Badlands (5 page)

She'd once read that some reptiles had a transparent membrane like a second eyelid that covered their eyes. Spradley seemed as if he had the same adaptation. His eyes were open but shielded from images he didn't want to see. And they seemed incapable of showing emotion.

“Help me make sure I've got everything that happened in Montana two years ago in the right order, okay? It's something I think about a lot because there were loose ends and nobody left alive to tie them up—except you.”

Spradley let out another heavy sigh as she methodically went through the events when the Sullivan sisters from Colorado were abducted on the highway after their car broke down. She recounted finding the concrete bunker on the ranch that served as the staging location for the horrendous abuse and murder of dozens of women by Ronald Pergram and his two associates. She described encountering one of them on the stairs down into the bunker and shooting him dead. He'd been a Montana state trooper named Rick Legerski.

And she recalled standing helplessly by the smoldering ruins of Pergram's childhood home. At the time, she said, they didn't know if Pergram's body was inside. After it was carefully investigated, they did find a body. But it wasn't Pergram. The body belonged to Pergram's mother.

He listened to her with his dead-eye stare, but he didn't interrupt. She reasoned that despite his denials and subterfuge, he was
interested
to hear what Cassie was telling him. All he knew previously about the death of his associate Legerski, she guessed, was what he read in the papers or saw on the Internet.

But he refused to take the bait, to say or do anything that could be used against him. A suspect couldn't be arrested for blinking his eyes.

She paused, her mind racing. There had to be a way to get him to admit he was the Lizard King.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said. She rose and rapped on the door and the deputy let her out.

*   *   *

“IT'S NOT
working,” she said to Behaunek. Sheriff Puente nodded and looked away. He didn't appear to be upset with Cassie but with the hopelessness of the situation. Agent Rhodine, on the other hand, appeared defeated.

“No, it isn't,” Behaunek said. “He's too good. Our chance to crack him was right after you walked in. It shook him up, we could tell. But now he's settled in. There's nothing you can say that will make him break character.”

“I still like my idea about finding him hanging in his cell,” Puente said.

“Please,” Rhodine said with frustration. “Maybe he's telling the truth?”

It was a trial balloon that hit the wall with a thud.

The four of them stared at the man in custody in the monitors. He hadn't moved since she left.

“It's him, I know it,” Cassie said.

“That doesn't help us right now, you knowing it,” Rhodine said, brusquely running his hand through his perfect hair. “Despite what you led him to believe in there, you've never actually seen him in person. It's in your report. Defense counsel will shred us if we try to go with that one.”

Cassie stared at Spradley-Pergram on the screen. Rhodine was right and she knew it. She thought about what she knew about the Lizard King, about his past in Montana. About the fact that he'd murdered perhaps hundreds of helpless women and probably his very own mother.

“We're going to have to cut him loose,” Rhodine said. “We've held him too long as it is. Sheriff…”

“I know, I know,” Puente said, his face red.

Cassie said, “I can try something else,” and spun on her heel. She didn't reply when Behaunek asked what she was contemplating.

*   *   *

CASSIE SAT
back down across from him. He beheld her with a weary expression and said, “Are we done here?”

“Close but not yet.”

Then she made her play.

She said, “We know this Montana state trooper who was shot and killed was the mastermind behind the whole operation,” she said, continuing in the same tone she'd used to recount the tale. “It was on his property, after all. Of the three of you involved in the crimes, he was the only one intelligent enough to pull it off for so long. He was the only one with a college education. Even his ex-wife conceded how smart he was, even if he was diabolical.”

Although he didn't say anything or move in the slightest, she could hear the rate of his breathing increase. The Lizard King didn't like it that she had so casually dismissed his intelligence. She wished he was plugged into a heart rate monitor so they could watch how he was reacting.

“It's such a shame that the trooper was such a deviant,” she said. “But he must have been very charismatic and convincing to be able to recruit both of you into his sick world and to make you keep your mouths shut. I know it couldn't have been the other way around.

