by C. J. Box
Antlerhead was right behind her, loping from the alley. Apparently, he’d seen her come out for her smoke break as well and when he caught up with her, he grabbed her by her arms and spun her around to face him. Her cigarette dropped into the gutter with a display of sparks.
Cassie cursed herself for not seeing it coming and she opened the door of the Jeep and pushed herself out. The call from Rachel had thrown off her concentration. She fumbled for the recording app on her phone as she walked quickly across the street toward Nayna and Antlerhead. Nayna struggled to break his grip.
Cassie took a deep breath to calm herself. She hadn’t expected Antlerhead to escalate the situation so quickly.
“I just want to talk to you,” Antlerhead said.
“Let me go, you asshole.”
“Nayna, please. I just want to talk.”
“There’s nothing to say. Let me go or I’ll call the cops. I’ll start screaming.”
He prevented that by wheeling her around again so he could clamp her in a headlock with his left arm across her throat.
Cassie heard a muffled yell, and Antlerhead said, “Stop it, Nayna, goddamn you. I don’t want to hurt you. I fucking love you.”
Nayna’s eyes were wide open and panicked but they locked on Cassie’s approach. Antlerhead hadn’t seen her yet because he was so focused on getting Nayna to stop struggling.
Cassie gave up on turning on the recording app—too many wasted seconds, too many stupid swipes of the screen—and she thumbed the icon for her camera. A red dot appeared and she punched it. She was now recording video and she raised her phone to chest level and aimed it at Antlerhead and Nayna with her left hand while reaching back for the grip of her Glock with her right.
“Jerry, let her go.”
Antlerhead’s head bobbled at the sound of his name and he glared at Cassie. He kept Nayna in the chokehold. Cassie hoped the waitress could get enough air to stay conscious.
“Who in the hell are you? This is a private conversation.”
He even sounded dumb.
“It’s not a conversation, it’s an assault,” Cassie said. “Let her go right now or I’ll blow your stupid head off.”
She drew her gun as she said it and leveled it at Antlerhead. The front sight was aimed squarely at the dent above his eyebrow.
“Shit, man,” he said. He sounded offended. “Put that down and turn that camera off.”
Cassie steadied the weapon and hoped her hand wouldn’t tremble.
Then he relaxed his grip on Nayna and she twisted away. As soon as she got her balance she coughed, then turned on her heel and kicked Antlerhead so hard between his legs it lifted him off the ground. He wheezed—it was a pathetic sound—and he dropped to his knees.
Nayna cocked her leg back for another kick and Cassie said, “Back off, Nayna. It’s over.”
“It ain’t over,” Nayna said as she kicked him in his sternum. “He was choking me.”
Antlerhead moaned and fell over in slow motion.
“I’m not kidding,” Cassie said to her. “That’s enough or I’ll call the cops on both of you.”
“He’s supposed to be in jail anyway,” Nayna said. “He won’t leave me alone.”
“I get that.”
“Who are you anyway?” Nayna asked. Then: “Oh, I remember you from earlier. Are you some kind of cop?”
“I’m a licensed private investigator. My name is Cassie Dewell. I’m here to take our friend back to his parents’ house.”
“He ain’t my friend.”
“He used to be.”
“Well, he ain’t no more. He’s an asshole.”
“I’ll give you that.”
Cassie neared Antlerhead and holstered her weapon. He writhed on the asphalt with both of his hands clamped between his thighs. His clothing was white from the film of ash on the ground.
“Did you hear that, Jerry? It’s time to go home. We can do this without getting the police involved. How does that sound?”
“Just get him out of here,” Nayna said. “I don’t ever want to see his stupid fucking face again for the rest of my life.”
From Antlerhead, a childlike sob. His body shook as he cried.
“Come on, Jerry,” Cassie said. “Let’s go over to that Jeep across the street.”
“Nayna,” he cried. “Nayna.”
Cassie could see that Nayna was positioning herself for another kick so she stepped between them. The waitress backed away.
