Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands

by C. J. Box

  “I still like my idea about finding him hanging in his cell,” Puente said.

  “Please,” Rhodine said with frustration. “Maybe he’s telling the truth?”

  It was a trial balloon that hit the wall with a thud.

  The four of them stared at the man in custody in the monitors. He hadn’t moved since she left.

  “It’s him, I know it,” Cassie said.

  “That doesn’t help us right now, you knowing it,” Rhodine said, brusquely running his hand through his perfect hair. “Despite what you led him to believe in there, you’ve never actually seen him in person. It’s in your report. Defense counsel will shred us if we try to go with that one.”

  Cassie stared at Spradley-Pergram on the screen. Rhodine was right and she knew it. She thought about what she knew about the Lizard King, about his past in Montana. About the fact that he’d murdered perhaps hundreds of helpless women and probably his very own mother.

  “We’re going to have to cut him loose,” Rhodine said. “We’ve held him too long as it is. Sheriff…”

  “I know, I know,” Puente said, his face red.

  Cassie said, “I can try something else,” and spun on her heel. She didn’t reply when Behaunek asked what she was contemplating.

  * * *

  CASSIE SAT back down across from him. He beheld her with a weary expression and said, “Are we done here?”

  “Close but not yet.”

  Then she made her play.

  She said, “We know this Montana state trooper who was shot and killed was the mastermind behind the whole operation,” she said, continuing in the same tone she’d used to recount the tale. “It was on his property, after all. Of the three of you involved in the crimes, he was the only one intelligent enough to pull it off for so long. He was the only one with a college education. Even his ex-wife conceded how smart he was, even if he was diabolical.”

  Although he didn’t say anything or move in the slightest, she could hear the rate of his breathing increase. The Lizard King didn’t like it that she had so casually dismissed his intelligence. She wished he was plugged into a heart rate monitor so they could watch how he was reacting.

  “It’s such a shame that the trooper was such a deviant,” she said. “But he must have been very charismatic and convincing to be able to recruit both of you into his sick world and to make you keep your mouths shut. I know it couldn’t have been the other way around.

  “I checked up on you, Ronald. I interviewed your old teachers, your neighbors, and the employees at your old trucking company. I think I might know you better than anyone else left alive.

  “Let’s talk about your new truck. Yellow—that’s kind of bright and cheery, isn’t it? Kind of, you know, metrosexual or something? Have you come out of the closet, Ronald? Now that you have a bright yellow truck, what are you? The Lizard Queen?”

  She paused and smiled at him. “You aren’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, Ronald?”

  His breathing pattern was becoming more rapid. The long wheeze had morphed into a series of quick whistles, but he didn’t seem to be able to hear himself. Although his expression was frozen in place, his ears had reddened. And she could see a tiny pearl necklace of perspiration on his scalp beneath his dark hair.

  “It couldn’t have been easy growing up in that house with no father. And your mother, before she got obese and obsessive, couldn’t really see any value in you. Especially not compared to your sister JoBeth, God rest her soul.”

  Cassie held out her right hand, palm up and gestured to it. “Here we have JoBeth: two-sport all-state athlete, honor roll, Future Farmers of America award winner. She’s athletic, attractive, and smart. She was even the homecoming queen. Then she joined the U.S. Marines and went overseas to Kuwait. She was a hero. And just like my husband, she was killed in action. Your mother kept the folded flag they sent her on the wall, right next to JoBeth’s trophies. She was proud of JoBeth, and who wouldn’t be?”

  Cassie raised her left hand and expelled a puff of breath as she looked at it. “And here we have Ronald. Dull, overweight, held back in the third grade. The only physical activity he participated in was masturbating in his bedroom. Picked up for DWI the week before he planned to join the army, so even they wouldn’t take him. He took one minimum-wage job after the other and had to come home every night and look at that flag on the wall. He is a forty-five-year-old man who still lives at home with his mother.”

  She paused and nodded to her right hand and said, “Winner.” Then to her left, “Loser.”

