The Bitterroots

by C. J. Box

*

  The school was as big as he remembered it although it looked like there were a few add-ons near the old brick gym. The grounds were grass turning yellow, cottonwoods shedding leaves, and dark spruce trees standing like sentinels. Hanging wisps of smoke gave it an eerie feel. The light blue glow from overhead lights cast shadows and made the campus look far more serious and formidable than he knew it to be.

  Seeing the building again—peaked roof, brick and glass construction, everything unimaginative and institutional—brought back a flood of memories that made him stir in his seat. They weren’t good memories.

  If it was possible to hate a building, he hated the building in front of him. He hated every brick, every bland tile in the hallways, every locker, every teacher, every administrator, every classroom but one—auto shop.

  And he despised nearly every kid that went to the school back then. He doubted they were any different today and they were probably worse.

  From what he’d observed, the coming generation was just a bunch of pussies. Coddled, softheaded narcissists, all of them. They were all heroes in their own minds and in the minds of their parents and the school administration. They all had a shelf stacked with participation trophies.

  They were so into their own feelings. Their heads were on swivels to constantly look for offense so that they could be righteously outraged by something. He’d read where the senior class of the school in front of him had gone on strike the previous year because of something a gym teacher said that was construed as racist and homophobic. The students were portrayed in the press as champions of tolerance. The gym teacher was suspended and later let go.

  Pussies.

  These little snowflakes had no idea what they were going to face when they got out into the real world. They should all have to spend thirty days in prison to find out what the law of the jungle was truly like. They should be assigned to a cell in D Pod with no television, no cell phones, no social media, and no Wi-Fi. They should have to bunk with a Crow Indian from the res who was in there for murdering a seventy-year-old Good Samaritan couple from Missouri who stopped on the highway to help him and his broken-down pickup.

  That thought made him smile.

  *

  He’d promised to himself to stay clean for the night. No alcohol, no weed, no meth. He’d kept his promise, although he couldn’t stop his left leg from bouncing up and down as he sat.

  The driver painted the whole of the school with his eyes. He picked out individual classrooms where he’d once been trapped. He recalled that his only solace was staring out the window toward the mountains and waiting for the final bell of the day.

  He was surprised how vivid his memories were and how much they affected him now. He hadn’t expected it.

  Few knew what it was like to go to a high school in the wake of a legacy—his siblings—and come up short. To be judged not on your own accomplishments or attributes but solely in comparison to those who had gone before. You could see it in the eyes of his teachers once they established his lineage. Sometimes they told him stories about those before him as if that somehow would make him feel better about himself. Instead, though, it drove home the fact time and time again how he paled in comparison. Every damned time.

  And he hated the factions: the stoners, the cowkids, the hipsters, the socials, the athletes, the emos, the nerds, the elites. He never belonged to any of them. He was an outcast and he hung around with other outcasts, most of whom he couldn’t stand.

  He would forever be an outcast.

  But it was different now. He was an outcast with a plan.

  A plan and a gun.

  *

  With the weapon tucked into his waistband and his jacket pulled over it, the driver climbed out of his truck and shut the door behind him and walked toward the high school.

  He crossed the teacher’s parking lot quickly because it was wide open and illuminated by overhead lights, pausing only when he was in the deep shadow of a campus spruce. He looked around again, checked the streets, checked the sidewalk.

  He turned his back on the front doors of the school where he knew there were closed-circuit cameras. There had been cameras even when he went there, although he wasn’t sure they’d actually worked.

  The truck driver knew about the cameras from a clip he’d watched on YouTube depicting an act of student bullying that took place inside the entrance vestibule. The cameras clearly identified the perpetrators—they pummeled a kid who looked like he deserved pummeling—and the offending students were later suspended. He didn’t care about that. What interested him was the range and quality of the video cameras. It was like a fucking television studio inside the vestibule.

  No one could enter the front doors of the school without being clearly seen, and it was a long way inside—past the principal’s office, past the guidance counselors, past the school security room— to where the classrooms were located.

  There was no need to take that gamble.

  *

  From tree to tree, shadow to shadow, he progressed the length of the long building toward the back. He paused at the gym building and stood tall to look through a window into the interior. The gym was lit by widely spaced emergency lights but from what he could see it still looked the same. The uncomfortable stands, the gym floor, the stupid paintings of the mascot on the walls under each basket. Looking inside brought back a flood of feelings he didn’t like.

  He could smell the sour sweat and piss from the locker room and hear the reverberation of sharp sounds inside the gym itself. That place was a special kind of hell and he fought an involuntary shiver when he took it in.

  *

  He stayed close to the exterior brick walls because the angle of the moonlight kept them in complete shadow. The grass ended as he got closer to the farthest building from the front of the school, the auto shop. They didn’t bother to keep the grass groomed back there because it couldn’t be seen from the street and the students who hung out there were losers anyway.

  His boots crunched on gravel mixed with cigarette butts and it nearly made him smile. He used to smoke there, right there in the same place. He was glad the tradition had been upheld.

