by C. J. Box
Cassie tapped the tip of her pen on her notes. “Okay, there are a lot of family issues. I’m not sure us knowing them helps your case.”
“It explains everything,” he said defensively. “I haven’t even told you about the Kleinsasser Family Trust.”
Cassie cocked her head and Rachel leaned forward.
“The Kleinsasser Family Trust?” Rachel asked.
“It was established by my grandfather, Horst Kleinsasser. He was the so-called leader of a breakaway Hutterite cult who established the ranch in 1916 after being shunned by the rest of his colony. He was a strange and twisted dude, which maybe accounts for why my family is the way it is. But yes, he wrote a long document and deed establishing how the ranch would be passed down through the generations. My dad has it memorized and so do my idiot brothers.”
Cassie wrote down the words Kleinsasser Family Trust for later research.
“Going by the Kleinsasser Family Trust, I should get everything,” he said. “I’m the oldest son. It’s all mine if I want it. It’s up to my discretion whether my siblings get a piece of it or not. But there’s a catch. The only way the heir can be expelled from the trust is by denouncing the family name or committing ‘moral turpitude.’”
Rachel sat back. “Like rape.”
“That’s correct. Like rape.”
Cassie was intrigued but suspicious. “Are you saying they conspired against you in some way to establish moral turpitude?”
“I guess that’s up to you to prove,” he said. “But they already tried to get me kicked off the trust. They said that by leaving the ranch I’d denounced the family name. They hired attorneys and everything, but the judge concluded that going to work some place other than Lochsa County, Montana, isn’t the same as formally denouncing the family, even though to my fucked-up family it was. So this is the next best thing.”
“Again,” Cassie said forcefully, “you’re trying to convince us that they hate you so much that they forced you to assault your underage niece?”
With that, she dropped her pen on her notes and sat back with her arms crossed across her breasts. She wasn’t buying it.
“I’m telling you what I know and what I suspect,” Kleinsasser said. For the first time, there was a hint of desperation in his tone.
“Did you pick up Franny Porché from church that night?”
He nodded. “I did. I thought she was innocent. I thought she might be redeemable because she’s of the fourth generation and that the magical hold the ranch has on the rest of them might not be as strong with her. I guess I thought that she might be able to talk some sense into J. W. and Rand.”
Cassie switched her glare from Kleinsasser to Rachel. Rachel responded by looking away.
“You took a fifteen-year-old girl to an old outbuilding on the ranch because you wanted to talk with her?” Cassie asked. She couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice.
“I know how it looks,” he said, “but that cabin is where I spent the only good years of my life growing up on that place. I guess I wanted to show her that I did have a connection to the family after all these years despite what her mom and her uncles told her.”
“You guess?”
“I’d been drinking for three days,” he said looking down at his hands. “I can only remember bits and pieces of those seventy-two hours. I remember picking her up and I remember waking up when the deputies pulled me out of my bed at the motel.”
Cassie shook her head. She disliked Blake Kleinsasser and she thought he was pathetic.
“How do you explain the whiskey glass they found at the cabin with your fingerprints on it?”
He shrugged.
“How do you explain your semen found on her underwear?”
To his small credit, he cringed. But he shrugged again.
“You’re not going to claim that the sexual intercourse was consensual, are you?” Cassie challenged. Because if he did, she thought, she’d walk out of the room.
“There was no sexual intercourse,” Kleinsasser said. “It didn’t happen. Believe me, if it happened, I’d remember it. That’s something even a drunk remembers.”
There was no reason to ask him about the tire tracks from his rental car. He’d already admitted picking Franny up and taking her out there.
“Have you been accused of assaulting underage victims before this incident?”
“God, no.”
“So, when we dig into your past there won’t be similar incidents? I ask because for sure the prosecution is looking.”
“I’m not a monster,” he said. “I’m just a stupid drunk uncle who thought he was doing the right thing.”
Cassie bit her tongue. The sudden shift to victimhood in his tone rankled her. Like Antlerhead, like most criminals, nothing was ever their fault.
“Why did your lawyer quit?” Cassie asked. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Rachel tense up at the question. It was likely out-of-bounds. Cassie didn’t care.
“You’ll have to ask him,” Kleinsasser said. “But as you’ll find out, everybody in Lochsa County is connected to my family in some way. Maybe he figured that if he wanted to continue his practice into the future he needed to step aside.”
“Cassie,” Rachel cautioned, “do you have any more questions about the facts of this case?”
Cassie slumped in her chair. Her disgust with Kleinsasser and her role in his defense made the bile rise in her throat.
She asked him, “Can you give me the names of people who might have witnessed you during the time you started drinking to when you were rousted out of your bed at the hotel?”
He squinted as if trying to remember. “There’s a man I met at the Corvallis Tavern.”
“What is his name?”
“I think it’s Frank.”
“Anyone else?”
“I met a woman there. Lindy. Blond, late twenties, nice … figure. We spent a lot of time together before I blacked out.”
“Last name for Lindy?”
“You think I got her last name?”
Cassie sighed. “Anyone else?”
