“Oil companies don’t hire deranged people to defecate on the property of a retired English professor.”
“It’s not Wyatt Dixon’s style, either.”
“What is? Killing people?”
“I grant Wyatt’s got a bad history. But he’s not a voyeur. He can’t keep the women off him.”
“Wyatt?”
“He’s an unusual guy. When it comes to rodeoing, he’s got a lot of admirers.”
“I’m not among them.”
“I can’t blame you,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a pack and staring up the slope. “I don’t think he’s your man, but I’m going to bring him in and have a talk with him. If you see him around the property, or if he tries to contact your daughter, let me know.”
“There’s something else. Somebody cut a message in the wall of a cave up there.” I recited it and asked, “You ever see anything like that written anywhere else around here?”
“Not that I can recall. Sounds like it’s from the Bible.”
“Part of it, but it’s screwed up.”
“Meaning Dixon would be the kind of guy who’d screw up a passage from Scripture?”
“It occurred to me.”
He lit his cigarette and drew in on it and turned his face aside before he blew out the smoke. “Let me confide in you,” he said. “A young Indian girl went missing six days ago. She was drinking in a joint near the rez and never came home. Her foster grandfather is Love Younger.”
“The oilman?”
“Some just call him the tenth wealthiest man in the United States. He has a summer home here. I’m supposed to be at his house in a half hour.”
His choice of words was not good. Or maybe I misinterpreted the inference. But a county sheriff does not report to a private citizen at his home, particularly at a prearranged time.
“I’m not following you, Sheriff.”
“You’re a homicide detective, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Mr. Younger is an old man. I don’t like telling him his granddaughter had personal problems. I don’t like telling him the girl is probably dead or close to it or in a state of mind that no seventeen-year-old girl should be in. That particular bar she went to is a hangout for ex-cons, outlaw bikers, and guys who would cut you from your liver to your ligh
ts for a package of smokes. We used to call Montana ‘the last good place.’ Now it’s like everywhere else. A few years back somebody went into a beauty parlor just south of us and decapitated three women. I’ll let you know what Dixon has to say.”
He mashed out his cigarette against a tree trunk and field-stripped the paper and let the tobacco blow away in the wind.
ALAFAIR HAD GONE to town to buy several bottles of shampoo and baby oil and solvents to help Albert untangle the snarls and concrete-like accretions that had built up in the manes and tails of his horses. When she returned, I went upstairs to the back bedroom, where she wrote every day from early morning to midafternoon and sometimes for two or three hours in the evening. Her first novel had been published by a New York house and had done very well, and her second one was due to come out in the summer, and she was now working on a third. From her desk she had a grand view of the north pasture and the sloped roof of the barn that was limed with frost each morning and that steamed as the sun rose, and a grove of apple trees that had just gone into leaf and the velvety green treeless hills beyond it. She had a thermos of coffee on her desk, and she was staring out the window and holding a cup motionlessly to her mouth. I sat down on the bed and waited.
“Oh, hi, Dave,” she said. “How long have you been there?”
“I just came in. I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
“It’s all right. What did the sheriff say?”
“He doesn’t believe Dixon is a likely candidate.”
She set down her cup and looked at it. “I think a guy was following me in town.”
“Where in town?”