Badlands (2 page)

“Oh man, he's gutted.”

“Should we call the ambulance?” the other deputy asked.

“Maybe two—one for each half.” The man laughed harshly.

“Anyone else inside?”

“Not that I can see. But I haven't checked around yet to see if anyone was ejected.”

“Do you know who he is?”

The flashlight choked down and illuminated the bloody head of the driver. Kyle could see jet-black hair, blood, and winking glass in his scalp.

“Don't know him, but he looks like a Mex. Got a bunch of unattractive neck tattoos.”

The second deputy shined his light on the back bumper. “Arizona plates.”

“‘Land of Enchantment,'” the first deputy said and he dropped to all fours and shined his light inside the vehicle.

“That's New Mexico. Arizona is ‘The Grand Canyon State.'”

“Oh. My mistake.” Kyle thought the deputy seemed to be looking for something inside. “I would have guessed he was an Idahole. Either that or a Utard or Washingturd.”

“Did you see anything? You seemed to be all over this.”

“Yeah,” the first deputy said. “I had a speed trap set up on Everett Street so I was watching the highway. Then I saw this guy driving his car like his hair was on fire when he went off the road. I hit the gas and I was the first on the scene. How did
you
get here so fast?” The tone was accusatory.

“I just punched out and was heading home when I saw you peel out. I'm surprised you didn't hit your lights, but I thought I'd head over here to see if you needed a hand.”

“Yeah, I appreciate that. I guess I was just so surprised to see the wreck I didn't think about my siren or lights. Don't tell anyone.”

The second deputy laughed, and said, “I won't.”

The first deputy said, “One car rollover at five thirty in the morning. Want to lay odds on what this guy has in his system?”

Kyle thought, One car? Had the deputy not seen the race with the second car?

“No bet,” the second deputy said. He turned away from the first deputy and spoke into a microphone attached to his left shoulder. “This is BCS thirty-two requesting an ambulance for a deceased subject and an evidence tech for a one-car rollover on highway…”

While he made the call, the first deputy stood back up at full height and swept his beam across the brown tall grass around the wreck.

Kyle lowered his profile until his chin rested on the top of his handlebars. They didn't know he was there. Should he tell them about the second car? How the second car had two men inside and it had forced the other car off the road? He knew what he should do but something held him back.

Then he pushed his bike out from behind the Russian olive bush until he was in plain sight on the trail. The deputy's flashlight hit Kyle in the eyes and blinded him.

“Stay right where you are, son,” the first deputy said. “There's something here you don't want to see.”

“Who is that kid?” the second deputy asked after finishing up his request.

“Paperboy.”

“What's he doing out here?”

“Delivering papers, I'd guess.”

“Ha!”

Kyle stopped and held his hand up against the flashlight to shade his eyes.

“What's your name, boy?” the fat deputy asked.

Kyle didn't answer.

“Ask him if he saw anything,” the second deputy said as if Kyle weren't there.

“Look, see his face? He won't be any help.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now I recognize him,” the first deputy said. “It's the Westergaard boy.”

Kyle opened his fingers and peeked through them to see the first deputy gesture by rotating his index finger in a circle around his right ear. The other deputy nodded, then looked back at Kyle with sympathy on his face.

He said, “Poor kid. But at least he's got a work ethic.”

“You would too at that age if the newspaper was offering a signing bonus,” the first deputy said with a chuckle. “It ain't like when you and me were kids.”

Then, more gently, “Son, turn that bike around. Go finish your route. There might be someone out there stupid enough to want to read the
Grimstad Tribune
.”

The second deputy laughed at that.

Kyle didn't respond, and he clumsily turned his bike around in the trail. He felt the light on his back and saw his long shadow out ahead of him. Then the light went out.

“You want to go meet the ambulance up on the road?” the first deputy asked the second. “I'll keep looking around here in case there's another victim.”

