Light of the World (8 page)

“Waste of tax money,” Albert said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out of biker saloons or shoot at people with hunters’ bows.”

“Some of them are deranged and dangerous, Albert.”

“There’s nothing like fearing a man with a hole in his shoe.”

I didn’t feel like arguing with Albert’s proletarian views. “I’m going to walk up on the ridge. I’ll see you inside.”

“Tell that bunch I’d better not find their nasty cigarette butts on the property,” he replied.

As I worked my way up the slope, I could hear people talking on the far side of the trees. Then I saw a deputy in uniform, a second man in a baggy brown suit, a man in a checkered shirt I figured for a crime scene technician, and Wyatt Dixon, who was barefoot and hatless and sitting against the hillside, wrists manacled behind his back, clothes mud-streaked and sticking wetly to his skin. Gretchen Horowitz had just started back down the slope, her face as hot as a woodstove.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Don’t ask,” she said. She went past me as though I were a wood post.

I gained the road and looked down at Dixon. His teeth were red when he grinned. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“You all right, Mr. Dixon?”

The mud in his hair and the drip from the trees were running into his eyes, and he had to squint to look up at me. “Do not misinterpret the situation of this poor rodeo cowboy. I am honored to once again find myself surrounded by such noble men as yourselves. God bless America and the ground that men such as yourselves walk on.”

“Where are your boots?”

He studied the bloodied tops of his feet as though seeing them for the first time. “The detective stomped my toes proper and told me I wouldn’t need no foot covering for a while.”

“What do you want here?” the man in the baggy suit said.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. What did y’all do to this fellow?”

“Nothing. He slipped down the slope,” the man in the suit said.

“He must have slid a long way. Did you say something to Miss Gretchen?”

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“The woman who just left here. She was angry about something.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Right. What’s your name?”

“Detective Bill Pepper. I told the woman not to contaminate a possible crime scene. If she got her nose bent out of shape, that’s her problem.”

The crime scene technician was standing in the background. “Come on up to the cave with me. I want to show you a couple of things,” he said.

I grabbed hold of a pine sapling and pulled myself up on a footpath and followed the crime scene tech to the entrance of the cave. He was a rotund man with a florid face and the small ears and scar tissue of someone who might have been in the ring. He had put rubber bands around the cuffs of his cargo pants. “How you doin’?” he said.

“Better than that cowboy.”

“Here’s what we’ve got going on. The rain didn’t do us any favors. There was supposed to be a bunch of scat here, but I can’t find it. Same with the fingernail clippings. The boot prints are wiped out, too. Maybe somebody got here before we did.”

“Is Dixon lying about getting his feet stomped?”

“Detective Pepper said he wanted Dixon’s boots to be clean when he tried to match them with the tracks of the guy who was holed up in the cave. Sometimes Bill’s way of doing things is a problem for the rest of us.”

“Why is Dixon in cuffs? I thought he was coming in on his own.”

“He didn’t know the Indian girl’s purse was found last night behind a hay bale in the barn where she was killed. There was a receipt in it for a bracelet she bought from Dixon. The bracelet wasn’t on her body. The date on the receipt was the same day she disappeared.”

“What does Dixon say?”

“He weaves bracelets out of silver and copper wire and was wearing one in the Wigwam, and she saw it and wanted to buy it. He says he sold it to her for fifty dollars.”

“What was the deal with Miss Gretchen?”

“The gal who just went down the hill?”

“Down south you don’t call a woman a ‘gal.’ I especially wouldn’t do that with her.”

“I want you to understand something, Detective Robicheaux. Our department treats people with respect, our current sheriff in particular. The deputy and detective out there are the exception. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”

“What happened?”

“The lady, or whatever you want to call her, Miss Gretchen, came on a little strong about Bill’s treatment of Wyatt Dixon. When she was walking away, the deputy said, ‘Is she butch enough for you, Bill?’ Pepper goes, ‘I’d probably have to tie a board across my ass so I didn’t fall in.’ ”

“She heard them?”

“Probably. Would you tell her I apologize on behalf of the department?”

“If I were you, I’d tell your friends to do that.”

“She’s gonna file a complaint?”

“No, she’s not given to filing complaints,” I said, and looked back out the opening of the cave. “Is Dixon going to be charged?”

“Depends on what the prosecutor says. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. I didn’t get what you were saying. The lady is not gonna file a complaint? So what is she gonna do?”

I looked at the biblical message incised in the soft patina of lichen on the wall and wondered what kind of tangled mind was responsible for it. “It’s nice meeting you,” I said. “I hope to see you again. Tell those two morons out there they put their foot into the wrong Rubicon.”

“Sorry?”

“Tell them to look it up.”

A
FTER THE FIRST
interview, Alafair waited three days in the motel for Asa Surrette’s attorney to return her call. It was January, and snow was driving parallel with the ground, and the landscape was sere and stippled with weeds, and in the distance the hills looked like piles of slag raked out of a furnace.

It was a land of contradictions, settled by Populists and Mennonites but also by fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of John Brown. In spring the rivers were swollen and streaked with red sandbanks and bordered by cottonwoods that fluttered with thousands of green leaves resembling butterflies. The Russian wheat in the fields was the most disease-resistant in the world, the harvest so great that sometimes the grain had to be piled in two-story mounds by the train tracks because there was no room left in the silos.

