Then something snapped inside his head, like a wound-up rubber band breaking behind his eyes. His breath exploded from his chest. He jerked his hand free of the trigger guard and jacked open the chamber, ejecting the unfired round on the car seat. Outside the car, the mowing machine scotched the top of a tree root into pulp.

Once again, Jimmy Dale had failed. But this time he didn’t care. He wasn’t a killer, no matter what Troyce Nix or the world or the prison system had done to him. Then he realized all the sound had gone out of his ears. The entire park seemed empty of voices or birdsong or the rattle of a kite in the wind or the roar of a grass-cutting machine. He opened and closed his mouth as though he were inside the cabin of a plane losing pressure at high altitude.

The problem was not with his hearing. The groundskeeper had hit the kill button on his machine and was staring through the back window of Jimmy Dale’s vehicle. “That man’s got a gun!” he shouted, his finger pointing frantically.

Jimmy Dale piled into the front seat, fired up his stolen gas-guzzler, and left a cloud of blue smoke behind him.

When Candace Sweeney got to Troyce Nix’s side, he was staring at the now empty street and the elevated interstate the street fed into.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” she said.

“That boy just don’t learn. He’s a real hardhead is what he is.”

She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “We’re leaving tonight, though?” she said. “Right, Troyce? Nothing has changed.”

“I think we might have to put things on hold a little bit,” he replied. He removed his shades and pinched his eyes, as he always did when he did not want her to see the thoughts he was thinking.

CHAPTER 22

THURSDAY MORNING I made an appointment to meet with Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans in the federal building on Broadway in Missoula. I had many things to say to her, or to ask her, some of it about Clete, some of it not. Unfortunately, because of my desire to protect Clete, my relationship with her had become adversarial when it should not have been. Regardless, I needed her help, and as a visitor to Montana with no legal authority in the state, I was taking on the role of a beggar inside the legal system. If she wanted to rub my face in it, now was her opportunity.

When I entered her office, her hands were folded primly on her desk blotter, her lean face turned upward like a blade. The last time I had seen her, she had told me she would not forget that I had deceived her regarding my suspicions about J. D. Gribble’s identity and the fact that he was an interstate fugitive. The truth was, I could not forget her accusing me of duplicity.

“Before you say anything, Mr. Robicheaux, please be aware that I’m speaking to you only because you’re an officer of the law in the state of Louisiana,” she said. “I’ve spoken to your sheriff, and she tells me you’re an honest man. But so far that hasn’t been my impression of either you or Clete Purcel. I don’t like being lied to.”

I felt a wave of heat bloom in my chest. I started to speak, but she raised one finger. “No, it’s time for you to listen,” she said. “You and Clete Purcel seem to think you can decide what other people need to know or don’t need to know. Does that strike you as a bit arrogant?”

“If you put it that way, I guess it does.”

“If I put it that way?”

“No, as you say, it’s arrogant,” I replied.

“Why are you here?”

“May I sit down?”

Her face was tight and white around the mouth. I could see her nostrils dilating when she breathed. I sat down without waiting for her to give me permission. “What did you guys find out about the mask in Quince Whitley’s truck?”

I could see the pause in her eyes, as if she was deciding whether or not she should continue our meeting. “It probably came from a store in Denver or Seattle or Salt Lake,” she said. “Actually, it could have come from anywhere. It’s no help. There were no prints on it at all, not even Whitley’s.”

“But y’all are still looking at him for the attack on Clete?”

“We know Whitley filled a two-gallon gas container at a convenience store near Swan Lake on the day of the attack. Whitley worked as a truck driver over the years. We can put him in the general area where a number of homicides remain unsolved, all of them similar in some way to the homicides we’re dealing with here. I think I’ve probably told you enough.”

But I could tell she had not told me enough and that she was bothered in the same way I was about elements in the case that were not getting looked at squarely, for whatever reasons. “We’re talking about a lot more here than just the death of a possible serial killer, aren’t we?” I said.

“I looked at the bodies of those two college kids in the morgue,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting I have nightmares about them. I think the day you can say you sleep well in this job is the day you should leave it. I think those kids had information or evidence of some kind that someone wanted from them. I don’t think the primary motivation for their deaths was simply sadistic, although that was clearly part of it.”

I thought back upon the burglary of Seymour Bell’s house. “After Bell was killed, an intruder took a throwaway camera from his room. The camera was in full view. But the intruder tore up the whole house. So he was after something else as well,” I said.

“Go on,” she said.

“I think the Wellstones are big players in this. But I don’t know what a kid could have in his possession that could endanger people as powerful as they are.”

Her eyes were glued on mine, fraught with both meaning and conflict. She had just lectured me on the arrogance of an individual deciding what others should or should not know. I believed she was caught inside her own admonition. Her stare broke, then she knitted her fingers and swallowed and looked at a place just to the right of my face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“When Sally Dio’s plane crashed into a mountainside, it exploded in a ball of flame. Everybody inside was badly burned. Some of the identification was speculative in nature. But maybe one man survived. The Indians found him and took him to a hospital in Kalispell. Then he disappeared.”

“Who was he?”

“We don’t know. But the Wellstones had ties with casino and hotel interests in Vegas and Reno. They’ve also been tied up with casinos on Indian reservations, particularly in your home state. Are you following my drift here, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“Maybe.”

“The Bureau has hit a giant dead end on this case. It’s not because we’re inept or corrupt or arrogant or any of the things our critics like to say about us. It’s because we spend most of our time following around foreign students who are thinking about math tests and getting laid and not hijacking airplanes so they can fly them into the administration building.”

“You’re saying maybe Sally Dio survived the crash?”

“No, I’m saying don’t ever lie to a federal agent again. Anything else on your mind?”

“Yeah, Clete Purcel is outside in my truck. He’s the best cop I’ve ever known. He’s a recipient of two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Navy Cross. He also happens to have enormous affection and respect for you. Why don’t you give him a break?”

AT A CERTAIN time in your life, you think about death in a serious way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy receptacle for water leaking through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky, a plain of brown grass with tumbleweed bouncing across it. Inside the mound, if your ears could hear, they would tell you the shovel that raises you into light again will do so only for reasons of scientific curiosity.