Swan Peak (26 page)

“That’s all of it?”

“He said, ‘No cigar, fat man.’”

“You told the deputies he blew smoke in your face?”

“From a cigarette. I could tell by the smoke. You find a butt?”

“No. Gribble said he picked it up from the ground. The guy was evidently sanitizing the crime scene before he set you on fire.”

The image her words created made Clete glance up at her face. “The FBI was still following me?”

“No, we got a call from the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office.”

“What have you found so far?”

“The tie cuffs and the tape he used on your eyes. We’ve got his gas can, too. Maybe we can trace it back to the vendor.”

“I heard machinery up the hill, steel treads and a clanking sound.”

“It’s a front-end loader with a claw bucket on it. He hot-wired it.”

“Why was he digging on the side of the hill?”

“I think he was going to cook you and put you in a grave.”

“We finished here?”

“You ought to go to the hospital.”

“I need a drink. Thanks for your time.”

“Thanks for my time? Your vehicle is evidence. It’s going to be towed into Missoula. You’re not driving anywhere.”

“Then I’ll walk.”

She looked at the flashlights and emergency flashers burning in the mist, one hip cocked, a holstered Glock on her gunbelt. Her dark hair looked clean and full of tiny lights. “Go sit in my car with Mr. Gribble. I’ll take you home in a few minutes.”

“I didn’t ask for a ride home. I told you I need a drink. How do I get that across?”

“We can stop at a store on the highway,” she said. “I’d like to tell you something on a personal level, Mr. Purcel.”

He waited for her to go on.

“You deserve better treatment than you’ve gotten. I think Sally Dee and his men died because of an engine failure. If the airplane crash wasn’t an accident, I still say good riddance,” she said. “We’re going to find the guy who did this to you. But you’re going to have to help us, and that means you need to take care of yourself.”

“The guy knows heavy equipment. He had the burial site set up. He also knows a cigarette butt is a source for DNA. I think he’s done this lots of times.”

Alicia Rosecrans made no comment. Clete looked at her left hand and the absence of a ring on it.

“I’m gay,” she said.

REVEREND SONNY CLICK
didn’t think anybody’s luck could be this bad. First those two plainclothes roaches had come to his house asking questions about a double homicide, then they’d indicated he was a molester they were going to throw into his own airplane propeller. His stomach was flip-flopping for an hour. He smoked a joint down on the river to calm his nerves and rebuild his mental fortifications, then threw his suitcase in his twin-engine and fired it up. He blew out his breath, resolving to put the two plainclothes snerds out of his mind, and eased the throttle forward, gaining speed down the pale green runway that had been mowed out of a hayfield. In seconds he would be climbing above the Clark Fork River on his way to East Oregon, where that evening he would address a rural audience that treated him like a rock star. Enough with the polyester jerk-offs and their threats.

Except his port engine began leaking oil across the wing, and the propeller locked in place and the plane spun sideways on the strip.

Now it was Monday morning, and he was still stuck in Missoula, having canceled out in East Oregon and Winnemucca, wondering if those cops would be back again, asking questions about a pair of dead kids he wished he had never seen.

An SUV came down the service road and turned onto his property, two people in it, a woman in the passenger seat and a tall man behind the steering wheel. No, “tall” wasn’t the word. “Huge” was more like it.

They parked on the edge of his lawn and got out of the vehicle, glancing at the dry grass and the dead flowers in his window boxes. The woman wore a black cowboy shirt that was unsnapped to expose her cleavage and the tattoos on the tops of her breasts. Just what he needed showing up at his house when cops were sniffing around him for a possible molestation beef. But it was not the woman who bothered the Reverend Sonny Click, it was the man. He wore a short-brim Stetson slanted on his head and mirror shades and spit-polished needle-nosed boots. His posture and the fluidity of his walk and the grin at the corner of his mouth reminded Click of John Wayne.

“My name is Troyce Nix, Reverend. Candace and me caught your revival on the res. Hope you don’t mind us dropping by,” he said. “You got you a fine place here.”

