The Highway (29 page)

*   *   *

After she terminated the call, she called Jenny Hoyt. Jenny was weary and seemed resigned to very bad news. No, she’d not heard a word from Cody, and Justin had heard nothing from the Sullivan girls. No, Cody wasn’t sleeping it off in any town or county jails anywhere in southwestern Montana. No, the Sullivan parents hadn’t received a call or text from their daughters, either. Ted Sullivan, Jenny said, was flying to Helena that morning and had asked her about the investigation thus far.

“Don’t send him down here,” Cassie said. “He’d only get in the way.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Jenny said. “He sounds frantic on the phone. I’m not sure I can keep him here.”

“I’ll call you as soon as the warrant arrives,” Cassie said, leaning against a battered open Dumpster behind the bar, “and I’ll keep you posted after we go to the compound.”

“Thank you.” After a beat, Jenny said, “So are you thinking he might have gone there last night and someone did something to him? Maybe those church people?”

“I don’t know.”

“I remember reading about them a few years ago,” Jenny said, “They seem like a strange bunch of people. But why would they hurt a cop? That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Cassie said.

*   *   *

She closed the phone and dropped it in her bag. A light wave of pinprick snow washed through the air. The storm was sudden but didn’t seem long-lasting, she thought. All she needed was to get socked in before the nascent investigation even got going, she thought with gloom.

Whether it was the name Legerski mouthed about her or the questions he’d raised at the table, the simple weight of doubt seemed suddenly very heavy. All along, she’d assumed the disappearance of the Sullivan girls and Cody’s disappearance were of course related. But what if they weren’t? What if the girls had taken a wrong turn and hooked up with some boys their age, and Cody had simply kept driving? There
hadn’t
been enough time yet to conclude they were officially missing.

What if an all-out effort by Legerski and the Park County sheriff’s department turned out to confirm only that Investigator Cassie Dewell had overreacted for no good reason? She could guess what her colleagues would say about her, and knew what Sheriff Tubman would instigate.

She felt very alone. So alone, she wished Cody were there with her.

There was nothing to do but wait until she heard from Legerski about the warrant. She hoped it wouldn’t take long.

If nothing else, she thought, she could use the interim time getting a better feel for the highway and the valley. Figure out where the compound was and look it over from a distance. Drive the road south toward Yellowstone to see if she could find anything about the Sullivan girls or Cody the trooper had missed.

As she turned away from the blowing snow she found herself facing the open trash container. Cody always had a thing about garbage cans, she knew. He explained it by saying that when people threw things in the garbage it was almost like ridding the items from their lives. Out of sight, out of mind, he’d said. More than half the valuable evidence he’d retrieved in felony crimes came from rooting through garbage cans, he said.

So she raised up on her toes and looked in. It was obvious Jimmy didn’t have his trash hauled away very frequently. Hundreds of empty bottles, food containers, and open packages were inside almost to the top. She thought that the entire social history of the bar for the past month could be determined by the layers inside; what customers drank, what they ate, what they’d tracked in.

On the very top was a fairly clean empty box that had probably held the cinnamon rolls that were on the breakfast menu, she thought. She smiled, remembering what Legerski had said about Jimmy’s famous rolls. But obviously, Jimmy didn’t bake them: they were delivered.

She reached in and opened the box. The bottom was scored with caramel-colored swirls from where the rolls had been, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. Because in the corner of the box was a small heap of ashes and cigarette butts. Jimmy had obviously used the empty box as a dustpan when he cleaned up that morning. She recognized the Marlboro Red butts as the kind Cody left everywhere.

Cassie removed the box and carefully poured the contents into a clean paper bag she found next to it.

She looked inside and counted: eight. Eight cigarettes. She could have them tested for DNA but she had no doubt who’d smoked them. Even Cody wasn’t capable of smoking eight in twenty minutes. Which meant he’d been there much longer than twenty minutes the night before.

She wondered why Legerski had lied to her. And why Jimmy had gone along with it.

She decided to question Jimmy herself to find out, but as she walked around from the back of the building she heard a motor start up and a hiss of thrown gravel.

