Now Blackburn charged by the hour, the day, the week, the year, whatever you liked. He catered to all and sundry.

Gaines knew that whatever Blackburn told him, there would always be some other story hiding just beneath the surface. He was curious as to how such a small man could bear such a burden of secrets.

Gaines told Blackburn that Webster’s motel cabin was a crime scene, that it was to be treated as such. There would be no entry, not even for Blackburn, and he—Sheriff Gaines of Whytesburg—would be overall responsible for any and all matters that related to the investigation.

He asked Blackburn how long Webster had lived there.

“A year,” Blackburn said. “Maybe a year and a half.”

Gaines didn’t wait for questions, and it seemed Blackburn didn’t have any. Blackburn seemed like a man well practiced in keeping his mouth shut tight, just in case he opened it and the truth inadvertently fell out.

Gaines told Hagen to call in to the office, to get Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton out there. Every resident of the motel needed to be questioned, their particulars taken. Gaines wanted to know—first and foremost—if any of these people had known about this. Had Webster ever spoken to anyone of these twenty-year-old events?

Chantry and Dalton arrived. Gaines gave Hagen the responsibility of overseeing the actions there, the canvassing of the neighbors, the collection of whatever information they could glean about Webster himself, about his comings and goings during his residence at the motel. Lester Cobb had said that Webster was upstream regularly, but had Webster been seen in the proximity of the buried body? Did he make a habit of returning to the scene of the crime?

Hagen produced the release document. “I typed this up,” he said. “Get Webster to sign it soon as you can.”

Gaines read it through, folded it, and tucked it into his pocket, and with Hagen and the deputies then organized, Gaines steeled himself for the task at hand. He would search the room, the bathroom, the front and rear of the cabin.

Once again, he covered his face, and once again he entered Lieutenant Michael Webster’s motel cabin, the first room of which was dark, unsettling, and stank like rotten meat.

Gaines switched on the lights, and it was only then—in the glare of two stark and shadeless bulbs—that he appreciated the level of filth and chaos that had consumed Webster’s cabin. It was said that the state of a man’s living space was a reflection of his state of mind. Gaines’s own quarters were somewhat stark, an evident lack of personal touches, but he lived with his mother, cared for her there, and thus had considered all things from her perspective and for her comfort. When she died, if she ever died, then her things would go. Gaines would not want to live with constant reminders of her presence. And then the house would be empty and he would have to start over.

But here? Here was something beyond all comprehension. In the darkness of the unlit room, those minutes when he had first spoken with Webster, his attention had been on Webster. Now Webster was not present, the room no longer dark, and Gaines could see the reasons for the unbearable funk of the place. To the right was a small kitchenette and eating area, and it was here that the vast majority of the garbage was concentrated. Takeout food boxes, a half-eaten pie, trash bags spilling over with mold-infested waste, dirty plates, articles of unwashed clothing, a heap of skin mags, clothes, shoes, boxes of ammo, three handguns, a rusted bandolier, napsacks, a suitcase full of 45-rpm records, many of them broken. Amid this bedlam were ashtrays piled high with the roaches of joints, a couple of plastic bags of weed, twists of paper, within which was amphetamine sulfate. And then Gaines found a grocery sack filled with prescription medication bottles, many of them bearing names that were not Webster’s. Uppers, downers, everything imaginable, a concoction of which would have killed any man of regular constitution. Webster was able to stand, to talk, to act, but his mind, his imagination, his rationale, had to be utterly fucked.

Gaines found a heap of clothes in the corner of the room. Using the tip of his pen, he lifted the pants, held them up, saw the thick, dried mud that traveled as far as the knees. He gagged, felt the tension in his throat fighting against the urge to just puke, to just let it out, to release the entire physical reaction to this terrible, terrible thing. But Gaines held it down.

He dropped the pants, headed back to the car for some bags, returned with a pair of gloves as well. Carefully, trying to ensure that none of the dried mud fell away, he bagged the pants, a shirt, a pair of boots. If this mud could be identified as the same mud from the riverbank, then it would corroborate Cobb’s statement that he had seen Webster there. It was of no great consequence, of course. So Webster liked to go looking for garter snakes. So Webster took a walk by the river every once in a while. Perhaps, Gaines thought, he himself was looking for nothing more than any small certainty he could find amid the ocean of uncertainties that faced him. He put the bags in the trunk of his car, and then he took a few moments to breathe deeply, to gather his thoughts, to steady his nerves before he searched further.

He stood for a while, almost as if he believed that he could become acclimated and insensate to the smell. He could not, and he would not, and he knew he was merely postponing the inevitable.

He maneuvered his way through the garbage to the back of the room. Here were the boxes he had seen behind Webster. There were a good half dozen, and he lifted down the first and started looking through it. At first, Gaines had the impression that here was nothing but a mountain of random newspaper clippings, but then a certain pattern seemed to emerge. Fires, collapsed buildings, mining disasters, floods, storms, hurricanes, typhoons, ships lost at sea, car crashes, train wrecks, bridges dropping into ravines and rivers, forest fires, farming accidents and gas explosions. On it went, both natural disasters and man-made calamities. The common thread, sometimes so obvious from images of individuals being carried from the ruins of some building, other times revealed in the third or fourth paragraphs, were the survivors. Sometimes one, sometimes two or three, but always a small number in relation to those who had lost their lives. And the clippings had been collected from newspapers right across the country, not only local but national, covering everything from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to the Boise City News and the Charleston Post and Courier. The boxes were dated in sequential years, starting as far back as Christmas of 1945 and running all the way to the present. Gaines counted six boxes, each box covering five years, the last box having started in 1970 and still incomplete. If nothing else, Webster had been obsessive in his organization. He had underlined the number of survivors in each case, and where they had been mentioned, he had underlined their names.

What this meant, Gaines could not even begin to conceive, but it had to represent something.

And then Gaines had it. The reference Webster had made to his section in Guadalcanal.

November third, I was in a foxhole with my section. Nine of us left, all hunkered down to weather it through, and they hit us direct. Eight dead, one living.

And after that, what he had said about making a deal. How he had made some kind of deal. And then something had happened in 1952, and they had started calling him the luckiest man alive. Who were they? People in general, or some specific people?

And he had gone on to say that he had been dead already, dead ever since the moment he’d made the deal.

What was this deal? A deal to survive the war? And with whom? Such a thing had to exist solely in Webster’s deranged mind. Did he believe he had made a deal with some divine or arcane force and thus had survived Guadalcanal while everyone else in his section had been killed? And what was this thing in ’52? Had he murdered Nancy Denton and performed some bizarre ritual on her as some kind of payback for the life he’d been given? Is that what Michael Webster actually believed?