Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands

by C. J. Box

  Davis agreed. He said, “With Tollefsen out of the picture, should we expand the inquiry now? Get more guys involved with looking for Kyle and Willie Dietrich and those Salvadorans?”

  Cassie said, “Not quite yet. I’m not sure why I say that, but it doesn’t feel right to me to do that yet.”

  “You’re the boss,” Davis said. But it was clear he disagreed.

  * * *

  CASSIE HEARD a dispatch on the radio as they entered Grimstad that caught her attention. She leaned forward and turned the radio up.

  The dispatcher was requesting an officer drive-by at a house on Third Street. Someone had called 911 from the home but didn’t make a report. The 911 operator said she thought she had heard sounds of distress inside.

  There was no response. Cassie thought it strange until she realized all the other department personnel were still at the rail hub.

  The operator read out the exact address as well as the name of the renter.

  Cassie snatched the mic from the dashboard and said, “We’re close and we’ll respond.”

  “What unit is this?” the dispatcher asked.

  “What unit are we?” Cassie asked Davis.

  “BCS, zero-zero-four.” Davis grinned.

  Cassie repeated it.

  “What are we doing?” Davis asked her.

  “Didn’t you hear the name? The house is rented by someone named Rachel Westergaard. Westergaard.”

  “Like Kyle Westergaard.”

  “Damn right—my paperboy again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  DAVIS DROVE up into the driveway of the Westergaard home on Third Street behind a minivan with dealer plates. Cassie recognized the small house in a block of small houses from her tour with Sheriff Kirkbride. The outside of the 1960s-style single family home needed a coat of white paint and there were broken shingles on the roof. It was a tired-looking house, she thought.

  “Front or back?” Davis asked.

  “I’ll take the back. If no one answers in front, give me a count of ten after you knock before you go in.”

  “We’re going in?” Davis asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “The dispatcher said someone was injured. I’m sure we’ll hear something or see a good reason,” she said, opening her door. Then she added, “Even if we don’t.”

  He smiled. “Is this the way they do it in Montana?”

  “It’s the way I do it,” she said.

  The cold was stunning. It felt like a cup of acid had been thrown on her exposed skin. As she skirted around the side of the house toward the back she wondered if she’d ever get used to it. She could feel icy tendrils crawling down her collar and up her pant legs.

  There was an old washing machine on the side of the house with a heavy chain and lock around it. The snow around the appliance was packed down by footprints. She paused for a moment when she recognized a distinctive bicycle tire track, but there was no bike.

  Kyle, she thought, had been there recently. Where was he now?

  Cassie hiked up the bottom of her parka to pull her weapon. It was a small-grip .40 Glock 27 with nine rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. It fit well even in her gloved hand. She’d used it once to kill that trooper in Montana and had fired it only at the range since.

  When she cleared the back corner of the house she was surprised to see they weren’t the first police officers to respond. A sheriff’s department SUV was idling in the alley, the front door still open as if the occupant had flown out without bothering to close it after him. There were tracks in the snow toward the porch—in fact, several sets of tracks both coming and going—but she had no idea who had made them or how long they’d been there.

  She turned and rushed back around the house to the front to warn off Davis, but she heard him pound on the front door and identify himself.

  When she appeared around the corner Davis spun toward her, his weapon out.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She said, “I think there’s already a cop inside. There’s a sheriff’s unit in the back.”

  “What the hell?” Davis asked aloud. “I didn’t hear anything over the radio about someone getting here first.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Davis furrowed his brow and poised to knock again. Cassie scrambled again to the back in time to see Deputy Lance Foster—the Surfer Dude—cock open the back storm door from inside. His head was turned in the direction of the pounding.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Foster wheeled toward her, his hand on his weapon. When he recognized her he stepped out on the porch. He seemed flushed, Cassie thought.

  “I found blood inside,” Foster said quickly. “But no body.”

  She tried to read his face. She knew she surprised him by being there, but she couldn’t tell if that was all it was.

  “Where were you going?” she asked.

  “To my unit,” he said, pointing toward the idling Tahoe. “I was going to call it in.”

  “Why didn’t you just open the front door? You must have heard Deputy Davis pounding on it.”

  Foster was at a loss for words for a moment. Then he said, “I didn’t want to contaminate the scene any more by walking through the house. We always get yelled at by the evidence techs when we do that.”

  “So it’s a crime scene?”

  “I told you,” Foster said with some heat, “I found what looks like blood inside.”

  At that moment, Davis came around the other corner of the house with his weapon up. He said to Foster, “Dude, what are you doing here?”

  “Responding to the damned call,” Foster said. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? What’s with you two?”

  Cassie nodded to Davis. “Let’s search the house.”

  * * *

  “IT’S IN the back bedroom,” Foster said, leading Cassie and Davis through a small kitchen. He seemed to have calmed down, she thought. But still …

  It was warm inside but the house had a lingering sour smell, she noticed. The linoleum floor in the kitchen was covered with muddy boot prints. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the counter. Someone had left the coffeemaker on until a ring of thick black tar was baked on the bottom of the pot.

  Poor Kyle, she thought.