Jimmy’s old Jeep Wagoneer was sizzling down the highway to the north. He’d hastily hung up a
SORRY FOLKS, WE’RE CLOSED
sign in the front window.

32.

9:47
A.M.
, Wednesday, November 21

R
ONALD
P
ERGRAM WAS AWAKENED BY
the burr of his cell phone on his pillow. He grunted and reached to turn it off, assuming it was the dispatcher calling to tell him about his next load, but the number displayed on the screen jolted him awake. It was a temporary number of a prepaid cell phone Legerski used only for emergencies.

As Pergram rolled to his side in bed the laptop that had been perched on his white belly slid off onto the mattress. He’d fallen asleep watching the DVD he’d selected, even before he got satisfaction from it. He was still bone tired and he’d not come close to having enough sleep.

“Yeah.”

“Meet me at the place,” Legerski said. He sounded agitated. Pergram could hear road sounds in the background. Legerski was calling from a moving vehicle.

“Now?”

“Fuck yes,
now,
” Legerski said. “We’ve got problems.”

Pergram closed his eyes. Pure red anger gathered in his chest and pushed up his throat. But he was wide-awake.

“Isn’t that your department?” Pergram said. “I do the hunting and run the heavy equipment, and you solve the problems. That was the deal.”

“Jesus, this isn’t the time. Just get your ass to the place as soon as you can. I called Jimmy and he’s on his way.”

Pergram’s heart leapt. “Are you talking about a session?”

“Don’t be a moron. We don’t have time for that until we’re in the clear. I’m talking about a stupid cunt cop snooping around. She doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing but she’s got me worried.”

His hopes dashed, Pergram slid his feet out of bed and placed them on the cold floor.

“Okay, I’ve got to get dressed.”

“Bring the tapes,” Legerski said. “All of them.”

Pergram glanced down at the collection in the ammo box near the side of the bed.

“The DVDs too?”

“Of course the DVDs, too. You know what I meant.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Pergram said, killing the call.

Yeah,
Pergram thought,
I know
exactly
what you mean.

*   *   *

Before leaving his room, Pergram checked the loads in the magazine of his Taurus .380 ACP and shoved it into his waistband at the small of his back. A blunt two-shot Bond Arms .45 Derringer went into the front right pocket of his Carhartt parka. His sheathed bone-handled skinning knife fitted nicely into the shaft of his right work boot, and a razor-sharp throwing knife went into the left.

He got back down on his knees and retrieved the “Oh Shit” box and bolted the floorboard hatch.

Locking his room behind him, he carried an ammo can in each hand and went as quietly as he could through the tunnel of refuse toward the front door. Although he couldn’t hear her, he felt her presence and turned his head sharply. She glared at him from an ancient overstuffed chair in an alcove of boxes and translucent containers packed with items that still had the price tags fixed to them. Her wide feet were up on a stool made of milk crates and the fat from her sides pooled over the armrests. She’d been just sitting here, in the shadows, waiting.

“Where you going?”

“Out.”

“What you got there in your hands?”

The ammo cans. He didn’t look down at either when she asked, but the handles felt like they were burning his flesh.

“Might go to the range,” he said.

“Go ahead and lie to me,” she said. “You’re up to no good. I can see it on your face. I’ve always been able to tell when you’re out causing trouble.”

The rage hadn’t receded far, and it climbed into the base of his throat again. Three steps and he’d be on her. Three steps swinging two heavy steel containers. He wondered how long it would take them to find her in all the garbage.

“Not like JoBeth,” she said. “JoBeth never caused no trouble. She was the opposite of you. I still don’t know how the two of you grew up in the same house. It just don’t seem possible.”

He said, “I’m taking your car again.”

Her mouth dropped open. The reaction was worth it, he thought.

“What if I need to use it?”

“It’ll wait.”

“I’m going to have to hide the keys from you, Ronald. I swear, I’ll hide the keys.”

“I’ve got a spare set,” he said, turning for the front door.

The last thing he heard was, “Put some damned gas in it this time!”

