James Burke - Swan Peak

“A man’s past ends at my front gate, Dave.”

“Good way to get your throat cut.”

Albert’s eyes looked like small blue lights inside the softness of his skin. “Would you kindly take yourself someplace else?” he said.

“Is Gribble a fugitive?” I asked.

“Don’t know and don’t give a shit.”

“Is Gribble the man in that photo?”

“I gave Nix back his photo without looking at it. I suspect Nix is up to no good. The woman seems like a good person. Why she’s with the likes of him is beyond me. Case closed, conversation over.”

How did Albert Hollister remain functional inside an academic bureaucracy? Why was he not beaten to death by his colleagues?

You got me.

I WALKED BACKup to the cabin and tried to think. J. D. Gribble’s possible status as a fugitive was an issue between Albert and Gribble. Troyce Nix’s possible beef with Gribble was Gribble and Nix’s grief and none of my own. The only relevant issue for me was Clete Purcel and the decades he had invested in being my closest friend. A deviant had attempted to burn him alive and in all probability would take another run at it, possibly with different methods but with the same depraved intentions. Gribble had told the FBI he had heard a car or truck engine in the darkness, then the sound of the vehicle’s door slamming. Alicia Rosecrans, the FBI agent, had concluded that perhaps two perpetrators were involved, the driver and the man in the mask. But the man in the mask may have opened the vehicle’s door, started the engine, then slammed the door later. Or Gribble could have simply been mixed up.

I needed to concentrate on the man in the mask. I was convinced he was the same man who had abducted and murdered the college kids on the mountainside behind the university and killed the California couple in the highway rest stop. It wasn’t a matter of forensics; it was a matter of mathematical possibility. How many men like Clete’s tormentor could be living in the same sparsely populated area?

Unfortunately, there were precedents that went against the math. The Hillside Strangler was actually not one man but a team of two cousins, both of whom seemed to have souls that were fashioned in a furnace. What is the probability that two monsters, with little in their background that would explain the depth of their cruelty to innocent and trusting young women, could come from the same family?

Years ago, in a midwestern city whose collective ethos was heavily influenced by the humanitarian culture of abolitionists and of Mennonites, I attended twelve-step meetings with some of the best people I ever knew. Most of them were teachers and clerics and blue-collar workers in the aircraft industry. They were drunks, like me, but by and large their sins were the theological equivalent of 3.2 beer. The meetings were small, the content of the discussions restrained, the mention of sexual indiscretions infrequent. Two ex-felons, recently discharged from the state pen, were required to attend the meeting by their PO. They sat quietly in the back of the room, deferential, neatly dressed, and polite. They were well liked and gradually were considered twelve-step success stories in the making. I became accustomed to seeing one of them sitting in front of me at Sunday-morning Mass, his wife and two children next to him in the pew.

Then the two of them were busted ninety miles to the north of us, in a wheat-farming town where the biggest social event of the season was the John Deere exhibition at the high school gym. The charge was homicide, but that convenient abstract term didn’t come close to what these men had done to their victims. They had lain in wait for girls leaving bars by themselves at two A.M., offering them rides, maybe a toke or two of some Acapulco gold or a steak at an all-night café. Once the two ex-felons got their hands on their victims, they raped and tortured them for hours, degrading and humiliating them and putting them through every ordeal imaginable before snuffing out their lives.

The people at the meeting I had been attending were stunned. No one could deal with it, explain it, or reconcile himself to his own naïveté. What are the odds of two men like this finding each other at a small, family-oriented twelve-step meeting in a city associated with Toto, Dorothy, and the yellow brick road? What are the odds that all of us, including me, would be taken in by them? What are the odds that one of them would sit with his family in front of me at Sunday Mass?

The answer that presents itself is not a pleasant one: There are more of them out there than we think, and they recognize one another when we do not. If you doubt this, check the statistics on the number of children who disappear each year and are never seen or heard from again.

But the attack on Clete Purcel was not random. When people kill one another, it’s always for reasons of money, sex, and power. I suspected that whoever was behind the attack on Clete was driven by all three.

I called the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to patrolwoman at the NOPD, and later had become my plainclothes partner at the Sheriff’s Department in New Iberia. She was an attractive, enigmatic woman, and I was convinced several personalities lived inside her. She was the subject of an IA investigation after she had an affair with a confidential female informant. She also had an affair with Clete Purcel. She was the only cop in the area he allowed to bust and hook him up after he had destroyed a saloon in St. Martinsville and almost killed three outlaw bikers with a pool cue.

On occasion her eyes would turn warm and linger on mine, as though one of the women who lived inside her was having thoughts about straying. But I never questioned her integrity or challenged her authority, and I always respected her courage and the grace with which she conducted her life. I also learned that anyone who mocked or treated her disrespectfully did so only once. When our former sheriff retired and Helen took his place, Helen won the hearts of the entire community, and no one publicly discussed her sexual persuasion.

I called her and asked if she could run Leslie and Ridley Wellstone for me.

“The oil and natural-gas guys?” she said.

“Right,” I replied. But I knew what was coming.

“Is there a pattern here?”

“Sorry?”

“You have trouble with rich people, Streak. Entertain the trout and let Montana take care of its own problems.”

Then I told her what had happened to Clete Purcel.

“I’ll get back to you in two hours,” she said.

Her phone calls produced a surprise.

I HAD EXPECTED HELENto find compromising material on the patriarch of the family, Oliver Wellstone, or on Leslie, the Berkeley-educated humanist who had given up on the flower children and gone to the Sudan, where his features had been melted off his face like wax on a candlestick.

But it was Ridley, the over-the-hill cowboy, the stoic, laboring painfully on his aluminum forearm crutches, whose name had figured in a double-homicide investigation many years ago. The case had almost been forgotten and written off by everyone except a Houston homicide detective who had worked on it for a decade before he was found asphyxiated in his garage, his car motor running for twenty-four hours in the middle of July. He left no suicide note and, according to his friends and colleagues, had shown no signs of depression or worry in the days leading up to his death.

But the homicide detective had left behind a case file bursting with notes and transcriptions of interviews with people who occupied every stratum of Houston society.

Thirty-one years ago, Ridley had met a salesclerk by the name of Barbara Vogel in a Galleria jewelry store. She was approaching middle age, but her suntanned skin was as smooth as tallow, her chestnut hair cut like a young girl’s, giving her an appearance that was both asexual and yet strangely erotic. But it was her brown eyes that made Ridley return to the store twice, finding excuses to talk about jewelry, finally asking her to have dinner with him at the River Oaks country club, the same club that had excluded his parents from membership years before. Barbara Vogel’s eyes were warm and guileless and seemingly intrigued by everything Ridley had to say. Her body had the firmness of an athlete’s, and she could talk about any subject and had experience far beyond that of a salesclerk. She said she had been a barrel-racing rodeo queen in Dalhart, the owner of a boutique in Fort Worth, and an insurance appraiser in Beaumont. She also knew quail hunting, the price of slaughter beef, and the depth a drill rig was expected to hit a pay sand in a certain offshore quadrant. She also hinted that she was part owner of the jewelry store.