  Cassie lowered her hands to the tabletop and shook her head as if she was disappointed in him.

  “All those women you tortured and killed, Ronald, just to get back at your mother and sister. It’s pathetic when you think about it—”

  He exploded across the table and screamed, “You fat fucking bitch!” before she had time to react. His huge manacled hands were on her throat, his thumbs crushing her windpipe. She tried to pry them off but he was twice as strong and she couldn’t break his grip.

  Cassie rose in an attempt to twist away, and she impulsively kicked at him but her toe bounced off the table leg. The pressure on her throat was unbelievable and the sight of his grimacing face darkened and faded out of her sight like a curtain being drawn across a window.

  Footfalls, like cascading thunder, echoed from the hallway.

  She never heard the door burst open.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Grimstad

  T-LOCK WAS pacing like a caged panther on the inside of the dirty glass storm door when Kyle got home after school. Kyle climbed off his bike and leaned it against the old washing machine on the side of the house. He used to keep his bike in the front but there had been so many stories of bike thefts recently that he used the new location. The washer had been there for a year. Kyle’s mom was always asking T-Lock to take it away to the dump or at least lock it closed with a chain so no little kids could crawl inside and die. Neither had been done.

  T-Lock opened the side door and leaned out, his eyes bulging. He glanced left and right down the block, then growled, “You, get in here. Now.”

  Kyle nodded. He knew he should be scared. T-Lock could be a scary guy and Kyle knew he must be in trouble for something.

  Kyle simply stared at the man. He considered turning his bike around and riding away—but where?

  T-Lock’s real name was Tracy Andersen and he was a roofer. That’s what he told people who asked what he did. He said he got the name “T-Lock” because of the shingles he used to work with. So no one would forget, he had the name embroidered above the pocket of his denim jacket and tattooed on his forearm.

  “I said move your ass, Kyle. I’m freezing to death standing here with the door open.”

  It was cold. Clouds had blown in from the north and covered the sky in dark gray. Pelletlike snow came in waves, carried by gusts of wind. The brown grass—what little there was of it in the front yard—was catching the snow and holding it there. Kyle wondered how much snow there would be the next morning when he went out to do his paper route. He needed those warm boots and some gloves. Maybe he could convince his mom to take him to Work Wearhouse later that night.

  “Now, Kyle. Come on, man.”

  If T-Lock wore clothes other than black concert T-shirts and jeans with big holes in them—and maybe even shoes instead of flip-flops—he wouldn’t be so cold all the time, Kyle thought.

  Kyle climbed off his bike, readjusted his backpack full of books, and marched toward the front of his house with his head down. Their house was in the older part of town. Big trees, small lots, buckled sidewalks, no fences, lots of cars parked on the street because the homes had been built in the olden days before two- and three-car garages. Some of the houses, usually owned by old people, still looked pretty nice. Others didn’t. Kyle’s didn’t.

  T-Lock kept the storm door open for Kyle, who trudged up the cracked concrete steps and ducked under T-Lock’s outstretched arm. T
he storm door was closed behind him, followed by the front door. The inside of the house smelled of cigarette smoke, as usual. T-Lock wasn’t supposed to smoke inside except in the attached one-car garage, but he did it anyway. Especially since Kyle’s mom worked the afternoon shift at McDonald’s and wasn’t around.

  It was dark inside the house because T-Lock kept the curtains and blinds closed during the day.

  Kyle didn’t expect T-Lock to grab him by the shoulder and spin him around so they were face-to-face. The move nearly made Kyle lose his balance and fall to the floor because his heavy pack swung around as well.

  T-Lock was in his face. “We gotta talk, Kyle, we gotta talk. I went out to the garage to burn one and you know what I found, don’t you? You know what I found.”

  T-Lock was his mother’s boyfriend and had been, on and off, for a few years. He was tall and wide-shouldered with long stringy hair parted in the middle. He had deep-set eyes and a slow stoner’s smile when he smiled. In the winter he grew his beard out and didn’t shave it off until summer. T-Lock’s whiskers were thin and scraggly and about an inch long. The tips of his whiskers curled white as if covered by frost.

