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“He didn’t just kill him.”
She waited for me to go on.
“You don’t want to hear the details, Molly. Whoever killed Pepper was a monster. Surrette may be one of the worst serial killers in American history. He’s cruel to the bone. I don’t want to tell you what he did to the children he murdered.”
“Don’t talk about it anymore.”
“I want to kill him.”
“You can’t carry around those kinds of thoughts. It’s like drinking poison.”
“It’s the way I feel. If he gets his hands on Alafair, she’s going to die a terrible death.”
“Stop it, Dave.”
I clenched my hands on my knees, stiffening my arms. In the distance, I could see Alafair’s Honda coming up the dirt road, driving faster than was her custom.
“Did you hear me?” Molly said.
“I’ve dealt with only one other man like Surrette. Remember Legion Guidry?”
“I remember what you said about him. When he was an overseer, he sexually abused black women in the fields.”
“What else did I say about him?”
“I disregarded that, Dave. I don’t believe we should think of our fellow human beings in those terms, no matter how bad they are.”
“I told you I thought he might be the devil. He had a smell about him like none I ever smelled on a human being.”
She got up from her chair. “I love you, but I won’t listen to this.”
I sat for what seemed a long time in the chair without moving. When Alafair turned under the arch into the driveway, I got up and walked down the steps and across the lawn to meet her. The back of my shirt was peppered with sweat in the wind, the flowers in Albert’s gardens bright with drops of water from the sprinklers. I wanted to gather Alafair in my arms and take her and Molly to a place ten thousand miles away, perhaps to an Edenic island on the Pacific Rim, like in the stories of Somerset Maugham and James Michener. But the canker in the rose is real, and Polynesian paradises long ago had been turned into cheap farms to supply the breadfruit fed to Caribbean slaves.
Alafair got out of the car and walked toward me, her fingers holding a sheet of lined yellow paper by one corner. “This was under my windshield wiper when I came out of the post office,” she said.
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I got my handkerchief from my pocket and took the paper from her and read it. The message had been hand-printed with a felt-tip pen, each of the letters like a block or a cube, as stiff and linear as a hieroglyph. I could hear the wind coursing through the maples and the ornamental crab apple. Molly had followed me down from the deck and was looking over my shoulder. “What is it?” she said.
“Read it,” I replied, holding the letter by the corners.
“I don’t need to. Just tell me what it is,” she said.
“Read it,” I repeated.
Her eyes followed one line into the next, the blood draining from around her mouth.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“To get that goddamn do-nothing sheriff on the telephone,” she said.
I wanted to laugh or at least to smile to take the tension and angst out of the moment. But humor was not an option. That’s the hold evil has upon us. There is nothing funny about the kind of evil represented by men like Asa Surrette or Legion Guidry. Charlie Manson was funny because he was so inept and cowardly, he had to use a collection of mindless vegetables to carry out his crimes. I was becoming convinced that creatures like Asa Surrette and my old antagonist Legion did not have human origins. They came from somewhere else. Where? you ask. I didn’t want to think about the possibilities.
The letter read:
Dear Alafair,
It’s so good to be in touch with you again. Sorry to hear about Ms. Horowitz’s friend the weenie-boy who smacked into the mountain. It must be terrible knowing you’re going to crash and you can’t do anything about it. Oh well, he’s a crispy critter now. Poor little fag. Boo-hoo.
