Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands

by C. J. Box

  Now that it had finally come to pass, she was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other. Her heart raced and she gasped for air. She knew the locals waiting for her in the terminal would start to wonder if she was ever coming out.

  The case file in her briefcase consisted solely of reports, affidavits, and testimony concerning one man: Ronald Pergram, aka the Lizard King.

  Within a few hours, she would be face-to-face with him—or someone the locals thought was him—in the interrogation room of the Wilson County jail.

  * * *

  CASSIE WAS thirty-six years old with short brown hair and large brown eyes. She’d lost twenty pounds twice in two years and gained it right back, plus a few. She was self-conscious about being heavy and thought that her suit felt and looked like a sausage casing.

  But she didn’t care how she felt or looked if she could help put Pergram in a cage for the rest of his life or, better yet, into the ground. Before she boarded her flight in Helena, she’d Googled “North Carolina death penalty” on her iPhone and was reassured to find out the state had put more than forty-three murderers to death since 1977. She wanted the Lizard King to be number forty-four.

  The Lizard King had haunted a large part of her life since he’d been unmasked near Park County, Montana, by her former partner Cody Hoyt. Cody paid for the discovery with his life. At the time, Cody had no idea that Pergram, a long-haul trucker, was a serial killer likely responsible for the disappearances of scores of truck-stop prostitutes known as “lot lizards,” or that Pergram had local associates who were involved in the torture and murder of the women. Pergram had also likely abducted victims whose cars had broken down on the highways across the nation. Although entire cars had been unearthed where they’d been buried in a high mountain valley, not a single body had ever been found. Cassie uncovered the associates and shot one of them to death in a highly publicized shoot-out. But the Lizard King himself vanished in his truck.

  In his truck. It was still incomprehensible to her as well as members of the FBI’s Highway Serial Killers Initiative how Pergram and his massive Peterbilt and trailer had simply disappeared. The only evidence they had that he still might be out there was the increase in the estimate of missing lot lizards, from seven hundred to more than a thousand.

  Cassie had never seen Pergram in person, but she’d gathered the few photos she could find of him, including his high school yearbook photo from Livingston High and two commercial driver’s license (CDL) head shots. Those photos of a doughy and unremarkable man in his midfifties with wavy ginger hair and sullen eyes had in fact been flashed across television screens throughout the nation. His face, as dull and pedestrian as it was, was the cause of parents’ nightmares as well as the working girls who crawled from truck to truck at nights.

  That face had been in Cassie’s nightmares as well, since it was very likely he had seen her even if she hadn’t seen him.

  Which was why she’d left her six-year-old son Ben in the care of her mother Isabel and had flown to North Carolina. Her idea had been to review the thick file on the airplane. But when she opened it up, she realized she’d practically memorized every page: every documented missing victim’s profile and photo, every newspaper or Internet clipping, and every printed report from the FBI on the twenty to twenty-four suspected serial killers who drove long-haul trucks.

  * * *

  MEETING HER in the lobby of the airport near baggage claim were Wilson County Sheriff Eric Ernest Puente, County Prosecutor Leslie Behaunek, and FBI task force liaison Special Agent Craig Rhodine.

  They stood in an obvious huddle and were easy to spot. Sheriff Puente was round and short in his uniform, and had an easy smile. Behaunek wore a dark suit similar to Cassie’s, although it fit her better. She had dark red hair and was tall and lean with a long, almost horselike face. Agent Rhodine looked like every FBI field agent Cassie had ever met: fit, intense, clean-cut, and dressed in a sports coat, tie, and slacks. He looked ex-military even if he wasn’t. Any other time, Cassie would have been a sucker for that look. Not now.

  “Are you Investigator Dewell?” the sheriff asked, who stepped out, removed his hat, and extended his hand.

  “I am,” she said, shaking his hand.

  “We’re glad you could come on such short notice. And bless your heart, I guess I expected some kind of Montana cowgirl in cowboy boots and a hat,” he said in a soft Carolina accent. “‘An Angel with a Lariat,’ as k.d. lang once sang. Do you know the song?”