Or the skies could blacken with dust storms or, worse, clouds of smoke rising from a peaceful town, such as Lawrence, where guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson spent an entire day systematically murdering 160 people.

Just after Alafair had given up and decided to return home the next morning, she got a call from Surrette’s attorney, the same one who’d negotiated Surrette’s allocution and sentence, trying to ensure that his client not be exposed to the death penalty reinstated in 1994. “Asa would like to see you again,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

There was a beat. “
Why?
To help with your project. To give his side of things.”

“Your client is a narcissist. He’s had no interest in helping anybody with anything. If he wants the interviews to go forward, the questions will be on my terms. He’ll make an honest attempt to answer them or we’re done.”

“You’ll have to work that out with him.”

“I’ll work it out with you. There will be no proscriptive areas of inquiry.”

“I think you’ll find Asa pretty forthcoming. He likes you.”

“Are you serious?”

“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t ask you back. What did you say to him, anyway?”

“He has one reason for wanting to see me again. I bother him. I told him why he took the body of one of his victims to his church and photographed it.”

There was another beat. “Ms. Robicheaux, there is one area that should not be explored in your interview. You know what it is, too.”

“No, I don’t,” she lied.

“Asa has admitted to eight homicides committed during the 1970s and ’80s. Those are the only crimes he will be discussing, because those are the only crimes he committed.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure of what he told me. I’m sure the authorities, including the FBI, have never found evidence of any kind that Asa was less than truthful about any of these matters.”

“The same guys who couldn’t catch him for thirty years? The same people who caught him only after he contacted them and then sent them a floppy disk traceable to a computer in his workplace?”

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” the attorney said.

It was snowing the next morning, in clumps that floated softly down and broke apart and melted on the highway and were blown into a muddy spray by the trucks leaving an oil refinery whose smokestacks were red at night and streaming in the morning with gray curds of smoke that smelled like leakage from a sewage line. Asa Surrette was locked in a waist chain, waiting, when Alafair entered the interview room. Through the slitted window, she could see the snow blowing like feathers on a series of small hills that seemed to blur in the distance and then dissolve into nothingness.

“You keep looking at the hills,” he said.

“The winter here is strange. It contains no light.”

“I never thought of it in those terms.”

“Is it true there used to be eighteen Titan missile silos ringed around the outskirts of Wichita?”

“That’s right. They were all taken out.”

“Nonetheless, people here lived for decades with mechanized death buried under the wheat?”

“So what?”

“Had war started with the Soviet Union, this place would have become a radioactive Grand Canyon.”

“Yeah, that kind of sums it up.”

“Did that enter your thinking when you committed your murders?”

He looked at her with a gleam in his eye that was between caution and hostility. “No. Why should it?”

She didn’t answer.

“Why do you keep glancing out the window?” he asked.

“It’s the sense of nothingness that I get when I look at the horizon. The reality is, there
is
no horizon here. The grayness seems to have no end and no purpose. Is that how you felt when you stalked your victims?”

He wrinkled his forehead, craning around, the chain on his waist tinkling. “I think that stuff you’re talking about comes from Samuel Beckett. I read him in my literature class. I think his work is crap.”

“What did you feel after you killed your victims?”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

“Nothing?”

“What’s to feel? They’re dead, you’re not. One day I’ll be dead. So will you.”

“How about the misery you caused them in their last moments? The suffering their loved ones will undergo the rest of their lives?”

“Maybe I’m sorry about that.”

“You felt remorse?”

“Maybe I felt it later. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about things in sequence. People’s emotions don’t happen in sequence.” His wrist chain clinked as he tried to raise his hands in order to make the point.

“You haven’t answered the question, have you? What did you feel after you killed your victims?”

He straightened his back against the chair, breathing through his nose, his expression composed, his gaze roving over her features. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I thought about how I had stopped time and changed all the events that would have happened. I tore the hands off the clock.”

She felt her eyes moisten. “Did they beg?”

“What?”

“For their lives? For the lives of their children? What did they say to you when they knew they were going to die?”

“I already talked about all that.”

“No, you didn’t. You told the court only what you chose for them to hear. Do the voices of your victims visit you in your sleep?”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“No, you don’t. I have no interest in statements about your behavior or your motivations. You’re a psychopath, and nothing you say is reliable. That means the book I write about you will be unreliable. You’ve had an enormous influence on me, Mr. Surrette.”

“Oh?” he said, the corner of his mouth wrinkling.

“I’ve always opposed capital punishment. Now I’m not so sure.”

His eyes dulled over in the same way they had during the first interview, as though he had gone to a place inside himself where no one could follow. “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

“You didn’t stop killing people in 1994, did you? There were other victims, in other towns or other states, weren’t there?”

“No.”

“People like you can’t shut down the mechanism. It’s always there. It’s like a craving for morphine or pornography or booze or any other addiction, except much worse. How do you give up tearing the hands off the clock and changing history?”

“You’re not going to write the book, are you?”

“No. You’re not only untrustworthy as a source, you’re too depressing a subject. I’m going to do something else, though. I’m going to publish an article or a series of articles stating my belief that you never stopped killing. That if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, it’s you.”

The room was sour with his smell. He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted forward, his eyes glowering under his brows. His unshaved cheeks looked smeared with soot. “You came here acting like an intellectual. You’re nothing but a cunt and not worth my time. On the gate, boss man!” he said.