James Burke: Swan Peak

Joe Bim Higgins studied the hillside, his chest rising and falling. He folded his notebook and put it in his pocket, then buttoned the flap on the pocket. His face was fatigued, his breath sour. “You worked a lot of homicides?” he said.

“A few.”

“Thursday evening a girl by the name of Cindy Kershaw went hiking with her boyfriend up Mount Sentinel, behind the university. She ended up at the bottom of the canyon with a broken skull. We couldn’t find her boyfriend and thought maybe he was involved. Late last night a man called in a tip from a pay phone and told us where to look. He told us the kid was alive and tied to a tree, but we’d better get our asses up there soon. You ever get tips like that?”

“Yeah, from people who were jerking us around.”

“The boyfriend’s name was Seymour Bell. He was twenty years old. He wasn’t tied up. He was shot four times at close range, all in the face. According to the coroner, he was shot on the hill, not moved there from somewheres else. From the looks of his britches, he died on his knees. The shooter took his brass with him. You didn’t hear any shots?”

“No sir.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“A few months, before it got real hot.”

“Maybe this prick used a suppressor. Why you figure he’d kill the girl in one place and her boyfriend in another?”

“Was the girl raped?”

“She’d had recent intercourse. It could be called rough sex. But that doesn’t go with what people knew about either her or her boyfriend.” Then he told me what the perpetrator had done to her.

“My guess is the girl was the target. The perp separated them so he could take his time with the girl,” I said. “Maybe he locked the boy in the car trunk. Can cars get up the mountain behind the university?”

“There’s a fire road for pump trucks along the face of the mountain.”

When I didn’t reply, he looked up at the hill again. The morning was blue with shadow, the wind channeling through the wildflowers and bunch grass. Farther down the valley, wood smoke was drifting off a stone chimney that was still dusted with frost. “If I owned Albert’s place, I’d hang up my badge and mess with my horses and trout-fish in the evening,” he said. “I wouldn’t do this kind of work anymore.”

THAT AFTERNOON Ihelped Albert dig knapweed and leafy spurge out of his pasture. Knapweed is a nuisance in the American West. Leafy spurge is a plague. The root system can go twenty feet into the ground and form a network that, once established, cannot be eradicated with chemicals or even excavation by giant machines. A shopping center can be constructed on top of it, and its root system will continue to reproduce and grow laterally until its stems find sunlight. That’s not a metaphor.

Albert was sweating heavily, chopping at the ground with a mattock, his gloves streaked with the thick milky-white substance that a broken spurge stem produces. He hadn’t spoken for almost a half hour.

“Something bothering you besides noxious weeds?” I said.

“That fellow Wellstone owes me for a punctured gas tank.”

But I doubted that his mood had its origins in a minor car accident. The light had died in his eyes, and I had a feeling that Albert had gone to a private place inside himself that he shared with few people.

“Molly said you remembered hearing this guy’s name.”

“When I was eighteen, I was in a parish can on the Texas-Louisiana line. The electric chair traveled from parish to parish in those days. I was there when it was brought in on a flatbed truck, the generators all tarped down so people wouldn’t see their tax dollars at work. They electrocuted this poor devil thirty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. The next morning I got in the face of a hack who had been a gunbull at Angola.”

I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t speak.

“He cuffed and leg-chained me and frog-walked me down to an isolation cell. It was almost fifty years before I told anybody what he did to me. I saw him in a feed store in Beaumont once, when I was about twenty-one. He was a foreman on a cattle ranch. He had no idea who I was, the man who was to give me bad dreams for a half-century. He asked me why I was staring at him. When I didn’t answer, he told me it was rude to stare at people and I had better stop.

“I was buying a weed sickle. It had an edge on it that could shave hair off your arm. I wouldn’t let go of his eyes. He laughed because he couldn’t stop what was happening. He said, ‘Boy, whatever it is you’re thinking, you’d best take it somewheres else.’

“I stepped close to him and touched his hip with the point of the sickle. I said, ‘I was thinking about killing you. If I see you again, I expect I’ll do it.’”

I looked at the side of Albert’s face. It reminded me of a dead fire after all the heat has gone out of the ash and stone. “You ever see him again?” I asked.

“At the Wellstone ranch outside Beaumont, when I went there looking for work. They were oil-and-natural-gas people and ranched on the side. They were also mixed up with tent-religion groups that were just starting to expand into television.”

“I’d let Wellstone and the past go,” I said.

“I did, a long time ago. But Wellstone gashed a hole in my fuel tank. I called his house about it last night. A woman hung up on me. I think it was the gold-haired one who was sitting in the back of his limo.”

Albert arched his back, squinting slightly. He stared up at the hill behind his house. “Did you know Chief Joseph and the whole Nez Perce tribe came right down that draw? They were trying to outrun the U.S. Army. They got slaughtered down on the Big Hole – women and children and the old people, too. The soldiers mutilated the dead and later robbed the graves.”

“Yeah?” I said, not making the connection.

“This place looks peaceful. But it’s not. The degenerate who murdered that college boy up there is the canker in the rose. It doesn’t matter where you go. The same fellow is always there. Just like that jailhouse I was in when I was eighteen.”

THAT AFTERNOON CLETEcame down to our cabin and asked me to take a walk with him.

“Where we going?”

He lifted his eyes up to the hill behind Albert’s house.

“What for?” I asked.

“The sheriff, what’s-his-name, Higgins, thinks it’s just coincidence that kid was killed behind Albert’s place.”

“You don’t?”

“Higgins says Albert called the Shrubster a draft-dodging fraternity pissant in the local newspaper. The paper actually ran the letter. He helped run a PCB incinerator out of town. He got into it with some outlaw bikers over a barmaid. He has a general reputation for causing trouble wherever he goes.”

“Why would somebody execute a kid on his knees because he’s got it in for Albert?”

“Somebody called in a 911 on the location. The caller also said the kid was alive. He wanted as many people as possible to suffer as much as possible. I don’t think Higgins knows what he’s dealing with. I don’t believe Albert does, either.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“To use your own words, why do the shitbags do anything? Because they enjoy it, that’s why. Trust me, Streak, the guy who did this has got a beef with Albert.”

I followed him up a switchback trail to the top of the ridge, Clete wheezing and sweating all the way. Then we walked up a gradual slope through pine and fir trees to a level place where yellow crime-scene tape had been strung through the tree trunks. The tape had been broken in several places, probably by deer or elk, and the dirt road that led off the hillside was rutted by tire tracks. At the higher altitude, the air had become cold, flecked with rain, filled with the sound of wind sweeping across the enormous breadth of landscape below us.