The Highway (16 page)

His voice croaked, “Cody Hoyt.” His throat was raw from cigarettes. The caffeine hadn’t sobered him up much but had simply made his nascent hangover more wide-awake.

“This is Trooper Rick Legerski of the Montana Highway Patrol. I got your number from Edna Mulcahy in Helena.” His voice was deep, gravelly, gruff, and no-nonsense. Cody could hear a radio or television in the background and assumed the man was calling from his home.

Cody introduced himself while sopping up more coffee with a series of Kleenex tissues from a box he kept on his bookshelf.

“Edna tells me you used to be married to her sister,” Cody said. This is how it went in Montana. Longtime residents sniffed around each other until they found someone they both knew. Usually, it didn’t take long.

There was a moment of silence.

“Sally, yeah,” the man said with a sigh. “Do you have any ex-wives?”

“One,” Cody said.

“I’ve got two. Love is grand, but divorce is a hundred grand. But enough about that.

“Yeah, Hoyt,” Legerski said, changing the subject, “I’ve heard of you before.” His voice was cautious and a little weary. Cody recognized the intonation and had heard it many times from older law enforcement types.

He smiled. “You’ve heard all good things, I imagine.”

“I knew your uncle Jeter,” Legerski said. “In fact, I busted his head open once when I spotted him weaving across the center line outside of Ekalaka with a dead bull elk in the back. He refused to take a Breathalyzer and got belligerent so I … subdued him.”

“So that was you,” Cody said. “I remember hearing that story.”

“His head was as hard as a rock,” Legerski said. “It bent my baton and I had to get a new one.”

Cody chuckled.

“And your name has come up a time or two around here,” Legerski said.

“I suppose it has.”

“You’re looking for a couple of missing teenagers in a vehicle,” the trooper said, done with small talk.

“That’s right,” Cody said, and repeated the make and model of the Ford as well as the names and descriptions of Gracie and Danielle Sullivan.

“Colorado plates?”

Cody spelled the license plate and recapped the story.

Legerski said, “I haven’t been down that road through Yankee Jim Canyon tonight but I haven’t heard of anything unusual. I was dispatched up to a roadblock on I-90 most of the night and I just got home and clocked out. I was just about to eat a late supper when I saw Edna called.”

“Sorry to bother you at home,” Cody said, not sorry at all. But he needed whatever help he could get so he said it.

“Part of the deal,” Legerski moaned. “A Montana state trooper is always on call.”

Cody rolled his eyes and pressed a ball of tissues into his lap to soak up more liquid.

He’d always had a knack for visualizing the details of people on the other end of the phone by the way they spoke, their choice of words, and their intonation. His former partner Larry used to bet him whether his premonition would be correct when compared to the real person when they finally met them. Most times, Larry had to pay up.

Because of the anecdote about Uncle Jeter, who had died three years before, Cody guessed Legerski was in his late fifties or early sixties, probably close to retirement. He was likely a big guy, as most troopers were, and because of his drawl Cody painted a drooping thick gunfighter mustache on a hawk-beaked craggy cowboy face. Since he’d mentioned working out of Ekalaka in Eastern Montana, Cody assumed Legerski was a lifer and had moved around the state throughout a long career. Ekalaka was in the middle of nowhere. Livingston and Gardner were in Park County, which was considered a high-profile and plum location because it bordered Yellowstone. So Legerski had moved up through the years. Which meant he got along within the state bureaucracy—the Montana Highway Patrol was a division of the state Justice Department—in ways Cody had never gotten along within his. Legerski’s tactic of introducing himself with a story about splitting open Uncle Jeter Hoyt’s head was right out of “Old Cop 101,” and designed to put Cody on the defensive right away and establish that Trooper Rick Legerski was a tough old bastard who had seen a lot and wasn’t impressed much by local sheriff’s department investigators.

Cody usually got along with tough old bastards, he thought. Except when he shot them.

Cody outlined the possibilities—breakdown, accident, cell phone outage, wrong turn somewhere. He repeated the line about “not
that
many roads to check.”

