"It's good to have you here, bud," I said.

"How could anybody figure Doc for a murderer? What kind of law they got up here, anyway?"

"Doc's a complicated man."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He killed a lot of people in the war, Lucas."

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

"You saying maybe he done it?" he asked.

"I try not to study on it. The way I figure it, the guy who died had it coming."

I heard him clear his throat, as though a moth had flown into it. He lifted the bacon in his skillet with a fork and turned it over in the grease, his eyes watering in the smoke.

"Sometimes things come out of you that scare me, Billy Bob," he said.

I PICKED UP Temple at her motel in Missoula and we drove to the courthouse and walked down the corridor to the sheriff's office.

"Let me talk to him alone," she said.

"Why?"

"Woman's touch, that sort of thing."

"You think I already tracked pig flop on the rug?"

"You? Not a chance."

She left his door partly open, and I could see inside and hear them talking. I soon had the feeling the sheriff wished he had gone to lunch early.

"How does anybody lose a bag full of bloody and semen-stained sheets and clothing? You drop it off at the Goodwill by mistake?" she said.

"We think the night janitor picked up the bag and threw it in the incinerator," the sheriff said.

"So then you conclude there's no physical evidence to prove Ellison stole Doc's knife. Which allows you to arrest Doc for Ellison's murder. What kind of brain-twisted logic is that?"

"Now listen-"

"You pulled in two other suspects for Maisey's rape. Their fingerprints were at the crime scene. But you didn't charge them."

"One guy was a part-time carpenter. He worked on that house before Dr. Voss bought it. The other man was at a party there. A couple of witnesses back up his story."

"You know they did it."

"Help me prove that and I'll lock them up. Look, you're mad because your friend is not easy to defend. The knife puts him inside Ellison's cabin. He stopped at a filling station a mile down the road and filled his tank with gas a half hour before the fire started. He had motivation and no alibi. When we picked him up and told him somebody had burned Ellison to death, he said, 'I should give a shit?' You were a police officer. Who would you have in custody?"

"I'd start with Wyatt Dixon. Why do you allow a psychopath like that in your town, anyway?" "Say again?" he said.

"Back home our sheriff is a one-lung cretin who couldn't go to the bathroom without a diagram. But he'd have Wyatt Dixon pepper-Maced and in waist chains five minutes after he hit town."

"Yeah, I heard about the way you do things down there. We sent a bunch of our convicts from Deer Lodge to one of your rental prisons. We're still paying off the lawsuits. Now, look, Missy-"

"Say that again?"

"Sorry. I mean Ms. Carrol. You and Mr. Holland aren't married, are you? You two seem to make a fine match," the sheriff said.

"I'll be back later."

"Oh I know. Yes, ma'am, I surely know," he said, two fingers pressed against one eyebrow.

Temple and I walked outside into the sunshine. The maples on the courthouse lawn were puffing in the wind, and a long procession of bicyclists in brightly colored Spandex outfits was threading in and out of the traffic.

"Who was the kid with Dixon? The one at the literary reading you told me about?" Temple said.

"You got me. Why?"

"We need to find a weak link. What's the deal on this Indian gal?" she said.

"Her name is Sue Lynn Big Medicine. I think she's working for the ATE"

"What's their interest?"

"Guns, maybe. Or the Alfred P. Murrah Building."

"The Oklahoma City bombing?"

"Sue Lynn asked me why the feds would want information on people who have been in Kingman, Arizona."

Temple widened her eyes.

"That puts a new perspective on things," she said.

"I don't buy it," I said. "This trouble is local, and it has to do with money."

"It always has to do with money. Or sex and power," she said. "Who's this woman you're involved with?"

It WASN'T HARD to get the name of the kid who had accompanied Wyatt Dixon to Xavier Girard's literary reading. The reading had been intended as a library fund-raiser, and everyone attending had been required to sign the guest book and give his mailing address at the door.

The name above Wyatt Dixon's was a woman's. The name below was Terry Witherspoon.

Temple used her cell phone to call a friend in the sheriff's department in San Antonio. He ran the name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and called us back. Temple listened, then thanked him and clicked off her phone.

"If it's the same kid, he was in a juvenile facility in North Carolina," she said. "What for?" "His records are sealed."

Terry Witherspoon lived in a knocked-together shack on a dirt road notched out of a hillside high above the Clark Fork River.

I parked in a clearing among the pines and waited for the dust to blow away before we got out of the truck. Out in the trees we could see a great, rust-streaked, ventilated iron cylinder set up on a rubber-tired trailer. A huge gray hunk of raw meat was hung inside the front of the cylinder, crawling with flies, stinking of putrefaction.

"What's that?'' Temple said. "A bear barrel. Fish and Game uses them to trap black bears when people complain about them."

"Billy Bob, there's something in there," she said. A cinnamon bear, one weighing perhaps two hundred and fifty or three hundred pounds, had climbed into the back of the barrel, lured by the odor of meat, and an iron gate had slammed down behind it, trapping it so it could not turn around or go either forward or backward.

In a railed dirt lot behind the shack a lean, bare-chested kid, with ribs etched against his skin, was throwing a long, single-bladed pocketknife into a fence post. His brown hair grew over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a mocking smile at the corner of his mouth.

"You Terry Witherspoon?" I asked. His glasses were full of reflected light when he looked at us.

The smile never left his mouth. "Who wants to know?" he said.

"We're investigating the death of Lamar Ellison," Temple said. She opened her private investigator's badge holder, then closed it.

"Yeah?" he said, almost enthusiastically. The knife's blade hung from the tips of his fingers. Hardly glancing at his target, he whipped the knife sideways, flinging it end over end into the fence post, where it embedded solidly into the wood and trembled like a dinner fork.

"What's the story on the bear?" I asked.

"It's been getting into my trash. I called the game warden. They brought out the barrel," he replied.

"When are they going to pick it up?" I said.

"They didn't say. Maybe if it gets thirsty in there, it won't come back when they turn it loose," he said.

His face was flat and his glasses wobbled with light.

Temple studied a folded-back page in her notebook. "Wyatt Dixon talk to you about killing Lamar Ellison?" she said.

His face seemed to soften. "Wyatt hasn't hurt anybody. If I was you, I wouldn't be talking about him that way," he said.

He pulled the knife from the fence post and walked back into the center of the lot. He stood at an oblique angle to the post, concentrating, the knife blade dripping from his fingers. His mouth pursed slightly before he flung the knife again. This time the handle caromed off the post.

"You go to the university, Terry?" I said. "I'm thinking about it. Or I might take up rodeoing."

"What were you down for in North Carolina?" I asked.