  At the corner of the end of the building the driver paused and reached for his pistol. It was a Browning Buck Mark .22 semi-auto with a homemade suppressor and a ten-round magazine filled with hollow-point rounds. It felt balanced and substantial in his hand.

  Then he leaned around the corner and aimed up. Under the high eave was a glass bulge that looked like an upside-down bowl. That’s where the closed-circuit camera was housed.

  He racked a cartridge into the pistol and caught a glimpse of brass before it was seated. Then he raised the weapon again and steadied it by leaning against the brick. He thumbed the safety off and squeezed the trigger.

  Snap-snap-snap-snap-snap-snap.

  Shattered glass and pieces of the surveillance camera fell to the driveway. What remained of the camera itself stuck out of the housing like the tongue of a dead animal.

  The sound of the shots were high-pitched and, he thought, not loud enough to draw attention.

  He targeted what was left of the camera.

  Snap-snap-snap-snap.

  The unit dropped out of the housing and hung there, held up by a single electric wire. It twisted in the moonlight like a dead rabbit caught in a snare.

  *

  The driver gathered up all the spent casings and counted them twice to make sure he had them all. They’d all been kicked out the same direction and most of them had been nestled in a crack in the concrete driveway. He dropped them into his pocket along with the empty magazine and shoved an extra ten-shot magazine into the grip.

  With the pistol tucked back into his waistband—the barrel was surprisingly hot—he walked around the corner and tried to turn the knob of the outside door. Locked, as he thought it would be.

  Then he bent and grasped the handle of the big garage door. If the students were like the ones he’d gone to class with,
they sometimes forgot to lock the overhead garage door. He pulled up on it. Locked.

  But he knew a trick that used to work.

  He grasped the garage door handle with both hands and set his feet. The latch that anchored the folding garage door to the track used to not line up to the locking slot correctly. It had been installed poorly when the building was built.

  In the driver’s view, maintenance people working for the school system, like the teachers and administrators, did the absolute minimum possible. They did their day-to-day chores, enough to keep them employed. But they rarely took the initiative to fix a fundamental problem like a misaligned garage door unless it was an immediate problem.

  Then he jerked the door hard left, putting his weight into it. The latch gave with a click.

  He thumbed the green button next to the doorjamb and he heard the opener inside growl to life. The door rumbled and began to raise.

  He paused it after two feet, just enough to see the shiny concrete floor on the inside and to get a whiff of motor oil and transmission fluid. Then he closed it and rocked the door to the right until the latch reseated.

  From the auto shop there was an annex that led to the main classroom building. There were no doors or barriers in between.

  He knew there were probably cameras in the hallways but he wasn’t concerned with them. They might capture his image, but by the time they did he’d be well inside moving to his destination. It would be too late to stop him.

  The driver knew he could get into the school any time he wanted to.

  He also knew it might take weeks for the repair order on the outside camera to work its way up through the administration and back down again to a breathing maintenance man, who would then have to order a whole new closed-circuit video assembly and wait for it to get shipped before he could even think about installing it.

  *

  The driver stayed in the pools of shadow as he made his way back to his truck.

  He climbed inside the cab, closed the door, and returned the Browning to the center console.

  After checking the streets to ensure that no one was watching, he started the engine and rumbled away. His target, he thought, would never see him coming.

  Part II

  Envy slays itself by its own arrows.

  —The Greek Anthology, X 111

  You shall not hate your brother in your heart.

  —Leviticus 19:17

  seven

  As Cassie drove to Lochsa County the next day, she was still unnerved from the encounter the night before with the tractor-trailer outside her house. It had been so unexpected and it had awakened in her a feeling of dread and doom that she thought she had left behind.

  Maybe she should see someone, she thought, a counselor of some kind. If simply seeing a semi-truck in a state filled with them on every highway brought out this kind of dread …

  She tried to push it aside. Cassie had always thought herself smart and strong enough to deal with her issues and she had secret contempt for people who ran to psychologists as a matter of course to dissect their feelings. But maybe when things slowed down she would see someone, she thought.

  The last thing she needed, though, would be for word to leak out that she was undergoing psych treatment. That might discourage current and future clients. She knew from experience how fast rumors could travel within law enforcement and legal circles even among the more enlightened. She knew she’d have to discreetly ask around for a name or two of counselors who could keep their mouths shut.

  But first, she had work to do.

  Blake Kleinsasser, rapist and moral reprobate that he was, deserved a competent defense. And if he was as guilty as he seemed, Rachel needed to know it so she could negotiate with him on solid ground to cop a plea.

  That would be the best route, Cassie knew. Blake would go to prison and Franny would be spared reliving the crime in front of jurors and press coverage.

  *

  Smoke hung in every valley and it distorted the view of the mountains in every direction, as if someone had smeared Vaseline on the interior windows of her Jeep. It was so thick she could taste it.

  She glimpsed makeshift camps of temporary firefighters as she drove west as well as distant helicopters and aircraft carrying loads of water and fire retardant. The fires were everywhere there was timber, and that meant there were fires throughout the Northern Rockies.

