“His tank burned. He was trapped inside it. That’s why he looks that way. Don’t stare at him. What’s the matter with you?” Jamie Sue said.

Leslie Wellstone grinned broadly. “Don’t run off. Would you like to have another drink? Or maybe a dance or two?”

The couple from Malibu were out the front door like a shot.

“Why do you have to act like that?” Jamie Sue said, her eyes wet.

“They probably got a kick out of it,” her husband replied, fitting his arm around her shoulders. “Harold, what do you have that’s good and cold?”

EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING, one day later, the sheriff of Missoula County, Joe Bim Higgins, called me at the cabin. The caller ID indicated he was using a cell phone. “Can you and Mr. Purcel come down to my office?”

“What’s up?” I replied without enthusiasm.

“It’s in regard to the college kids who were killed and to the little wood cross Mr. Purcel found on the ridge behind Albert’s house.”

“I don’t see how we can help you, Sheriff.”

“It also has to do with another double homicide. This one happened two nights ago at a rest stop west of town.”

“Same answer,” I said.

“I’m about seven miles from you right now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your time.”

I walked down the road to Albert’s house and knocked on the downstairs door. Clete was still in his skivvies, cooking breakfast in the small kitchen that was part of the accommodations Albert had given him. I told him about the call from Joe Bim Higgins.

“You’re pissed off at me because I found evidence at a crime scene and reported it to Higgins?” he said.

“No.”

“Then get that look off your face.”

“You go out of your way to get us into it, Clete.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, you do. No matter what the situation is, you can’t wait to put our tallywhackers in the hay baler.”

His back was turned to me as he flipped a pork chop inside a skillet. I could see the color climbing up the back of his neck. But when he turned around, his face was empty, his green eyes on mine. “You want to eat?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He sat down at the table and ate out of the skillet, pumping ketchup all over his meat and eggs. He stared at a documentary on the History Channel, then got up and shut off the TV set with the heel of his hand. “A kid got smoked on his knees up on that hill. Two of the Wellstones’ gumballs rousted me because I strayed onto a posted stream. The same two dudes came here and made threats. I found a cross at the crime scene that was probably torn from the victim’s throat. Can you explain how I caused any of those things to happen?”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“Yeah, but that’s the signal you send. Now, how about we give it a rest?”

He was right. I had wanted to believe that somehow our journey into the northern Rockies, what some people call “the last good place,” would take us back into a simpler, more innocent time. But trying to re-create the America of my youth through a geographical change was at best foolish, if not self-destructive.

“You have any coffee?” I said.

“In the pot, big mon,” Clete said.

Ten minutes later, Joe Bim Higgins’s cruiser pulled into the driveway. While hawks floated over the pasture and the sun broke across the mountain crest on fir and pine trees limned with frost, Joe Bim told us of the double homicide in a rest stop on Interstate 90.

“A trucker saw the smoke coming out of the women’s side of the building and thought somebody had set fire to a trash barrel. He said by the time he got his extinguisher out of the rig, he smelled the odor and knew what it was. He kicked open the stall door and sprayed her with the extinguisher, but she was already gone.

“We found the man out in the trees. A dead joint was lying in the grass. The entry wound was right behind the ear, muzzle burns all over the skin and the hair. From the blood pattern on the ground, the coroner thinks the vic was forced to lie on his face before he was shot.

“There was one bullet hole in the door to the stall where the female died. With luck, she got it before her killer soaked her in gasoline.”

“Who were the victims?” I asked.

“The female had two arrests for solicitation in Los Angeles. The man was an independent film producer of some kind. LAPD says he may have been hooked up with some porn vendors. They were traveling on his credit card. From the charges, it looks like they were bar-hopping their way from the Swan Valley back to Spokane.”

“I don’t see how we figure in to this, Sheriff,” I said.

“They were in a saloon in Swan Lake. According to the bartender, they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone, the sister-in-law of Ridley Wellstone.”

“I still don’t get the tie-in,” I said.

“Maybe there isn’t one. But when Mr. Purcel called in about the little wood cross he found up on the hill, he mentioned two thugs who work for the Wellstone family, guys he had trouble with. Maybe that’s all coincidence. What’s your opinion?”

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“Let me be honest here,” Joe Bim said. “Sometimes I like to believe that the victims of violent crime invite their fate. Maybe this porn dealer and his hooker girlfriend were killed by their own kind. But the thought of what happened to those two college kids doesn’t give me any rest. They were taking a stroll on a beautiful summer evening behind the school they attended, and a degenerate sodomized and raped the girl and snuffed out her life and made her boyfriend beg or commit oral sex on him before the perp blew his head off.

“We lifted Seymour Bell’s thumbprint off the wood cross. There were no other prints on it, so the cross probably belonged to the boy. Why would somebody rip it from his throat? Why deny a kid about to be murdered a symbol of his religion? It’s thoughts of that kind that make me want to blow somebody out of his socks. Did you guys ever feel like that? Did you ever want to blow the living shit out of certain people and drink a beer while you did it?”

Clete and I looked at each other and didn’t reply.

JOE BIM HIGGINS was not an inept lawman or administrator and probably didn’t need my help in his investigation. But an execution-style murder had been committed within sight of the cabin where Molly and I were living, and to pretend an act that evil had no relationship to our own lives, to wait for the authorities, with their limited resources, to assure us that our environment was safe, is the kind of behavior one associates with someone who relies on the weatherman to protect him from asteroids.

Clete and I drove to Missoula and went into the big stone courthouse where the sheriff kept his office. We explained that we wanted to ask questions of some people who had known the two murdered college students, that we did not intend to impose ourselves on his investigation, that we would report any meaningful discoveries immediately to him, that, in effect, we would not become an unwelcome presence in his life.

He was sitting in a swivel chair with one booted foot on the wastebasket. He chewed on a hangnail and stared out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “How would you describe your relationship with the FBI?” he said.

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“That’s what you think,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“An FBI woman was in here an hour ago asking questions about Mr. Purcel. You worked for a greaseball up at Flathead Lake?” he said.

Clete was standing in front of the sheriff’s desk, looking into dead space, his face impassive. “His name was Sally Dio. His private plane nose-dived into the side of a mountain.”

“Really?” Joe Bim said.

“Yeah, I heard ole Sal looked like marmalade hanging in one of the trees. All the whores in Vegas and Tahoe were really broke up about it,” Clete said.