  Cassie noticed that Behaunek rolled her eyes in embarrassment at the comment.

  “Yes,” Cassie said, “I’ve been known to wear boots. I haven’t gotten around to the hat and the rope, though. And I don’t know what to tell you about my hair. It’s the humidity, I guess.”

  “You think this is humidity?” The sheriff laughed. “My lord, you should come back in August.”

  “Our car is outside,” Behaunek said after introductions were made. “It takes an hour to get to Wilson and we can go over everything on the way there.”

  Agent Rhodine tilted his chin up. “We think we just might have our man.”

  Cassie nodded grimly.

  “There’s something we want to show you on the way, Miss Cassie,” Sheriff Puente said. Cassie knew “Miss Cassie” was a Southern thing and she overlooked how condescending it came across to one not used to it.

  “What’s that?”

  “His truck.”

  * * *

  DECEMBER IN North Carolina was brown and gray but not white. Light rain fell from a close granite sky. The hardwood trees were tall and skeletal and a thick brown carpet of leaves covered the forest floor. The walls of pine were so close to the highway she could see nothing through them. It was like driving through a tunnel, and she wondered how anyone who lived there knew where anything was if they couldn’t even see forty feet in any direction. She’d grown up in Montana and was used to big skies and vistas.

  Back in Montana, snow was on the ground and had been since October and the mountains were snowcapped.

  An FBI agent drove the black SUV with U.S. Government plates and merged onto I-40. Rhodine occupied the passenger seat. Cassie sat next to Sheriff Puente in the second row, and Behaunek sat alone in the back. Upon entering the Ford Expedition, Behaunek opened her briefcase and shuffled through documents.

  * * *

  RHODINE TURNED and draped his arm over the front seat so he could face her. He smiled as if to reassure her, but she read it as “Aren’t I a good-looking man?” He said, “I don’t know how much you know but I wanted to brief you on everything before you actually meet him. I know you talked to Sheriff Puente and County Prosecutor Leslie Behaunek yesterday, but I don’t know if they stressed what an important role you have to play if we want to hold this guy.”

  “We did,” Behaunek said wearily from the backseat.

  Rhodine ignored her. Cassie could already discern the tension that had developed between the locals and the FBI. It wasn’t unusual when the feds moved into a local jurisdiction to assist, because “assist” was often defined by the FBI as “take over from the stupid locals.”

  “Basically,” Rhodine said, “law enforcement was first tipped off regarding the subject two days ago by a loading supervisor at a grocery warehouse distributor in Raleigh. The supervisor said he’d posted a full load from Raleigh that needed to get to Virginia Beach the next day. I don’t know if you know about the system independent truckers use, do you?”

  Cassie said, “Yes, I know about it. When someone needs a truckload of something delivered, they post the contents and the weight on a national computer network that is displayed on screens in most big truck stops. If drivers are close, they’ll call the customer and make the deal. It’s completely different from trucking companies that haul the same freight for the same companies most of the time.”

  “Exactly,” Rhodine said. “Independent drivers compete with each other for work and they make the deals themselves directly with the distrib
utor. There are no dispatchers or trucking companies doing it for them. We’ve been thinking for some time that Pergram likely went that route once he vanished. It’s easier for a man like that to hide in plain sight if he’s not working for any one company. And lord knows, we sent his photo to every trucking company in the country. When we never heard anything, we figured he’d likely gone indie.

  “So anyway, this warehouse guy gets a call from a trucker who says his name is Dale Spradley and he’s just a couple of hours away. The warehouse guy says he asks Spradley if his truck can handle a full load, and Spradley tells him he just made a delivery and he’s got a refrigerated trailer and he’s rolling empty at the moment.”

  Cassie knew truckers referred to those trailers as “reefers,” but she didn’t interrupt.

  “So Spradley shows up and backs up to the delivery dock and the warehouse guys start loading the empty trailer with pallets of frozen food while they work out the paperwork. Just about when they’re through with the contracts, a guy notices something odd about the trailer of the truck.”

  “Odd how?” Cassie asked.

  “Sheriff, why don’t you tell her the rest?” Rhodine said.

