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The couple from Malibu were out the front door like a shot.
“Why do you have to act like that?” Jamie Sue said, her eyes wet.
“They probably got a kick out of it,” her husband replied, fitting his arm around her shoulders. “Harold, what do you have that’s good and cold?”
EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING, one day later, the sheriff of Missoula County, Joe Bim Higgins, called me at the cabin. The caller ID indicated he was using a cell phone. “Can you and Mr. Purcel come down to my office?”
“What’s up?” I replied without enthusiasm.
“It’s in regard to the college kids who were killed and to the little wood cross Mr. Purcel found on the ridge behind Albert’s house.”
“I don’t see how we can help you, Sheriff.”
“It also has to do with another double homicide. This one happened two nights ago at a rest stop west of town.”
“Same answer,” I said.
“I’m about seven miles from you right now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your time.”
I walked down the road to Albert’s house and knocked on the downstairs door. Clete was still in his skivvies, cooking breakfast in the small kitchen that was part of the accommodations Albert had given him. I told him about the call from Joe Bim Higgins.
“You’re pissed off at me because I found evidence at a crime scene and reported it to Higgins?” he said.
“No.”
“Then get that look off your face.”
“You go out of your way to get us into it, Clete.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you do. No matter what the situation is, you can’t wait to put our tallywhackers in the hay baler.”
His back was turned to me as he flipped a pork chop inside a skillet. I could see the color climbing up the back of his neck. But when he turned around, his face was empty, his green eyes on mine. “You want to eat?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. He sat down at the table and ate out of the skillet, pumping ketchup all over his meat and eggs. He stared at a documentary on the History Channel, then got up and shut off the TV set with the heel of his hand. “A kid got smoked on his knees up on that hill. Two of the Wellstones’ gumballs rousted me because I strayed onto a posted stream. The same two dudes came here and made threats. I found a cross at the crime scene that was probably torn from the victim’s throat. Can you explain how I caused any of those things to happen?”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“Yeah, but that’s the signal you send. Now, how about we give it a rest?”
He was right. I had wanted to believe that somehow our journey into the northern Rockies, what some people call “the last good place,” would take us back into a simpler, more innocent time. But trying to re-create the America of my youth through a geographical change was at best foolish, if not self-destructive.
“You have any coffee?” I said.
“In the pot, big mon,” Clete said.
Ten minutes later, Joe Bim Higgins’s cruiser pulled into the driveway. While hawks floated over the pasture and the sun broke across the mountain crest on fir and pine trees limned with frost, Joe Bim told us of the double homicide in a rest stop on Interstate 90.
“A trucker saw the smoke coming out of the women’s side of the building and thought somebody had set fire to a trash barrel. He said by the time he got his extinguisher out of the rig, he smelled the odor and knew what it was. He kicked open the stall door and sprayed her with the extinguisher, but she was already gone.
“We found the man out in the trees. A dead joint was lying in the grass. The entry wound was right behind the ear, muzzle burns all over the skin and the hair. From the blood pattern on the ground, the coroner thinks the vic was forced to lie on his face before he was shot.
“There was one bullet hole in the door to the stall where the female died. With luck, she got it before her killer soaked her in gasoline.”
“Who were the victims?” I asked.