*   *   *

KYLE WAS
hurt by that index-finger-in-a-circle thing. Of course, he'd seen it before. But he was even more hurt by that look the second deputy gave him, that look of pity. It wasn't fair, but it somehow made him invisible.

And he was confused by the conversation between the fat older deputy and the younger one. There had been
two
cars. How could the fat deputy not have seen the second car take off?

He stopped at the bundle and lowered his kickstand. After transferring all of the papers from the right pannier into the ink-stained left pannier, he lifted the bundle and dropped it in the empty bag. It felt like there were bags of sand inside. The bundle outweighed the newspapers and would make his bike list, but it wasn't as clumsy as he thought it might be if he stood on the pedals and shifted his weight to the left.

Then he started pedaling back up the trail. The incline would make it hard work but it would also warm him up, he hoped.

He still had a lot of newspapers to deliver before six thirty or angry subscribers would start calling the gnome Alf Pedersen and complaining about him. If he got many more complaints, Alf had said, he would lose the job and have to return the signing bonus. Kyle knew it was already spent, so that wouldn't work. His mom had bought a new HD TV at ALCO with the money.

Kyle's hands were freezing.

And that bundle was
heavy
.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Wilson, North Carolina

AS SOON
as the airplane door was opened to the exit ramp at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, Investigator Cassie Dewell felt her hair begin to frizz. It was subtle at first, and it reminded her of a self-inflating sleeping pad she'd once seen unfurled in a dome tent on a camping trip in the Crazy Mountains.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

She wore the dark blue suit she reserved for funerals and for testifying in court, a white blouse with a string of fake pearls, and low heels. She'd received a few compliments on the outfit that might have been perfunctory but had cheered her nevertheless. Of course, on the occasions she received the compliments she was back in Montana, not the South, and her hair wasn't frizzing out due to the sudden humidity and looking like an oversized helmet made of fur like it was now.

Cassie stood and retrieved her garment bag from the overhead compartment and a bulging black fabric briefcase that weighed more than her clothes.

Inside the terminal, Cassie stepped aside and let the other passengers proceed in front of her toward baggage claim. They all seemed to be in a hurry. She wasn't, although she'd waited two years for what was about to happen. Two years of scanning the ViCAP and RIMN law-enforcement databases every morning for an arrest or verified sighting. Two years of waiting for her cell phone to ring.

Now that it had finally come to pass, she was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other. Her heart raced and she gasped for air. She knew the locals waiting for her in the terminal would start to wonder if she was ever coming out.

The case file in her briefcase consisted solely of reports, affidavits, and testimony concerning one man: Ronald Pergram, aka the Lizard King.

Within a few hours, she would be face-to-face with him—or someone the locals
thought
was him—in the interrogation room of the Wilson County jail.

*   *   *

CASSIE WAS
thirty-six years old with short brown hair and large brown eyes. She'd lost twenty pounds twice in two years and gained it right back, plus a few. She was self-conscious about being heavy and thought that her suit felt and looked like a sausage casing.

But she didn't care how she felt or looked if she could help put Pergram in a cage for the rest of his life or, better yet, into the ground. Before she boarded her flight in Helena, she'd Googled “North Carolina death penalty” on her iPhone and was reassured to find out the state had put more than forty-three murderers to death since 1977. She wanted the Lizard King to be number forty-four.

The Lizard King had haunted a large part of her life since he'd been unmasked near Park County, Montana, by her former partner Cody Hoyt. Cody paid for the discovery with his life. At the time, Cody had no idea that Pergram, a long-haul trucker, was a serial killer likely responsible for the disappearances of scores of truck-stop prostitutes known as “lot lizards,” or that Pergram had local associates who were involved in the torture and murder of the women. Pergram had also likely abducted victims whose cars had broken down on the highways across the nation. Although entire cars had been unearthed where they'd been buried in a high mountain valley, not a single body had ever been found. Cassie uncovered the associates and shot one of them to death in a highly publicized shoot-out. But the Lizard King himself vanished in his truck.