“Please get back to work,” Cassie told her.
*
Arm in arm, they staggered across the street toward her Jeep. Antlerhead was unsteady on his feet and he hadn’t stopped sobbing.
Cassie saw the Big Timber PD unit turn the corner and drive slowly down McLeod Street toward them.
“Straighten up,” Cassie said sharply. “Act like a man.”
She guided him into the passenger seat and closed the door. Antlerhead slumped forward and put his head in his hands. Cassie would have preferred to cuff him and stow him in the back for the drive to Laurel but she didn’t want to draw attention from the local cop who passed by.
“That was close,” she said as she climbed in and turned the key to the ignition.
“Nayna.”
“Oh, please,” Cassie said as she drove cautiously out of town toward I-90. “You’re not the victim here.”
“The hell I ain’t,” he said. “She told me she loved me once and now she kicks me in the nuts.”
That struck Cassie as funny and she looked away so he couldn’t see the expression on her face. The release of tension from the situation and Antlerhead’s perceived victimhood made her want to laugh out loud.
After a few minutes, she said, “Let me know when you stop crying and can hold it together long enough for me to return a phone call.”
two
The law offices of Mitchell-Estrella were on the second floor of a newish office building on Main Street on the western flank of downtown Bozeman. It was a cool sunny morning tainted by the brackish odor of smoke from the forest fires in the mountains. Not until the temperature climbed to forty-five degrees would the inversion layer open up and allow the smoke to disperse into the atmosphere.
Cassie parked in the first visitor space in the lot and fished a notebook out of her handbag. She left the tools and weapons and stuffed the bag under the passenger seat so it couldn’t be seen from the outside.
Before getting out, she paused and sighed heavily. She was tired and it wasn’t even nine in the morning. She’d not arrived home until one thirty after delivering Antlerhead to Buford and Nadine Allen, and she’d been up at six forty-five to make breakfast for Ben and spend some time with him before he went to school and Isabel got up.
Of course, her son had barely spoken, and when she asked him about school, wrestling practice, and his friends he’d said all were “fine.”
“Just fine?”
He rolled his eyes, exasperated with her. “What do you want me to say, Mom?”
Fourteen-year-old boys were a challenge.
And so was making the effort to see Rachel Mitchell, even though Cassie had known this day would come.
Climbing the stairs to Rachel’s office, she fought the feeling that she was crossing a line that she didn’t want to cross.
*
Everything that happened in western Montana happened in one of the valleys between mountain ranges. The towns, the roads, the rivers, and the railroads were all funneled into the valleys between the Absaroka and Beartooth Range to the southeast, the Gallatins and Crazies to the southwest, the Bridger, Big Belt, and Elkhorn ranges to the north, and the Bitterroots to the northwest.
Cassie worked those valleys on a daily basis, and it wasn’t unusual for her to drive three hundred miles in a day as a private investigator working several different cases at once. She was the owner and principal of Dewell Investigations, LLC. She was a fully licensed private investigator and her services included skip tracing, asset searches, background checks, fraud, cri
minal defense investigations, domestic cases, and surveillance. Her Montana PI license number was number 7775.
After years of existing in the backstabbing bureaucracy of local law enforcement, she’d decided to strike out on her own. She thought it would be a good move for her and a good thing for Ben. Cassie liked the ideas of setting her own hours, choosing her own cases, and being her own boss.
Her career in law enforcement had been intense and tumultuous. She’d pursued and taken down Ronald Pergram, the infamous Lizard King, who was a serial rapist and murderer who operated as a long-haul trucker. He’d also become her obsession.
She’d also shot and killed Montana state trooper Rick Legerski who was a coconspirator of Pergram’s and the murderer of Cassie’s mentor, Cody Hoyt.
Her work as chief investigator in North Dakota both saved the life of a then fourteen-year-old boy with fetal alcohol syndrome and dismantled a violent MS-13-financed drug ring.