Legerski took umbrage to that. “There ain’t that many
paved
roads down here,” he said, “but that don’t mean there aren’t a lot of roads. We’ve got hundreds of miles of dirt and gravel roads. Old logging roads, old ranch access roads, fire roads, and two-tracks known only to poachers and old-timers. If those girls took one of those because their GPS steered them wrong or they were just dumb, that opens up a shitload of more possibilities. If they left the pavement at some point they could be high-centered in some wash or gulley out of cell phone range and we might not be able to find ’em for days.”

Cody winced. He listened haphazardly to Legerski outline two incidents he’d worked; one where a couple of elk hunters had knocked the axle out of their Jeep and didn’t get back to the highway for three days, and another where “some shithead Iraqi or Pakistani tourista” drove a Prius up a logging road and was found half-eaten by a grizzly bear ten days later. In both cases they’d flown a helicopter over the heavily timbered mountains but the vehicles hadn’t been spotted. Park County was still in litigation trying to get other governmental entities and federal agencies to share in the cost for the search.

Trooper Legerski, Cody thought, likes to talk.

“Okay, I got it,” Cody said. “And it’s possible they took a wrong turn somewhere. But from what my son tells me these girls were in a hurry to get to Helena. One of them, at least, has a level head on her shoulders. I doubt they’d just drive off the highway into the trees.”

“I don’t know why anyone would be in a hurry to get to Helena,” Legerski said, and laughed at his own joke.

“Yeah, yeah,” Cody said, waving it aside. Montanans loved to disparage their state capital. “But let’s assume for now they didn’t leave the road. How likely is it they’re broken down somewhere and no one has called it in?”

Cody heard a long wheezy intake of breath that he recognized as being from a fellow smoker. Then, “It’s possible, I guess,” Legerski said. “Not that many folks use that road this time of year. The touristas are all out of the park this late in the season because all the hotels and campgrounds are shut down. The road’s used mainly by locals this time of year and they’d likely notice an unfamiliar car on the side of the road and call it in.”

“So they might be down there along the road somewhere? Maybe in Yankee Jim Canyon where the cell service is bad?” Cody prompted.

“Anything’s possible, I guess.”

Cody wanted Legerski to offer to drive the road. The trooper was under no obligation since no one had called in a report of an accident or breakdown and he was off duty, but …

“I’d do it for you,” Cody said finally. “If you ever need a favor in Lewis and Clark County, I’m the guy to call.”

Legerski’s laugh seemed mocking and inappropriate, Cody thought.

“You must think we’re real rubes down here,” the trooper said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You must think that we’re so far off the beaten path that we don’t know about the Internet or something.”

Cody felt the hackles on his neck rise and vowed to himself to keep calm and not blow up.

“’Cause I got an e-mail sitting right here in front of me says you got suspended today. That as of right now you’ve been busted back to civilian.”

Cody wondered who’d sent it. But it didn’t matter.

“I’ll be reinstated within a week,” Cody lied. “In the meantime, there are two girls out there lost or hurt or worse on your roads.”

“Well,” Legerski said, “I suppose I can change back into my uniform and take the cruiser back out. But you’ll owe me if I don’t find anything.”

“I owe you anyway,” Cody said. Thinking, Now Justin owes
me
.

“Yeah, I wasn’t doing nothing anyway,” Legerski said sourly. “Just getting ready to grab some dinner and go to sleep for the night.”

“A Montana state trooper is always on call,” Cody said.

“You’re kind of a smart-ass, aren’t you? For a guy asking for a favor?”

“You’re right,” Cody said. “So thank you. And give me a call either way, okay? I’m sure I’ll be up. And if by some chance we hear from those girls, I’ll call you right away.”

“Call me on my cell,” Legerski said, giving Cody the number. “I can’t do any more overtime and if HQ knows I’m going out on a private call they’ll raise hell. So let’s keep this between you and me—back channel.”

“Fine,” Cody said, well aware of how many times he’d gone off the radar screen himself.

As he began to close his phone, he heard Legerski say, “Hoyt? You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s one thing and we can talk about it later, I suppose.”

Cody frowned. “What’s that?”

“This isn’t the first,” the trooper said.

Cody sat up. “What do you mean?”

“Nobody wants to entertain this theory very much, especially the suits in HQ,” Legerski said. “But this isn’t the first time a car with females in it just up and vanished down here.”

Cody felt his scalp crawl. He said, “Come again?”

