Free Light of the World by James Lee Burke

for fifty dollars.”
    “What was the deal with Miss Gretchen?”
    “The gal who just went down the hill?”
    “Down south you don’t call a woman a ‘gal.’ I especially wouldn’t do that with her.”
    “I want you to understand something, Detective Robicheaux. Our department treats people with respect, our current sheriff in particular. The deputy and detective out there are the exception. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”
    “What happened?”
    “The lady, or whatever you want to call her, Miss Gretchen, came on a little strong about Bill’s treatment of Wyatt Dixon. When she was walking away, the deputy said, ‘Is she butch enough for you, Bill?’ Pepper goes, ‘I’d probably have to tie a board across my ass so I didn’t fall in.’ ”
    “She heard them?”
    “Probably. Would you tell her I apologize on behalf of the department?”
    “If I were you, I’d tell your friends to do that.”
    “She’s gonna file a complaint?”
    “No, she’s not given to filing complaints,” I said, and looked back out the opening of the cave. “Is Dixon going to be charged?”
    “Depends on what the prosecutor says. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. I didn’t get what you were saying. The lady is not gonna file a complaint? So what is she gonna do?”
    I looked at the biblical message incised in the soft patina of lichen on the wall and wondered what kind of tangled mind was responsible for it. “It’s nice meeting you,” I said. “I hope to see you again. Tell those two morons out there they put their foot into the wrong Rubicon.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Tell them to look it up.”
    A FTER THE FIRST interview, Alafair waited three days in the motel for Asa Surrette’s attorney to return her call. It was January, and snow was driving parallel with the ground, and the landscape was sere and stippled with weeds, and in the distance the hills looked like piles of slag raked out of a furnace.
    It was a land of contradictions, settled by Populists and Mennonites but also by fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of John Brown. In spring the rivers were swollen and streaked with red sandbanks and bordered by cottonwoods that fluttered with thousands of green leaves resembling butterflies. The Russian wheat in the fields was the most disease-resistant in the world, the harvest so great that sometimes the grain had to be piled in two-story mounds by the train tracks because there was no room left in the silos.
    Or the skies could blacken with dust storms or, worse, clouds of smoke rising from a peaceful town, such as Lawrence, where guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson spent an entire day systematically murdering 160 people.
    Just after Alafair had given up and decided to return home the next morning, she got a call from Surrette’s attorney, the same one who’d negotiated Surrette’s allocution and sentence, trying to ensure that his client not be exposed to the death penalty reinstated in 1994. “Asa would like to see you again,” he said.
    “Why?” she asked.
    There was a beat. “ Why? To help with your project. To give his side of things.”
    “Your client is a narcissist. He’s had no interest in helping anybody with anything. If he wants the interviews to go forward, the questions will be on my terms. He’ll make an honest attempt to answer them or we’re done.”
    “You’ll have to work that out with him.”
    “I’ll work it out with you. There will be no proscriptive areas of inquiry.”
    “I think you’ll find Asa pretty forthcoming. He likes you.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t ask you back. What did you say to him, anyway?”
    “He has one reason for wanting to see me again. I bother him. I told him why he took the body of one of his victims to his church and photographed it.”
    There was another beat. “Ms. Robicheaux, there is one area that should not be explored in your interview. You