  She glanced into a bedroom to her right as they entered a narrow hallway that led to the front room. There was an unmade queen-sized bed, clothes on the floor, and the smell of stale tobacco and something else. Weed, maybe. The bedroom was dark because the only window was covered in thick frost.

  “This one,” Foster said, stopping at the second doorway off the hall. He didn’t enter the bedroom but stood in the opening, pointing inside. When Cassie approached Foster stepped aside so she could see.

  It was a boy’s room, no doubt. There were pictures of Plains Indians on the walls that looked torn out of magazines. A crooked shelf was crammed with boy’s things: bones, toy cars, a baseball. The single bed was pushed haphazardly against the door so it would open only halfway. That bed was unmade also but there were several dark red blotches on the top of the worn coverlet.

  “Have you been inside?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Foster said. “I saw the blood and I was on my way to call it in when you two showed up.”

  Cassie nodded. “But you saw no reason to let Davis in the front door?”

  “Look,” he said, “I told you already.”

  “That you didn’t want to disturb the crime scene. Right. Got it,” Cassie said crisply. “So why didn’t you respond on the radio that you were answering the call?”

  “That’s right,” Davis said. “Why aren’t you at the rail hub with everybody else?”

  Foster’s face went blank but the side of his mouth hitched up in an involuntary tic. He wouldn’t meet her eye. Cassie thought he looked guilty of something. He said to Davis, “There was really nothing to do out there, Ian. I kind of sneaked away for lunch. I was a minute away from here on Second when the call came, so I just popped on in
.”

  “On your own,” Cassie said. “Without telling the dispatcher.”

  “Okay,” Foster said, looking away from her. “Okay, okay. I screwed up the procedure. I mean, the dispatcher said she heard somebody moaning. It might have been a matter of life and death. You can write me up if you want to. If that’s what floats your boat.”

  Cassie gestured toward the boy’s room. She mouthed, “He’s still in there.”

  Both Foster and Davis were obviously puzzled. Foster started to speak but she put a finger to her lips and glared at him.

  “There’s a car outside,” she mouthed.

  Then she pointed to the dirty carpet they were standing on and moved her open hand across the floor as if presenting it to them. There was no blood. Anyone bleeding as profusely as the splotches on the bedcover indicated would bleed on his way out as well.

  She said out loud, “Well, I guess there’s nobody here. I’ll go out and call it in. Foster, we’ll see you back at the department. I’ll call the evidence techs to do an analysis of the blood.”

  They got it.

  She gestured to Davis, you first.

  Then to Foster, back him up.

  And she moved aside.

  Davis stepped up on the top of the bed and vaulted to the floor, with Foster right behind him. Davis spun and dropped to his haunches to check under the bed, his gun out in front of him. He shook his head.

  “There he is,” Foster said, aiming his weapon at the open closet. “Come out of there with your hands on your head.”

  There was a moan from the closet.

  Cassie prayed it wasn’t the boy, and it wasn’t. Instead, a tall and gaunt man stepped out, knocking boy’s clothes off hangers as he did. The man’s face was paper white, and his eyes peered out from hollows. The shaft of an arrow stuck out of his neck.

  “I’ll call for an ambulance,” she said, as Foster and Davis forced the man to his knees. He didn’t fight back.

  “He’s known as T-Lock,” Davis said to Cassie. “On a scale of one to ten for dirtbags, he’s about a one point five.”

  T-Lock moaned again, this time in protest.

  “Stay with him,” Cassie told Foster. She gestured to Davis to come with her.

  When Davis had stepped across the bed again and joined her in the hall, she whispered, “Let’s search the house for the drugs. They might be in here. No Kyle, though.”

  Davis nodded, then said, “Is there something hinky with the Surfer Dude??”

  “Maybe.”

  * * *

  IT WOULDN’T take long for the ambulance to arrive, she thought. There were several on standby at the rail hub with EMTs in them so all they’d have to do was release one. Since there had been no explosions from the crash site, she didn’t think it would be a problem.

  Davis took the kitchen and bathroom. Cassie took the front room and the other bedroom. In Rachel Westergaard’s bedroom, she went through the drawers and the closet, checked beneath the bed, and rifled through the nightstands. There was a half-empty box of .25 ammunition in one of the drawers but no weapon.

  It was obvious Kyle’s mother Rachel was living with a man, and Cassie guessed it was T-Lock. She confirmed it when she found a Walmart photo booth shot of the two of them together.

  There was paraphernalia for shooting up between the box springs and the mattress: a syringe and needle, a spoon, a candle, and a couple of small baggies of black tar heroin. She didn’t touch the syringe but she could see it was clouded with fingerprints. She hoped they didn’t belong to Kyle’s mother.

  Suddenly, there was a thump and a cry from the boy’s bedroom, then a deafening gunshot.

  She drew her weapon and rushed to the boy’s bedroom to find T-Lock sprawled on his back across the bed with a bullet hole in his forehead. His arms and legs twitched in death throes. Foster maintained his shooting stance in the middle of the room, his Sig Sauer gripped tight.

  “Son of a bitch tried to kill me!” Foster shouted.

