The Highway (21 page)

Shanna Marone, Bozeman, seventeen, white, long dark hair, brown eyes, five foot six, 140 pounds, tattoo of red lips on neck and Harley-Davidson logo tattoo on mid-lower back, reported missing eighteen months before after not showing up for classes at the alternative high school. Mother distraught, father not in the picture. A passing motorist on State Highway 205 (between Belgrade and Manhatten) reported seeing a person hitchhiking who matched the description of the missing subject, including a yellow down coat she was known to wear. No other verified sightings had ever been confirmed.

Chelsey Lybeck, Big Timber, fifteen, white, short blond hair, blue eyes, four feet eleven, 110 pounds, was reported missing by the father, a ranch foreman on the Lazy Double-Ought Ranch …

But she was found, Cassie realized as she read on. Her body was discovered last summer on the bank of Sweet Grass Creek by fishermen. Cassie recalled reading something about it in the newspaper. The body was too decomposed to determine the cause of death, but the Sweet Grass County Sheriff’s Department speculated she’d died of blunt force trauma followed by exposure. To date, there had been no arrests, although the ranch foreman father had been questioned twice and the file remained open.

Cassie didn’t include Chelsey Lybeck on the document she was building, but concentrated on Erin Hill and Shanna Marone. Both runaways, apparently. Both last seen—possibly—at a truck stop along an interstate highway and on a state highway. Both never seen again, if the ViCAP records were correct.

She thought of the Sullivan girls. Similar age. On the highway. Missing. Cassie forced herself not to make a leap of speculation based on such a weak and isolated set of circumstances.

Then she saw the link on the bottom of the ViCAP Web page for
HIGHWAY SERIAL KILLER INITIATIVE
.

She hesitated, worried about spending too much time going down a wrong path when there were other things she could be doing.

But she floated the cursor down and clicked on it. As she read, Cassie felt the hairs rise on her forearms and on the back of her neck.

First, she scanned a map of the United States covered with red dots. The dots were placed along interstate and state highways, looking like a strings of red pearls from coast to coast. The highest concentration of dots were in the east, Midwest, and southeast. But there were plenty in Montana and throughout the rest of the country.

In 2004, an analyst from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation detected a crime pattern: the bodies of murdered women were being dumped along the Interstate 40 corridor in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi … ViCAP analysts have created a national matrix of more than 500 murder victims from along or near highways, as well as a list of some 200 potential suspects, almost all long-haul truck drivers … The victims in these cases are primarily women who were living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution. They’re frequently picked up at truck stops or service stations and sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped along a highway … the mobile nature of the offenders, the unsafe lifestyles of the victims, the significant distances and multiple jurisdictions involved, and the scarcity of witnesses or forensic evidence can make these cases tough to solve …

She took a deep breath and scrolled down to a specific incident report.

A passerby found the severed head on Feb. 10, wrapped in two plastic bags and stuffed inside a backpack in Barstow, Calif. Authorities still haven’t identified the victim or her killer, but the circumstances point in a particular direction.

The teenage girl likely had been killed days earlier, Barstow police say. Her head lay a few hundred yards from a truck stop just off Interstate 15, not far from I-40. To authorities, the proximity to the truck stop and the interstates suggests that the slaying might have been the work of a distinctive type of criminal: a serial killer operating along the nation’s highways.

Cassie thought it remarkable and horrifying that there were so many missing women along the highways that a task force had been created in the first place. And her mouth went dry when she read that ViCAP and the task force had assisted local authorities to arrest no more than a dozen suspects—all long-haul truckers. There had been two convictions, but more than five hundred open cases were unsolved.

The fact there was an actual federal task force on highway serial killers disturbed her greatly. Cassie’s father had been a long-haul truck driver. The story of how her parents met was a sweet one—how her mother had been hitchhiking back in the days when people actually hitchhiked across the country en route to a Grateful Dead concert in Big Sur—when the ex-Marine with a buzz cut named Bill Scribner picked her up in his Kenworth. The unlikely pair disagreed on everything except their attraction for each other.

