Free Light of the World by James Lee Burke Page B

no interest in statements about your behavior or your motivations. You’re a psychopath, and nothing you say is reliable. That means the book I write about you will be unreliable. You’ve had an enormous influence on me, Mr. Surrette.”
    “Oh?” he said, the corner of his mouth wrinkling.
    “I’ve always opposed capital punishment. Now I’m not so sure.”
    His eyes dulled over in the same way they had during the first interview, as though he had gone to a place inside himself where no one could follow. “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”
    “You didn’t stop killing people in 1994, did you? There were other victims, in other towns or other states, weren’t there?”
    “No.”
    “People like you can’t shut down the mechanism. It’s always there. It’s like a craving for morphine or pornography or booze or any other addiction, except much worse. How do you give up tearing the hands off the clock and changing history?”
    “You’re not going to write the book, are you?”
    “No. You’re not only untrustworthy as a source, you’re too depressing a subject. I’m going to do something else, though. I’m going to publish an article or a series of articles stating my belief that you never stopped killing. That if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, it’s you.”
    The room was sour with his smell. He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted forward, his eyes glowering under his brows. His unshaved cheeks looked smeared with soot. “You came here acting like an intellectual. You’re nothing but a cunt and not worth my time. On the gate, boss man!” he said.

I T WAS DUST in downtown Missoula when Detective Bill Pepper entered a workingman’s saloon called the Union Club and ordered his first shot and beer of the evening. He knocked back the shot and drank from his mug of draft and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin, then tapped his fingernail on the lip of the shot glass for another. He was not aware that across the street, in the gloaming of the day, a young woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair had watched him enter the saloon and was now waiting for him to leave.
    At eight P.M. , just as the sun was setting, he emerged on the street and began walking toward the brick cottage where he lived on the opposite side of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. In minutes he reached North Higgins and walked past the steamed windows of a Mexican restaurant filled with college kids and family people, then past an old vaudeville theater and over a long bridge, the roar of the water and its cold, heavy smell rising from far below, the sun descending in a red melt where the river fanned out and disappeared between the mountains.
    On the far end of the bridge, he turned right and descended a set of steps that led down past an old train station and onto the maple-shadowed sidewalk that reminded him of the neighborhood in Mobile where he had lived as a child. He lit an unfiltered cigaretteand removed a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and tilted the flask to his mouth, closing his eyes while a warm burn radiated through his viscera.
    Down the street, a chopped-down pickup with Hollywood mufflers eased to a stop under a maple tree that blocked the light from the streetlamp. The woman in the scarf behind the wheel fitted on a pair of dark glasses and layered her mouth with lipstick, then got out and looped a tote bag over her arm. She began walking on the opposite side of the street toward a small brick bungalow set close to the river. Baskets of petunias hung from the eaves of the porch. There was a swing set in the yard and a basketball hoop nailed above the porte cochere.
    She stopped under a tree directly across from the bungalow. The lights were on in the front, and she could see Bill Pepper pacing up and down in his living room while he talked on his cell phone. She removed her dark glasses and took a tiny pair of binoculars from her tote bag and