Read Online Light of the World by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

refers to Yahweh’s statement in the Old Testament that He existed before the beginning of time.”
    “So the guy who wrote this has a little problem with ego?”
    “It’s called the messianic complex. It’s characteristic of all narcissists.”
    “I want to get a forensic team up to that cave in the morning.”
    Through the window, I could see water pooling in the north pasture and the green-black sheen of the fir trees when lightning leaped between the clouds.
    “The victim was raped?” I said.
    “We don’t know yet. Her jeans were pulled off. Her panties were still on. Have you worked many like this?”
    “More than I want to remember.”
    “Dixon is supposed to come in tomorrow at eight. If he doesn’t, we’ll pick him up. Does your daughter still have that arrow?”
    “I’ll ask her.”
    “If Dixon’s prints are on it, I’m going to owe you and her an apology.”
    “No, you won’t. I think you’re doing a good job.”
    “In the last two years we’ve had ten sexual assaults on or near the university campus. A couple of the victims claim that university football players raped them. Sometimes I wonder if the country hasn’t already gone down the drain.”
    I had grown up in an era when a black teenage boy named Willie Francis was sentenced to die by electrocution in the St. Martinville Parish jail, nine miles from my home. In those days the electric chair traveled from parish to parish, along with the generators, and was nicknamed Gruesome Gertie. The first attempt at the boy’s electrocution was botched by the executioners, one of whom was a trusty, because they were still drunk from the previous night. Willie Francis screamed for a full minute before the current was cut. Later, the United States Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, and the governor who wrote the song “You Are My Sunshine” refused to commute the sentence. Willie Francis was strapped in the electric chair a second time and put to death.
    I did not speak of these things to the sheriff, nor do I mention them to those who pine for what they call the good old days. “See you in the morning,” I said. “Be careful on our road. It looks like it’s about to wash out.”
    T HE EARLY DAWN was not a good time of day for Gretchen Horowitz. That was when a man with lights on the tips of his fingers used to visit her room and touch her with a coldness that was so intense, it seared through tissue and bone into the soul, in this case the soul of a child who was hardly more than an infant.
    When Gretchen woke from her first night’s sleep in Montana, the rain had stopped and the cabin was filled with a blue glow that seemed to have no source, the windows smudged with fog or perhaps even the clouds, which were so low they were tangled in the trees on the hillside. She put water on her face and dressed and, while Clete was still asleep, eased open the door and got into her pickup and followed the two-lane along a swollen creek into Lolo.
    At the McDonald’s next to the casino she bought a breakfast to go of sausage and scrambled eggs and biscuits and scalding-hot coffee, then drove back to the ranch and walked up the hillside and spread her raincoat on a flat rock and began eating, the first glimmer of sunlight touching the tops of the trees far down the valley.
    She heard sounds, up on the logging road, and only then noticed the cruiser parked behind Albert’s house. Down by the south pasture, a second cruiser was coming slowly up the road, as though the driver were looking for an address. The driver turned under the archway and parked by the barn and got out. He was a heavy man who wore a suit and street shoes and a rain hat; in his left hand he carried a pair of cowboy boots. He opened the back door and pulled out a man dressed in skintight Wranglers and a long-sleeved snap-button red shirt and a straw hat. The man was barefoot, and his wrists were handcuffed behind him.
    The man in the suit fitted his hand under the