This time, he closed his eyes while apparently trying to recall more details.
“There was a goofy old cowboy—a ranch hand. He was the foreman back when I was a kid but apparently he got let go. Named Hawk. He was nice to me. I remember sitting next to him at the Corvallis Tavern. He seemed to know me from my youth but I couldn’t remember him as well as he remembered me. One of those old-timers, you know? He had a hard-on for my dad and my brothers. We talked about what assholes they are.”
“Was this the first night of your bender?”
“No, the second, I think. But don’t hold me to that.”
“Did you spend time with Lindy that night?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone else?”
“Probably, but I can’t think of anyone right now. It’s all kind of a blur, like I said.”
In her notes, Cassie wrote down: Hayloft Saloon / Lolo / Lindy. Corvallis Tavern / Hamilton / Hawk.
“You’re less than helpful,” Cassie said. “Can you help me with a time line from the hour you entered the Hayloft Saloon to when you were arrested?”
“Not anything other than what I told you. I was blotto.”
Cassie sat back. “How often does this happen—these blackout periods when you’re drinking?”
He shrugged. “Back when I was a young big swinging dick on Wall Street it was every couple of years, but it hasn’t happened in a long time. This place isn’t good for me, I guess.
“I don’t know what it is about coming back to Montana,” Kleinsasser mused. “But whatever it is—the big sky or the bad memories—it makes me want to find a bar stool as fast as I can.”
Cassie looked over at Rachel again. The attorney looked as exasperated with Kleinsasser as Cassie felt.
He said, “They used to tell me when I went on a bender that the people I talked to didn’t even know I was drunk,” he said. “They described me as ‘luc
id.’ But afterwards, I couldn’t remember a damned thing.”
“Let’s say there was a scheme against you,” Cassie said to him. “Who would likely be the prime mover in it?”
“J. W.,” Kleinsasser said quickly. “Absolutely John Wayne. He thinks of himself as the keeper of the family name. Rand is unstable and he worships J. W., so I wouldn’t be surprised if he were in on it.”
“What about your sister?”
He shook his head. “Cheyenne and I have the same problem. We tend to go on benders where we can’t remember what we did. Except when Cheyenne goes on one she comes back pregnant.”
“Your parents?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
“And why would Franny lie?”
“I wish I could tell you. I liked her. She’s a little off in the head but anyone would be growing up in that family.”
“So, in conclusion,” Cassie said, “everyone in your family is poison, twisted, and paranoid except for you. Your role is to show up and try and help everyone out of the goodness of your heart after twenty-five years of being away. Did I get that right?”
Kleinsasser started to talk but caught himself. Then he turned to Rachel. “I don’t have to listen to this bullshit.”
Rachel said, “This is nothing compared to what you’ll hear in the courtroom.”
“I’m not copping a plea,” he said. “There’s no way I did this.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t remember what happened,” Cassie said.
*
Cassie waited on a worn bench in the jailhouse hallway for Rachel to finish her meeting with Blake Kleinsasser. She couldn’t spend another minute with him.
When Rachel came out she flashed her palms up. “Don’t say it, Cassie. I know.”
Cassie nodded.
“If you go up there and come back with corroboration maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to convince him to change his plea and we can move past this.”
“How do you do it?” Cassie asked. “How do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
“I don’t.”
“We’re on the wrong side here,” Cassie said.
Rachel didn’t disagree. She looked out the smudged jailhouse window and said, “The fires are bad this morning. My throat feels like I smoked a pack of cigarettes.”
“I’ll go tomorrow,” Cassie said as she stood up.
They walked down the hallway together but didn’t say another word until they parted for their separate cars in the parking lot.
“Sometimes, they’re not guilty,” Rachel said over her shoulder.
But most of the time they are, Cassie thought to herself.
Like Blake Kleinsasser.
four
The dining room still smelled of soy and MSG as Cassie gathered the dishes after dinner that night with Isabel and Ben. She’d stopped at Chinatown Restaurant on West Main on her way home and picked up cartons of sweet and sour pork, cashew chicken, fried rice, and hot and sour soup. Chinese was a compromise of sorts: Ben liked it because it was still exotic to him after living in North Dakota, and Isabel tolerated it because in her mind it was the product of struggling indigenous immigrants in a Caucasian world even though Chinese had built the railroads and had been established in Montana for generations.
Dinner had been quiet: Cassie with her thoughts, Ben with his, and Isabel scrolling through her iPad. But they’d all eaten together and not argued about anything, so it was a win. Often, lack of tension was all she could ask for.
While she scraped off the dishes and placed the half-full containers in the refrigerator for future meals, she tried to fend off feeling dirty for what she’d taken on. It had hung with her throughout the afternoon after meeting with Blake Kleinsasser. She hadn’t mentioned a word of it to either her son or her mother because she wasn’t sure she could defend herself against their questions.
