After a bend, we saw below us a tree that had been struck by lightning. It looked like a man who’d been crucified, with his head and hands torn off and just a few shreds of flesh hanging from him. The dead tree was alone, surrounded by healthy trees on an impressively steep slope. I gestured to Duigan to stop the car.
“You brought me all this way to show me a dead tree?”
I felt very embarrassed. I knew I was going to hurt him a hell of a lot. When he found out, he might well take out his service pistol and shoot me in the head. He knew he wasn’t going to be getting any good news in this place. He seemed resigned, though, ready to face the reality of the situation.
“So, Al, what’s so special about this dead tree?”
I hesitated for a while then said, “It’s as dead as the girls I threw down there.”
Duigan leaned against the car. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest, but he made a huge effort to control himself and said, “What girls, Al?”
“The missing girls. Six co-eds from Santa Cruz.”
He came and stood in front of me. “Like the Dahls’ daughter, you mean?”
I nodded. He started crying and I felt genuinely sorry for him. Then he stopped abruptly.
“Oh my God, you killed the Dahls’ daughter?”
I tried to regain the initiative. “That’s why I brought you here. It’s for you to decide. There probably isn’t much of them left. The bears, the coyotes, the wolves, the birds of prey . . . ”
“Stop with the fucking zoo, Al! How did you kill them? With a hammer?”
“Oh, no, with my 9mm pistol, a bullet just under the breast. And I made sure they couldn’t be identified. I cut off their heads and hands.”
“And what did you do with them?”
“I threw the hands away in the forest. I kept the heads. I just couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them. You won’t believe this, but the day I appeared before the psychiatric panel that wiped my record clean, I had two heads in the trunk of my car. But then . . .”
“Then what?”
“Sorry to go into these details. Even when I put them in the refrigerator, I had to throw them out after two or three days.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I put them in the garbage. You know, people imagine things about heads. Even a big head isn’t so heavy. There you are, Mr. Duigan, now it’s for you to decide. I’m not trying to apologize for anything, but you have to know that I picked up hundreds of girls. But with these girls, I couldn’t stop myself, even with alcohol. And then three days ago, bringing the last two girls here, I realized it wasn’t their fault at all. It took me two more days to make up my mind to kill my mother. Now, I feel as if the evil has gone out of me. I feel as if I’ve been exorcised. I know I’ll never harm anybody again.”
Duigan was silent, not daring to look any further than the tips of his toes. If we’d been in a movie, the cry of a sparrow hawk would have pierced the silence of the forest. But in that place, all the sounds seemed to have been sucked down into the bowels of the earth. Duigan walked to the edge of the precipice and tried to make out something below.
“You won’t see anything. They’re a long way down. Nobody will ever find them by accident. Not even hunters. I almost got noticed one night. I was just tipping a body over the edge when a guy pulled up in a pickup, a surfer type with white teeth, a little drunk. He was surprised to see me there in the middle of the night, and asked me if everything was all right. I went up to him and smiled. He left without suspecting a thing. So, what’s it going to be?”
“I’m going to call the Oregon police, and then, when I get back to Santa Cruz, I’m going to hand in my resignation.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Duigan. You know, I did everything I could to resist. I could have killed so many more.”
He’d stopped listening to me. The only thing he was thinking about was his decision to quit, and almost certainly to leave the region of Santa Cruz—to do what, I wouldn’t have dared to ask him.
“Tell Wendy that . . . that I’m sorry too.”