The Highway ch-2

by C. J. Box

  Cody sat back. “Thank you, Edna. That was good thinking.” He jotted the name down on his pad.

  There was a long moment of silence before Edna said, “Cody, I heard you were suspended today.”

  “Just a flesh wound,” Cody said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Will I get in trouble with the sheriff for helping you out?”

  “Maybe,” Cody said. “If you want to tell him.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Besides, would you really not want to find those stupid girls?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then,” he said.

  “Dispatch clear,” Edna said.

  He mumbled a thank you and closed his phone.

  * * *

  “No luck?” Cassie asked from the door. He realized she’d been there since the phone rang and had been listening in.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  She looked over her shoulder in the direction of the living room, obviously checking to see where Jenny and Justin were, then stepped in and closed the door behind her.

  “Cody,” she said, “what do you really think?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “But I do know it’s not going to help anybody to panic. We’re pulling the trigger on this thing pretty fast. If someone called in the situation to me at my desk, given the short time period that’s lapsed between the last text message and now, I’d counsel them to calm down and wait for at least a couple more hours.”

  She nodded. “This Danielle,” she said. “Is she trouble?”

  Cody said, “Oh, she is. But she’s that kind of trouble boys find irresistible. You should see her picture.”

  Cassie said, “Justin showed me a shot of her on Facebook. She looks like the kind of girl who used to take me aside and tell me I could be pretty if I just tried.”

  Cody smiled.

  “So,” she said, turning serious, “what do we do?”

  He nodded at his phone. “We wait. Somebody out there will locate them.” He didn’t say how. Or what they’d find.

  She came over and leaned against the edge of the desk, facing him. She said, “What does your gut tell you? Just between us?”

  He looked away for a moment, then back at her. “We give it a couple of hours. The word is out to the highway patrol, local law enforcement, game wardens, and park rangers. There may not be a lot of ’em out there this time of night, but if they’re out on patrol there aren’t that many roads to check.”

  She took in a deep breath and crossed her arms. “And if after a couple of hours we don’t hear anything?”

  “Then we start to get worried,” he said. “This is the kind of situation where time is everything. If they are in trouble, well, we can’t act fast enough.

  “In fact,” he said, squinting up at her, “if we don’t hear anything soon I’m going to head down there and start rousting people.”

  “You’re in no condition to drive,” she said.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “In fact, I’ve probably logged in more road miles drunk than most people have sober. But I can’t just sit around. I’ve got to get into the middle of things and start knocking some heads. Many times, a case doesn’t get solved until all the players involved-local sheriffs, cops, state guys-are properly motivated. And if there are suspects, I want to be the one asking questions. We can’t wait until morning.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “Nope,” he said. “You won’t.”

  “Really,” she said. “I can take a sick day.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “You don’t want to be around me if I have to use some unorthodox methods to get answers, if you know what I mean.”

  She said, “I read the report about what happened in Yellowstone. I know there were some allegations of brutality. One witness said you shot him in the knees and hung him from a tree.”

  Cody shrugged. “Otherwise, the bears would have eaten him. I saved his miserable life. But you don’t want any part of that. You want to be as far from that kind of thing as possible at this stage of your career. Besides,” he said, “How do I know you wouldn’t just report me again?”

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” she said angrily.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Look,” he said, “if you want to help you can help me more by staying here. If I get onto something down there I’ll need someone to work the phones and access all the databases. I can’t rely on anyone else in the department considering my situation. So if you keep yourself available, you could be a hell of a lot more help than if you tagged along.”

  She started to argue, but thought better of it. “Makes sense,” she said.

  “So if this thing goes to hell, keep an eye on e-mail and keep your cell phone on.”

  She nodded.

  The door opened and Jenny came in. Justin hovered just behind her.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Cody said. Justin’s shoulders slumped in despair.

  Over his shoulder, a chime on his computer sounded. He glanced over and saw it had come from Edna.

  “Everybody out,” Cody said, “I need to collect my thoughts before I call that idiot Ted Sullivan and tell him his daughters are missing.”

  21.

  11:32 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

  A SINGLE DARK CLOUD SCUDDED across the slice of moon, halving it, while the Lizard King adjusted the control for the RPMs on the ancient Case backhoe. The powerful old engine revved roughly, rattling the metal floor of the cab, but settled into a banging muscular rhythm that could be heard for miles if there had been anybody out there to hear it.

  Mountains rose on all four sides of the deep little valley and they were blacker than the sky. The night was still and cold. And beyond the growl and glow of the backhoe in the mountain meadow there was utter darkness.

  The four lights mounted on the roof of his open cab threw harsh white light on the matted grass in front of the machine. He dropped the outriggers on both sides of the backhoe and triggered the stabilizers. They bit into the soil with a hydraulic hiss and he could feel the backhoe sit back on its haunches and settle in. He placed his gloved hands on the two tall lollypop sticks between his knees. The left stick maneuvered the hinged hydraulic arm and the right stick controlled the bucket curl. The scarred steel teeth of the bucket plunged into the soft soil and the motor strained as he lifted the first big mouthful and dumped it to the left of the backhoe. The ground was dark and moist with a few large rocks, and he should be able to dig a square pit that was fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and six feet deep within a couple of hours.

  He knew this because it wasn’t the first excavation he’d performed in the narrow valley. In fact, if one looked closely, the valley floor was riddled with them.

  * * *

  The Lizard King was both incredibly excited and exhausted. He’d not slept for twenty hours and the night had been a roller coaster of anger, lust, fear, and triumph. He hadn’t been home yet and his cell phone was filled with messages. Since he knew what was on them and who had left them there was no reason to listen. No reason at all.

  * * *

  To the right of the hole he was digging was the little red Ford they’d towed in. In the glow from the light bar above his head he could see the reflection of his white Tyvek jumpsuit crumpled on the front seat of the car. On the passenger seat was a bundle of clothes and shoes that had been removed from the comatose girls. Everything would soon be buried under tons of dirt. Including that green Colorado license plate.

  By morning light there would be no visible trace of the red Ford or the items inside it and the backhoe would be garaged in the county machine shed.

  He thought of those two thin, flawless, half-naked bodies they’d unloaded. They were so unlike the lot lizards he’d brought back the last few months. Sure, there had been treasures from time to time when he got lucky and the circumstances were right. But for too many months, the
y’d had to make-do on a steady diet of lot lizards.

  Then he pushed the thought aside as far as it would go so he could concentrate on his work.

  22

  11:38 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

  As Cody reached for the landline phone to call Ted Sullivan’s Omaha phone number, his cell phone lit up. The display showed a 406 area code-Montana-but he didn’t recognize the number. In his move for the phone he’d knocked over half a cup of coffee Jenny had brought in for him-his third so far. Hot coffee flooded across the surface of his desk and a rivulet poured into his crotch where he sat. Cody kicked his chair back, daubed the spilled coffee with the sleeve of his shirt, and opened his phone with his free hand.

  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?”