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could see Albert’s house, but nobody in Albert’s house could see him. He chose this spot deliberately, and he knew who lived down below. This fuckhead is a classic psychopath. He stays high on control and inflicting pain while he’s within sight of people who have no idea what he’s doing.”
    “That doesn’t mean he knows Albert.”
    “Maybe,” Clete said. But his attention had already shifted to something down the slope.
    “What is it?” I said.
    Clete worked his way about five feet down the incline, holding on to pine trunks for balance. He took his ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and tried to pick up a leather cord and a small wood cross that lay at the base of a lichen-encrusted rock. The cord was broken, and it slipped off his pen.
    “Don’t taint the scene, Clete,” I said.
    “If we hadn’t found this, no one would have ever known it was here,” he said. But he didn’t touch the cord with his hand; instead, he lifted up the end with his pen. “Look, the break is dry and there’s no discoloration. The kid tore it off the shooter, or the shooter tore it off the vic.”
    “A logger might have dropped it, too.”
    “No, something weird happened out here. This isn’t a random abduction and killing. I’ll call the evidence in to Higgins,” he said.
    “Okay, partner, but I think you’re overreading the information,” I said.
    Clete pulled himself up the incline and stepped back on level ground. His face was blotched from exertion and the high altitude. He looked at me a long time.
    “Say it,” I said.
    “What’d the guy do to the girl before she died?”
    “Everything he could without leaving his DNA,” I replied.
    “We’re going to hear more from this guy. You know it, Dave. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
    The mist was white blowing through the trees. The rock that was stippled with the dead boy’s blood glistened in the weak light. I picked up a pinecone and flung it into space.
     
    DURING THE WEEK we heard a lot more about Ridley Wellstone and his family, in the same way you hear a word or name for the first time and then hear it every hour for the next month.
    The Wellstones had arrived in Montana with checkbook in hand, not unlike the Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley millionaires who had come in the 1990s, believing that the beauty of the state was simply one more gift that a just and wise capitalistic deity had bestowed upon them for their personal use.
    I must make a confession here. After telling Clete to ignore the destruction of his fishing gear by the Wellstone security personnel, and after telling Albert to forget the past and write off Ridley Wellstone’s arrogance, I had made calls to friends in the oil business in both Lafayette and Dallas. The information I gathered about the Wellstones may seem from another era. It isn’t. To a southerner, the story of the Wellstone family is a familiar one. The coarseness and privation of their background, the occasional ruthlessness of their methods, and the exploitation of their fellow man are rites of passage that are forgotten within a generation, if not sooner. The battle-fatigued knight returning to his castle, dragging his bloodied sword across stone, does not have to give an accounting for his deeds. Why dwell on the sight of burning huts in a peasant village when you can thrill to the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux?
    Ridley and his brother, Leslie, were the children of a Texas wildcatter by the name of Oliver Wellstone who, at age ten, had carried water by the bucket to drilling crews in the original Spindletop Field outside Beaumont. At age twenty-three, during the Depression, he borrowed one hundred dollars from a Bible salesman and talked a black farmer into accepting a promissory note for the lease on a two-acre cypress bog. The rig was constructed of salvaged railroad ties; the drill was powered by a twelve-cylinder motor removed from a junked Packard automobile. Three weeks after drilling