Authors: Peter Bowen
Du Pré took another chair and he rolled a smoke.
“Thanks,” said Pidgeon.
“Yah,” said Du Pré.
“I haven’t lost it like that for a while. Not supposed to let this stuff get to you. It gets to you. Those poor women. They come to me in my dreams. I was raised by kind and loving parents. Ozzie ‘n’ Harriet kinda family, you know. I think of those poor runaway girls screaming while this bastard rapes and tortures and kills them. I hate him. I am not supposed to. Not professional.”
“It don’t seem very professional not give a shit,” said Du Pré.
“Harvey really likes you,” said Pidgeon. “Said you’re one of them Montana cowboys that’s more’n half-Indian. Crazy fuckers, what Harvey says, but you can trust them. He told me about … the Martins, and that guy Lucky … and how you and Bart came to be such good friends.”
Du Pré shrugged.
“Tell me about Benetsee,” she said.
“Him,” said Du Pré, “he is an old man, been around here long as anybody. Good friend to my grandfather, my father, me. Old drunk, he is, sometimes. Dreamer. Medicine Person, holy person. Funny man, though some time he make jokes on me I want to kill him.”
“He’s Métis?”
“Dunno,” said Du Pré. “We are all over, you know, some of us act real white, live whiteside. Some of us been doing that generations, don’t even know we are Métis anymore. Some of us live on the reservations, are more Indian. Lots of us around. Whites call us Indian. Indians call us white. Catch shit, everywhere. Been like that for three hundred years. More. Some say we were here before Columbus.”
“How?” said Pidgeon.
“Seapeoples,” said Du Pré. “Celts, you know, Breton French, Irish, Scots, maybe sail here, their little fishing smacks, long time. Catch the cod, dry it, take it to Portugal, sell it for bacãlao. We are the voyageurs, most of the Mountain Men, they were Métis. Got French names, Scottish names, look Indian.”
“What’s the name of the guy with the ice water, in there?” said Agent Pidgeon.
“He don’t got one,” said Du Pré. “I guess he had one but Benetsee say it is the wrong one. So he is. waiting for a name.”
“I see,” said Pidgeon. “Is he an apprentice?”
“Dunno,” said Du Pré. “That Benetsee, when I say he joke, it is true. Be like that Benetsee, hide in the bushes, watch us listen to some guy don’t know shit.”
Pidgeon looked at him startled.
“I am being pissy,” said Du Pré. “Benetsee not do that, this guy is maybe some relation of his, wants to learn from Benetsee. You can’t decide to be a Medicine Person. It just happens. Happen to anybody. Happens to whites, once in a while. They see things maybe.”
“Anything that will help,” said Pidgeon, “will help.”
Madelaine came out, carrying a little tray with three cups of coffee on it. She set it on a low-cut cottonwood stump and she took a chair that Du Pré pulled up for her.
“Him something,” said Madelaine. “I don’t know what he is seeing, but he is seeing something.”
“He was telling me about Benetsee,” said Pidgeon. “I wish that I could meet him.”
“Oh.” Madelaine laughed. “He will be here sometime.”
Du Pré pulled out the map of the West with all the marks on it where the bodies had been found, dozens and dozens.
He unfolded it. The paper was getting beaten and soft. He carried it in his hip pocket, always. There were two more like it at Bart’s.
Madelaine looked once at it and she looked away. Her lips moved a little. Hail Mary.
“First off,” said Pidgeon, “this guy may have been doing this for as long as twenty years.”
She was pointing to the crop of x’s stippled up the Front Range of the Rockies. The old Great North Trail.
“And this one,” she said, pointing to the trail that began near Puget Sound, “may have been doing this for fifteen. Ten, more likely. Hard crimes to solve. That bastard Bundy may have killed ninety women. We’ll never know.”
Green River Killer. Ted Bundy. Hi-Line Killer. What they call this asshole come out from Seattle?
Bastards. They die some, soon.
Du Pré was getting angry looking at it.
“They are not all him,” said Du Pré. “Not all them two.”
“No,” said Pidgeon. “Of course not. But enough of them are. The Bureau has been on this for three years. Before that, we weren’t welcome. The killer spread the damage across so many jurisdictions and we can’t in law come in on this sort of thing till we’re asked. Nobody asked. When they did ask—Sheriff down in southern Colorado, in fact—the crimes led both directions. Christ, what a mess. This guy knew what he was doing. He’d drop bodies in places where jurisdictions overlapped. Then nobody wanted the cases.”