But instead of kudos and promotions, Cassie had been made the scapegoat by a politically ambitious county attorney for a sting operation that went horribly wrong and resulted in the deaths of several fellow deputies including her fiancé at the time. She’d eventually been cleared and offered her job back, but she couldn’t make herself put on a badge again.
Although her sense of justice and respect for the law remained intact, her enthusiasm to “ride for the brand” had been crushed. There had been too many self-aggrandizing officials, too much misanthropy among the good old boys in the system, and too much politicization instead of investigation. She still wanted to put bad guys away and protect innocent people, but she could no longer fight the bureaucracy in order to do that.
It had all worked, sort of. Her idea of setting her own hours and not being beholden to a departmental superior had resulted in longer days, fewer vacations, and serving the toughest boss of all— herself.
Setting up shop had been more difficult than she thought it would be. She hadn’t given enough thought about how tough it was to deal with landlords or the city administration when it came to leasing space and setting up shop. There were so many taxes and fees it was as if the system was set up to make her fail.
The hardest part, though, was overcoming her aversion to private investigators due to her years in local law enforcement in Montana and most recently North Dakota. Jon Kirkbride, the sheriff of Bakken County and her boss in NoDak, once told her, “TSA agents are folks who were too dumb to pass the test for a job at the post office, and private investigators are folks too dumb to qualify for the TSA.”
Nevertheless, she met the minimum license requirements in Montana and passed a background investigation and fingerprint check, she had the requisite experience in spades, and she could afford the two-hundred-fifty-dollar application fee and the premiums for a half-million-dollar commercial liability policy. Her references included cops she’d worked with in her native Montana as well as Kirkbride, who wished her well. She’d passed the examination for private investigators with the highest score ever recorded, according to the clerk who’d administered it. And for another fifty-dollar fee, she’d automatically received a firearms endorsement because of her previous qualification certificates on the range in both states.
She was a neophyte when it came to hiring competent clerical and administrative help. In the two years since she’d launched Dewell Investigations, she’d been through five administrative assistants. Two had left on their own and three had been fired for incompetence.
If it wasn’t for Isabel filling in—her mother justified the hours as “assisting the downtrodden of society”—Cassie might have given up or gone to work for someone else. Or even put aside her revulsion and applied with the local sheriff’s department or police department.
Income hadn’t been an issue after the first four months of her new enterprise. Word got around that she was professional, efficient, and honest. She had more work than she could handle and she had the luxury of not taking unsavory cases—usually.
She’d been told more times than she cared to be told that she “didn’t look like a private investigator” and she was never sure how to take the comment. Cassie was in her mid-thirties, five foot four, ten to fifteen pounds overweight, and her hair was thick and unruly. She didn’t have the commanding presence that would instantly bring a room to order, and she was more of a listener than a talker. Since she no longer wore a uniform, she was rarely taken for a cop.
The only person in her life who thought otherwise was Ben, who said she had “cop eyes.” Whatever that meant.
Cassie had quickly become the PI of choice for several bail bondsmen, a half-dozen insurance companies, two car dealerships, the county realtors’ group, and one criminal defense firm: Mitchell-Estrella.
*
Mitchell-Estrella was gaining both prominence and notoriety in Montana legal circles. Although partners Rachel Mitchell and Jessica Estrella were Cassie’s age and the firm was less than ten years old and the majority of their clients were still lowlifes looking for plea deals, Mitchell-Estrella had recently won acquittals in several high-profile criminal trials. The most lurid case involved Monte Schreiner, the ex-governor of the state who’d been accused of hiring a transient to murder his mistress near his vacation cabin by hitting her over the head with an oar, loading her unconscious body in a drift boat, and pushing it out onto Flathead Lake where she was later found dead of exposure. Cassie had carefully followed the trial in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
The blustery Schreiner, who was known for his frequent appearances on cable television news shows wearing a bolo tie and who brought his dog along to every event, came across in news reports as likely guilty to most Montanans, Cassie included. In a state where nearly everyone had met the governor and seen him in action on a personal basis, it just seemed like the kind of thing he would do. Cassie had once seen the governor work a room and put his hands on every person in it, lingering just a little too long with the younger and attractive women whether they were married or not.