Scribner was based in Wyoming and he drove his truck for eleven months and hunted elk the other, and he could quote Shakespeare and Paul Harvey without missing a beat. He wanted to marry but Cassie’s mother refused to engage in the formality of a ceremony and a contract, so they had an understanding of sorts. He doted on Cassie during his rare overnight visits, and he’d taken her on several cross-country runs when she was ten and eleven. While he drove and the country went by, he told her that Americans had a restless gene and he must have been double-dosed with it. But he said he performed an important and honorable service, and he was proud of his profession. He told Cassie that professional long-haul truck drivers like himself were “Knights of the Road” and they had their own code of conduct and civility. She remembered him telling her he was “building America, one truckload at a time.” She was proud of him also, and noted how other truckers looked up to him with respect and admiration when he strode into truck stops or met foremen to pick up or drop off a load. There was even a time when she thought she’d like to follow in his footsteps. She wanted to be a Knight of the Road, too.

But Bill was struck down with inoperable brain cancer that took him down so quickly he was dead by her thirteenth birthday.

Still, though, she thought of her father and those glorious trips through a warm sentimental haze. And she was disgusted there were a few drivers out there who had penetrated the knighthood in an evil way.

*   *   *

From the darkened doorway, Ben said, “Momma, what are you doing? What are you looking at?” and she was jolted back to the present. She reflexively reached up and closed the laptop screen.

“Ben…”

“I miss Dad,” Ben said, and stepped into the light. He was five years old, wearing his flannel pajamas with the cowboy print. His feet were bare and looked cold. He was dark-headed and chubby, like his mother.

“Come here,” she said, sliding back in her chair and opening her arms.

He shuffled forward, arms to his sides, and thumped his head into her breasts.

“I miss him,” Ben said, his voice muffled by her clothing.

“I know you do, honey. So do I. But you need to get to bed and get some sleep.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe if I got a snack.”

“I’ll get you a glass of milk.”

“And maybe some cake…”

“No cake,” she said, extricating herself. “Milk and off to bed.”

As he settled into a chair she poured a glass of milk from the refrigerator after checking the expiration date. Her mother was loath to throw anything away until it was consumed. The milk was okay.

“What are you doing?” Ben asked when she sat back down.

“Working. Sometimes I have to work late.”

He nodded, not very empathetic, and gulped the milk down and shivered.

“Don’t drink so fast,” she said.

He shrugged.

Before he could settle in, she guided him out of the kitchen and down the dark hall. As they passed the bedroom occupied by her mother, she heard, “Cassie? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“I heard talking.”

“Ben.”

“Is he sick again?”

“Just sleepwalking,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she fudged on the answer.

“I’m
not
sleepwalking,” Ben whispered over his shoulder. Cassie shushed him.

“There’s cake in the fridge,” her mother called out.

“I told you,” Ben said accusingly.

“Good
night,
” Cassie sang through the door to her mother.

Her mother said something else she didn’t hear, and Cassie ushered Ben to bed and tucked him in. She straightened up his blankets and quilts against the cold and kissed him good night on the cheek.

“Night, Ben.”

“Night, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

A shaft of moonlight from the window illuminated the framed photos on Ben’s dresser. Three photos of his father Jim Dewell, one in the dress uniform after basic, two in his desert fatigues. In the one Ben liked best, Jim leaned back against a wall of sandbags cradling a machine gun. He wore a pistol on his belt and a smirk on his face.

Ben didn’t actually miss his father because he’d never met him. But he knew if he said it, Cassie would always react with sympathy. Cassie knew it, too. She sometimes wondered if she’d done the right thing, raised Ben the right way. But she was new at this, and didn’t know better. She’d had no real road map from her own mother.