Madelaine got up and she took the coffee cups and she went into the house with the tray.
“I’m going to Sheridan,” said Pidgeon, “soon’s we wangle a request from the cops there. Could you come?”
“What I do there?” said Du Pré.
“Think,” said Pidgeon.
“Take the guy in there,” said Du Pré.
“Hmm,” said Pidgeon. “I’ll think about that.”
“Me,” said Du Pré, “I live here, I know here, what I can maybe do I do here. Don’t want to go, you know.”
Pidgeon nodded.
“What else can you tell me, maybe, about this guy,” said Du Pré.
“Oh,” said Pidgeon. “I don’t favor getting too cute and specific. Trouble with that is that then that’s what you are looking for. Profiles are pretty good up to a point. After that, they can blind you.”
Pidgeon got up and went into the house.
Du Pré smoked.
The sun was warm. He looked up for the eagle but he couldn’t see it, he scanned the sky for a black speck.
Nothing.
Pidgeon came back out.
“He left,” said Pidgeon.
“Huh?” said Du Pré.
“Yup,” said Pidgeon. “Told Madelaine that the little girl was the work of one man and that the other three were the work of another.”
Du Pré nodded.
“That there is witchcraft around the killer of the little girl.”
Witchcraft? What the fuck he mean by that? Du Pré thought, we got green-skinned hags boiling up lizards here? Witchcraft.
“You’re going to Sheridan,” said Pidgeon.
OK, thought Du Pré, my Madelaine is in this.
“Day after tomorrow, I guess.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Bart’s flying us down and back,” said Pidgeon.
My Madelaine she has been on the telephone. World is cranking around all right, she has seen to it.
“That OK,” said Pidgeon, “with you?”
Du Pré nodded.
“Good,” said Pidgeon. “I guess I’ll be staying here.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Du Pré!” Madelaine yelled through the kitchen window. “You got a phone call here!”
Du Pré got up and he went to the steps and he tripped and fell going up, catching himself on the jamb.
Madelaine was looking sad.
She handed him the phone.
“Du Pré?” said Benny Klein.
“Yah,” said Du Pré.
“Another.”
“Shit. Where are you.”
“Blaine’s Cut.”
Years ago some crazy old man had cut a road through rock.
Charged a quarter to use it. The only way to get up to the top of a dry riverbed, left over from when the glaciers melted.
And men up into the Wolf Mountains, so the miners paid.
It was maybe fifteen miles away.
Right next to Bart’s land.
“I be there,” said Du Pré.
Pidgeon was sitting in his cruiser when he got there.
N
OW
I
SPEND THE
rest of my life looking at crosses in the earth and remembering, Du Pré thought. I ever find this guy I kill him what he has done to what I see every day.
Du Pré was about six feet up the left wall of Blaine’s Cut, looking at what at first glance seemed to be a tree root sticking out of a wide cleft in the fragile rock. It was a human foot, with dark brown skin, dried and mummified. The toenails were dark yellow-brown.
There was a vertical cut in the rock about ten feet to Du Pré’s right.
Left arm of the cross, right hand of Christ.
Du Pré looked in the cleft. He squinted. The body had been in a duffel bag. The canvas had rotted and the edges of the tears were white. Insects crawled over the dried corpse. It didn’t look like anything human.
Du Pré dropped back down to the ground.
“No telling how long that’s been there,” said Benny.
“Years,” said Pidgeon. “Who found it?”
“Kid out shooting his .22,” said Benny. “Shot at the foot. Toenail fell off. Smart kid. He took one look at the toenail and he ran like hell. Got his dad and the old man come and crawled up there and then he called me. No telling how many people just walked right by this, you know.”
“I dunno how I’ll get the body out of there,” said Benny.
“You’ll have to hook it out,” said Pidgeon, “and it’ll probably break up. Pretty dry and brittle. Where’s the toenail?”
Benny handed her a glassine envelope. Pidgeon looked at it for a long time.
“Got a little red polish on it,” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded.
Pidgeon was looking up at the top of the cut. The sagebrush hung over the sheer edge a little. She made a clicking sound with her tongue.
