The Wild Inside (16 page)

We looked around the place. Monty almost tripped over an old rusted hubcap lying on the floor. “Jeez, this is depressing.”

“Makes you want to volunteer for the DARE program, huh?”

“That or slit my wrists,” Monty said dryly.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “This place is definitely a target-rich environment.”

“Target rich?”

“Never mind.”

“I gotcha,” Monty said. “The whole area.”

“Yeah.” I was referring to the entire canyon. I took another look around. The way Victor had lived was nothing out of the ordinary for many people involved with meth in the area. Over the years, the canyon had become a haven for meth makers and users with its own culture of distraught individuals hooked on the horrible stuff, seeking each other out and, perhaps unintentionally, making drug and criminal activity the norm. In my high school in Kalispell, everyone referred to the canyon as “the Line.” Back then, it was known for housing the dealers of marijuana, crack and heroin, and anything else that could get you toasted. If you wanted to be a little crazy, go get drunk and high on a Saturday afternoon with your buddies and be let into all the bars underage, you’d head
up the Line
.

My ma used to warn me:
water seeks its own level
. She said that the people often continued the cycle of their own hell, collecting welfare and getting high to find some kind of escape from impoverished circumstances. She used to say that when an area got known for its drug use, it meant that was only part of the story—that it was always about much, much more: economic troubles and the loss of a way of life. I figured she was being overly dramatic for my sake, but if she were here with us at Victor’s trailer, she’d be saying, “I told you,” with her arms folded before her chest, her chin held high. Later, by the mid- to late nineties, after new ways to cook methamphetamine began to spread to inland America, making it became the fastest way to make some money in an area where jobs were hard to come by and cycles were uneasily broken.

“I found the cell phone.” Gretchen held up a plastic bag. “Batteries dead, but I’ll let you know if there’s anything interesting on it as soon as possible.”

“Thanks.” I nodded. “He didn’t pay his bill. Surprise, surprise. But we’ve got records from the past year up until September.”

“And there’s something else,” she said.

I looked at her.

“The traces found on the duct tape,” she said, leaning into one hip. “The analysis on the chemical makeup of the tape came in and was confirmed to be a type of capsaicin.”

“Capsaicin?”

“Yep,” Gretchen said. “But in much lower amounts than used in bear spray.”

“So what are you thinking?” I asked. “That the blood on the tape diluted the spray? Are you thinking that someone sprayed Victor or gave him spray to use and it accidentally got on him?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all.” She leaned over to put the bag with the phone in her bag. “We have no evidence that he was sprayed or sprayed toward something else and got it blown back into him. The element is only on the tape and had to have gotten on the tape prior to being wrapped around the victim. It was stronger on one edge than the other, as if the entire roll had simply been next to or was sitting in something that had leaked, perhaps an earlier leak of bear spray in a pack from some time ago. There’s no trace of it anywhere on the victim at all, not the scrap of shirt that was left, not his scalp or hair that’s left . . .”

“Curious,” Monty said.

I nodded and instantly thought of Lou’s home and that I needed to get inside to see if I noticed anything suspicious lying around, like duct tape, bear spray, or firearms. Although, even if I did, everyone in this neck of the woods has bear spray and duct tape. I thought again of how finding the slug could potentially give us a better reason to search Lou’s home, and if we could get a match on some tape fibers and a pistol, we’d have the case.

• • •

We left Victor’s by eight a.m. and spent the next half hour checking with the two neighboring residences to see if anyone had noticed anything out of the ordinary before Victor was taken. When I asked them,
both laughed and said that everything the guy did was out of the ordinary: loud parties, cars coming and going at all hours of the night, fights with high-pitched female voices.

The neighbor who lived farther east of Victor said he couldn’t hear much from his place and didn’t notice much one way or the other. He said that Victor did flip him off a time or two over the summer when he had yelled at him to slow down because he was driving on the dirt road too fast and kicking up dust.

“What kind of vehicle?”

“Some old truck. An old Toyota. One of those small ones. Dark blue, I think. Looked like it was on its last leg. But I’ve also seen him on a motorcycle a time or two.”