In his truck
. It was still incomprehensible to her as well as members of the FBI's Highway Serial Killers Initiative how Pergram and his massive Peterbilt and trailer had simply disappeared. The only evidence they had that he still might be out there was the increase in the estimate of missing lot lizards, from seven hundred to more than a thousand.

Cassie had never seen Pergram in person, but she'd gathered the few photos she could find of him, including his high school yearbook photo from Livingston High and two commercial driver's license (CDL) head shots. Those photos of a doughy and unremarkable man in his midfifties with wavy ginger hair and sullen eyes had in fact been flashed across television screens throughout the nation. His face, as dull and pedestrian as it was, was the cause of parents' nightmares as well as the working girls who crawled from truck to truck at nights.

That face had been in Cassie's nightmares as well, since it was very likely he had seen her even if she hadn't seen him.

Which was why she'd left her six-year-old son Ben in the care of her mother Isabel and had flown to North Carolina. Her idea had been to review the thick file on the airplane. But when she opened it up, she realized she'd practically memorized every page: every documented missing victim's profile and photo, every newspaper or Internet clipping, and every printed report from the FBI on the twenty to twenty-four suspected serial killers who drove long-haul trucks.

*   *   *

MEETING HER
in the lobby of the airport near baggage claim were Wilson County Sheriff Eric Ernest Puente, County Prosecutor Leslie Behaunek, and FBI task force liaison Special Agent Craig Rhodine.

They stood in an obvious huddle and were easy to spot. Sheriff Puente was round and short in his uniform, and had an easy smile. Behaunek wore a dark suit similar to Cassie's, although it fit her better. She had dark red hair and was tall and lean with a long, almost horselike face. Agent Rhodine looked like every FBI field agent Cassie had ever met: fit, intense, clean-cut, and dressed in a sports coat, tie, and slacks. He looked ex-military even if he wasn't. Any other time, Cassie would have been a sucker for that look. Not now.

“Are you Investigator Dewell?” the sheriff asked, who stepped out, removed his hat, and extended his hand.

“I am,” she said, shaking his hand.

“We're glad you could come on such short notice. And bless your heart, I guess I expected some kind of Montana cowgirl in cowboy boots and a hat,” he said in a soft Carolina accent. “‘An Angel with a Lariat,' as k.d. lang once sang. Do you know the song?”

Cassie noticed that Behaunek rolled her eyes in embarrassment at the comment.

“Yes,” Cassie said, “I've been known to wear boots. I haven't gotten around to the hat and the rope, though. And I don't know what to tell you about my hair. It's the humidity, I guess.”

“You think this is humidity?” The sheriff laughed. “My lord, you should come back in August.”

“Our car is outside,” Behaunek said after introductions were made. “It takes an hour to get to Wilson and we can go over everything on the way there.”

Agent Rhodine tilted his chin up. “We think we just might have our man.”

Cassie nodded grimly.

“There's something we want to show you on the way, Miss Cassie,” Sheriff Puente said. Cassie knew “Miss Cassie” was a Southern thing and she overlooked how condescending it came across to one not used to it.

“What's that?”

“His truck.”

*   *   *

DECEMBER IN
North Carolina was brown and gray but not white. Light rain fell from a close granite sky. The hardwood trees were tall and skeletal and a thick brown carpet of leaves covered the forest floor. The walls of pine were so close to the highway she could see nothing through them. It was like driving through a tunnel, and she wondered how anyone who lived there knew where anything was if they couldn't even see forty feet in any direction. She'd grown up in Montana and was used to big skies and vistas.

Back in Montana, snow was on the ground and had been since October and the mountains were snowcapped.

An FBI agent drove the black SUV with U.S. Government plates and merged onto I-40. Rhodine occupied the passenger seat. Cassie sat next to Sheriff Puente in the second row, and Behaunek sat alone in the back. Upon entering the Ford Expedition, Behaunek opened her briefcase and shuffled through documents.