*   *   *

There was a winter storm blowing in from the north and Pergram drove into the teeth of it. The sky was dark and close, the bumpers of the individual clouds tainted slightly green, the clouds themselves blocking out the omnipresent mountains. Thin smokelike waves of snow twisted across the highway, rolling like sidewinder snakes he’d seen firsthand in Texas. The heater in the Riviera wasn’t working worth a damn and the air the vents expelled smelled like radiator fluid. The ammo box filled with tapes and DVDs was on the passenger seat next to him.

She always brought up JoBeth, he thought. She used JoBeth like a blunt object to beat him with. Thin, lovely, athletic JoBeth, his little sister. Two-sport all-state athlete, honor roll, Future Farmers of America award winner. Somewhere in all that shit back home were her clippings from the Livingston
Enterprise
, each one of them painstakingly scissored out an eighth inch from the text and pressed into a three-binder scrapbook that used to sit prominently on the front coffee table when it could still be found. JoBeth’s official U.S. Marines induction photo was on the wall, her clear blue eyes gazing out with a sense of purpose as straight as her jawline. When the word had come that the Humvee she was riding in in Iraq was destroyed by an IED, Pergram had mixed emotions. His mother didn’t. She went off the deep end and found some kind of solace in “collecting.” Collecting, Pergram thought, and acting the martyr. Her perfect child had been taken away, leaving her with …
him.

Not for long, he thought.

*   *   *

Out of habit, Pergram checked traffic ahead and behind him on the highway—there was none—before slowing and taking an unmarked two-track that wound through high sagebrush toward the mountains. Tiny pellets of snow rattled across the hood of the car and against his driver’s side window. Twisted fingers of forsaken lone sage scraped the undercarriage of the Riviera as he drove.

The old road took him through a narrow stand of old mountain ash trees and down a switchback slope. He crossed an ancient bridge constructed of railroad ties that sagged over a creek. Every time he drove the tractor over it he expected it to cave in, but it never did.

The trees cleared and he topped a rise and the old Schweitzer place was laid out in front of him. It wasn’t really a ranch because it had too few acres—maybe a thousand acres—to feed enough cows to make a go of it, he’d heard. But when crazy old man Schweitzer bought it in the early 1950s, ranching wasn’t his main priority. His thought then was to find a location that would withstand a nuclear war with the Soviet Union or Red China. That’s why he chose acreage with high mountains on all four sides far away from any population center that might be a target. That’s why he built the bunker beneath his house with three-foot reinforced concrete walls and ceiling. It wouldn’t withstand a direct hit, but humans inside could conceivably live through just about anything else. The air-filtration system was on its last legs but it still worked. They’d know when it failed when they found asphyxiated dead bodies inside. So far, though …

*   *   *

Just get your ass to the place as soon as you can.… Don’t be a moron.… Bring the tapes.

Pergram reran those words through his mind over and over again. Each time he did he got angrier. He wondered what that woman cop had said to Legerski to cause his reaction.

He remembered a time a few years before when his secret world was his and his alone. Before Legerski bullied his way into it. Before Jimmy joined them. Things weren’t perfect back then because he was always afraid he’d get caught. But he learned as he went along, got better and more cautious all the time. He’d never been arrested or even questioned. The only person who seemed to suspect him—and blab about it—sat in a ratty old easy chair with her fat feet up back at home. She didn’t know the extent of his secret life and would be shocked to find out. She just knew he was inherently rotten and she didn’t mind sharing that opinion with anyone who asked. Rick Legerski had asked, apparently.

Things were so much better before, he now realized. At least no one ever called him while he was sleeping and told him to get his ass anywhere. Or called him a moron.

No one, Pergram thought, had the right of status to say that. No one had the right to treat him like a simpleton, an idiot, a mouth-breather who would do what he was told and not question the reason why. Not unless they’d been through what he’d been through and done what he’d done on the highways.
He
was the one who had started this, he thought.
He
was the one who made it happen.
He
was the one who delivered the goods to people who not only didn’t appreciate it but started to think they were better and smarter than he was.