  Puente cleared his throat. “We got an old boy named Lightning Bates who works at the warehouse. He’s a young fellow, and they call him ‘Lightning’ because he’s anything but. It’s kind of mean but he don’t seem to mind. Anyway, Lightning is pretty dim but when it comes to patterns and numbers he’s kind of a genius. When he was in high school here he went to a swim meet at the brand-new pool and afterwards he told the principal the pool wasn’t long enough for the races. Keep in mind they’d just constructed that pool and it cost an arm and a leg of taxpayer money. But Lightning insisted it wasn’t fifty meters. Finally, they measured it just to shut him up and it turned out to be forty-nine point eight meters. You can imagine how that caused a stink.”

  “Lightning Bates is an autistic savant,” Behaunek said crisply from the back as if to urge Sheriff Puente on with his story.

  “Yeah,” Puente said, “like that. Anyway, Lightning helped fill that trailer at the warehouse but when they were done and closing it up he was real upset. He told his supervisor they’d just filled a fifty-three-foot standard trailer with a forty-eight-foot load. As you know, a trailer is either forty-eight feet or fifty-three feet. Those are the standard sizes in the trucking industry.”

  “I’m aware,” Cassie said. “I’ve learned a lot about the ins and outs of trucking. My dad was a trucker. He had a forty-eight footer, too.”

  She was intrigued. She said, “It takes a very trained eye to tell the difference.”

  “Unless you’re Lightning Bates, I guess,” Sheriff Puente noted. He obviously wanted to credit one of his own constituents for what happened next.

  “Yes,” Rhodine said, “so this Bates and the supervisor discussed the discrepancy after the truck pulled away. They started talking about the alerts they’d received urging everyone to be on the lookout for the Lizard King. That guy has become kind of a legend, even though Spradley didn’t exactly fit the description of Ronald Pergram. But the supervisor trusted Lightning Bates, and he thought it was suspicious that a forty-eight-foot load fit perfectly into a fifty-three-foot trailer. That made him wonder why five feet of space inside was unaccounted for. So he called the state police. Spradley was pulled over just inside the Wilson county line by a North Carolina trooper and asked to account for the misunderstanding.”

  “Hold it,” Cassie said, raising her hand. “The police responded because a warehouse supervisor had a suspicion?”

  Sheriff Puente said, “The supervisor’s on the county commission. Some of them guys like to throw their weight around.”

  Cassie nodded but didn’t approve. She’d had it with local politicians influencing county law enforcement. It was no solace that it occurred in other states.

  Rhodine said, “But Spradley made a big mistake. He got belligerent with the trooper and refused to open up his trailer. He claimed his load was frozen—which it was—but said if he opened it up and anything thawed he’d take a financial hit. Spradley said he was being railroaded by a bunch of Southern rednecks and worse.”

  Cassie nodded. She hated to agree with Spradley, but …

  “The trooper called in backup, which happened to be the Wilson County Sheriff’s Department,” Rhodine said.

  “My guys,” Sheriff Puente said. “This Spradley or whoever he is called them every name in the book. They charged him with noncooperation and threw cuffs on him and hauled him in. By the time he got to county lockup, he was going berserk. We had to pepper spray his fat ass just to calm him down.”

  Cassie asked the sheriff, “When did you suspect Dale Spradley was Ronald Pergram?”

  Puente said solemnly, “Not until we opened up that truck just up ahead. That’s when we called in the FBI.”

  As he spoke the words, the SUV slowed down and took an exit to a service road that paralleled the interstate. Through the trees, Cassie saw high chain-link fencing and a weathered sign that read:

  MISSING YOUR CAR?

  ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT THE OFFICE.

  WILSON COUNTY IMPOUND LOT.

  Then she saw the huge eighteen-wheel truck and trailer on the lot.

  She said, “That’s not it.”

  Agent Rhodine’s formerly confident face went slack.

  * * *

  “PERGRAM DROVE a black Peterbilt Model 379,” Cassie said as they approached the big rig. Pallets of once-frozen food were stacked unceremoniously on the asphalt. The smell of rotting meat hung low in the air. Cassie wondered who would cover the loss when something like this happened, but she didn’t ask.

