Badlands (4 page)

Cassie nodded and looked at her shoes.

“Too bad we can't have some kind of accident where he's found hanging by his belt in his cell,” Puente said.

“Please,” Rhodine said sharply, “I don't want to hear any more of that. We need to nail this guy by the book and we need to do it this afternoon or we'll have to cut him loose.“

He turned to Cassie. “That's why it's so important that you're here.”

She understood. And she didn't know if she was up to the task.

*   *   *

BACK IN
the SUV on the way into Wilson, Rhodine said to Cassie, “So have you done a lot of interviews with suspects?”

“What kind of question is that?” she snapped back.

“No offense,” he said, raising his palms to her in a gesture that read, “Calm down, lady.” She hated when men did that to her.

“I read up on her,” Behaunek said to Rhodine from the backseat. She had a pair of reading glasses perched halfway on her nose and looked over them at the FBI agent. “Dewell here put down the Lizard King's partner in a shoot-out. Hit him six times and killed him dead. I think she can handle an interview.”

Cassie appreciated the defense. But the fact was she hadn't done more than a dozen interviews in her career, and none as important as this.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Rhodine said to Behaunek with mock sincerity. “I just want to make sure she's comfortable with this.”

“You two talk like I'm not sitting right here,” Cassie said. “I know the situation we're in.”

*   *   *

THE SITUATION
was dire, as Behaunek had explained to her the day before on the phone. They couldn't prove that Dale Spradley was, in fact, Ronald Pergram, aka the Lizard King. Spradley was approximately the same size, shape, and age. He had the same profession and he had a kill room in his truck. But he didn't look the same in the photo Behaunek had e-mailed her of the suspect in custody.

Dale Spradley had jet-black hair, a thick Fu Manchu mustache, and horn-rimmed glasses. He had heavy jowls and was thirty to forty pounds heavier than Ronald Pergram's most recent commercial driver's license shot. Still, Cassie could see a resemblance that couldn't be disguised: the wide Slavic face, the flat expression, the soulless eyes.

It didn't help that Dale E. Spradley had what appeared to be proper documentation proving who he was, including a valid CDL, a social security card, load insurance, a medical examiner's report, and a federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) score sheet that showed he had a clean record.

Cassie had asked Behaunek if Spradley's DNA matched that of Pergram and the answer dismayed her. There was no Pergram DNA to match. None had ever been taken and since he'd burned his childhood home and all of his possessions to the ground when he left Montana, there was no way to get any. The only blood relative Pergram had that could have produced similar DNA was his mother who had died in the fire. No sample was taken of her remains. The same with fingerprints or dental charts: no record of Pergram.

But there was a hole in Spradley's story, Behaunek said. It wasn't enough to invalidate his identity but it was enough to hold him in custody until Cassie could arrive. No one in Oakes, North Dakota, could be found who could corroborate Spradley's claim that he was from there. It was thin, but it was something. Spradley claimed that he'd always kept to himself and had long ago left Oakes for a nomad's existence on the nation's highways, but not a single person could remember him in a small farm town of less than two thousand people?

So, Cassie was told, they had to tie Spradley to Montana and to the events that took place there two years before. If Cassie could get him to admit he lived there, get him to react in a way that would break character, they could arrest him and hold him long enough, they hoped, that the FBI super techs could come through with damning evidence of what Spradley-Pergram had done in the secret room of his semi-trailer. Additional time and publicity might even produce a witness who could place Spradley in Montana, or better yet connect him to the abduction of a truck stop prostitute.

*   *   *

“DOES HE
know I'm coming?” Cassie asked as the SUV pulled in front of the impressive and ancient county courthouse on Nash Street. The building was massive and gleaming with ornate fluted Corinthian columns and a recessed porch. It seemed to Cassie to be more courthouse than Wilson needed.

“No,” Rhodine said. “He doesn't know we suspect he's the Lizard King. At this point, he's being held for interfering with a police officer. We're hoping that when he sees you—the one person who knows more about him than anyone else who is still alive—it'll shake him. He'll know what we suspect the second you walk into that room.”

“Good.”

“And he's waived his right to a lawyer at least for now,” Behaunek said from behind her.

“That fits,” Cassie said. “He thinks he's smarter than anyone else. He thinks he'll never get caught.”

“So far, he's been right,” Puente said.

Cassie tried to swallow but her mouth was dry.

Behaunek said, “So it will just be you and him in the room. I imagine he'll be quite surprised to see you in North Carolina.”

Cassie nodded. Her hands were cold and her palms sweaty. She flexed her fingers in and out at her sides but kept her hands low so no one could see how nervous she was. “You'll be watching everything?”

“Of course,” Sheriff Puente said. “We'll have a deputy right outside on the other side of the one-way mirror. The rest of us will be a few steps down the hall watching the monitors. We'll have one camera tight on his face to record his reaction to seeing you the first time. The other one will be a two-shot of you both.”

Behaunek said, “We discussed how far you should go, and you need to be careful. We can't have anything on that video defense counsel can point to later and claim illegal coercion. If you start to go over the line, I'm going to open the door and break it up.”

“Got it,” Cassie said.

“Do you need anything before you go in there?” Sheriff Puente asked. “Water, or to use the bathroom?”

“I need to check messages and use the bathroom,” she said.

“Put on your game face,” Rhodine said as he opened the door for her. “We're all counting on you. We know you won't let us down.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said, fighting an urge to slap him.

*   *   *

CASSIE TRIED
to tame her hair in the mirror and failed, then drew her cell phone from her purse. No messages from her mother about Ben, which was good. Isabel didn't text or e-mail—she called. If Cassie didn't answer immediately, she kept calling. Cassie hoped she could get through the interview without hearing from her mother.

