The Highway (20 page)

Cody sighed in frustration. “We don’t need a warrant. We just drive up and ask them if we can look around. They’re supposed to be good people. If they don’t have anything to hide they should let us on the property.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we have probable cause, don’t we?” Cody asked.

Legerski leaned back and looked at Cody blankly.

“Can’t this wait until morning? We can see most of the compound from the highway. We could be there at dawn with field glasses and spotting scopes and see if we can locate the car. Then we’d have a reason to go get Judge Graff.”

“Too much time,” Cody said. “If they did what you suggest they did, that would give them time to hide the car and stash those girls. Every minute counts in something like this.”

“Man, I don’t know,” Legerski whispered.

“Think about it,” Cody said, leaning back himself. He thought if Legerski refused he’d go anyway. There was nothing illegal or unethical about asking for permission to look around the compound. If the church people said no, they said no. And he’d figure out a way to access it anyway.

Cody leaned forward again across the table, and Legerski reluctantly did the same.

“So who is the guy who just came in?”

The trooper lowered his voice so even Cody could barely hear him. “He’s a long-haul trucker who lives with his mother in a shack six miles away from here in the foothills. His name is Ronald C. Pergram.”

“Seems like an odd one,” Cody said, stealing a sidelong glance. Pergram didn’t look over. Jimmy had delivered his beer and stood hovering over him. Cody got the feeling Jimmy was letting Pergram know that Cody and Legerski were talking about him in whispers.

“This Jimmy,” Cody said, “is he a good guy?”

“The best,” Legerski said. “I’ve known him for years.”

“He seems to be pals with Pergram.”

Legerski snorted. “I doubt that. He’s just being Jimmy. Jimmy knows everybody in this valley.”

There was a quick vibration in Cody’s pocket.

“Excuse me,” he said, and withdrew his phone. Legerski watched him suspiciously.

CHECKING VICAP, Cassie had written in a text. FOUND SOME MISSING FEMALES WITHIN A 100 MILE RADIUS. LAST SEEN AT TRUCK STOPS. WILL KEEP DIGGING.

“You say he’s a long-haul trucker,” Cody said, closing the phone.

“Who was that?” Legerski asked, nodding toward the closed phone in Cody’s hand.

“My son Justin,” Cody lied. “He still hasn’t heard a word from the Sullivan girls.”

Legerski shook his head.

“Tell me,” Cody said, “Have there been any other reports of missing women here on Highway 89?”

Legerski looked back, puzzled. “What are you thinking?”

“Just a wild hair,” Cody said. “Something to look at if our first theory goes kablooey.”

Legerski nodded, but seemed to withdraw a little. Cody got the impression Legerski didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken, and found it telling. The trooper had a theory he wanted to sell to Cody, and Cody wasn’t entirely buying it, which seemed to unsettle the man.

“So,” Cody said, pushing away from the table, “let’s go to church.”

“Man…”

“You can come with me or stay or go home. Your choice. But since it’s your stomping grounds, I thought you might want to come along.”

Legerski sat at the table and finished the last of his coffee. Cody didn’t linger, but stood and pulled on his jacket and turned for the door. He didn’t hear the trooper follow.

*   *   *

When he stepped outside through the faux bat wing doors onto the old wooden portico, Cody noted that the condensation from his breath billowed around his head like a helmet. He paused for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. There were no lights in any direction, only the hard white stars that appeared like cream wash in the night sky. The moon reflected off the river in the distance and the windshield of his car. He zipped up his jacket against the cold.

Something had happened inside the bar but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The way the three men—Legerski, Jimmy, the truck driver—interacted without words around him was unsettling, but he couldn’t unpack it. Why did Legerski seem so different—jumpy, intense—when he returned from the toilet? Cody felt he’d missed something but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He wished the alcohol in his system had dispersed but it was still there, dulling his instincts and fogging his brain. He thought about turning on his heel and going back inside to order a drink. He knew from long experience that sometimes the hair of the dog resharpened his wits, at least temporarily.

“No,” he said aloud to himself.
You’ve got to ride this out.

As he stepped down toward the hitching post and his truck he heard the door open behind him and the bat wing doors swing out. They moaned on rusted hinges.

