A FEW MINUTES LATER I watched the paramedics carry Maisey on a gurney to the back of an ambulance and place her inside. The night air was cold and a paramedic had pulled a blanket to her chin. Her face was turned from me, but I could see a marbled discoloration on her neck, like the shape of a hand. A sheriff's deputy wearing latex gloves came out of the house carrying a vinyl garbage bag that contained Maisey's jeans and torn blouse and undergarments.
Doc climbed into the back of the ambulance with her and looked back at me, his face like I'd never seen it before.
"I'll follow y'all to the hospital," I said.
He didn't answer. A paramedic closed the door and the ambulance turned around in the yard and drove back through the meadow toward the gate and the dirt road. The engine made no sound, and I could hear the grass that grew along the two-track lane brushing against the ambulance's undercarriage.
"Your friend is having a bad night, so I don't hold his rudeness against him," the sheriff said. "But I'm gonna tell you what I told him, and you can repeat it to him in the morning. There were three bikers."
He held up three fingers in front of me.
"One way or another we'll nail them. That means your friend takes care of his daughter and I take care of the law. You hearing me on this?" the sheriff said.
"Yeah, I am, Sheriff. What bothers me is it's the same bullshit I ran on crime victims when I knew the perps would probably skate," I said.
"I don't care for your manner, Mr. Holland, but I'm gonna let that go… We talked to the boy she was with earlier. The kids told Dr. Voss they were going to a movie. But that wasn't the real plan. After you and the doctor left, they thought they'd have a little private time together. Except they had a fight at some point and the boy went home. I say 'at some point,' do you follow me?"
"They were in the sack?" I asked.
"Neither one is willing to say that, but that'd be my guess."
"So even if you nail the bikers, their attorney will put it on Maisey's friend?"
"You're a defense lawyer. Do you know an easier client to get off than a sex predator?"
"I couldn't tell you. I don't take them."
"You damn shysters take anybody with a checkbook," he said.
Then he shook his head as though taking himself to task. "Look, back in the 1860s the Montana Vigilance Committee lynched twenty-two murderers and highwaymen," he said. "They bounced them off cottonwood trees and barn rafters all over the state. I guess it could make a man yearn for the good old days. But this ain't them. You tell that to Dr. Voss for me."
Try telling him yourself, bud, I thought as he walked away from me, the thickness of his sidearm showing against the flap of his coat.
I stayed with Doc in the waiting room at St. Patrick's in Missoula while he paced and hammered one fist on top of the other.
"Slow it down, Tobin," I said.
He stopped pacing, but not because of me. He was listening to a conversation outside the door. Two uniformed deputies were enjoying a joke of some kind, one with coarse edges, a reference to sodomy, a laugh at the expense of a woman.
Doc stepped out into the hall.
"You guys have something else to do?" he said.
"What?" one of them said.
"We're all right here," I said, stepping into the deputy's line of vision.
One deputy touched the other on the arm, and the two of them walked back toward the hospital entrance.
"I'll buy you a cup of coffee across the street," I said to Doc.
"I'm going back to the emergency room," he said.
"They told you to stay out. Why don't you let them do their job?"
"You lecture me one more time, Billy Bob, and I'm going to knock you down," he replied.
I couldn't blame him for his anger. He was a good man who loved his daughter, and the two of them had just stepped into the middle of an unending, degrading, and callous process that treats victims and family members as ciphers in an investigative file, rips away all vestiges of their privacy, and often inculcates in them the conclusion that somehow they are deserving of their fate.
I left Doc alone and went outside into the darkness. The maple trees were in full leaf, the night air crisp and tinged with smoke from a grass fire on a hill. Children were riding bikes on a sidewalk and the sounds of a baseball game broadcast from the West Coast came through the open window of an old brick rooming house. It was a scene from the brush of Norman Rockwell. But inside the hospital Maisey Voss was plugged into a morphine-laced IV, her body strung with purple and yellow bruises that went into the bone, the fetid breath of her attackers still wrapped around her face like cobweb.
A few feet away I saw L.Q. Navarro leaning with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, rolling a cigarette, his down-tilted Stetson and black suit silhouetted against the lighted entrance of the emergency room.
"You don't have anything to say?" I asked.
"I'd head for the barn on this one," he said.
"That wasn't ever your style, L.Q.," I replied.
"Doc fired them bikers up because he cain't let go of his wife's death."
"You don't walk out on your buds," I said.
"He says he didn't like Vietnam? Maybe dying has messed up my ability to remember things. I thought SEALs was volunteers."
I never could win an argument with L.Q. He twisted the ends of his cigarette and put it in his mouth and struck a kitchen match on the butt of his holstered revolver. His skin and mustache flared in the cupped flame of the match.
"This one ain't just about bikers. Why do you think the sheriff pointed you at that alcoholic crime writer and his wife, the actress, what's that gal's name, the one who snorts up coke like an anteater?" L.Q. said.
"I stubbed my toe on that one, too."
"You gonna keep us here?"
"I'll let you know," I said.
He drew in on his cigarette and breathed the smoke across the tops of his fingers. His eyes were filled with a black luminescence, the ascetic, lean features of his face even more handsome in death. I thought I saw him grin at the corner of his mouth.
A HALF HOUR LATER Doc Voss joined me outside.
"They moved her upstairs. You want to hear what those bastards did to her?" he said.
"I was a cop, Doc. I've been there," I said.
But he told me anyway. In physiological detail, his voice cracking in his throat, his palms opening and closing at his sides.
"She's alive, partner. A lot of predators don't leave witnesses," I said.
"You're pretty glib for a guy on the sidelines," he said.
I let it pass and looked down the street, away from his angry stare.
He pressed the ball of his thumb into my arm.
"What would you do if she were your daughter? Don't you lie, either," he said.
"Try to get the wrong thoughts out of my head," I replied.
"You and L.Q. Navarro stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people," he said.
"They tortured a DEA agent to death. They threw down on us first."
"My daughter doesn't count as much as a federal agent?" he said.
"I think you're working on a nervous breakdown, Tobin."
I walked away from him. Down the street a sheriff's department cruiser pulled around the corner and approached us. Inside were the two deputies whom Doc had insulted earlier. One of them sat in back with a handcuffed man whose jaws were bright with gold stubble, his long, tangled hair tied up on his head with a bandanna that leaked blood above one eye. The deputy in back lifted the handcuffed man's chin with a baton, as though displaying a severed head on a plate.
"This is one of the guys who raped and sodomized your daughter. He fell down a fire escape while resisting arrest," the deputy said. "Lamar, you got something you want to say to Dr. Voss?"
"Yeah. My dick in your ear," the biker named Lamar Ellison said out the window.
"The standards in street mutts gets lower every day," the same deputy said, shaking his head. He tapped on the seat for his partner to drive on.
Doc stared at the rear window, his jawbone flexing.
"They got one. They'll get the others," I said.
"It's not enough," he replied.