“I checked up on you, Ronald. I interviewed your old teachers, your neighbors, and the employees at your old trucking company. I think I might know you better than anyone else left alive.

“Let's talk about your new truck. Yellow—that's kind of bright and cheery, isn't it? Kind of, you know, metrosexual or something? Have you come out of the closet, Ronald? Now that you have a bright yellow truck, what are you? The Lizard
Queen
?”

She paused and smiled at him. “You aren't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, Ronald?”

His breathing pattern was becoming more rapid. The long wheeze had morphed into a series of quick whistles, but he didn't seem to be able to hear himself. Although his expression was frozen in place, his ears had reddened. And she could see a tiny pearl necklace of perspiration on his scalp beneath his dark hair.

“It couldn't have been easy growing up in that house with no father. And your mother, before she got obese and obsessive, couldn't really see any value in you. Especially not compared to your sister JoBeth, God rest her soul.”

Cassie held out her right hand, palm up and gestured to it. “Here we have JoBeth: two-sport all-state athlete, honor roll, Future Farmers of America award winner. She's athletic, attractive, and smart. She was even the homecoming queen. Then she joined the U.S. Marines and went overseas to Kuwait. She was a
hero.
And just like my husband, she was killed in action. Your mother kept the folded flag they sent her on the wall, right next to JoBeth's trophies. She was proud of JoBeth, and who wouldn't be?”

Cassie raised her left hand and expelled a puff of breath as she looked at it. “And here we have Ronald. Dull, overweight, held back in the third grade. The only physical activity he participated in was masturbating in his bedroom. Picked up for DWI the week before he planned to join the army, so even they wouldn't take him. He took one minimum-wage job after the other and had to come home every night and look at that flag on the wall. He is a forty-five-year-old man who still lives at home with his mother.”

She paused and nodded to her right hand and said, “Winner.” Then to her left, “Loser.”

Cassie lowered her hands to the tabletop and shook her head as if she was disappointed in him.

“All those women you tortured and killed, Ronald, just to get back at your mother and sister. It's pathetic when you think about it—”

He exploded across the table and screamed, “
You fat fucking bitch!”
before she had time to react. His huge manacled hands were on her throat, his thumbs crushing her windpipe. She tried to pry them off but he was twice as strong and she couldn't break his grip.

Cassie rose in an attempt to twist away, and she impulsively kicked at him but her toe bounced off the table leg. The pressure on her throat was unbelievable and the sight of his grimacing face darkened and faded out of her sight like a curtain being drawn across a window.

Footfalls, like cascading thunder, echoed from the hallway.

She never heard the door burst open.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Grimstad

T-LOCK WAS
pacing like a caged panther on the inside of the dirty glass storm door when Kyle got home after school. Kyle climbed off his bike and leaned it against the old washing machine on the side of the house. He used to keep his bike in the front but there had been so many stories of bike thefts recently that he used the new location. The washer had been there for a year. Kyle's mom was always asking T-Lock to take it away to the dump or at least lock it closed with a chain so no little kids could crawl inside and die. Neither had been done.

T-Lock opened the side door and leaned out, his eyes bulging. He glanced left and right down the block, then growled, “You, get in here.
Now.
”

Kyle nodded. He knew he should be scared. T-Lock could be a scary guy and Kyle knew he must be in trouble for something.

Kyle simply stared at the man. He considered turning his bike around and riding away—but where?

T-Lock's real name was Tracy Andersen and he was a roofer. That's what he told people who asked what he did. He said he got the name “T-Lock” because of the shingles he used to work with. So no one would forget, he had the name embroidered above the pocket of his denim jacket and tattooed on his forearm.

“I said move your ass, Kyle. I'm freezing to death standing here with the door open.”