  “Do you know what’s in that bag you brought home?” T-Lock asked, shoving his face closer to Kyle’s. His eyes were bulging and there was a throbbing vein in his forehead that mesmerized Kyle because he’d never noticed it before. Of course, T-Lock rarely got so close. Kyle could smell his smoky breath.

  Kyle shook his head. When he’d returned that morning with the heavy packet he didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t leave it outside. His mom was still asleep with T-Lock in their bedroom, so he couldn’t ask her. He carried it from the canvas Tribune bag into the junky garage and put it on the floor under the workbench. It was tight in there because T-Lock had pushed an old Toyota Land Cruiser into the garage the year before so he could get it running. It was still there and not running. Kyle’s mom had to park their old minivan out on the driveway, even in the winter.

  “You really don’t know?” T-Lock asked.

  Kyle shrugged.

  T-Lock stood and whooped as if he couldn’t believe how dumb Kyle was. Then he bent back down and his face got serious. The intensity of T-Lock’s eyes unnerved Kyle because he’d rarely seen him look that way before. Usually, T-Lock was so laid-back it seemed possible he could drift off to sleep any minute.

  “First, Kyle, tell me where you found it.”

  Kyle could talk. He just didn’t like to. It was hard, although it seemed to be getting a little easier since he’d started working with the speech therapist and special ed teacher at school. He liked his special ed teacher. She was a kind and roly-poly lady from Mandan. He didn’t like the speech therapist, though. She spent most of their session texting with someone on her cell phone. The special ed lady hadn’t been there that day, though, and he’d spent the whole time in class with the rest of the sixth grade. They watched movies. Kyle didn’t like being in the class with the others because he was a year older than they were and they knew it. All of his old classmates and friends had moved up to seventh grade and middle school and had left Kyle behind.

  “In the grass,” Kyle said.

  T-Lock rolled his eyes. “I mean where, exactly, in the grass? You mean on somebody’s lawn or something?”

  Kyle gestured to the south. “No. Out in the prairie. It was on the ground.”

  T-Lock cocked his head while he thought. “Was this around when that car wrecked this morning?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “Did you see it happen?”

  Kyle nodded again.

  “And you went down there and found that bag? Did it come out of the car when it rolled, is that it?”

  “I think so.”

  T-Lock cradled his head in his big hands and held it there for a moment.

  “Kyle,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice, “Did anyone see you grab the bag?”

  No.

  “Does anybody know? Don’t lie to me, Kyle.”

  Kyle didn’t lie. T-Lock should know that, he thought.

  “The cops don’t know?” T-Lock asked.

  “No one knows,” Kyle said.

  “You’re sure?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “You didn’t tell your mom or nothing, did you? You didn’t tell your grandma?”

  “No.”

  T-Lock seemed to be thinking. When he did that he closed his eyes. Then, suddenly, they popped open and T-Lock grasped both of Kyle’s hands in his and squeezed hard enough that Kyle took in a breath and held it so he wouldn’t cry out.

  “Kyle, you can’t tell anybody. Anybody. You’ve got to swear to me right here and now you’ll keep your mouth shut about finding that bag.”

  Kyle wasn’t sure. He’d planned on telling his mom about it and then maybe taking it to the police. That seemed like the right thing to do.

  “Why?” Kyle asked.

  “Why? I’ll fucking show you.”

  Kyle thought, That word again. Just like the two men in the second car. He wondered if they, or T-Lock, could speak without it.

  * * *

  THE CANVAS duffel bag was unzipped on the dining-room table. T-Lock clicked on the overhead light so it shone down on the bag. It looked like the bag was being interrogated—like on television—Kyle thought.

  T-Lock skirted the table and stood on the other side of it. He plunged both hands inside and came up with a handfuls of small plastic clear glassine baggies the size of a penny. The tiny baggies were filled with crystalline powder that looked like snow crust at the end of winter. The powder was bluish in color.

