Dark Rivers of the Heart

crime wasn't solved for a while. For six years, in fact."
        The vibrations from the helicopter engine and rotors traveled through the frame of the craft, up Roy's seat, into his bones, and carried with them a chill. A not unpleasant chill.
        "The boy and his father continued to live on the ranch," Duvall said.
        "There was a father."
        The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.
        Roy turned up the fourth and final photograph.
        The man in the shadows. That piercing stare.
        "The boy's name wasn't Spencer. Michael," Gary Duvall revealed.
        The black-and-white studio photograph of the man in his middle thirties was moody: a fine study in contrasts, sunlight and darkness.
        Peculiar shadows, cast by unidentifiable objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn by the subject, as if this were a man who commanded the night and all its powers.
        "The boy's name was Michael-"
        "Ackblom." Roy was at last able to recognize the subject in spite of the shadows that hid at least half the face. "Michael Ackblom. His father was Steven Ackblom, the painter. The murderer."
        "That's right," Duvall said, sounding disappointed that he had not been able to hold off that secret for another second or two.
        "Refresh my memory. How many bodies did they eventually find?"
        "Forty-one," Duvall said. "And they've always thought there were more somewhere else." 'They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,"
        " Roy quoted.
        "You remember that?" Duvall said in surprise.
        "It's the only thing Ackblom said in court."
        "It's just about the only thing he said to the cops or his lawyer or anyone. He didn't feel that he'd done anything so wrong, but he acknowledged he had. So he leaded guilty, confessed, and accepted sentencing."
        " 'They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,"' Roy whispered.
        As the Rover raced through the Utah morning, sunshine angled among the needled branches of the evergreens, flaring and flickering across the windshield. To Spencer, the swift play of bright light and shadow was as frenetic and disorienting as the pulsing of a stroboscopic lamp in a dark nightclub.
        Even as he closed his eyes against that assault, he realized that he was bothered more by the association that each white flare triggered in his memory than he was by the sunshine itself. To his mind's eye, every lambent glint and glimmer was the flash of hard, cold steel out of catacomb gloom.
        He never ceased to be amazed and distressed by how completely the past remained alive in the present and by how the struggle to forget was an inducement to memory.
        Tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand, he said, "Give me an example. Tell me about one of the scandals this nameless agency smoothed over."
        She hesitated. "David Koresh. The Branch Davidian compound.
        Waco, Texas."
        Her words startled him into opening his eyes even in the bright steel blades of sunshine and the dark-blood shadows. He stared at her in disbelief. "Koresh was a maniac!"
        "No argument from me. He was four different kinds of maniac, as far as I know, and I sure wouldn't disagree that the world is better off with him out of it."
        "Me neither."
        "But if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wanted him on weapons charges, they could've collared him at a bar in Waco, where he often went to hear a band he liked-and then they could've entered the compound, with him out of the way. Instead of storming his place with a SWAT team. There were children in there, for god's sake."
        "Endangered children," he reminded her.
        "They sure were. They were burned to death."
        "Low blow," he said accusingly, playing devil's advocate.
        "The government never produced any illegal weapons. At the trial they claimed to've found guns converted to full automatic fire, but there each sect member-all legal. Texas is a big gun state. Seventeen million people, over sixty million guns-four per resident. People in the sect had half the guns in the average Texas household."
        "Okay, this was in the newspapers. And the child-abuse stories turned out to have no apparent substance. That's been reported-even if not widely. It's a tragedy, for those dead kids and for the