James Burke - Light of the World

“It doesn’t look like anybody is home,” Clete said.

I looked at my watch. “Maybe they’re eating dinner,” I said.

I tapped on the door. I could hear no sound inside. I tried again. Nothing. I tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked. “Let’s walk around back,” I said.

We went through the side yard. The shades on the dining room windows were pulled halfway down. There were no place settings on the table or any sign of movement in the house. In the backyard, there was a pole shed attached to the side of an old barn where firewood had been stacked neatly against the barn wall. The grass was scattered with freshly split chunks of pinewood; the woodcutter’s ax had been left embedded on the rim of the chopping stump, the handle at a stiff forty-five-degree angle. Clete looked up at the sky. A bank of thunderheads had moved across the sun. “You’d think a guy this neat would want to get his wood under the shed before it rained,” he said.

He went up the back steps and banged on the door. No response. He held up one hand to keep the reflection off the glass and attempted to see inside. Then he went up the rear stairs to the second floor and tried the door and pressed his ear against the glass. “I can’t hear a thing,” he said. He went around the side of the house and came back. “Maybe they went off somewhere.”

I wished I had asked one of the neighbors how many vehicles the minister’s family owned. “Could be. But the Bronco is in the garage. This doesn’t look like a three-car family.”

“What do you want to do?” Clete said.

I glanced at my cell phone. No service. A cat walked around the corner of the house and watched us. Its water and food bowls were empty. I stared at the house. Its quiet and dark interior was of such intensity that I could hear a ringing sound in my head. “There’s something wrong in that house,” I said. “Break the glass.”

Clete knocked out a pane in the kitchen door with a brick and reached inside and opened the door, his shoes crunching on top of the shattered glass. I followed him through the mudroom into the kitchen. The oven had been left on, and the heat was enough to peel the wallpaper. Clete turned off the propane and took his .38 snub from his shoulder holster, letting it hang from his right hand, the muzzle pointed at the floor. The only sound in the house was the scraping of a tree limb on the eave.

“This is Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux,” he called into the dining room. “I’m a private investigator, and Dave is a sheriff’s detective from Louisiana. We’re visiting at Albert Hollister’s place down the road. We think there might be a problem in this house.”

His words echoed through the downstairs. We started moving through the house, Clete in front, his .38 held up at a right angle. We opened the closet doors and the door to a bedroom and the door to a pantry and a laundry room. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Clete started up the stairs one step at a time, his gaze fastened on the landing, his left hand on the banister. His back looked as wide as a whale’s, the fabric of his coat stretching across his spine.

On the left side of the landing was another bedroom, its door open, the bed made, raindrops clicking on the windowpane. I went inside the bedroom and looked in the closet. It was full of clothes that probably belonged to a teenage girl. I came back out on the landing. Neither Clete nor I spoke. He opened the bathroom door and winced. I could smell the fecal odor without going inside. If I hadn’t known better, I would have concluded someone had just used the toilet.

There were no towels on the racks, no toilet paper on the spindle. An incense bowl rested on top of a dirty-clothes hamper. Clete felt the bathroom walls and rubbed his fingertips with his thumb. It was obvious someone had used adhesive tape of some kind to hang up pictures or pieces of paper all over the walls. I tried the door on the right side of the landing. It swung back from the jamb, revealing a small room furnished with a chest of drawers and a narrow bed without sheets or a mattress cover. On the floor was a dust-free rectangle where a footlocker might have rested. Clete turned in a circle and lifted his arms to show his puzzlement.

We left the bedroom and closed the door behind us. Clete flicked on the light above the landing. The oak floor had been wiped clean in the center, but there were tiny hairlike traces of a dark substance between two boards. I squatted down and rubbed my handkerchief along the grain, then held up the handkerchief for Clete to see. I returned to the bathroom, holding my breath against the odor, removed the incense bowl, and opened the hamper. I had found the towels that were pulled off the racks. I tilted the hamper so Clete could see inside. He silently mouthed, The basement .

We went back downstairs and through the hallway. When I opened the door to the basement, I smelled an odor that was like night damp and mildew and perhaps a leak from a sewage line, but nothing you wouldn’t expect in a basement that seldom saw sunlight. We waited at the open door for at least ten seconds, listening. Then I felt for the wall switch and clicked it on, flooding the basement with the harsh illumination of three bare lightbulbs. This time I went first. We had to lower our heads when we passed under some water and heating pipes; we found ourselves standing in the midst of what seemed a conventional setting beneath an early-twentieth-century farmhouse. There was a propane-fed furnace that had rusted out along the floor, a keg of nails and a wheelbarrow full of broken bricks shoved in a corner, two cardboard boxes filled with Christmas-tree ornaments and strings of colored lights under a window whose wood frame had rotted. Clete turned around and peered through the shadows at something no human being ever wants to see, an image that no amount of experience can prepare you for. “Mother of God,” he said.

The two figures had been put in transparent garment bags, and the bags hung with baling wire from a rafter. The weight had stretched the bags into the shape and wispy texture of cocoons. One of the figures was a woman. Her hair was pressed in a bloody tangle against the plastic. She was probably dead when she went into the bag. The other figure was a man. His wrists were crisscrossed behind him with duct tape. One eye was half-lidded, the other popping from the socket. His mouth was attached to the plastic like a suction cup.

Clete walked to the corner of the basement and retched, his big arms propped against the wall, hiding his face from me, the smell of whiskey rising from the concrete.

The rain shower had already stopped when the first sheriff’s cruiser arrived, followed by the paramedics, the crime scene techs, the coroner, the sheriff, and the FBI special agent I’d had words with earlier, James Martini. He went down in the basement for five minutes. When he came back, his tie was pulled loose and his face had a winded look, although he was a trim, muscular man in his late thirties who probably worked out regularly. He seemed unsure of what he wanted to say. “Who got sick down there?” he asked.

“My friend Clete Purcel.”

He nodded, looking around, his gaze focused on nothing. “You ever work one like this before? Down in Louisiana?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why is Surrette prowling this ridge?” he asked.

“Part of it has to do with Albert Hollister.”

“The writer?”

“He owns a ranch just down the road. He was Asa Surrette’s creative writing professor at Wichita State University in 1979. Surrette has a grievance against him, something about an objectionable short story he turned in.”

“That’s a new one.”

“A guy like this doesn’t need much of an excuse.”

“Your daughter interviewed Surrette in prison and got him stoked up?”