  Cassie chose to leave Interstate Highway 90 after Butte and she cut south and west on two-lane state roads. There was no direct route because the Sapphire Range ran north to south between the interstate and Lochsa County. There was one unpaved road that switchbacked over Skalkaho Pass, but she’d seen digital roadside warnings reporting that there was an active fire on top and long delays were likely.

  So she took Highway 43 to Wisdom, Montana, with the Pioneer Mountains on her left, the Sapphires and Continental Divide on her right, and the Big Hole River coursing through the stunning empty valley. She encountered less than a half-dozen cars along the route, although she glimpsed drift boats and fly fishermen at times on the river.

  Cassie recalled from her Montana history that the Big Hole Battlefield was where Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce engaged the U.S. Seventh Infantry in a day and a half battle in 1873. It was a sad and depressing story, as well as a typical one.

  The American government renounced a treaty they’d signed with the Nez Perce to allow settlers and white miners into their lands, and Chief Joseph—betrayed too many times already—had decided to lead the entire tribe through the mountains to Canada where he hoped to team up with Sitting Bull and his relocated Lakota. The army intercepted them along the Big Hole River and attacked, killing almost a hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children.

  With the survivors, Chief Joseph fled east through what was now Yellowstone Park, then cut to the north hoping he could elude the army. Forty miles short of the border and starving, he surrendered.

  The valley might be breathtakingly beautiful, she thought, but it cloaked one of the worst episodes from the settling of the state and the country.

  *

  She was slowed twice by farm machinery inching along the blacktop and at one point by a large herd of black Angus being driven by mounted cowboys. The pavement was covered with wet green manure and the inside of her Jeep smelled of it for fifteen miles. Then she began to climb into the mountains.

  Finally, she descended via a sharp set of switchbacks into the Bitterroot Valley on U.S. Highway 93. The route would take her north parallel to the Idaho border into the series of communities and counties in far western Montana.

  As she drew closer to Lochsa County, she was reminded of observations she’d made in her high school sports days when the bus she was in ventured to that part of the state. While Montana was made up of mountains, valleys, rivers, and plains, it was as if those massive formations and vistas were pushed together and jammed against a wall the farther one traveled west. Mountain ranges seemed taller and closer together, meadows and hayfields were smaller and steeper. It was as if the terrain of the state was pinched together from the sides up against the sawtooth border of Idaho—which ran along the top of the Continental Divide all the way to Canada—and it was all extreme and mildly claustrophobic.

  *

  Because she hadn’t been able to sleep after her encounter with the curbside trucker, Cassie had researched Lochsa County itself and its odd origins.

  With Missoula County to the north and Ravalli County to the south, Lochsa was small by Montana standards. It stretched east to west, sandwiched between the two and without a town with more than two thousand residents. The county seat was Horston, population eighteen hundred. She found it striking to study the map and see that between Hamilton and Lolo it was almost a void. And in the center of Lochsa County, hard against the Bitterroot Mountains to the west and the Bitterroot River to the east, was the vast Kleinsasser ranch.

  After reviewing Blake Kleinsasser’s arrest report and all of the documents Rachel had
provided for a second time, Cassie had turned to a fresh page on her legal pad and made a list of what she hoped to accomplish on her trip to Lochsa County: interview Sheriff Ben Wagy and review evidence and charging documents; try to interview Blake’s former defense attorney, Andrew Thomas Johnson; find Hawk; find Lindy; Kleinsasser Ranch; try to walk through building where assault took place; write report with conclusions for Rachel.

  Of those, the only item she felt good about was talking with the local sheriff. The others could be stymied by noncooperation (Johnson) or pure shots in the dark (Hawk, Lindy, getting permission to view the crime scene).

  Cassie found the website for Lochsa County and composed a brief email introduction of herself and made the request to speak to Sheriff Wagy the next day. She knew that being the sheriff of a rural county was equal parts political, social, and law enforcement. If the sheriff was cooperative with her—and most in her experience were—it was by far the best way to start an investigation and build a time line.

  *

  She also did a deeper dive into the founding of the county itself, and the name “Kleinsasser” popped up everywhere. Horst I, Jakob, and Horst II were involved in everything: local politics, county politics, planning commissions, joint powers boards, school boards, weed and pest control boards, on and on. John Wayne and Rand were mentioned on a much smaller scale. Blake’s name was nonexistent.

  Horston, of course, was named after Horst I.

  She also found it interesting that the Kleinsasser Ranch had another name. It was officially registered as the Iron Cross Ranch, and its brand was the German Empire symbol:

  As the late afternoon heated up into the seventies, the heat and dry air fueled the many fires and Cassie had to slow down as visibility decreased. She turned right at Chief Joseph Pass and dropped into the Bitterroot Valley on a steep highway featured with S-curves.

  The sharp outline of Trapper Peak, at 10,157 feet, dominated the western wall of mountains, but Cassie had to remind herself that there were 199 peaks in the state that were higher.