“The CIA in Langley?” bleated Mr. Poundmaker.
“That’s where we keep it. Got doors and a roof and everything.”
“Yes sir. I’ll get on it as soon as we hang up.”
“Excellent.”
“May I speak with Willard?”
“No.”
“Will you kindly relay a message, then?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him I regret to inform him that we are no longer friends.”
“I’ll do it, but it’ll break his heart.”
“One more question—”
“Shoot.”
“Am I going to jail?”
“Not if you do what you’re told.”
“Will you report this to the FBI, Mr….”
“Dalton. Micah Dalton. If those banking records are in Langley before I get to Billings, this will stay between us, Mr. Poundmaker.”
“Where are you now?”
“Bozeman.”
“Dear God—”
Dalton shut the phone off.
“Jeez,” said Fremont. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
“Just don’t kill a friend of mine.”
“You really think Moot had anything to do with the suicide—”
“The death.”
“With Porter Naumann’s death?”
“I can hardly wait to ask him. By the way, Dick asked me to tell you that he regrets to inform you that you are no longer his friend.”
“He said that?”
“His words precisely.”
“Dick’s a dick.”
“That was my impression.”
They were forty miles farther east when Dalton’s phone rang.
“Dalton.”
“Micah, it’s Sally again.”
“That was fast.”
“This isn’t about the faxes. I’m still waiting for those. I was doing a run on the rest of the guys in Fremont’s unit and I turned up something.”
Dalton gave Fremont a brief sidelong look. “Yeah?”
“Your guy Fremont? He mention a Crucio Churriga?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Just coming up to Butte.”
“That’s what I thought. You might want to stop in there.”
“Okay. Why?”
She told him.
He thanked her, shut the phone down, and then he told Fremont.
Thirty minutes later, they were pulling off 90 and turning north onto Harrison. The old town of Butte was a tangled grid of dusty red Victorians that climbed up the ocher slopes of a ragged mountain, behind the crest of which lay an abandoned slag pit that was now the home of the world’s largest toxic-waste pond.
Below the steep grade of the old town, spreading out into the valley to the south and west, ringed in by snowcapped peaks to the north and east, was the suburban sprawl of the new town, a maze of shopping malls and trailer parks and cardboard housing gnawed all winter by storms off the Rockies and baked all summer by a blistering dry heat. Back in the 1880s Butte had been the home of the Copper Kings. Now it was the home of the Burger Kings and any number of hardscrabble peeler bars with names like Double Deuce and Trigger Time. A general air of resignation and gloom lay over the town, relieved from time to time by little explosions of domestic violence or clashes between what was left of the Indians and what was left of the miners. The patron saint of the town, and still its most famous son, was Evel Knievel, who honored his birthplace by getting out of town as fast as humanly possible — in his case on a Harley — and never going back.
The Copper Kings Palliative Care Center on Continental Drive — so named because the Continental Divide was a few miles up the mountain ring, on the far side of Elk Pass — was a fairly new complex of low limestone blocks scattered about the stony hillside under the spreading arms of Our Lady of the Rockies.
Dalton pulled the Crown Vic up under the portico and shut the engine down. A Montana state trooper pushed his way through the green-tinted double-glass doors and walked over to meet them. He was a big slope-shouldered man in his late fifties with a barrel chest, ruddy cheeks, careful blue eyes, and a snow-white handlebar mustache. His handshake was as hard as his face and his uniform would have made a Fort Bragg DI glow with admiration.
“You’re Mr. Dalton?”
“I am. This is my associate, Mr. Fremont.”
Fremont shook the trooper’s hand, looking a little worried. The trooper gave Fremont a once-over, looking skeptical. A cutting wind carrying yellow dust was swirling around the entranceway, stinging their eyes.
“I’m Bo Cutler,” said the trooper — a captain, by his silver bars. The biting dust seemed to have no effect on him. “Nice to meet you. I got your call from D.C. You boys are with the Federales?”
Dalton shook his head.
“No sir. Not the FBI. We’re with another agency.”
Cutler’s eyes narrowed and he showed them broad yellow teeth under his massive mustache. “That’s what I thought. Mr. Churriga’s medical insurance and his pension checks were sort of a clue. Okay. Let’s get this done.”
They both nodded. Cutler led them through the doors and into a broad lobby with a floor of limestone blocks. A cluster of nurses stood together in one end of the lobby, under a huge oil painting of a buffalo herd flowing over the plains under a lowering veil of thunderclouds. Cutler nodded to the nurses, whose faces all wore the same shattered, shell-shocked look, and led the way down a long hallway that smelled of iodine and stale piss toward a set of stainless-steel doors at the far end. Two young troopers stood on either side of the doors. When Cutler got to within some sort of critical distance known only to the troopers, they braced up and snapped out a pair of salutes, palms flat, faces set and blank. The doors were marked CCU.
Cutler bulled through the doors and turned left into a darkened room. Another trooper was sitting in a chair beside a hospital bed. He got to his feet and saluted as Cutler came into the room.
The bed was inside a large clear plastic tent. In the bed, under a crisp pink sheet, lay a skeletal figure, bony chest rising and falling. A rack of monitors beeped and whirred behind the trooper, and a tall IV drip stood beside the tent. Tubes ran into the man’s arm and another snaked out from under the sheet, dripping into a receptacle under the bed. The room smelled of ozone and blood and antiseptic.
Fremont came forward and looked at the man in the bed. The man’s face looked like a heap of raw meat. The lower part was a horror, a gaping red maw with a few pink molars showing. Fremont stood looking down at the man for a long time while Dalton and Cutler waited in silence. Finally Fremont turned away and looked at Cutler. “What happened to him?”
Cutler sighed deeply, making his gun belt creak. “Like we told you on the phone. Looks like the attacker peeled his face off. Skinned it, from the hairline to what was left of his jaw. The docs had already taken off a large section of Churriga’s lower jaw and some of the cheekbone, as you can see there. But the rest was pretty intact. Cancer was… aggressive. Rapid spread, so the docs say. But the cutter was — I guess he’d done it before. Worked fast but good.”
“No one… heard?” asked Fremont.
“Nobody to hear,” said Cutler. “Only two nurses on the ward at the time. Both of them were dead. Throats cut. Mutilated.”
“Before or after?” asked Dalton.
“The guy spent some time with them before he cut their throats.”
“Enjoying himself,” said Dalton, not as a question.