“Look, I better get going. But tell me your e-mail address before I go. I’ll fire you an e-mail with some links in it you might want to check out.”

“What do the links go to?” Cody asked.

“You’ll see,” Legerski said and hung up.

*   *   *

“Oh my God,” Ted Sullivan said when Cody told him. “Oh my God!”

“Don’t panic, Ted,” Cody said. “We don’t know enough yet for you to get hysterical.”

Ted Sullivan had light auburn hair so thin his freckled scalp undergirded it and hazel eyes that darted from one thing to another and seemed to focus up and to the left of the person he was speaking to. The one word Cody had heard over and over from others talking about Sullivan when they’d first met in Yellowstone was “weak.” Gracie hadn’t said as much, but she did concede her father was “not strong.” Cody had learned that Sullivan was a software engineer of some note within his own particular circles, something about cloud technology, and he’d been divorced for seven or eight years from Danielle and Gracie’s mother. He’d moved around the country with different firms and was now in Omaha. Cody was aware Ted Sullivan probably made ten times as much money as he did, but that didn’t impress him. Little about Ted Sullivan impressed him. But as a father himself, he almost felt for the guy. No one wanted to be on the other end of this particular phone call.

“Marcia is going to kill me,” Ted said morosely.

“She should,” Cody said. “You deserve it. Justin told me that Danielle called you and how you went along with it. We just found out about the scheme tonight.”

“She’ll take me back to court,” Ted said. “She’ll get my visitation rights taken away.”

“Enough about
you
, ass-hat,” Cody barked. “When was the last time you heard from
them
? Have you gotten a call or a text in the last four hours?”

“No.”

“Did you try to call them?”

“Well…”

“So you didn’t, okay. As I thought, you’re no help right now, but you need to know the situation.” Cody said. He noticed both Jenny and Justin were peeking in the room at him, probably because his voice had gotten so loud. He waved at them to go away. Neither moved. Jenny frowned back at him.

“That’s just not true,” Ted said. “I know for a fact that both Gracie and Danielle have GPS-embedded phones because I bought them for them. All we have to do is trace their whereabouts through cell-mapping software. They also have a Garmin I sent them. We can contact the company and—”

“Ted,” Cody said impatiently, “GPS doesn’t work if they’re out of cell range. This is Montana. And don’t you think that if their phones were working we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now?”

“Oh.”

“Okay,” Cody said to Ted while nodding at Jenny that he’d received the message from her to cool down, “You need to take off your geek hat and let their mother know. And when you do, find out if they’ve been in touch with her and when it was and exactly what they said. Give her my number if she wants to talk with me directly.”

Sullivan moaned. “You have no idea how she can be.”

“Yeah, Ted. You’re the only man with an ex-wife, so I wouldn’t know how that is,” Cody said, glancing at Jenny who looked back steaming. “You need to call her, Ted. Tell her what’s going on.”

There was a beat of silence. “Can you…”

“No,” Cody said. “I don’t even know her name or number.”

“I could give it to you.”

“
Call your goddamned ex-wife, Ted!
” Cody shouted. “Man up and call her.”

“Okay.” His voice was a whisper. Then, “I’ll be on the first plane to Helena in the morning.”

“Don’t come, Ted,” Cody said. “I’ve seen you in action. Stay the hell in Omaha by the phone. I’ll keep you posted on anything we find out.”

“But they’re my daughters,” Ted said. “They’re all I’ve got.”

Cody started to yell again but caught himself. He thought of what he’d do in similar circumstances, and he couldn’t blame Sullivan for wanting to be there.

He said, “I can’t stop you but if you come here you’re on your own if you do. I don’t want you around me trying to help. I’ve seen your version of help before. It results in a clusterfuck and dead bodies.”

There was a long silence. Jenny had covered her face with her hands and was shaking her head from side to side. Cody thought maybe he’d overdone it.

Then Ted said, “Call me the second you find out something.”

“I’ll do that,” Cody said, and closed his phone.

“Great bedside manner,” Jenny said. “I can see why you used to be the star of the sheriff’s department.”

“Best they’ve got,” Cody said. Thinking,
And the best they’ve ever seen.
At least that used to be the case when he had nothing to lose. He corrected himself: “Best they had.”