Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

killer operating on the game reserve. A connection with the double homicide at the rest stop is anybody’s guess. The FBI says the male, the porn producer, was Mobbed up, so maybe it was a contract hit, an object lesson of some kind that has nothing to do with the college kids.
    “The boy who was killed behind Albert’s house was shot with a forty-five. The killer at the rest stop used a nine-millimeter. But there are a lot of similarities just the same. The shooter picked up his brass at both scenes, and he made both males show submission to him before he shot them. He also enjoys hurting women. You ever investigate a torch murder?”
    “Both of us have,” Clete replied.
    “You saw the vic at the crime scene?” Higgins asked.
    “I’ve never stopped seeing the vics,” Clete said.
    Joe Bim removed two manila folders from his file drawer and opened them on his desk. The faces of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell stared up at us from their photos. Two of the photographs had been taken for school yearbooks. Two of them had been taken in the morgue. The disfigurement done to their features by their killer or killers was of a kind you hope no family member will ever be forced to look upon.
    “Jesus Christ,” Clete said.
    “We have other open homicide cases here in Missoula County, cases that have been total dead ends,” Joe Bim said. “One involves a guy we called the Mad Hatter. Some guy in a stovepipe hat went into a beauty parlor down in the Bitterroot Valley, made three women lie in a circle, then shot and killed all three of them. Then he cut off their heads. We don’t have a clue who he was, where he went, or why he did it.
    “Somebody out in Hellgate Canyon killed an eighty-year-old woman in a nursing home with a screwdriver. Maybe it was an inside job, maybe not, we just don’t know. We’ve pulled ten-to twenty-year-old human bones out of campgrounds, but we have no idea who the vics are or how they died. This is supposed to be a place where tourists roast hot dogs on their summer vacations.”
    “We’re going to start at Cindy Kershaw’s dormitory, Sheriff. We appreciate what you’ve told us,” I said.
    “I pulled a week’s worth of surveillance tape from the health club where the Kershaw girl worked. You want to check it out?”
    “What’s in it?” Clete said.
    “A kid who could be my granddaughter,” Joe Bim replied.
    We went into a separate room where the sheriff plugged an edited and synthesized cassette of the health club’s surveillance tapes into a VCR.
    Most cops and newspeople tend to use categorical names for both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, particularly violent ones that involve depravity and sadism. Why? The answer is simple: It’s easier to believe the perpetrator is a genetic aberration or the product of a subculture that is unconnected to our lives. By the same token, the victim is someone unlike us, perhaps a person who, like a candle moth, chose of his own accord to swim through flame, perhaps someone actually seeking an executioner.
    Then you look at a videotape of an eighteen-year-old girl wearing down-in-the-ass jeans, her baby fat exposed, vacuuming a rubber-matted floor with headphones on, the vacuum pack on her back swaying to music that only she heard.
    In the background, people in workout dress clanked iron and sweated on the vinyl padding of the Life Fitness and Hammer Strength machines and pounded along on the treadmills as though they were traversing great spans of topography. On the opposite side of a glass window, a man lay on a table while a physical therapist pushed his knee up toward his chest; his mouth opened wide with a muscle spasm.
    “Would you back it up a few frames?” Clete said.
    “You see something?” Joe Bim asked.
    “Yeah, the guy by the watercooler,” Clete replied. He waited a moment. “Hold it right there.” He studied the frozen image of a lean man with uncut hair who wore his shirt outside his slacks. The man was watching