The transient, who admitted to the crime and agreed to turn state’s witness against Governor Schreiner, was shredded on the stand and caught in a half-dozen lies by attorney Rachel Mitchell. Mrs. Schreiner, who eagerly wanted to see her husband sent to prison and had agreed to testify against him, was forced to admit under Rachel’s cross-examination that she had conducted multiple affairs in the past and that she’d exchanged text messages with a fly-fishing guide promising to be with him if “she could just get rid of Monte.”
Monte Schreiner was found not guilty and Mrs. Schreiner had moved to Seattle.
After the verdict, Rachel gave a press conference on the courthouse steps declaring that justice had been done.
Cassie saw the clip on the news and thought that a guilty man with a sharp and aggressive lawyer had beaten the system. Although the prosecution’s case had some holes in it—didn’t they all?—this was the kind of thing that had soured her about the criminal justice system in the first place. She’d vowed not to ever be a part of it.
*
But Cassie and Rachel Mitchell had history. Rachel’s father, Bull, had been a cantankerous outfitter who had guided both Cassie and her mentor Cody Hoyt into the Yellowstone wilderness. Cody had been in pursuit of a client on a multiday horse pack trip who was also a multiple murderer. Cassie had later hired Bull to go after the Lizard King.
Rachel had been in the middle of both situations, both trying to look out for her father’s welfare and providing local legal counsel.
Against her better judgment as well as Rachel’s admonitions, Cassie had persuaded Bull to come out of retirement one more time and even though he was excited to go and at the time was rejuvenated by the adventure, his physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly upon his return. Although still in Rachel’s home in his own special wing, Bull rarely ventured out of his recliner and frequently forgot the names of his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. He only came to life during prime time on Fox News, when he awoke to
rail and shake his fist at liberals.
Although Rachel didn’t blame Cassie outright for Bull’s rapid decline, Cassie felt tremendous guilt for her direct role in it and she knew her requests of him had accelerated his physical and mental decline.
She felt she owed Bull and Rachel, but she’d also made it clear to Rachel that she didn’t like the idea of helping to exonerate Rachel’s criminal clients no matter who they were. Rachel had assured Cassie that she’d never ask her to do work that would “offend her sensibilities.” She’d said it in a wry and irritating way, Cassie thought.
Shortly after that conversation, the firm of Mitchell-Estrella sent the first monthly retainer check to Dewell Investigations. Cassie weighed the decision but cashed it. She needed the money to get started. By doing so she acknowledged her obligation.
Which was why the phone call the night before had thrown Cassie off her game. She knew at the time that Rachel was calling to collect.
*
Rachel Mitchell stood up from behind her desk as Cassie entered her office. Rachel was slim, stylish, and graceful—everything Cassie was not. The attorney had auburn hair, a sly smile, and green eyes. The credenza behind her desk was filled with framed photos of her teenage boys white-water rafting, fishing, and skiing at the local mountain called Bridger Bowl. There was a large shot of Rachel and her handsome husband waving from the basket of a hot air balloon taken somewhere tropical. A black-and-white still showed a much-younger Bull Mitchell astride a horse guiding a long string of pack horses into the Yellowstone Park wilderness.
“Cassie, you look tired,” Rachel said after grasping both of Cassie’s hands in hers in a firm greeting. Right to the point.
“You don’t,” Cassie replied. She knew Rachel either ran or swam every morning before coming to work to stay healthy and fit.
“I was up late on a case,” Cassie said as she sat down in one of two leather-bound chairs across from Rachel’s desk. She dropped her handbag on the surface of the other.
“Anything I should know about?”
“I don’t think so. A skip trace in Big Timber. He’s back home with his family for the moment awaiting trial.”