When I asked when the last time they’d seen him was, the neighbor to the west in the double-wide, a graying wiry-haired guy with overly shaded glasses—the kind that make you wonder what’s being hidden—said that he’d seen him drive by on a motorcycle sometime before dark on Wednesday. I told him I appreciated his time, and Monty and I left, half thankful for rural Montana—for being spared the tedious job of going door to door in neighborhood-dense urban areas.

10

I
N A HOMICIDE
investigation, someone inevitably brings God into the mix, because when you’re dealing with human beings unstable enough to commit murder, questions on the order of things, of evil, and whether or not the devil played some role often pop up.

My father didn’t believe in God or some overriding and predetermining entity. My mother, raised Catholic, did. In spite of my mother’s prodding for me to go to church with her and my sisters after my father died, I refused. I felt I had received a get-out-of-religion-free card and was born into a completely neutral zone. I couldn’t understand why my sisters didn’t choose to play the card too. Fortunately, staying neutral has worked fairly well in my line of work.

In one of my college criminology classes, I remember reading about an incident involving Ted Bundy when he was only three years old. The serial killer’s aunt had told the account and had claimed that while in the household of the grandparents who actually raised him, she had fallen asleep one afternoon on the floor. When she woke, the little Bundy had completely surrounded her with knives and was standing over her with a wicked smile.

If this incident was accurately told, it begged the question of whether little Teddy boy could have learned or acquired the tendency to do harm through his environment so early or if he had been born with it. A girl in one of my study groups had insisted that the devil had decided to do his work through the boy. Some other guy in the group
had scoffed at this, saying it was utter nonsense. Everyone in the group fell into a raging discussion about religion.

“
Then explain to me why a three-year-old would be compelled to surround someone with knives?” I remember the gal had placed her hands on her hips, her chin lifted in defiance.

“There are such things as psychiatric disorders,” he had replied.

She ended up so angry that she left early. I stayed neutral because I had very little to offer on the subject, and eventually everyone decided that my evasiveness was a problem, that I was weak for not taking a stance. I had shrugged and said, “Why in the hell would I fight over something I have no understanding about?”

“Being agnostic is a cop-out.” Another guy from Lake Placid with smooth shoulder-length blond hair and faded jeans with large holes, just the right worn-in leather boots and a perfectly soft flannel shirt (we used to call it the affordable-poor look) had glared at me.

“I don’t care whether it’s a cop-out or not,” I had replied calmly even though I had to admit that the guy had gotten under my nose, and what I really wanted to say was,
I don’t give a flying fuck what you think
. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it; because I had. Copiously. As a teen, I went over ad nauseam whether it was written in some divine plan or not that my father be taken. Whether that grizzly was just a bad apple or different than the others, who wanted nothing to do with campers or hikers. Whether, in the end, it was simply the wrong weekend to go camping, bad timing, and unfortunate circumstances, or something much more predetermined and mysterious. If we had not gone camping that weekend, would the heavy-leaden foot of fate slammed down on cue anyway, taken him in a car accident, a house fire, an early heart attack?

At any rate, it was Leslie Boone who brought God into the mix first. She said that Victor Lance’s death was God’s doing when I told her that Monty and I were visiting to speak to her about her ex-lover. We went on Monday morning, and she had let us into her white mobile home
with mauve trim on Lodge Avenue off of Gladys Glen Road in the small town of Coram, north of Martin City and Hungry Horse.

Her mobile sat nestled among pine trees not far off US Highway 2 outside of Glacier Park. We waited until her son, Lewis, had taken the bus to school, then found Leslie putting away breakfast dishes. She let us in and showed us to a small living room with a lavender carpet and flowery wallpaper blistering at the edges and peeling away from the wall near the top. A ceiling fan hovered too close to my head. It was off, but I felt like I had to sit down as soon as possible to get away from it in case some unexplained force turned it on.

Leslie, still in her black terry-cloth robe, excused herself momentarily to walk back to one of the bedrooms and came out holding a Bible. She sat down with it in her lap, stroking the cover like it was a kitten. I wanted to ask,
What’s with the Bible?
But I knew better. I could tell that she had struck some fragile balance with whichever concept she was clinging to, and it was literally saving her life, keeping her from all too voluntarily diving back into a black sea of bad habits and overpowering needs. I shuddered at the amount of mental and physical strain it must take to abstain from a crank addiction.

“God finally taught him a lesson,” she offered.

The smell of burned toast pervaded the room, begging for the windows to be cracked open. Now that I was sitting out of the fan’s way, with the smell sharp and the mobile stuffy, I wished she would turn it on. “That’s certainly one way to look at it,” I said nicely, not snotty and with a sweet smile. I wanted to be encouraging with this woman because I didn’t know how easily she might break. The bouts of paranoia for a recovering meth addict take a long time to beat.

“There’s
no
other way to see it.” She sucked on her bottom lip and made a kissing sound. Her face seemed to want to fold in on itself. “What goes around comes around.”

“Well, I suppose I should thank him for keeping me employed then.” I smiled closed-lipped, holding back the desire to tell her that
she was mixing up religions with the karma thing. Or maybe not, depending on how you looked at it. That was the thing about them; you could always dice ’em up and serve them any way you wanted. I pulled out my notebook and looked as pleasantly as I could at her, at her pallid complexion, slight build, and the dark circles discoloring the milky translucent skin below her eyes. They held a haunting quality, as if her troubled life had lent them pathos, if not wisdom. I tried to see her father’s features in her and could only see some similarity in her thin nose and wide-set eyes. She was much smaller than her sister, Heather, and she reminded me of someone, perhaps an actress, not because she was exotic or particularly beautiful, but because of the anxiousness in her expression. “When did you last see Victor?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

“How long’s a while? Weeks, months, several days?”

She sighed. “I guess a couple weeks. He’d come by—it might’ve been a weekend, but Lewis wasn’t here, so maybe it wasn’t a weekend and he was at school.” She shrugged. “Or maybe he was with my sister. Anyway, he was just looking for a fight.”

“A fight?”

Leslie set her Bible on the floor by her chair, went to the kitchen, and returned with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Yeah,” she said through the corner of her mouth as she lit it. “He had heard that I’d been seeing someone and wanted to know who it was. I suppose you know we used to see each other; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”

“When did it end?”

“Summer. August.”

“You tell him you’re seeing someone else?”

She shook her head, then looked out the window, one elbow resting on her other arm hugging her waist, the cigarette dangling in her fingers as if it might fall. She had that elusive quality, as if she belonged on some overly anorexic photo shoot of drugged-out, hollow-looking young women who might blow away with the next strong wind. Or that she
might fade away like a ghost at any moment, wisps of white matter left in her place. I felt for Joe—could almost feel his pain pinging somewhere inside me. I glanced at Monty sitting on the other easy chair jotting information down, quiet and poised as usual. “Why not?” I asked her.

“Because he had a temper.” She began pacing. “That’s why.”

“And you were protecting him?”

“Pretty much.”

“His name?”

“Paul. Paul Tyler. Nicer than Victor ever was.” She stood still for a moment and shook her head, her eyes distant.

“Do they know each other?”

“No. Thank the Lord.” She bit her lower lip, then sucked on it. “He’s watching out for me and Paul now. And Lewis.”

“Who is?”

“The good Lord.” She turned to me, her eyes irritated.

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” I held up my palm. “So the last time you saw Victor, which was about two weeks ago—”

“Maybe three.” She sat down.

“You said he was angry?”

“Yeah, the usual. Started yelling at me for seeing someone else. Calling me a slut.” Still holding her cigarette, she picked up her Bible again and hugged it to her chest and began rocking back and forth. I noticed it had a sticker of crossbones on its underside. It was the local Bones Church, I thought, the latest craze in the area, that had helped save her, offered the young and the unmoored salvation with its message wrapped in cool, skateboarder imagery. “Threw the usual fit. Said I’d regret it.”