And there was nothing yet from the sheriff of Grimstad, North Dakota, where she'd made the short list of applicants for a much better-paying job as chief investigator. The sheriff there had promised to let her know his decision by the end of the day. Cassie checked her watch. It was 2:00
P.M.
in North Carolina, noon in Montana, and 1:00
P.M.
in Grimstad. She had hours to wait.

Then she raised her head and looked into her own eyes in the mirror and tried to steel herself for what was to come. For two years, the Lizard King had been out there somewhere but still a constant part of her life. She despised him, and wished she could sever the link today, right now, by opening the door to his conviction and his death.

She said aloud, “Let's go get this son of a bitch.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

Wilson

CASSIE LOWERED
her head and strode down the hallway toward the interrogation room. She could see Behaunek, Sheriff Puente, and Agent Rhodine gathered around two closed-circuit monitors in the communications center. As she passed them, Puente gave her a thumbs-up.

A deputy swung the door open and whispered, “I'll be just outside,” into her ear as she entered the stark white and windowless interrogation room.

The door shut behind her.

He was seated with his manacled wrists on top of a brushed metal table. He was a big man, bigger than she realized. His hands were pink and the size of hams. He had thick stubby fingers with dirty fingernails.

She had the strange feeling that she was watching herself enter the room from above, as if she wasn't really in her own body. She could see her disheveled hair, her too-tight suit. And she could see the man sitting at the table.

When he looked up at her his eyes blinked. There was no other gesture or tic to indicate he knew who she was. He sat absolutely still, breathing slowly with the slight wheeze of a fat man, his dead eyes fixed on her. But she saw it.
He blinked.

She hoped the camera caught it, too.

“Hello, Ronald,” she said. “It's been what—two years?”

Suddenly, she was no longer viewing the scene like an outsider. She was all in.

He cocked his head slightly to the side and he looked at her warily.

“Two years ago on the street in Gardiner, Montana,” she said. “I was inside a quilt shop interviewing the owner. But I heard your truck and looked outside just in time to see you leave a package of videos on the seat of my car that would implicate your partner so you could get away. It looks like you've really gained some weight since then. Don't tell me—too much truck-stop food?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said. His voice was higher than she would have guessed. His tone had air in it, as if his throat was constricted by the rolls of fat.

“I'm Investigator Cassie Dewell from the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff's Department in Helena. But you knew that, right?”

“Again,” he said, “I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've never met you and you've never met me. And all I know about Montana is it's a big-assed state that takes too damn long to drive across.”

She shook her head as if disappointed and sat down in the chair directly across from him. When she tried to scoot the chair closer she realized the legs of both the chair and the table were bolted to the floor. So she shifted forward until she was on the edge of the chair. She leaned in as close as she could to him and looked directly into his eyes.

He was slumped back and didn't react to her closing in on him.

“I saw in your eyes that you recognized me when I walked in,” she said. “Quite a surprise, huh, Ronald?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Them dumb rednecks out there either need to arrest me or they need to cut me loose. They can't just hold me in here without any charges being filed.”

He lifted his chin and addressed the camera in the ceiling over Cassie's head, “Yeah, I know you heard me, you dumb rednecks. I know my rights. You can't detain me without charging me with a crime. And you better damn figure out who is going to pay for the load I got screwed out of too, not to mention the time and money I've lost since you dumb rednecks brought me in here.”

She was about to speak but he wasn't done talking to the camera. He said, “And come get this goofy bitch out of here. I don't know her and I'm not talking to her. She thinks I'm somebody I'm not. If you don't come drag her out of here I'm gonna get a lawyer to sue your ass for harassment.”

“Are you through?” Cassie asked.

He lowered his chin and glared at her.

“You can deal with them later,” she said. “Now you need to deal with me.”

Was that a slight smirk on his face?

“When I saw you last in Montana you were driving a black truck—a Kenworth or a Volvo or something, right? Now you've got a new one.”

She'd hoped he'd correct her and say it was a Peterbilt. Hard-core truckers thought of Peterbilts the way hard-core bikers thought of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Peterbilts were a trucker's truck. That she suggested otherwise, she hoped, might get a rise out of him.

It didn't.

He said, “My truck is in the impound lot.”

“But that's your new truck,” she said. “What happened to the old one? The black one?”

“I don't know what the hell you're asking me.”

“Sure you do. You used to have a black truck and now you've got a yellow one.”

He took a big breath and held it. She knew she'd hit a nerve. But he didn't take the bait and talk about his black truck.

“For years,” she said, “you used that black truck to pick up prostitutes at truck stops. You called them ‘lot lizards' and yourself the ‘Lizard King.'”

Another hit, she thought. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply, as if counting to ten. But when he reopened them, there was nothing.

She said, “It took a while, but we found where you hid the bodies, or at least some of them. Why don't we talk about that?”

In fact, no bodies had ever been located, despite searches by dogs and sonar finders. Every inch of the small ranch the Lizard King and his associates had used for their crimes was searched. Cars were found buried, but not a single body of a female murder victim. The only identifiable body found had been of Cassie's partner, Cody Hoyt.

Cassie listened for footsteps outside the door in the hallway, half expecting Behaunek to enter the room and shut down the interview.

Instead of talking, he revealed a slight knowing grin as if to say,
I know what you're doing. You didn't find any bodies.

“I think I've had enough of this,” he said. “You're just making things up.”

“I'd never do that,” she said. “So back to Montana. Emigrant, specifically, where you used to live when you were home off the road. What was it like going to high school in Livingston? Was it tough being kind of chubby and unathletic? Were you bullied by the other boys?”

She expected another hit, but he didn't react at all. It was as if he'd shut himself off from her, as if he'd taken his rage and anger with him someplace else and left his hulking shell in the room. Cassie felt a twinge of panic.