Dalton turned away from the scrawl and faced the cop. “You’re right. I think I know who the cutter is.”
Cutler nodded, as if Dalton’s words had only confirmed his instinct. “I figured you did. And now you’re gonna tell me.”
“No. I can’t.”
Cutler’s face seemed to freeze over.
“You do not leave this room. I will take you apart, mister.”
“Anything I tried to do for you would get shut down by Langley.”
“You’re not in Langley, Bucky. You’re right here in front of me.”
“I can give you something,” said Dalton.
“What?”
“My word.”
“Your word?”
“Yes. My word that your cutter will be dead in a week.”
Cutler’s rocky face did not change. Threat, violence rose up around the two men like smoke from a fire. Dalton held his look.
Finally, the trooper sighed. “This guy? He’s on a tear?”
“Yes. So far we think he’s killed a man in Mountain Home, three more victims in London, another man in Italy. Now Mr. Churriga. And he’s getting… crazier. This eating thing… he’s losing himself. Coming apart.”
“And you’re on him? I mean, solid leads? You’re… close?”
“Yes. Real close.”
“I don’t know you, Dalton. I don’t know how good you are.”
“I’m good enough to take this man out.”
Cutler’s look was searching, as if he was trying to see into Dalton’s soul. After a while his features altered.
“I’ll want proof. Courthouse proof. DNA. The knife he used. Something I can show the families. There will be no… ambiguities.”
“You’ll get it.”
“DNA, Dalton! Tissue. Blood. Take-it-to-the-hangman proof!”
“One week.”
“Seven days.”
“At the longest.”
Cutler turned and walked to the window, stared out over the mountain slopes for a while. He spoke after a time, still looking out the window, but seeing only what was burned into his memory forever. “Something you should know about me, Mr. Dalton. One of those young nurses this cutter mangled up was a girl named Alice Foley. My daughter Ellen grew up with Alice Foley. Alice was in our house every day. Like a second daughter. Her mother and I were close once. Long ago, when we were both young. Close. You understand me?”
Dalton nodded, said nothing, and waited.
“I don’t forget much, Mr. Dalton. You fade on me, you break this word to me, I will find you. And that will be a bad day for both of us, but not as bad for me as for you. You follow?”
“I follow,” said Dalton.
Dalton and Fremont were fifty miles west of Billings, running down a steep, winding grade with the twelve-thousand-foot peaks of the Absaroke-Beartooth Range rising up in the southwest, the rolling grasslands of eastern Montana opening up before them, and the yellow cloud of refinery smog that always hovers over Billings barely discernible on the eastern horizon.
A long, haunted silence had gathered the two men up in separate solitudes since they left Butte, and now they were listening to a piercingly sad Rachmaninoff concerto. It came to an end.
Fremont sighed and looked over at Dalton.
“What did you do?” asked Dalton.
“I took his hand. I put the morphine controller into it. He tightened his fingers down on it. I pressed the feed button and I held his hand tight around it. After a few minutes his breathing got real slow. The monitor alarm started to beep so I turned the volume down. This nurse came to see what was going on. I shoved her out and closed the door on her. Locked it. Crucio flatlined a couple minutes later. I pulled the sheet up over him and walked out. The nurse and the trooper were standing there. She started to say something but the trooper put his hand on her shoulder and nodded to me. I walked out to car, waited for you.”
Dalton looked at Fremont briefly. Since there was nothing to say, they agreed to say nothing, and they both went back to pretending to concentrate on the road ahead.
Ten miles farther down the line and the clamor of the cell phone made him jump.
It was Sally.
She had the faxes.
“This Gibson guy gets around. He used his ATM all over the Northwest in the last two months. He’s averaging two hundred a day. Must be paying cash for everything, because there are no debit-card payments. Just these cash withdrawals. In the months of August and September he went from Cody, Wyoming, to Mountain Home, Idaho, then to Missoula, and then to Coeur d’Alene.”
“When was he in Mountain Home?”
“Ahh… let’s see. He took out five hundred dollars from a First Idaho Credit Union ATM on Two Moons Way on Thursday, August thirty. At four in the morning.”
“Can we get video of the withdrawal?”
“From the ATM? Probably not, not after all this time. They usually loop the tape. And even if they still had it, we’d have to ask the FBI to do it, which Jack will never go for.”
“Okay. What’s this tell us?”
“It tells me the highest amount of cash activity was in the final days of September and the first two days of October. He drew out four thousand dollars, at five hundred bucks a pop, going from Helena to Butte to Livingstone, back up to Bozeman, then Billings, Hardin, Sheridan, the last at some place called Shell, Wyoming.”
“Four thousand? How much money did he have in the account?”
“Close to fifteen thousand.”
“I thought he went bankrupt.”
“Yeah. He was. I got the record of it, then I called this Poundmaker guy back. He pranced around the issue for a while but I got the impression that Gibson had used the ATM card to deposit over twenty thousand dollars cash in the middle of August.”
“Did he say where Gibson got this twenty thousand?”
“I didn’t have the time to push him. You want me to?”
“Yes, if you can, after we hang up.”
“May I get biblical on him?”
“Please.”
“Now I do have something here that connects to him to Porter. There’s every reason to believe that Gibson was, at the very least, in England around the time that Porter’s family got killed.”
“I knew it. Thank you, Sally. Thank you.”
“Well, let me lay it out for you. I checked his passport records and he flew United coach from Denver to Gatwick and was entry-stamped there by the Brits on October second. From there he passes out of mortal ken until he resurfaces back in Greybull, Wyoming, on October eleventh. Four days ago,” she added, helpfully.
“Anything since then?”
“He withdrew a thousand over two days in Greybull. That’s the end of the records. I pulled his file from Personnel.”
“Any contact with Porter?”
“None on the records. Most of the stuff in it is all about his beef with the IRS. He wrote fifty-six letters over a two-year period, starting in oh three. They went out to various honchos at the NSA, State, even wrote a few congressmen and the junior senator from Wyoming. The last one was written about three months ago, and it’s mostly scrawled gibberish. Across the top he’s written ‘culebra’ and ‘purgatoire,’ on the bottom he’s written ‘atone,’ references to something hidden, to a struggle — ‘die born’ — what looks like a U.S. flag with a skull — ‘snake eater’ — all of this in block capitals — the word ‘messenger,’ and it’s all clustered around this weird drawing…”
“Describe it for me.”
“Well, just a mad scrawl, but there’s a daisy, or some kind of flower, over a crescent moon and what looks like a cross. Now that I look at it, I guess they’re a lot like that earring you were talking about earlier, the silver earring?”