He turned to find Legerski, fitting on his trooper hat.

“Changed your mind?” Cody said, smiling.

“Completely,” Legerski said.

“You want to come with me, or do you want me to ride along with you? Or take two cars and really impress the hell out of them?”

“Let’s take your pickup. In case this thing goes haywire, I’d rather not be in my cruiser. Let me get my camera and my sound equipment in case we have to document something.”

Cody grinned and climbed in. He was glad Legerski was with him. He started the motor and waited for the trooper to retrieve the items from his trunk. He watched him root around, find what he was looking for, and walk around the back of his pickup carrying a satchel. His taillights turned Legerski pink in the rearview mirrors.

The trooper climbed in and shut the door.

“Do you know how to get there?”

“I’ve seen the place,” Cody said. “It’s hard to miss.”

As Cody reached up for the shifter all of his senses suddenly came alive but things happened too quickly to process. Straight ahead, up the wooden porch steps and to the side of the door, two faces looked out from opposite sides of the neon Miller Lite beer sign in the window. At the same time, he heard the rustle of fabric from the satchel on Legerski’s lap as well as the sharp intake of breath from the trooper.

Instinctively, Cody glanced over but all he could see was the gaping silver-rimmed muzzle of a snub-nosed large caliber revolver an inch from his eye. The cylinder revolved, filled with dull lead bullets, as the trooper pulled the trigger.

There was a tremendous explosion of light and thunder.

He could no longer see out of his right eye, but it was more than that. There was no pain, only tremendous silence.

Then he was floating, light as air, as if his lungs had filled with helium. He passed through the sheet metal roof of his pickup into the night, which was no longer cold. As he rose his eyesight was restored but he no longer had feeling in his limbs and his arms hung loose at his sides.

He looked down. He could see the top of his pickup from above, the bed of his truck which was empty except for a crumpled fast-food wrapper in the corner, then the rusted metal roof of the First National Bar. The windows of his pickup strobed three more times but there was no sound and he felt nothing.

Cody’s life didn’t pass before his eyes, but he clearly saw the photo of Justin in his football uniform and a vision of Jenny sleeping in bed from years before they separated the first time and he rose until he could see the river and the ribbon of highway through the valley and Jimmy and the truck driver emerge from the bar and stand on the porch and he knew what happened to those poor girls and he felt both cheated and angry at the same time and he wished he could do it all over again, everything.

Especially the last five minutes.

Then nothing. No sound, smell, or sight.

Peace.

26.

3:53
A.M.
, Wednesday, November 21

C
ASSIE
D
EWELL SAT AT HER
kitchen table in worn sweats and slippers with her laptop open in front of her. Although she’d switched to decaffeinated coffee two hours after she’d returned home from Cody Hoyt’s house, she was still wired. And unsettled. Her stomach growled and burbled and sounded loud in the sleeping house, and each time it happened she found herself placing her hand over her middle with the same reflexive instinct she’d once used when she was pregnant with Ben.

She’d tried to sleep but couldn’t, and thought she’d work herself into exhaustion. Instead, though, she found her mind racing.

She considered eating something but nothing sounded good except cake. There was some in the refrigerator—German chocolate—left there by her passive-aggressive mother for the sole reason, Cassie thought, to keep her fat. So instead of eating it, she drank decaf and her stomach growled as if she’d swallowed a wolverine.

Cassie sat back and tapped out another e-mail on her phone and sent it to Cody. This one, from the
Bozeman Chronicle
the previous winter, was entitled
WITH DEATH OF CHARISMATIC LEADER THE FUTURE OF DOOMSDAY CULT IN DOUBT
. She found it of interest because, at the time, the reporter stated there was no clear plan of succession for the church and several factions were stepping forward to claim it. According to the article, the leadership of the Church of Glory and Transcendence would likely fall to Stacy Smith’s son Wayne, but no one was sure he either wanted the role or was up for it. There was a brief mention of someone named William Edwards, who represented a competing effort. There was no other information about Edwards in the article, and Cassie failed to find any other published information about him in her searches. The only reference she found to him was on the Web site of the church itself, which referred to him as “Terrestrial Caretaker.” Wayne Smith wasn’t listed at all, which she took to mean that Stacy Smith’s son had either not stepped forward or had been defeated for leadership. As far as Edwards went, there was no photo, no biography. She pointed out that fact in a note accompanying the link she sent to Cody’s phone, and wrote, “He seems to be the guy you’ll want to interview.”

