"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"I'd better get home. Billy Bob gets in trouble if I ain't around."

"You want to drive?" she asked.

"I don't mind."

They headed up the highway, following the Blackfoot, through timbered canyons and meadow-land, through sunlight and shady areas where spring-water leaked across the asphalt. The dog was already sound asleep on the backseat. Sue Lynn moved closer to Lucas and took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it in hers.

When he looked over at her, her gaze was focused straight ahead, her eyes sleepy with thoughts he couldn't fathom.

Tell me women ain't a puzzle, he thought.

Chapter 15

The next day I drove to a Catholic church in Missoula's university district. The chapel area was empty, the confessional booths stacked with furniture. A secretary in the pastor's office told me I could find the pastor at his home down the street. I walked a block under maple trees to a tan stucco house with a neat yard and tulip beds and saw a tall man in an undershirt and black trousers up on the roof.

"Can I help you?" he said, peering down through an overhang of maple leaves.

"I'd like to go to Reconciliation," I replied.

"You have a problem with heights?"

I climbed the ladder and joined him in a flat, sunless place where he had hung his tool bag on the chimney and was eating his lunch. The blueness of the sky overhead looked like a river through a gap in the canopy of the maple trees, as though the earth were turned upside down and we were viewing a riparian landscape from high above.

The priest's name was Hogan and he offered me a sandwich from his lunch sack. He talked politely for a moment, then realized the origin of my awkwardness with the ritual that Catholics today call Reconciliation.

"You're not a cradle Catholic?" he asked.

"I was baptized by immersion in a fundamentalist church when I was a child. I became a convert after the loss of a friend."

"You want to tell me what's bothering you?"

"I went to bed with a woman. It was a self-serving act, impulsive and badly thought out," I said.

"I'm getting the sense things didn't turn out as you planned."

"That's an understatement, sir."

"I'm not quite sure what we're owning up to here. You mean you acted lustfully or you feel you've used somebody, or you simply regret getting involved with the wrong person?"

"How about all of the above?"

"I see."

"I've done this previously. For reasons that mask a more grave sin in my past."

"I'm not sure I follow," he said.

In the silence I could hear the maple branches sweeping against the roof.

"I accidentally shot and killed my best friend. I did this while we were killing other men. His death is with me morning and night. His specter never leaves me," I said.

The face of the priest remained impassive, but he lowered his eyes so I could not see the sadness in them.

"Is there anything else you want to tell me?" he asked.

"No, sir."

He placed one hand on my shoulder. "You all right, partner?" he said.

"Right as rain," I said, hoping he would not hold my lie against me.

That afternoon a waxed black car drove through the field behind Doc's house and parked in front, the sunlight wobbling like a yellow flame on the tinted windows.

Amos Rackley, the ATF agent, got out of the passenger seat and knocked on the door with his fist, rattling a picture on the wall. He wore shades and a dark suit that seemed to contain and intensify the heat and energy in his body. His gum snapped in his mouth and his jawbone was slick with perspiration.

When I opened the door, he said, "It must be the genes."

"What?"

"Your family. Like a stopped-up commode that keeps overflowing on the floor. First I have trouble with you. Now your kid."

"What are you talking about?"

"We sent somebody to ring the doorbell at a certain Indian gal's house. Guess who answers the door?"

"Lucas?"

"Not wearing shirt or shoes. With long red scratches on his back. I'm surprised he took time to zip his fly."

"You guys should have had jobs at Salem in 1692. You would have fit right in," I said.

"You listen, you arrogant prick…"

But he was so angry he couldn't talk. He took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on a post and opened a folder full of eight-by-ten photographs. They showed blood-streaked people being lifted from rubble, a woman crying with a dead child in her arms, a white police officer giving mouth-to-mouth to a black man on a stretcher.

"That's the Alfred P. Murrah Building, motherfucker," he said. "I'm betting my career this shit goes back to Hayden Lake, Idaho. But you and now your son have decided to factor yourself in, either because you've got cooze on the brain or you just can't stand to let things alone. So why don't we just walk out in the woods here, you and me, and see what develops? I can't tell you how much I'd enjoy that."

I stepped out on the porch. The day was bright, the wind cold on my face in the shade.

"My son has nothing to do with your investigation. His interest in Sue Lynn Big Medicine is romantic. You were that age once. Why don't you show a little empathy?" I said.

"That's a great word coming from a disgraced Ranger who killed his own partner. I changed my mind about you, Mr. Holland. I wouldn't dirty my hands fighting a man like you. You turn my stomach."

When he drove away I could feel my eyes filming, the ridgeline and ponderosa and cliffs distorting into green and yellow shapes. I wanted to turn and see L.Q. standing by the barn or down in the shade of the cottonwoods by the river or perched atop a rail by the horse lot.

"L.Q.?" I said.

But there was no reply except the wind in the trees.

Toward evening Maisey and I saddled the Appaloosa and thoroughbred that Doc boarded for his neighbors and rode them up a switchback logging road in the hills behind the house. In the distance we could see old clear-cuts and burned stumps along the sides of the Rattlesnake Mountains.

"I overheard what that Treasury agent said to you this morning, Billy Bob. Why'd you let him get away with that?" she said.

"He lost his friends in Oklahoma City. He can't do anything about it, so he takes his grief out on others. That's the way it is sometimes."

"My father says under it all you're a violent man."

"I have been. That doesn't mean I am today."

"The sheriff called this morning. He wants to talk to my father again."

"What for?"

"The third man who raped me is dead. I'm glad. I hope he suffered when he died," she said. Her face was narrow with anger, her mouth pinched with an unrelieved bitterness.

"Maisey, I can't argue with your feelings, but-"

"Don't say anything, Billy Bob. Just please don't say anything."

She turned her horse away from me and rode into the shade, then dismounted and began picking huckleberries and putting them into her hat, even though they were green and much too sour to eat.

Down below I saw the sheriff's cruiser pull into the yard.

I rode the thoroughbred down the hill and took off my hat and looked at the greenness of the country and grinned at the sheriff and waited for him to explain the cloud in his face.

"I don't care to look up at a man on horseback," he said.

I got down from the saddle and hung my hat on the pommel and tied the reins to the porch railing. I let my hand trail off the thoroughbred's rump, my eyes fixed on the sheriff's.

"Where was the good doctor yesterday afternoon?" he said.

"I don't know. Ask him," I replied.

"I would. If I could find him." The sheriff stood by the open door of his vehicle, his face cut by light and shadow, the wind flapping his coat. "The third suspect in Miss Voss's rape was pulled out of a river two days ago in Idaho. He had chest waders on and was submerged standing up in the bottom of a pool like a man with concrete boots on."