“It’s all right,” Sonny Click said, his voice hollow, the way it got when he felt the presence of danger. “Just passing by, are you?”

“Not really,” Troyce said.

Sonny waited for the tall man to explain the contradiction in what he had just said. But he didn’t. “What do you mean?” Click asked.

“Wonder if you can do us a favor.”

“I’m waiting on a mechanic. My plane engine froze up.” Click wondered why he was offering excuses to a person he didn’t know, a man who kept his eyes hidden behind mirrors. This was
his
property. Who was this guy, and who was the woman hanging her tattooed melons in his face? “So I’d better get back to my obligations.”

“The favor I need is an introduction,” Nix said. “I’m sure you don’t mind giving folks an introduction.”

Sonny Click cut his head, a gesture he had learned from watching both Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, one that indicated humility and tolerance but benevolent contention at the same time. “I’d like to help out a fellow southerner, but I’m supposed to be on a mercy mission this afternoon.”

“You’re from Ohio, Reverend. You went to Bible college in Indiana. I like your accent, though. You want to drive with us up to Swan Lake? I think you should.”

Sonny tried to hold his eyes on Nix’s face, but his mouth was becoming dry, his throat constricted. He folded his arms on his chest, clearing his throat, pretending he had an allergy, knowing that his dignity was being pulled from him like a handkerchief from his pocket.
Get the subject off me
, he thought. “This got something to do with her?” he said, nodding toward the woman with the flowery jugs.

“Miss Candace is my lady. We both want to meet Jamie Sue Wellstone. I also want to introduce Wellstone Ministries to a couple of religious foundations I’m associated with in West Texas and New Mexico.”

“Then why don’t you call them up?” Click replied.

Troyce Nix reached out and rested his big hand on the top of Sonny Click’s left shoulder. He tightened his grip, the grin never leaving the corner of his mouth. “’Cause we like having a man of the cloth along,” he said.

When Click looked at the distorted reflection in Troyce Nix’s mirrored glasses, he saw the face of a frightened little man he hardly recognized.

CANDACE SWEENEY HAD
never been inside a grand home, particularly one that looked out upon red barns with white trim and emerald-green pastures full of bison and longhorn cattle. The deep carpets and recessed floors in some of the rooms and the French doors with gold handles and the chandeliers hanging over the entrance area and in the dining room gave her a strange sense of discomfort and awkwardness, like she was someone else, not Candace Sweeney, somehow less than what she had been before she had entered the house. The feeling reminded her of a dream she used to have in adolescence. In the dream, she would see herself walking nude into a cathedral, her body lit by the sunlight that filtered through stained-glass windows, and she would be filled with shame. Now, in this grand house that cost millions to build, she unconsciously fastened the top button on her cowboy shirt, wondering why she and Troyce were there, why Troyce had turned the screws on Sonny Click to get an introduction to people who wouldn’t spit in Candace’s or Troyce’s mouth if they were dying of thirst.

The two brothers had come into the living room first, one horribly mutilated by fire, the other on aluminum braces, followed by Jamie Sue Wellstone. They sat and listened politely while Troyce talked about the religious foundations he was connected with, the number of churches the foundations subsidized in the Southwest, the number of congregants who wanted to support patriotic, family-oriented political candidates.

Why was he saying all this crap?

Sonny Click sat by the French doors on a straight-back antique chair, one that had a little velvet cushion tied on the seat, and didn’t say a word. Even weirder was the fact that the guy who had given Candace a bad time at the filling station was driving a lawn mower across the side yard, his face bruised up as if a horse had kicked it.

When Troyce finished his spiel, a Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform served mint juleps off a silver tray. The man who walked on aluminum braces — Ridley was his name — said, “So you want to put us in touch with your friends? That’s why you got Click to bring y’all out here?”

“The Reverend Click was all for it,” Troyce said.

“And you did this out of the goodness of your heart?” the man with the burned face said. His name was Leslie, and his eyes had a way of lingering on Candace that made her skin crawl.