Ben was a boy through and through. He spent hours wordlessly disassembling his toys and putting them back together. He knew the makes and models of cars and trucks on the street, and he’d declared recently that as soon as he could he wanted to hunt deer and elk. There was a poster of Tim Tebow when he was the Bronco quarterback, on his wall despite her grandmother’s disdain for the man and his overt Christianity. Ben’s career path, he’d stated without doubt over breakfast cereal the week before, was to be an NFL quarterback, join the army, and drive tanks and later tractors. He wouldn’t get married and he’d eat elk meat for dinner. Cassie had stifled a smile when her mother reacted to the declaration with outright horror.

She closed his door and padded down the dark hallway, considered going to her own bedroom, and decided against it for now. She was still too wired. She thought of the missing Sullivan girls, Cody out there somewhere not responding, the way the sheriff had played her, and raising a boy in a home with a mother who worked too many hours and a grandmother who was crazy as a tick. She tried not to resent Jim for getting killed and abandoning her. It always bothered her that she’d never seen that gleeful smirk he showed in the photo in real life. Like he was really enjoying what he was doing and Afghanistan in general, and certainly much more than working back at the state highway shop to pay the mortgage with a fat wife and a crying baby at home.

He’d died in the Battle of Wanat in 2008 in Afghanistan. She was eight months pregnant at the time. The official letter from the Department of Defense said Jim Dewell had been killed when two hundred Taliban guerillas attacked the village in the province of Nuristan. Eight other Americans had been killed and twenty-seven wounded. An investigation launched by the government concluded that no negligence was involved and that “by their valor and their skill, they successfully defended their positions and defeated a determined, skillful, and adaptable enemy.” Words from a different era, she thought when she read them, about a battle no one had heard of in a war no one cared about.

Except Ben, of course, who idolized his father with Cassie’s encouragement. To Ben, his father was a hero and a god. No man—or Cassie—could compare with poor dead Jim. She was proud of her husband, that he’d given his life for the country. They knew she was pregnant when he shipped out. They’d married the week after she told him. And if he hadn’t been killed, he was due back for the birth. She wondered if he thought of her in his last seconds. She wondered if he thought they’d had a happy marriage. And she wondered if she did. It seemed so long ago.

Then
bam!
—five years. Five years with Ben as the only man in her life. Five years where she didn’t dare bring a man home who would pale in comparison with the mythic Jim Ben believed in. Not that there hadn’t been a few opportunities. Unmarried—and a few married—men at both the academy and the sheriff’s department had tried. A couple were even, maybe, okay. Not drug addicts or rednecks or total losers. Maybe there would be a right time, and a right man. When Ben could handle it, and maybe even encourage it. But Cassie couldn’t imagine when that would be.

Cassie stopped and closed her eyes and tried to picture Jim in her mind. It frightened her she couldn’t see his face anymore. And it bothered her that when she thought of him she recalled the photo on Ben’s dresser instead.

*   *   *

She checked her cell phone on the table for messages. There were none. Then, keeping the laptop closed, she hesitated for a moment and called Jenny Hoyt’s phone. Cassie didn’t want to get immersed again in the contents of her laptop, or speculate without evidence.

Jenny answered after one ring.

“I’m sorry to call you so late. Were you sleeping?”

“I wish I could. But it’s okay. I was just sitting here waiting and when the phone rang I thought it might be Cody.”

Cassie paused. “So he hasn’t been in touch?”

“Not for a while. Two hours, to be exact. He texted Justin and asked if he’d heard anything from those girls, and he sent me a text saying he was meeting with a highway patrolman in Emigrant. I haven’t heard anything since.”

Cassie imagined Cody drinking, spewing his philosophy and buying rounds for the local alcoholics. Forgetting to check his phone or not caring enough to do so.

“My mind just keeps conjuring up things,” Jenny said as much to herself as to Cassie, Cassie thought. “Like maybe he got into some kind of trouble. Or if he’s on another goddamned toot. I want to think that isn’t the case. I know there are dead spots down there without cell service. But…” she trailed off.

Cassie wasn’t sure what to say. “I haven’t heard from him, either.”

“I’m his wife,” Jenny said sharply. “He knows the rules. He’s supposed to check in.”