  “Do you know what this is?” T-Lock asked.

  “Drugs,” Kyle said. He knew about drugs from drug-prevention movies at school, although he’d never seen drugs in real life. The weed he’d seen T-Lock smoke in the garage didn’t count.

  “Damn tootin’,” T-Lock said, letting the baggies sift through his fingers into the opening of the duffel. “Hundreds of little packets. Maybe a thousand, I don’t know. I don’t know how many because I haven’t had a chance to count ’em yet. But there’s fifteen or twenty pounds of them in here, maybe more.”

  Kyle blinked. Fifteen or twenty pounds sounded like a lot, but not when compared to potatoes or dog food, he thought.

  “That ain’t all,” T-Lock said, digging into the duffel. He came up with a large Ziploc bag bulging with smaller bags of what looked like black pebbles. Kyle frowned. Rocks?

  “This is called black tar,” T-Lock said. Kyle wondered who would want black tar. To himself, T-Lock mumbled, “Gotta keep this shit away from your mom.”

  T-Lock shoved the bag of black tar back into the duffel and held up two thick bundles of cash. The money was tied together into bricks by thick rubber bands. It looked like used money, not clean bills. Kyle could only see the denomination of the bills on the top and bottom of the bricks—fifties, twenties.

  “I ain’t counted this yet, either, but do you know what this could mean?” T-Lock asked.

  Before Kyle could answer, T-Lock said, “Yeah, I know, the bills are marked. But there are ways around that.”

  He showed Kyle where someone had run a light purple highlighter pen up and down the sides of both bricks.

  “I heard about this trick,” T-Lock said. “All you have to do is shine a black light on the edge of a bill and that mark will show up. Otherwise, you’d never know. They do that so the courier can’t skim.”

  Kyle had no idea what T-Lock was talking about.

  “Back to the subject. I said, ‘Do you know what this could mean?’” T-Lock said, his eyes bulging again as he thrust out a brick of cash in each hand, “It means we can take care of your mom.”

  Kyle hadn’t thought of that but he instantly warmed to the idea.

  T-Lock said, “You don’t know this, but your mom got a notice from the landlord last week evicting our ass. These pricks around here can charge big money for rental houses now that the oil boom is on. They d
on’t need hardworking people like us anymore.”

  T-Lock only worked when it was warm outside, which wasn’t often in North Dakota. The rest of the time, like now, he hung around the house in his T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops. Freezing. Kyle didn’t know what else T-Lock did during the day. He guessed he watched TV.

  “Well, your mom didn’t want to tell you we might have to move, but it’s been worrying her sick. She’s a good lady, Kyle, you know that. She works her ass off to give you a good home and stuff to eat. You love your mom, don’t you?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “You don’t want her to go back downtown to work the pole again, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Damn right you don’t. I don’t either, even though it was good money and it paid the rent,” T-Lock said wistfully.

  Kyle had overheard his mom and T-Lock arguing about her job as a dancer. She wanted to quit for a long time and her hours were being reduced now that the club owners were bringing in professionals from around the country. She’d told T-Lock she was used as a backup when one of the “hotties” didn’t show up. T-Lock argued that she should keep the job since he didn’t have one.

  Kyle wanted his mom to be happy. If quitting her job made her happy, Kyle was on her side.

  Luckily, she’d quit dancing and had recently gotten a job at McDonald’s in Grimstad when they started paying $17 per hour plus benefits. It was weird seeing her come home in that McDonald’s uniform, but usually she had a bag or two of cheeseburgers and fries for dinner. Sometimes it was Big Macs or Filet-O-Fish, Kyle’s favorites.

  “Your mom,” T-Lock said, “she’s struggled for you. Just struggled,” liking the word enough to say it twice. “She got clean and convinced them people to let you come back. And she’s stayed clean. She doesn’t deserve to get thrown out of her own house, right?”

  Kyle nodded. He visualized the scene: large men in coveralls pitching his mom out the door into the snow so she landed on her rear end.