“I’m also a longtime fan of Miss Jamie Sue,” Troyce said.

“We’re flattered, Mr. Nix, but our friend Reverend Click over there looks seasick,” Leslie said. “You didn’t upset him in some way, did you? We’d be lost without his sonorous voice floating out to the multitudes.”

Troyce was standing by the mantel, a relaxed grin on his face, inured to mockery and to amateurs who might try to take him over the hurdles. Above him was a signed painting by Andy Warhol. “I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake’s Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake’s Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything — pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic — as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though — what really got them to pissing all over themselves — was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake’s Navel wasn’t real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn’t use them kinds of terms in his sermons.”

Leslie Wellstone was wearing a red smoking jacket and slacks and Roman sandals, one leg crossed on his knee, one hand clenched on his ankle. He took a sip from his julep. The coldness of the ice and bourbon and water turned his lips a darker purple. “You seem to be a man of great social insight. But why is it I don’t believe anything you’re telling us?” he said. “Why is it I think you’re a duplicitous man, Mr. Nix?”

Troyce’s gaze drifted to Jamie Sue and remained there for a beat. “I’m a founding company officer in a corporation that builds contract prisons. Right now I’m on medical leave from my job. But that don’t mean I’m necessarily off the clock,” he said. “I think we’ve got what some call commonalities of interest.”

“I think I’ve had all of this I can stand,” Jamie Sue said. She set down her drink and walked out of the room.

La-de-da, Miss Poopah
, Candace said to herself.

Ridley Wellstone lifted himself up on his braces and looked at his brother. “You clean this up,” he said, and clanked down a hallway toward a study filled with shelves of books.

Now only Candace, Troyce, Sonny Click, and Leslie Wellstone remained in the room. “Sonny, would you wait outside?” Leslie said.

“Beg pardon?” Click said.

“Outside,” Leslie repeated. “There’s a rainbow up in the hills. See, right up there where it’s green from the rain. Why don’t you go into the yard and enjoy the view?”

“The man said he was hooked up with a lot of money down in Texas. What was I supposed to say? ‘Wipe your horse’s ass with it’?” Sonny Click said.

“You did exactly the right thing. You run along now, and don’t worry about a thing.”

Click got up from his chair, shame-faced, the top of his forehead shiny with hair oil. He opened the French doors and stepped onto the patio, trying to appear composed and natural.

Leslie Wellstone took a peppermint from a glass container on the coffee table and stuck it in his mouth. He did not offer one to Candace or Troyce. He cracked the mint on his molars. “Care to tell me the true nature of your errand?”

Troyce lifted one finger toward the French doors. “That fellow driving the mower across your lawn? It was me what busted up his face on the rim of a toilet bowl,” he said.

“My,” Leslie said.

“I done that ’cause he was disrespectful to Miss Candace. He also told me he might take me down in pieces. He don’t strike me as overly religious in nature.”

“What’s the purpose of your visit, sir?”

Troyce removed the booking-room photo of Jimmy Dale Greenwood from his shirt pocket and handed it to Leslie Wellstone. “You know this old boy?”

“Oh, yes,” Leslie said.

“He’s around here somewhere, ain’t he?”

“Possibly,” Leslie said, returning the photo to Troyce.

“Either he is or he ain’t.”

“What do you plan to do with him?” Leslie asked.

Troyce kept his eyes locked on Wellstone’s and didn’t answer.

“You’re that serious about him?” Leslie said.

“We got us a mutual interest, is the way I see it.”

“I don’t believe that’s the case at all. What do you think, Ms. Sweeney? You seem like a nice young woman. Do you understand what Mr. Nix is suggesting?”

“No,” she said.

“You don’t?” he said.

“It’s not my business.”

His eyes roved over her face, her mouth and throat, dropping briefly to her breasts. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you all. Perhaps you can come back another time. We’re having friends over for a late lunch.”

“I was looking at your painting,” she said.

“Yes?”

“It reminds me of a billboard on the highway just south of Portland. Did the guy who painted this ever do billboards?”