*
Cassie, Ben, and Isabel lived in a three-bedroom ranch-style home on West Kagy Avenue in Bozeman that was south of Montana State University and within sight of the Museum of the Rockies. The neighborhood was old and established, and the homes in it ranged from well-appointed to worn-out. Cassie’s thirty-year-old house was closer to the latter. She knew she needed to get it painted and reshingled, replace the carpets and drapes, and update the kitchen.
Someday.
It wasn’t her dream home by any means but it was good enough to be a placeholder until she could afford a rural property with some space around it. Maybe even a horse or two. The idea of grooming a horse seemed restful. Riding one at dusk and letting the tension of the day melt away …
*
After dinner, Ben had gone straight to his room without a word and Isabel had moved into the family room and turned on the television. The only three channels she watched were CNN, PBS, and MSNBC.
Her mother stood near the bookcase shaking her head at whatever the president had said or tweeted that day. As usual, Isabel wore a flowing full-length dress and her long white-gray hair was bound in a ponytail. The bare nubs of her toes stuck out from the sandals she wore most of the year. For as long as Cassie could remember, she’d never seen her mother wear makeup.
Isabel, who refused to answer to “Mom,” or “Grandma” in Ben’s case, was a stubborn caricature of what a sixties radical should look like two decades into the twenty-first century and she knew it and it didn’t bother her. Once, after several glasses of wine, she’d mused about “changing her look” but she never had. Cassie was so used to it she was only reminded when strangers gaped at her mother when they saw her for the first time. It must be, Cassie thought, like suddenly meeting an actual cartoon character in the flesh.
“Don’t let yourself get worked up,” Cassie said as she entered the room drying her hands on a hand towel.
“It’s impossible not to,” Isabel said. “Just look at that orange clown. Just look at him. What is wrong with you people?”
It was a mantra. The current president had won Montana by nearly twenty percent. It was a source of apoplexy for Isabel and her small circle of like-minded friends.
“Has your life changed in any way?” Cassie asked, despite herself. “Mine hasn’t. Is there something in your life that has gotten worse since he got elected?”
Isabel didn’t look away from the screen. “I’m waiting for the internment camps. I’m waiting for the armies of intolerance to take over the streets and round up the gays and brown-skinned immigrants.”
She was only partially kidding.
“In Bozeman?”
Cassie regretted even bringing up politics. She knew better. Plus, she had a favor to ask.
“Isabel, I might need to be away for a few days. Are you able to look after Ben?”
That got her attention. “How many days?”
“I’m not sure. It’s for work. I may have to be gone a week at most.”
“A week?”
“It may not be that long.”
“Where are you going?”
“North,” Cassie said. “I’ve got to do an investigation in Lochsa County.”
Isabel’s eyes left the television and narrowed on Cassie. “Have you ever been there?”
“In high school but I’m sure you don’t remember.”
Isabel didn’t. She’d never paid any attention to high school sports or attended any of Cassie’s games. That wasn’t Isabel.
Cassie added, “Since then I’ve only driven through.”
“Let me tell you about that place. I went there once with your father and it was horrible.”
Cassie’s dad had been a long-haul truck driver who was away weeks at a time, leaving her and Isabel, his common-law wife, in Helena at the time. That arrangement seemed to work for the both of them because they were such different people that absence served to keep their marriage alive far longer than if they’d lived together in the same house. In the middle was Cassie.
“When were you there?” Cassie asked.
“Years ago. I let y
our father convince me to go on a run with him and I regretfully said yes. I remember rolling into Victor in time to see a mob shaving the hair off a Native American outside a bar. They held him down and shaved off his long black hair and let it fall into the street. I told your father to keep driving and I’ve never been back.”
Cassie pursed her lips. “I’ve never heard that story before.” She couldn’t imagine that at one time in her parents’ union that they’d been close enough that Isabel would actually agree to accompany her dad on the road.
“It was horrible,” Isabel said. “I swore I’d never go back.”
“Was this the sixties, then?”
“No—early seventies. How old do you think I am?”
Cassie didn’t take the bait. “That’s a long time ago and a whole different world.”
“And I seriously doubt those people have changed.” Isabel sniffed.
Then her face softened. “Of course, I’ll be here for Ben, but he’s getting more difficult. We used to have such a wonderful time together, but now I see how he looks at me.”
“He’s at that age,” Cassie said.
She didn’t add, He looks at me that way, too.
“I’ll leave cash for groceries and I’ll call every night,” she said. “Maybe you can figure out separate dinners while I’m away so there isn’t so much drama.”
“He needs to eat healthy foods for his own good,” Isabel said.
Cassie smiled. “Did you see him tonight? He ate twice as much as you and I. Wrestling practice after school makes him ravenous when he gets home, and he hasn’t gained an ounce of fat. I wish I could eat like that.”
“You could, once,” Isabel said, taking in Cassie in a way that Cassie didn’t like. “It’s that cop diet. You cops eat garbage all day.”
Cassie didn’t want to argue. She recalled a piece of advice once given to her by her then-mentor Cody Hoyt of the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Office, who said of day-to-day law enforcement routine, Take every possible opportunity you can to eat and take a shit, because this county is 3,500 square miles, a third of it roadless.
