx box on the table. The return address was a geological lab in Austin, Texas.

A
FTER SUPPER, GRETCHEN
had gone into her bedroom and lain down on top of the covers, her arm across her eyes, then turned toward the wall and fallen asleep. Clete sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and watched her sleep. He tried to think about the choices available to him. Have a quiet talk with the sheriff? Gretchen would end up shark meat. The sheriff would pull her jacket from Miami-Dade, and no credence would be given to anything she said. And the larger problem went way beyond Gretchen’s background. Again and again, victims of sexual assault were put on the stand and torn apart while the perpetrator either smirked at the defense table or shook his head in feigned disbelief. Rapes were downgraded to battery; child molesters were given probation. There was another problem, too. There was a sick culture in law enforcement, particularly among vice cops, and everyone knew it, Clete in particular: the corner-of-the-mouth jokes, the smug moral superiority, the collective rush in having set up a successful sex sting, the legal proximity to a sybaritic world where you could get laid in any way you wanted by just flipping out your badge.

For a vice detective with some loose time on his hands, after-hours New Orleans may not have been the Baths of Caracalla, but it was a pretty good surrogate.

In Clete’s opinion, the nation was still Puritan, at least when it came to the victimization of women. The temptress brought about her own downfall. The victim was the noun, the perpetrator an adverb. The moment Gretchen testified, she would be portrayed as a contract killer from Miami who had gone willingly to Bill Pepper’s home and entered into a tryst that ended in a lurid and inconsequential denouement on the Blackfoot River. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t charged with perjury.

Clete could see the curve of her hip and the tautness of her thighs and rump against the fabric of her jeans and her back rising and falling as she slept. She had begun a spartan health regimen in California and had lost twenty pounds by dieting and working out with weights and running four miles every morning on the beach in Santa Monica. The combination of her chestnut hair and violet-colored eyes and statuesque carriage made men turn and stare as she walked by. Even more intriguing, she seemed to take no notice of the attention they paid her, as though she were a polite but temporary visitor in their midst.

It was hard for Clete to separate the daughter he was looking at now from the woman who had been called Caruso in Little Havana. Blood splatter and the curse of Cain did not rinse easily from the hands or the soul. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing about the makeup of human beings, he thought. Aside from psychopaths, every person who killed another human being took on a burden he carried for the rest of his life. The daylight hours allowed you to concentrate on making money and buying food and clothes and worrying about your bald automobile tires. The nocturnal hours were a little different. The gargoyles that lived in the unconscious had their own agenda and were not interested in the ebb and flow of your daily life. When you were in bed by yourself at four
A.M.
, you could hear them slip their tethers and begin production of a horror movie in which you were the star, except you had no control of the events that were about to take place. How did you deal with it? You could try reds, four fingers of Jack, or even Nytol. Except you usually mortgaged the next day for a few hours of drugged sleep. There was another way: You could drop a solitary round in the cylinder of
your .38 and pull back the hammer and, with one soft squeeze of the trigger, put the problem out of your mind forever.