“What’s up there?” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded and he started up the cut so he could get up top and look. Pidgeon was wearing lady penny loafers with little gold chains over the arch of the foot.
Du Pré found a steep path that cut back and forth twice in rising ten feet to the top of the limestone shelf. He went up it. He had to grab a sagebrush at the top and hoist himself over the crumbling lip of yellow-gray rock and earth.
Du Pré looked off to the west. A rutted track looped and meandered back and forth through the dry tough benchland, one that avoided the rocks that stuck up high enough to grab a transmission. Grass grew in the ruts. Sparse yellow blades. They had been flattened. Someone had driven up here recently. He walked back along the lip toward the vertical cleft that split the formation.
Water. Du Pré rolled a smoke. Water and mountains fight, water it always win. Takes a long time, though. People, we don’t got that much time. Old stories.
Du Pré stood and thought of dead women lying alone in the dirt, eyes pecked out by birds, skunks chewing their faces.
He went to the cleft and he looked down. Pidgeon and Benny were looking up at him.
Du Pré glanced around.
“No more bodies up here,” he said, spreading his hands, palms up.
Benny called him a son of a bitch.
This is not funny, Benny, thought Du Pré. No, it is not funny.
One spur of the rutted track came to within fifty feet of Du Pré. He walked over to it, a circle wide enough for a pickup truck to turn around in. He walked around it slowly. Couple old beer cans. Deer hunters, antelope hunters. Du Pré glanced up. A half dozen antelope were running up the long slope of the next short hill.
Them prairie scooters. Move some. Good meat.
Du Pré stopped and he breathed deeply and he set his mind to lock out sounds and the wind and all that was not in his first sight. To bring the ground up to his eyes, see what was on it that shouldn’t be there.
At the place he had begun, when he returned to it after a time spent walking slowly, he glanced toward the center of the loop and he saw something circular.
No circles out here but eyes.
Du Pré walked over to the small circle in the yellow earth. He bent down and he looked a long time.
Socket. From a socket wrench set. Expensive kind, that black metal. Little yellow mud on the top, hard to see.
Du Pré rubbed the dirt from the outside of the socket.
9/16.
Made in America.
Snap-On Tool Corporation.
Du Pré had seen their trucks. They went around to where mechanics worked and they had a huge assortment of tools. Gave credit till payday.
9/16.
Du Pré put the socket in his pocket and he went back to the lip of the cut and he looked down at Pidgeon and Benny.
“Nothing here much,” said Du Pré.
Socket probably rolled out of somebody’s pickup they open the door. That is how I lose mine. When I figure out how I lose my sunglasses, I will be better, you bet.
Du Pré walked back down to the narrow steep path and he dropped off the edge and he landed and flexed his knees to absorb the shock and he took tiny steps quickly till he was at the bottom and could lengthen his stride.
“Had some maybe antelope hunters, deer hunters up there,” he said, “Beer cans. Found this, it maybe roll out of somebody’s truck.”
Du Pré handed the socket to Pidgeon.
She looked at it and nodded.
“Shit,” said Benny. “I have lost more a them damn things, you know, the box bounces open and they fly out and roll out the door when you open it. And there goes another three, four bucks. For the good ones, anyway.”
“This is a professional’s tool?” said Pidgeon.
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “But you got, remember, all the ranchers here have to be pret’ good mechanics, pret’ good welders, pret’ good carpenters, all them things …”
“Pretty good psychics, too,” said Benny, “and gamblers. Cattle business is like a damn séance. Always has been, I guess, when you deal in live things you never know what’s going to happen.”
“OK,” said Pidgeon. “Now, you gonna drag the bones out of me rocks, there?”
Benny nodded miserably.
“I do it,” said Du Pré. “You got a something I can use?”
Benny went to his truck and he got a boathook out and a black body bag. He brought them back.
“I got a ladder, too,” he said.
He fetched it.
Du Pré put the ladder up against the rock, to the left of the dried corpse jammed in the horizontal cleft. He went up the ladder and he picked up the boathook and he reached in and jiggled the hook for a purchase and he pulled.
The whole bundle moved, and very easily.
Du Pré inched it toward him.
Smell of stale old corruption. Some startled mice scurried off from their nests under the rotted canvas bag.
Du Pré got the bundle out to the edge of the rock face. He dropped the boathook and he grasped the bundle and he slid it forward and let it fall.
He squinted and looked in.