James Burke - Light of the World

“Tell me what it is.”

“It’s disgusting. Stay back.”

Someone had defecated in the middle of the road and made no attempt to dig a hole or cover it up. Horseflies were swarming on the spot. Up above, behind a cluster of bushes, was an opening to a cave. I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chunked it through the brush and heard it strike stone. “Come on out here, podna,” I said.

There was only quiet. I threw a second and then a third rock with the same result. I grabbed hold of a tree trunk and pulled myself up on the slope and walked toward the cave, the ground spongy with rainwater and pine needles. I could hear Molly climbing the slope behind me. I turned and tried to signal her to stop. But that was not the way of Molly Boyle and never would be.

“Hey, buddy, we’re not your enemies,” I said. “We just want to know who you are. We’re not going to call the cops on you.”

This time when I spoke, I was close enough to the cave to create an echo and feel the cool air and smell the bat guano and pooled water inside. I took a penlight from my pocket and stepped under the overhang and shined the light on the back wall. I could see the dried skin of an animal on the floor, ribs poking through the fur, eye sockets empty.

“What’s in there?” Molly said.

“A dead mountain lion. It probably got hurt or shot and went in here to die.”

“You don’t think a homeless person has been living there?”

“We’re too far from the highway. I think the rodeo clown came back and was watching the house.”

“Let’s get out of here, Dave.”

I turned to leave the cave; then, as an afterthought, I shone the penlight along the walls and ledges. The surface of the stone was soft with mold and lichen and bat droppings and water seepage from the surface. Close to the ceiling was a series of gashes in the lichen, a perfect canvas on which a throwback from an earlier time could leave his message. I suspected he had used a sharp stone for a stylus, trenching the letters as deep as possible, cutting through the lichen into the wall, as though savoring the alarm and injury and fear his words would inflict upon others.

I was here but you did not know me. Before there was an alpha and omega I was here. I am the one before whom every knee shall bend.

“Who is this guy?” Molly said.

The sheriff’s name was Elvis Bisbee. He must have been fifty and a good six and a half feet tall. He had a long face and pale blue eyes and a mustache he had let grow into ropes, the white tips hanging down from either side of his mouth. He stood with me in the shade at the foot of the arroyo at the back of the house, gazing up the slope at the bluff above the logging road. “The guy was wearing cowboy boots?” he said.

“I can show you the tracks.”

“I’ll take your word for it. You’re pretty convinced Wyatt Dixon is stalking your daughter?” He wore a departmental uniform and a short-brim Stetson and a pistol and holster with a polished belt. His eyes seemed to see everything and nothing at the same time.

“I don’t know who else would be out here,” I said.

“Albert likes to stoke up things. Right now it’s these heavy rigs that pass at the foot of your road on their way to Alberta.”

“Oil companies don’t hire deranged people to defecate on the property of a retired English professor.”

“It’s not Wyatt Dixon’s style, either.”

“What is? Killing people?”

“I grant Wyatt’s got a bad history. But he’s not a voyeur. He can’t keep the women off him.”

“Wyatt?”

“He’s an unusual guy. When it comes to rodeoing, he’s got a lot of admirers.”

“I’m not among them.”

“I can’t blame you,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a pack and staring up the slope. “I don’t think he’s your man, but I’m going to bring him in and have a talk with him. If you see him around the property, or if he tries to contact your daughter, let me know.”

“There’s something else. Somebody cut a message in the wall of a cave up there.” I recited it and asked, “You ever see anything like that written anywhere else around here?”

“Not that I can recall. Sounds like it’s from the Bible.”

“Part of it, but it’s screwed up.”

“Meaning Dixon would be the kind of guy who’d screw up a passage from Scripture?”

“It occurred to me.”

He lit his cigarette and drew in on it and turned his face aside before he blew out the smoke. “Let me confide in you,” he said. “A young Indian girl went missing six days ago. She was drinking in a joint near the rez and never came home. Her foster grandfather is Love Younger.”

“The oilman?”

“Some just call him the tenth wealthiest man in the United States. He has a summer home here. I’m supposed to be at his house in a half hour.”

His choice of words was not good. Or maybe I misinterpreted the inference. But a county sheriff does not report to a private citizen at his home, particularly at a prearranged time.

“I’m not following you, Sheriff.”

“You’re a homicide detective, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Mr. Younger is an old man. I don’t like telling him his granddaughter had personal problems. I don’t like telling him the girl is probably dead or close to it or in a state of mind that no seventeen-year-old girl should be in. That particular bar she went to is a hangout for ex-cons, outlaw bikers, and guys who would cut you from your liver to your lights for a package of smokes. We used to call Montana ‘the last good place.’ Now it’s like everywhere else. A few years back somebody went into a beauty parlor just south of us and decapitated three women. I’ll let you know what Dixon has to say.”

He mashed out his cigarette against a tree trunk and field-stripped the paper and let the tobacco blow away in the wind.

Alafair had gone to town to buy several bottles of shampoo and baby oil and solvents to help Albert untangle the snarls and concrete-like accretions that had built up in the manes and tails of his horses. When she returned, I went upstairs to the back bedroom, where she wrote every day from early morning to mid-afternoon and sometimes for two or three hours in the evening. Her first novel had been published by a New York house and had done very well, and her second one was due to come out in the summer, and she was now working on a third. From her desk she had a grand view of the north pasture and the sloped roof of the barn that was limed with frost each morning and that steamed as the sun rose, and a grove of apple trees that had just gone into leaf and the velvety green treeless hills beyond it. She had a thermos of coffee on her desk, and she was staring out the window and holding a cup motionlessly to her mouth. I sat down on the bed and waited.

“Oh, hi, Dave,” she said. “How long have you been there?”

“I just came in. I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“It’s all right. What did the sheriff say?”

“He doesn’t believe Dixon is a likely candidate.”

She set down her cup and looked at it. “I think a guy was following me in town.”

“Where in town?”

“He was tailgating me in a skinned-up Ford truck on the highway. He had his sun visor down, and I couldn’t make out his face. At one point he was five feet from my bumper. I had to run a yellow light to get away from him. When I came out of the tack store, he was parked across the street.”

“It was the same guy?”

“It was the same truck. The guy behind the wheel was smoking a pipe. I walked to the curb to get a better look, and he drove off.”

“It wasn’t Dixon?”

“I would have said so if it was.”