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Just after Alafair had given up and decided to return home the next morning, she got a call from Surrette’s attorney, the same one who’d negotiated Surrette’s allocution and sentence, trying to ensure that his client not be exposed to the death penalty reinstated in 1994. “Asa would like to see you again,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
There was a beat. “Why? To help with your project. To give his side of things.”
“Your client is a narcissist. He’s had no interest in helping anybody with anything. If he wants the interviews to go forward, the questions will be on my terms. He’ll make an honest attempt to answer them or we’re done.”
“You’ll have to work that out with him.”
“I’ll work it out with you. There will be no proscriptive areas of inquiry.”
“I think you’ll find Asa pretty forthcoming. He likes you.”
“Are you serious?”
“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t ask you back. What did you say to him, anyway?”
“He has one reason for wanting to see me again. I bother him. I told him why he took the body of one of his victims to his church and photographed it.”
There was another beat. “Ms. Robicheaux, there is one area that should not be explored in your interview. You know what it is, too.”
“No, I don’t,” she lied.
“Asa has admitted to eight homicides committed during the 1970s and ’80s. Those are the only crimes he will be discussing, because those are the only crimes he committed.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure of what he told me. I’m sure the authorities, including the FBI, have never found evidence of any kind that Asa was less than truthful about any of these matters.”
“The same guys who couldn’t catch him for thirty years? The same people who caught him only after he contacted them and then sent them a floppy disk traceable to a computer in his workplace?”
“It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” the attorney said.
It was snowing the next morning, in clumps that floated softly down and broke apart and melted on the highway and were blown into a muddy spray by the trucks leaving an oil refinery whose smokestacks were red at night and streaming in the morning with gray curds of smoke that smelled like leakage from a sewage line. Asa Surrette was locked in a waist chain,
waiting, when Alafair entered the interview room. Through the slitted window, she could see the snow blowing like feathers on a series of small hills that seemed to blur in the distance and then dissolve into nothingness.
“You keep looking at the hills,” he said.
“The winter here is strange. It contains no light.”
“I never thought of it in those terms.”
“Is it true there used to be eighteen Titan missile silos ringed around the outskirts of Wichita?”
“That’s right. They were all taken out.”
“Nonetheless, people here lived for decades with mechanized death buried under the wheat?”
“So what?”
“Had war started with the Soviet Union, this place would have become a radioactive Grand Canyon.”
“Yeah, that kind of sums it up.”
“Did that enter your thinking when you committed your murders?”
He looked at her with a gleam in his eye that was between caution and hostility. “No. Why should it?”
