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“How do you read all that back there?” Clete asked.
“I don’t. I’ve never understood the rich.”
“What’s to understand? They get a more expensive plot in the boneyard than the rest of us.”
“Pepper is bad news. He’s using the investigation for his own purposes,” I said.
“So we’ll have a talk with him. Did you catch the broad’s accent?”
“No,” I lied.
“She’s from New Orleans or somewhere nearby.” Clete looked sideways at me.
“Good. Now watch the road.”
“I was just saying.”
“I know what you were saying. You also mentioned she wasn’t wearing any undergarments.”
“I’m not supposed to notice something like that?”
“We’re not getting personally involved with these people. You got it?”
“You know what the essential difference is between the two of us, noble mon?”
“One of us falls in love with every injured woman he sees. Then he finds out he’s in the sack with the Antichrist. Sound like anyone you know?”
“No, I recognize the presence of my flopper in my life. It has X-ray vision and goes on autopilot whenever it wants. Sometimes it does the thinking for both of us. I’ve accepted that. I think that’s a big breakthrough. You might try a little humility sometime, Streak.”
“I’m not going to listen to this. I know what’s coming. You can’t wait to get in trouble again. I’ve never seen anything like it. Why don’t you grow up?”
“You grow up, you grow old. Who wants to do that? Relax. Think cool thoughts and don’t eat fried foods. You know who said that? Satchel Paige. Everything is very copacetic. You got my word on that.”
AFTER HER LAST interview with Asa Surrette, Alafair published three articles about his crimes, their heinous nature, and the compulsive p
attern that characterized his behavior from childhood until the day he was arrested. The thesis in each article was clinical in nature and ultimately not up for argument: A serial killer does not turn his compulsions on and off, as you do a noisy faucet. Surrette and his attorney maintained he had committed no crimes after the reinstatement of capital punishment in Kansas in 1994. Alafair believed otherwise.
The articles used direct quotations from the interview, and their arrangement created a damning portrayal of a man to whom cruelty, sexual conquest, bloodlust, and a pathological lack of remorse were a way of life.
At the time I asked if she had not become too emotionally involved in the subject.
“I have the quotes on tape. I didn’t make them up. He’s evil. The real question is, how could a man like this kill people in the same city for twenty years?” she said.
That was my kid.
When I returned from Love Younger’s home, Alafair asked me to come upstairs. An envelope and a piece of typewriter paper with a letter written on it in blue ink rested on her desk, next to her computer. “I never showed you this, Dave. Surrette wrote it to me after the articles were published,” she said.
“Why didn’t you want me to see it?”
“Because I thought it would make you mad. Read it.”
A strange thing happened. I didn’t want to touch a sheet of paper that Surrette had handled. I’ve known every kind of man in the world, and even held the hand of a man on the way to his electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. But I did not want to place my fingers on the paper that Asa Surrette had touched. I walked to her desk and looked down at his writing. His penmanship, if it could be called that, was bizarre. The paper was unlined, but every sentence, every word, every letter, was as uniform and neat and straight as the print created by a Linotype machine. Round letters were flattened and reduced to geometric slash marks, as though the penman believed forming a circle violated a principle. The greater oddity was the absence of punctuation. Surrette’s sentences and phrases were set apart by dashes rather than by periods and commas, as though he could not disconnect from his own stream of consciousness, or perhaps because he believed his own thought processes had neither a beginning nor an end. This is what he wrote in his prison cell and mailed through the censor to my daughter:
Dear Alafair—
I have read your articles and wanted to tell you how well written I think they are—I do not fault you for the way you have characterized me—I probably did not put my best foot forward during our talks—Nonetheless I believe there was a certain spark between us—One thing you did not understand about me was my origins—Some people were born before the primal dust of the world was created and have waited eons for their time to come round—Maybe you were also there before the hills and the mountains were settled—Perhaps we have much to share with each other—
Someplace down the road I know I will see you again—Until then I will always think of you in a fond way—