  The driver slowed to a stop with the shiny grille of the big truck filling the windshield.

  Rhodine leapt out, followed by Cassie and Sheriff Puente. Behaunek stayed in the SUV with her files.

  Cassie said, “I saw his rig once even though I didn’t get a clear look at the driver. But I never forgot the truck. He’d stripped all the chrome off it and had even blackened the exhaust stacks with some kind of heat-resistant paint. It was blacker than black.”

  She gestured toward the truck in the lot. “This is a newer model Peterbilt 389 with an Ultracab Unibilt. And it’s bright yellow. This isn’t the truck or trailer I saw.”

  “No one said it was,” Rhodine said through clenched teeth. “No one said he didn’t trade his old one in on a newer model.”

  Cassie paused and looked it over. She’d long speculated that Pergram would stay in his profession but figure out a way to change his identity and his vehicle.

  “It may be a new rig,” Puente said, “but wait until you see what we found inside.”

  Cassie approached the open back of the trailer with the two men. An aluminum loading ramp was attached to the back floor of the trailer and sloped down to the asphalt.

  Before entering, she looked inside. It was empty and cavernous. The inside walls were scarred from hundreds of skids that had been loaded and unloaded. On the far end of the trailer, on the other side of the wall and out of view, was the refrigerator unit to keep the temperature constant inside.

  “Go to the front,” Puente said.

  “Remember the length discrepancy,” Rhodine said in a tone that indicated he’d regained his confidence from learning it wasn’t the same truck. “Forty-eight versus fifty-three feet. The outside of this trailer is fifty-three feet on the nose. The inside measures forty-eight.”

  Their shoes echoed inside the empty trailer and Cassie walked to the front of the trailer. She wondered what it was she was supposed to see. The front wall was made of sheet steel and scarred like the sidewalls. Mounted at eye level across the length of the front panel were a series of ringbolts. She knew they were used to secure netting over the top of cargo that might shift or fall. She pulled and twisted each one in turn. Nothing happened. She knocked. The wall seemed solid. With that in mind, she turned to the sheriff and Rhodine and said, “So?”<
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  Sheriff Puente waggled his eyebrows in a gesture that suggested she look again. She got it. It wasn’t until she bent stiffly in her too-tight suit on the right side of the wall that she saw the nearly hidden hinges.

  “There’s a room here,” she whispered.

  “And we finally figured how to get it open,” Puente said, squatting clumsily to his haunches with a grunt. On the bottom of the sidewall, nearly flush with the floor, was an aluminum slide-out panel. When he opened the panel there was a single red button.

  “Watch this, Miss Cassie,” he said, and pressed it. She was starting to like being called Miss Cassie.

  There was a muffled click on the left side of the wall. Rhodine stepped around her and grasped one of the ringbolts and pulled.

  She stepped back so the front wall wouldn’t hit her as it opened.

  Behind the wall was an eight-foot-by-five-foot compartment lined with polished stainless-steel siding. It was lit inside by bright fluorescent tubes on the ceiling triggered on by the open door. A sheet metal conduit from the outside refrigeration unit stretched across the top of the room into the cargo area and there was a small adjustable vent on the bottom of it. This way, she thought with a chill, he could keep both his cargo and his victim cold. A steel-framed cot was bolted to the floor. Ringbolts were secured to the walls. Beneath the cot was a round stainless-steel drain.

  Cassie felt a chill shoot through her, and for a moment she almost reached out to steady herself on Puente. He noticed and grasped her hand to steady her. “Bless your heart, Miss Cassie,” he said softly, “But it looks like your man took his show on the road.”

  “Obviously,” Rhodine said, “you can’t touch anything.”

  She swallowed hard and gently withdrew her hand from Sheriff Puente’s grasp. She appreciated his gesture, though.

  “Have your evidence techs been through it?” she asked, wondering how many women had been in the secret room. Dozens? Hundreds? She couldn’t take her eyes off the drain.

  “Nothing so far,” Rhodine said. “No hair, no fiber, no fingerprints, no DNA.”