  “How?”

  “He pulled that arrow out of his own neck and came at me with it.”

  Cassie looked down. The arrow was in fact near T-Lock’s twitching hand.

  “My God,” she said. “He pulled it out?”

  “You’re telling me,” Foster said, taking a deep breath and holstering his gun. The room smelled of gunpowder and hot blood.

  “What a fucking idiot,” Foster said. “I had no choice.”

  Cassie looked from T-Lock’s body to Foster and back again. Foster wasn’t wearing gloves.

  She said, “So when we check that arrow, only his fingerprints will be on it, right?”

  Foster’s face went slack, then he recovered quickly. He said, “Come on. You don’t think I pulled it out myself and then shot him, do you?”

  She said, “We’ll find out. But in the meantime I need you to come out of that room and hand me your weapon and badge. I’ll keep both of them safe until we figure this out.”

  She felt more than saw Davis join her.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Foster said. “Who in the hell do you think you are?”

  He looked to Davis for support. “Ian, what is with this crazy lady?”

  Davis said, “She’s your boss.”

  Cassie asked, “Did he tell you where Kyle was before you shot him?”

  There was a beat. There shouldn’t have been a beat.

  “Who?” Foster asked.

  “The kid who rides a bike,” Cassie said. She gestured to the white tire track cast that had fallen out of Foster’s coat pocket during the struggle. It was on the floor next to his heavy boots.

  “Oh shit,” Davis whispered when he saw what Cassie had seen.

  Cassie drew her Glock and raised it with both hands, aimed at Foster’s big chest.

  “Ian, take his weapon.”

  Foster was quiet for a moment, but his eyes narrowed. She could tell he was weighing his options.

  “I don’t know how it got there,” Foster said.

  Cassie said, “Just like you don’t know why you didn’t respond to the dispatcher, right? So did you hook up with MS-13 while you were here or were you in their pocket before you moved here from California? I’d guess the latter. Am I right?”

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  She kept her front sight on Foster’s heart while Davis disarmed him. Davis also plucked a set of cuffs and a container of pepper spray from Foster’s belt. Davis had a sympathetic look on his face while he did it. Obviously, she thought, he wasn’t convinced she knew what she was doing.

  “Do you know where the drugs are?” she asked.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Do you know where Kyle is?”

  “I said I wanted a lawyer. I want our rep here before I answer any questions.”

  “Step aside,” Cassie said to Davis. “I’m going to shoot this son of a bitch.”

  Davis looked at her with horror. But there must have been something in her eyes, because he moved away from Foster.

  Foster saw it, too.

  He said, “Kyle’s gone. I don’t know where the hell he is. T-Lock didn’t know either.”

  “So he could talk a little. What else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Where is Willie Dietrich?”

  “With MS-13. There’s two of them.”

  “Names?”

  He shrugged. “I only know them as La Matanza and Silencio.”

  “Where are the drugs?”

  Foster hesitated for a moment, but when her finger whitened on the trigger he blurted, “Outside in that old washing machine.”

  “And where is Kyle’s mother?” Cassie asked.

  Foster lowered his eyes. He said, “MS-13 took her. I’m sure she’s dead by now.”

  Davis said, “Jesus.”

  * * *

  FOSTER WAS led by a stunned Sheriff Kirkbride to the Tahoe in handcuffs. Cassie stood with Davis and two other deputies while Undersheriff Max Maxfield went to his unit to ret
rieve a bolt cutter from the trunk.

  Davis pulled Cassie aside and said softly, “I really thought you were going to kill him in there.”

  “I was,” she said. “I hate guys like that.”

  “You really would have shot him?”

  “I learned from the best.”

  Davis shook his head and laughed bitterly. He was shaken by what had happened. She was, too. His laughter was a sign of uncomfortable relief.

  “That confession he made won’t stand up, you know—given the circumstances. He asked for a lawyer and instead you kept your gun on him. What am I supposed to tell the sheriff?”

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” Cassie said. “I won’t ask you to lie for me. I’ll tell the sheriff what happened later.”

  He nodded. She could tell he wasn’t sure what he was going to say or do yet.

  “Surfer Dude is probably going to walk,” he said.

  “I know. But he’ll be out of the department and out of our sight and I doubt he’ll ever get another job in law enforcement. That’s not the worst outcome in the world.”

  “Man,” Davis said, “two dirty cops. Who would have guessed it?”

  “He did,” Cassie said, nodding toward Kirkbride as the sheriff closed the back door on Foster. “Or at least he had his suspicions. That’s why he wanted me to investigate on my own without involving any of his other officers.”

  “How did you know about Foster?” Davis asked.

  “I didn’t,” she confessed. “I thought Cam was the only dirty cop.”

  Maxfield returned with the bolt cutter and fitted the chain between the sharp jaws and squeezed the long handles.

  The link popped with a sharp ping and the chain fell away.

  Maxfield opened the top of the washer and peered inside.

  He looked up, confused. “There’s nothing in here but some really old frozen clothes,” he said.

  After letting it sink in a few seconds, Cassie turned to Davis and said, “We’ve got to find Kyle.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN