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starting to expand into television.”
    “I’d let Wellstone and the past go,” I said.
    “I did, a long time ago. But Wellstone gashed a hole in my fuel tank. I called his house about it last night. A woman hung up on me. I think it was the gold-haired one who was sitting in the back of his limo.”
    Albert arched his back, squinting slightly. He stared up at the hill behind his house. “Did you know Chief Joseph and the whole Nez Perce tribe came right down that draw? They were trying to outrun the U.S. Army. They got slaughtered down on the Big Hole — women and children and the old people, too. The soldiers mutilated the dead and later robbed the graves.”
    “Yeah?” I said, not making the connection.
    “This place looks peaceful. But it’s not. The degenerate who murdered that college boy up there is the canker in the rose. It doesn’t matter where you go. The same fellow is always there. Just like that jailhouse I was in when I was eighteen.”
     
    THAT AFTERNOON CLETE came down to our cabin and asked me to take a walk with him.
    “Where we going?”
    He lifted his eyes up to the hill behind Albert’s house.
    “What for?” I asked.
    “The sheriff, what’s-his-name, Higgins, thinks it’s just coincidence that kid was killed behind Albert’s place.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Higgins says Albert called the Shrubster a draft-dodging fraternity pissant in the local newspaper. The paper actually ran the letter. He helped run a PCB incinerator out of town. He got into it with some outlaw bikers over a barmaid. He has a general reputation for causing trouble wherever he goes.”
    “Why would somebody execute a kid on his knees because he’s got it in for Albert?”
    “Somebody called in a 911 on the location. The caller also said the kid was alive. He wanted as many people as possible to suffer as much as possible. I don’t think Higgins knows what he’s dealing with. I don’t believe Albert does, either.”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “To use your own words, why do the shitbags do anything? Because they enjoy it, that’s why. Trust me, Streak, the guy who did this has got a beef with Albert.”
    I followed him up a switchback trail to the top of the ridge, Clete wheezing and sweating all the way. Then we walked up a gradual slope through pine and fir trees to a level place where yellow crime-scene tape had been strung through the tree trunks. The tape had been broken in several places, probably by deer or elk, and the dirt road that led off the hillside was rutted by tire tracks. At the higher altitude, the air had become cold, flecked with rain, filled with the sound of wind sweeping across the enormous breadth of landscape below us.
    I believed our climb up to the crime scene was a morbid waste of time. Even though the tape was broken, we had no right to go inside what was obviously a proscribed evidentiary area. Second, the ground was soft and already crisscrossed with the footprints of investigative personnel. In all probability, any forensic evidence there had already been removed, disturbed, tainted, or destroyed.
    Except for one element that was still in plain view: blood splatter on a rock the size and shape of a blacksmith’s anvil that protruded from the softness of the ground. The blood looked like it had been slung from the tip of an artist’s brush.
    Clete put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and peered down through the trees at the roof of Albert’s house. He removed his porkpie hat and messed with it idly, then replaced it on his head, the brim slanted down. Then he removed it again and twirled it on his finger.
    “What are you thinking?” I asked.
    “The guy who drove the kid up here beat the shit out of his own car. Why would he want to risk busting an axle or tie rod when he could have driven into the national forest just as easily? The kid died on his knees. The shooter probably made him beg or do worse. The shooter did all this right above Albert’s house. He