"I asked for it."
He grinned and spun his hat on his finger. "Who am I to argue with superior minds?" he said.
Temple Carrol had been told the juvenile file on Wyatt Dixon's knife-throwing friend, Terry Witherspoon, had been sealed. But there was another avenue. Temple had written down the name of the small town in western North Carolina where Witherspoon had been convicted, and I called the sheriff's department in
the county seat there and asked to talk with any officer on duty who handled juvenile cases.
My call was transferred to a detective named Benbow.
"Terry Witherspoon's a suspect in a murder investigation in Montana?" he said.
"Not exactly."
"Sounds a mite vague, Mr. Holland. Regardless, his records were sealed a long time ago. For all I know they were destroyed when he reached legal age."
"You know him?" I asked.
"I wish I didn't."
"Give me a thread," I said.
"You say you were a Texas Ranger?"
"Yes, sir."
I waited.
"Then you know the rules. Wish I could help," he said, and hung up.
But a half hour later he called back.
"I can't tell you anything about the records the court has sealed. We clear on that?" he said.
"You bet."
"But I can tell you about suspicions I have that never became part of a formal investigation. A year ago we had a bomber hid out in these mountains. I think Terry was bringing him food. I don't have any evidence to prove that. But I've known Terry since he was seven years old, and he's the meanest little shit I ever came acrost."
"He's hooked up with terrorists?"
"The cause will find Terry, not the other way around. A farmhouse was broken into not far from the caves where this bomber was hid out. The owner and his wife probably came home and surprised the intruder. He tied them both to chairs and stuffed gags in their mouths. Then he cut the woman's throat and shot the man."
"You think Witherspoon did it?"
"The FBI still hasn't caught the bomber. Whoever was feeding him knew every cave in this county. I think the same guy killed the two people in the farmhouse. We have a small population here. To my knowledge, we've produced only one kid around here the likes of Terry Witherspoon. You know what kills me about this stuff, Mr. Holland?"
"What's that?"
"The only job this simpleton ever had was boxing up groceries at a supermarket. We'll spend our careers getting a net over a box boy."
"You know why he came out to Montana?"
"He said he wanted to be a mountain man in a whites-only nation. Is it true you can buy Montana T-shirts that say 'At Least Our Cows Are Sane'?"
That night, outside a small settlement near the Idaho border, a truncated man with arms that were too short for his torso was carrying everything he owned out of a clapboard house and packing it into his automobile. The moon had just risen above the hollow where the man lived, and the crests of the mountains were black against the sky and the hard-packed dirt road in front of the house wound like a flattened white snake under the railroad trestle, past other dilapidated houses, out to the four-lane highway the man planned to drive full-bore all the way to the Cascades and Seattle.
The man's name was Tommy Lee Stoltz, and he wore a black cowboy hat mashed down on his ears and engineering boots with double soles and heels and thick glasses that made his eyes look like large marbles. Tiny blue teardrops were tattooed just below the corners of his eyes so that he appeared to be in a state of perpetual mourning. The night air was cold but he was sweating inside his clothes and his heart raced each time he heard automobile or truck tires on the dirt road.
Why had he ever left Florida? He'd had a good life dry-walling, hanging in open-air bars down on the beach, getting ripped on beer and cheap weed that was smuggled in from the islands, and opening up his scooter on Seven-Mile Bridge. Even that one-bit he did on a road gang in the Keys wasn't bad. The winter days were beautiful, and the fish was fresh and deep-fried and, if you wanted it, the Cubans on the serving line at the stockade would heap shitpiles of black beans and rice on your plate.