James Burke - Swan Peak

They got married after making a spontaneous champagne-soaked flight on his private jet into Juárez. Barbara Vogel didn’t bother to tell Ridley that she had been married twice already and her first husband had gone to prison for embezzlement. She also didn’t bother to tell him about her outstanding debts, her love of charge accounts, and her friendship with a collection of white trash who hung at a notorious bar in North Houston once known as the Bloody Bucket. Ridley got to meet a few of the latter when she bought a motor home the size of the Taj Mahal, loaded her friends into it, and drove to a Waylon and Willie concert in Austin. When she and her friends returned to the Wellstones’ sprawling estate, they were wiped out on reds and weed and purple acid and could hardly stand up in the yard. Most of them went to sleep on the lawn furniture and didn’t wake up until Ridley turned on the sprinkler system.

Ridley also discovered his wife’s affection for unusual fashion. She favored skintight riding pants, push-up bras, and western shirts unsnapped at the top that exposed both her cleavage and a diamond cluster that spelled out RICH BITCH.

Two years into the marriage, Barbara’s teenage daughter showed up, fresh out of rehab, her hormones blinking in red neon. She hung paper all over town and threw a roach in a horse stall, setting the barn on fire. She also got caught screwing her former high school drama teacher on his desk. The kicker for Ridley was the night both Barbara and her daughter piled his collector’s Rolls into a live-oak tree by Rice University. They not only left the scene, they told the cops later that they had not been driving the car, implying that Ridley was the man the cops needed to question.

The divorce should have gone smoothly. Ridley’s attorneys offered Barbara a three-million-dollar settlement. Barbara’s attorneys sued for seventy million and the house. They also indicated their hired psychiatric consultant had noted definite signs of sexual abuse in Barbara’s daughter and that nobody was ruling out criminal charges being filed against Ridley, with as much attendant publicity as Barbara’s attorneys could generate.

The double homicide took place on a humid September night in a quasi-rural area dotted with oak trees and split-level ranch houses. The spacious grounds surrounding Barbara’s house were bordered by a piked iron fence, the gates electronically locked, the hedges and gazebo and gravel walkways monitored by security cameras. The underwater lamps in the swimming pool automatically clicked on at sunset, creating a brilliant patch of blue light in the backyard, turning the flowers and umbrella and banana trees into a Gauguin painting. Fall was at hand, and the languid air was tinged with the odor of chrysanthemums and charcoal starter flaring on a grill. No one in the neighborhood paid particular attention to the visitor who arrived at Barbara’s house in a yellow cab.

He was tall and wore gloves, a raincoat, and a slouch hat, although the thunder in the clouds was dry and the local meteorologist had said there was little chance of rain that evening. The visitor punched in the security numbers on the gate and entered the grounds as the cab turned around in the lane, then parked under a tree.

The visitor’s weapon of choice was a cut-down pump twelve-gauge, loaded with double-aught bucks, hanging from his shoulder on a looped cord under his coat. While a neighbor broiling steaks stared aghast, the visitor walked poolside and paused in front of the recliner where Barbara’s daughter lay in a bikini, a movie magazine on her lap, her face lifted in either disdain or annoyance. The visitor raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger six inches from her forehead. Behind him, the visitor heard Barbara drop a tray with two cream-cheese sandwiches on it and try to run for the patio door. He pumped the spent shell casing onto the tile and caught her with a wide pattern across the back of her blouse. He crossed the St. Augustine grass, ejecting the casing, and looked down at his handiwork. He touched her once with the tip of his shoe, then buttoned his coat over his shotgun and got into the back of the waiting cab.

The two homicides had all the signs of the classical hit. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump and the dispassionate execution of the victims were marks of a professional killer. The gloves and raincoat ensured that no fingerprints would be left at the crime scene and the killer would not have blood splatter on his clothes. The stolen cab was a perfect getaway vehicle – commonplace and innocuous and easily dumped in a restaurant parking lot five minutes from the crime scene.

But how did the killer acquire Barbara’s security code? The electronic gate had been installed only six days before the night of the homicides. She would have had no motivation to give the code to her estranged husband. The cops pulled in an ex-convict whose wife ran a bar on Jensen Drive. His words were “A rich guy put out an open whack for fifteen grand on the Wellstone bitch and her daughter. I wouldn’t touch it with a pole, man.”

“Why is that?” a cop asked.

“Those oil-and-gas fuckers don’t pay their bills,” the ex-convict replied.

But the ex-convict was also known as a pathological liar, and he later tried to sell his story to a detective magazine.

Houston PD and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office questioned two men Barbara Wellstone had carried on affairs with. They also questioned an Australian porn actor the daughter had informed on after she had been pinched with a brick of his marijuana. That the shooter had sought her out first may have indicated she was the target rather than the mother.

But nobody was sure. Neither Barbara Wellstone nor her daughter was a sympathetic victim, and many people had motive to murder either or both of them. After a couple of years, media interest waned, the homicide detectives assigned to the investigation gradually moved on, and Barbara and her daughter became interesting mounds in a treeless cemetery outside Dalhart, Texas.

The only remaining problem for the killers was the homicide detective who had continued to work on the case long after everyone else had given up. Was his death a suicide? Or was he getting too close to the wrong people?

I knew those questions would probably never be answered. Not unless someone got the Wellstones into the iron cage where I thought they belonged.

THAT AFTERNOON Idrove into the Swan Valley. The day had warmed precipitously, and in the distance I could see a single column of smoke rising from a dark green stand of timber on a mountain slope. June is the wet month in Montana, but this year the rains in the lowlands and the snows in the high country had been less than they should have been. I hoped wildfires would not have their way, as they had in the years 2000 and 2003. I hoped that Montana would remain the fine place that it was, a window into America’s pristine magnificence. But as I looked through the windshield of my truck, the signs of change were everywhere. Maybe that’s just in the nature of things, but who says you have to like it?

Better yet, who says you have to accept the presence of those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit? The minions of the Wellstones were hired cretins, men like Lyle Hobbs and Quince Whitley. Their kind attach themselves to an authority figure, one who pays them not to think, and then they go about hurting other people with the idle detachment of someone clipping his nails. Putting them in penitentiaries provides jobs for correctional officers and makes everyone feel better about our justice system, but in reality, it does little to change the way things work. The enlisted people who were punished for crimes inside the Abu Ghraib prison wouldn’t drop their pants in a latrine without permission. If Hobbs and Whitley were involved in the attack on Clete, they had not acted on their own. But the problem lay in the very fact that they were windups – lacking credibility, fearful of retaliation, ultimately dispensable.