Not that Cody replied. In fact, he hadn’t acknowledged even receiving any of the texts or e-mails she’d sent in the past hour. She speculated that he was out of cell phone range, busy with something, or simply unresponsive and rude. All three were distinct possibilities. She began to understand why Larry Olson, Cody’s former partner, became so frustrated with him.

She wasn’t supposed to access the ViCAP database from anywhere other than an official departmental computer in the sheriff’s department, but she justified it to herself by noting the laptop actually belonged to Lewis and Clark County, so what did it matter? Cassie had no intention of claiming the overtime on her sheet because she wanted to avoid problems and questions from Sheriff Tubman. Questions like why she was assisting a suspended deputy in his investigation of two missing teenage girls in the middle of the night with no formal complaint or referral—and outside their jurisdiction.

She didn’t know how she would answer that question if it came up, other than it seemed like the right thing to do despite policy and protocol. That she felt unclean and guilty for being responsible for the suspension itself. That she didn’t want to be regarded by her colleagues around the office as the sheriff’s
tool.

Cassie sat back in her chair and knuckled at her eyes with both hands. Her spine cracked and her stomach burbled again. The house was cold for sleeping—her mother insisted on turning the temperature down to sixty-two at night to “save energy”—and Cassie’s feet were cold. But she didn’t want to risk turning the thermostat up. The rumble of the furnace and the whoosh of forced air might awake her mother, who would ask what she was doing and why she was doing it so late. Cassie didn’t want to deal with the questions now. Although Cassie was in her midthirties and had a son, her mother had a way of phrasing things—with a certain tone—that always made Cassie act guilty, like she was still twelve and trying to get away with something.

Although she was grateful her mother lived with her and watched over Ben and cared for him while she was at work, the situation was difficult and becoming worse. While Cassie had aged and changed, her mother hadn’t. The quirks and passions her mother displayed when Cassie had lived at home seemed more pronounced, more set, more rigid. Cassie looked on helplessly, for example, when her mother patrolled the house turning off lights and unplugging electronics that weren’t being used at the time. Cassie was afraid Ben would take to heart her mother’s leftist rants and genuine hatred of business, all Republicans, the military, and the police.
The police!
Didn’t her mother know what she did every day? Didn’t she know or care that Ben’s father had been in the army?

She swallowed the last of her cup of decaf and leaned forward to her laptop and keyed in the passwords for ViCAP—one for the department, one for her personally—and followed the prompts and she was in.

*   *   *

It took five minutes to narrow down the search. There were actually twelve missing women from southern Montana, but only four in their teens at the time of their disappearance. Of the four, one case had been open for five years, so she discounted it with a pang of guilt and the recognition that missing Jessica Lowry, age seventeen, Bozeman, history of drug abuse and emotional problems—would for now remain shoved aside and forgotten. She didn’t even want to look beyond the area, or statewide. Even in a state with a low population like Montana, the sheer number of missing people was overwhelming and depressing. Instead, Cassie keyed on the three girls she presumed Cody had asked about, and read up on each of them. She opened a document window aside from the Web pages so she could cut and paste relevant information to share with Cody, provided there was anything of note.

Erin Hill, Livingston, eighteen, white, brown hair (although possibly colored red), green eyes, five foot two, 160 pounds, reported missing by stepmother in July two years prior. Disappeared after being arrested for possession of meth, presumed a runaway. Divorced parents, lived with mother. An unconfirmed sighting of her was reported by a convenience store cashier at a truck stop on I-90 west of Billings. The cashier reported that a girl matching Hill’s description had used the ATM in the store and lingered for an hour inside, but the cashier didn’t speak to her or see her depart the store. The internal ATM video malfunctioned during the transaction and didn’t get a shot of the user, but the subject had used Hill’s PIN number to withdraw the last $120 from her savings account in a Livingston bank.