It
was
cold. Clouds had blown in from the north and covered the sky in dark gray. Pelletlike snow came in waves, carried by gusts of wind. The brown grass—what little there was of it in the front yard—was catching the snow and holding it there. Kyle wondered how much snow there would be the next morning when he went out to do his paper route. He needed those warm boots and some gloves. Maybe he could convince his mom to take him to Work Wearhouse later that night.

“
Now,
Kyle. Come on, man.”

If T-Lock wore clothes other than black concert T-shirts and jeans with big holes in them—and maybe even shoes instead of flip-flops—he wouldn't be so cold all the time, Kyle thought.

Kyle climbed off his bike, readjusted his backpack full of books, and marched toward the front of his house with his head down. Their house was in the older part of town. Big trees, small lots, buckled sidewalks, no fences, lots of cars parked on the street because the homes had been built in the olden days before two- and three-car garages. Some of the houses, usually owned by old people, still looked pretty nice. Others didn't. Kyle's didn't.

T-Lock kept the storm door open for Kyle, who trudged up the cracked concrete steps and ducked under T-Lock's outstretched arm. The storm door was closed behind him, followed by the front door. The inside of the house smelled of cigarette smoke, as usual. T-Lock wasn't supposed to smoke inside except in the attached one-car garage, but he did it anyway. Especially since Kyle's mom worked the afternoon shift at McDonald's and wasn't around.

It was dark inside the house because T-Lock kept the curtains and blinds closed during the day.

Kyle didn't expect T-Lock to grab him by the shoulder and spin him around so they were face-to-face. The move nearly made Kyle lose his balance and fall to the floor because his heavy pack swung around as well.

T-Lock was in his face. “We gotta talk, Kyle, we gotta talk. I went out to the garage to burn one and you know what I found, don't you? You
know
what I found.”

T-Lock was his mother's boyfriend and had been, on and off, for a few years. He was tall and wide-shouldered with long stringy hair parted in the middle. He had deep-set eyes and a slow stoner's smile when he smiled. In the winter he grew his beard out and didn't shave it off until summer. T-Lock's whiskers were thin and scraggly and about an inch long. The tips of his whiskers curled white as if covered by frost.

“Do you know what's in that bag you brought home?” T-Lock asked, shoving his face closer to Kyle's. His eyes were bulging and there was a throbbing vein in his forehead that mesmerized Kyle because he'd never noticed it before. Of course, T-Lock rarely got so close. Kyle could smell his smoky breath.

Kyle shook his head. When he'd returned that morning with the heavy packet he didn't know what to do with it. He couldn't leave it outside. His mom was still asleep with T-Lock in their bedroom, so he couldn't ask her. He carried it from the canvas
Tribune
bag into the junky garage and put it on the floor under the workbench. It was tight in there because T-Lock had pushed an old Toyota Land Cruiser into the garage the year before so he could get it running. It was still there and not running. Kyle's mom had to park their old minivan out on the driveway, even in the winter.

“You really don't know?” T-Lock asked.

Kyle shrugged.

T-Lock stood and whooped as if he couldn't believe how dumb Kyle was. Then he bent back down and his face got serious. The intensity of T-Lock's eyes unnerved Kyle because he'd rarely seen him look that way before. Usually, T-Lock was so laid-back it seemed possible he could drift off to sleep any minute.

“First, Kyle, tell me where you found it.”

Kyle could talk. He just didn't like to. It was hard, although it seemed to be getting a little easier since he'd started working with the speech therapist and special ed teacher at school. He liked his special ed teacher. She was a kind and roly-poly lady from Mandan. He didn't like the speech therapist, though. She spent most of their session texting with someone on her cell phone. The special ed lady hadn't been there that day, though, and he'd spent the whole time in class with the rest of the sixth grade. They watched movies. Kyle didn't like being in the class with the others because he was a year older than they were and they knew it. All of his old classmates and friends had moved up to seventh grade and middle school and had left Kyle behind.

“In the grass,” Kyle said.

T-Lock rolled his eyes. “I mean where, exactly, in the grass? You mean on somebody's lawn or something?”