James Burke - Bitterroot

Suddenly Dixon released him.

"Somebody get a mop. This man has done wet hisself," he said.

He picked up his cup of punch, and, with one gartered arm across his young friend's shoulders, walked out of the room.

The next morning I heard the story from the owner of a local bookstore who had come out to see Doc and Maisey. At noon I drove to the sheriff's office and was told where I could find him.

I parked my truck in the leafy shade of cotton-woods on the Clark Fork, only three blocks from the courthouse, and walked down the embankment to the water's edge. The sheriff was casting a Mepps spinner in a high arc out into the middle of the river, letting it swing taut in the riffle before he began retrieving it. In the sunlight the scars on the backs of his hands looked like thin white snakes.

I went through the account about Wyatt Dixon's behavior at the university reading. He waited for me to finish, reeling in his line, casting it out again, then said, "I know all about it."

"Why's a guy like Dixon care about this gold mine up on the Blackfoot River?" I asked.

"Carl Hinkel uses these morons to run various kinds of scams on the government."

"What kinds of scams?"

"Hinkel finds old mining laws on the books that allow him to file mineral claims for next to nothing. Then he starts bulldozing the mountain away and washing the rock with cyanide. The tree huggers go apeshit and hammer their tallywhackers on their congressman's desk till the government buys out the claim and makes a millionaire out of a pissant who wouldn't recognize gold if you pulled it out of his teeth and stuck it up his nose."

"I think Dixon wants to put suspicion for Ellison's death on Xavier Girard," I said. "He knows Doc didn't do it, and he figures eventually you're going to be looking at him for the murder."

"In other words, just about anybody in Missoula County could have killed Lamar Ellison except your friend?"

I hesitated before I spoke again. His physical size was huge, his level of tolerance unpredictable.

"You told me you'd like to pinch Ellison's head off with a chain. You drove a log truck. Whoever killed Ellison knew how to use a boomer chain," I said.

"Son, there's three categories of stupid. 'Stupid,' 'stupider,' and 'stupidest.' But I think you're establishing new standards. Did the doctor have to use forceps on your head to get you out of the womb?"

"You'd love Texas, Sheriff."

"That's not a compliment, is it?"

"Search me," I said, and walked back to my truck.

Behind me, I heard his nylon line zing off the reel, his metal lure rattling through the shining air.

An hour later I answered the phone at Doc's house.

"I ain't ever seen a place this beautiful, Billy Bob. I cain't wait to hit the stream," the voice on the other end said.

"Lucas?"

"Yeah. We're at Rock Creek. We need directions out to Doc's place."

"We?"

"Temple and me. My drilling rig shut down. You said to come out if I could get some time off."

I tried to remember the conversation but could not. My innocent, wonderful, talented, and vulnerable son, why did you have to come here now?

"Temple's with you?" I said.

"Yeah, what's wrong?"

Temple Carrol was the private investigator I relied on in my law practice. But she was a lot more than that, and our relationship was one that neither of us had ever been able to define.

"I didn't tell her to come up here," I said.

"Since when do you have to tell her anything?"

My head was throbbing.

"Lucas-" I began.

"Maisey called her. So did Doc. He said Maisey's real messed up in the head. Who are these guys who raped her?"

"You stay out of this stuff, Lucas."

"I'm gonna put Temple on the phone. Thanks for the welcome to Montana," he said.

Temple stood in the dusk by the side of the Ford Explorer she drove, her face obviously fatigued by the long drive from Deaf Smith and now my inept-ness in her presence. Temple had been a gunbull in Angola Prison in Louisiana, a patrolwoman in Dallas, and a sheriff's deputy in Fort Bend County in Southeast Texas. She had chestnut hair and dressed like a tomboy and had never lost the baby fat on her hips and arms. Her level of loyalty was ferocious. But so was her demand on the loyalty of others.

Lucas had already unloaded his things and was pegging up a tent among the trees by the river.

"Maisey and Doc didn't tell you I was coming up with Lucas?" she asked.

"No. But I'm glad you did," I said.

"I'm going to check into a motel in Missoula."

"There's room inside."

She shook her head. "Where's a good place to eat?"

"There's a truck stop in Bonner. I'll go with you. Then we'll come back here and you can stay the night."

She thought about it and yawned, then said, "You involved with somebody here?"

"Why do you think that?" I said, my eyes slipping off her face.

"Just a wild guess."

Early the next morning I smelled wood smoke and bacon frying outside, and I looked through the window and saw Lucas squatting by a fire ring he had made of stones next to the river's edge. He dipped a coffeepot into a creek that flowed into the river and sprinkled coffee grinds into the water and set the pot to boil on the edge of his fire. I walked down to the bank and squatted next to him.

"That creek water's got deer scat in it," I said.

"The animals drink it. It don't bother them," he said. He grinned and wedged the blade of his pock-etknife into a can of condensed milk.

He was as tall as I, with the same hair and wide, narrow shoulders. But he had his mother's hands, those of a musician, and her gentle looks.

"It's good to have you here, bud," I said.

"How could anybody figure Doc for a murderer? What kind of law they got up here, anyway?"

"Doc's a complicated man."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He killed a lot of people in the war, Lucas."

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

"You saying maybe he done it?" he asked.

"I try not to study on it. The way I figure it, the guy who died had it coming."

I heard him clear his throat, as though a moth had flown into it. He lifted the bacon in his skillet with a fork and turned it over in the grease, his eyes watering in the smoke.

"Sometimes things come out of you that scare me, Billy Bob," he said.

I PICKED UP Temple at her motel in Missoula and we drove to the courthouse and walked down the corridor to the sheriff's office.

"Let me talk to him alone," she said.

"Why?"

"Woman's touch, that sort of thing."

"You think I already tracked pig flop on the rug?"

"You? Not a chance."

She left his door partly open, and I could see inside and hear them talking. I soon had the feeling the sheriff wished he had gone to lunch early.

"How does anybody lose a bag full of bloody and semen-stained sheets and clothing? You drop it off at the Goodwill by mistake?" she said.

"We think the night janitor picked up the bag and threw it in the incinerator," the sheriff said.

"So then you conclude there's no physical evidence to prove Ellison stole Doc's knife. Which allows you to arrest Doc for Ellison's murder. What kind of brain-twisted logic is that?"

"Now listen-"

"You pulled in two other suspects for Maisey's rape. Their fingerprints were at the crime scene. But you didn't charge them."

"One guy was a part-time carpenter. He worked on that house before Dr. Voss bought it. The other man was at a party there. A couple of witnesses back up his story."

"You know they did it."

"Help me prove that and I'll lock them up. Look, you're mad because your friend is not easy to defend. The knife puts him inside Ellison's cabin. He stopped at a filling station a mile down the road and filled his tank with gas a half hour before the fire started. He had motivation and no alibi. When we picked him up and told him somebody had burned Ellison to death, he said, 'I should give a shit?' You were a police officer. Who would you have in custody?"