Then he was standing alone, as though under a glass bell, Hobbs at his feet, the children on the playground terrified by what they had just seen, the wind swelling the trees against a blue summer sky.

Think, he told himself.

He dropped to one knee, a handkerchief in his hand, and pulled a stiletto from a scabbard that was Velcro-strapped to his right ankle. He rubbed the surfaces of the handle clean, clicked open the blade, and wiped it clean, too. Then he pressed the handle into Hobbs’s palm and folded his fingers on it.

In the background, he could hear sirens pealing down the street.

ONE HOUR LATER, Clete was sitting on a bench by himself in a holding cell that contained no plumbing and smelled of disinfectant and stone. Down the corridor, someone was yelling without stop in a voice that reflected neither coherence nor meaning, as though the person were yelling simply to deliver an auditory message to himself about his state of affairs. When Clete closed his eyes, he kept seeing the faces of the children in the park, their disbelief at the level of savagery taking place before their eyes. Clete wondered if it was he who was the ogre and not Lyle Hobbs.

The undersheriff who had cuffed Clete stood at the cell door, one hand behind his back. He was a pleasant-looking man, a bit overweight, more administrator than policeman, his face windburned, pale around the eyes where his sunglasses had been. “Hobbs is at St. Pat’s. Did you use his head for a paddleball?”

“Sorry to hear that,” Clete said.

“You told him you made him for a bail skip?”

“Yeah.”

“And he came at you with a switchblade?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“Where was he carrying the switchblade?”

Clete glanced again at the undersheriff. The undersheriff’s left hand was still concealed behind his hip. “It’s my fault. I got sloppy on the shakedown,” Clete said.

The undersheriff held up a Ziploc bag with a black polybraid scabbard inside. “My deputy found this under Hobbs’s car. It’s the kind of rig some plainclothes cops or PIs use.”

“Wonder what Lyle would be doing with that,” Clete said.

“You’re lucky, Mr. Purcel. Hobbs has a couple of bench warrants on him. It’s minor-league stuff, but as a bond agent, you probably have a degree of legality on your side. Anyway, there’s a lady waiting for you by the front entrance.”

“I’m sprung?”

“For now,” the deputy said. “Be careful what you pray for.”

Clete gave him a look.

A few minutes later, Clete emerged from the courthouse and saw an Asian-American woman on the sidewalk, a black purse hanging from a leather strap on her shoulder, her expression almost clinical, her wire-framed glasses perched neatly on her nose. “I’m Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans, Mr. Purcel,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your car.”

“You’re with Fart, Barf, and Itch?” he said.

“I think you’re an intelligent man, regardless of what most people say about you. You can cooperate with us, or you can choose not to. You can also deal with the assault charge on your own. Do you want me to take you to your car?”

Clete saw a four-door silver Dodge Stratus with a government plate on it parked by the curb. Alicia Rosecrans waited for him to reply, then started toward her car. “I appreciate the offer,” Clete said to her back. “I’ve always appreciated what you guys do.”

But on his way to the university, he began to have second thoughts about accepting favors from Alicia Rosecrans. She made him think of a lab technician taking apart an insect with tweezers. She told him to open a manila folder on the seat. In it were a stack of photos, a copy of his discharge from the United States Marine Corps, and his medical records from the Veterans Administration.

“You guys followed me and Jamie Sue Wellstone to a motel?” Clete said. He tried to sound incensed, but he felt a knot of shame in his throat.

“No, we followed her. You inserted yourself into the situation on your own.”

Inserted?

“Why are y’all interested in my medical history?” he said.

“Because we think you probably suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Because maybe there are people in the Bureau who don’t want to believe you murdered Sally Dio and his men. Maybe some people believe there were complexities involved that others don’t understand.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove, her hands in the ten-two position on the steering wheel. Her face was free of blemishes, her profile both enigmatic and lovely to look at. Clete continued to stare at her, his frustration growing.

“I never had post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I drank too much sometimes and smoked a little weed. But any trouble I got into wasn’t because of Vietnam. I dug it over there.”

“Look at the photo taken at the homicide scene on I-90. There’s a man walking toward a compact car. If you look closely, you can make out a rectangular shape in his left hand. We think he’s the killer,” she said.

“Where’d you get this?”

“There was a surveillance camera in the rest stop on the opposite side of the highway. Evidently it had been knocked off-center, and it caught the man in the white shirt in two or three frames. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch the license number on the compact. Does this man look familiar?”

“No, it’s too grainy. He’s just a guy in a white shirt. Why are y’all investigating a local homicide?”

“Because during the last five years, there have been killings on several interstates that bear similarities to the one outside Missoula. The victims were made to kneel or lie on their faces. They were executed at point-blank range. They were sexually abused and sometimes burned or mutilated. Look at the next photo. Do you know that man?”

The eight-by-ten color blowup had been shot with a zoom lens in front of the saloon on Swan Lake. A tall ramrod-straight man wearing a short-brim Stetson hat and western-cut trousers and yellow-tinted aviator shades was looking directly at the lens. He had reddish-blond hair, and the sun on the lake seemed to create a nimbus around his body.

“I’ve never seen him. Who is he?” Clete said.

“We’re not sure. That’s why I asked you,” she said.

“Why does the FBI have Jamie Sue under surveillance?” Clete said.

Alicia Rosecrans turned a corner carefully, her turn indicator on; she glanced in the rearview mirror. “Look at the last photo in the folder,” she said. “Do you recognize that man?”

Clete lifted up the eight-by-ten and studied it. “He’s a nice-looking guy. But I’ve never seen him before.”

“Yes, you have, Mr. Purcel. That’s Leslie Wellstone, Jamie Sue’s husband, before he was burned in the Sudan.”

Alicia Rosecrans didn’t speak the rest of the way to the university.

CLETE HAD NOT called me from the jail, either out of shame or because he had thought he could elude a pending assault-and-battery beef by claiming he had feared for his life and acted in self-defense. Montana was still Montana, a culture where vegetarianism, gun control, and gay marriage would never flush. Nor would the belief ever die that a fight between two men was just that, a fight between two men.

That afternoon I went down to Albert’s house to talk to Clete. He was already half in the bag, but not because of Lyle Hobbs.

“Why’d that agent show me the photo of Jamie Sue’s husband before he was burned up?” he asked. “She wants to cluster-fuck my head?”

All of his windows were open. The weather had taken a dramatic turn, and the valley was covered with shadow, the air cold and dry-smelling, snow flurries already blowing off the top of the ridge.

“They’re not interested in Jamie Sue Wellstone,” I said. “They’re after her husband or brother-in-law. But I don’t know what for.”