Free Light of the World by James Lee Burke Page A

know what it is, too.”
    “No, I don’t,” she lied.
    “Asa has admitted to eight homicides committed during the 1970s and ’80s. Those are the only crimes he will be discussing, because those are the only crimes he committed.”
    “You’re sure of that?”
    “I’m sure of what he told me. I’m sure the authorities, including the FBI, have never found evidence of any kind that Asa was less than truthful about any of these matters.”
    “The same guys who couldn’t catch him for thirty years? The same people who caught him only after he contacted them and then sent them a floppy disk traceable to a computer in his workplace?”
    “It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” the attorney said.
    It was snowing the next morning, in clumps that floated softly down and broke apart and melted on the highway and were blown into a muddy spray by the trucks leaving an oil refinery whose smokestacks were red at night and streaming in the morning with gray curds of smoke that smelled like leakage from a sewage line. Asa Surrette was locked in a waist chain, waiting, when Alafair entered the interview room. Through the slitted window, she could see the snow blowing like feathers on a series of small hills that seemed to blur in the distance and then dissolve into nothingness.
    “You keep looking at the hills,” he said.
    “The winter here is strange. It contains no light.”
    “I never thought of it in those terms.”
    “Is it true there used to be eighteen Titan missile silos ringed around the outskirts of Wichita?”
    “That’s right. They were all taken out.”
    “Nonetheless, people here lived for decades with mechanized death buried under the wheat?”
    “So what?”
    “Had war started with the Soviet Union, this place would have become a radioactive Grand Canyon.”
    “Yeah, that kind of sums it up.”
    “Did that enter your thinking when you committed your murders?”
    He looked at her with a gleam in his eye that was between caution and hostility. “No. Why should it?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Why do you keep glancing out the window?” he asked.
    “It’s the sense of nothingness that I get when I look at the horizon. The reality is, there is no horizon here. The grayness seems to have no end and no purpose. Is that how you felt when you stalked your victims?”
    He wrinkled his forehead, craning around, the chain on his waist tinkling. “I think that stuff you’re talking about comes from Samuel Beckett. I read him in my literature class. I think his work is crap.”
    “What did you feel after you killed your victims?”
    “I didn’t feel anything.”
    “Nothing?”
    “What’s to feel? They’re dead, you’re not. One day I’ll be dead. So will you.”
    “How about the misery you caused them in their last moments? The suffering their loved ones will undergo the rest of their lives?”
    “Maybe I’m sorry about that.”
    “You felt remorse?”
    “Maybe I felt it later. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about things in sequence. People’s emotions don’t happen in sequence.” His wrist chain clinked as he tried to raise his hands in order to make the point.
    “You haven’t answered the question, have you? What did you feel after you killed your victims?”
    He straightened his back against the chair, breathing through his nose, his expression composed, his gaze roving over her features. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I thought about how I had stopped time and changed all the events that would have happened. I tore the hands off the clock.”
    She felt her eyes moisten. “Did they beg?”
    “What?”
    “For their lives? For the lives of their children? What did they say to you when they knew they were going to die?”
    “I already talked about all that.”
    “No, you didn’t. You told the court only what you chose for them to hear. Do the voices of your victims visit you in your sleep?”
    “I know what you’re trying to do.”
    “No, you don’t. I have