Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands

by C. J. Box

  One by one the deputies stood up, stated their names, and sat back down.

  “Jim Klug.”

  “Tom Melvin.”

  “Shaun McKnight.”

  “Bryan Gregson.”

  “Fred Walker.”

  Cassie made eye contact and nodded toward each deputy as they said their names.

  “Lance Foster, or as the guys call me, Surfer Dude.”

  She smiled and recalled when Kirkbride mentioned him earlier. Foster was blond and beefy, with a buzz-cut haircut and cherubic red cheeks. She noted who he was but didn’t let her eyes linger on him.

  A dozen other deputies barked out their names and sat down.

  “Cam Tollefsen.”

  Tollefsen was, in fact, one of the older men in the back row. He was nearly as tall as Kirkbride and he had a thick cowboy-style mustache that was flecked with silver. His large gut strained at his uniform shirt. Unlike the younger deputies, he seemed put out having to introduce himself.

  The round-robin of confusing introductions wound their way to the front of the room.

  “I’m Leslie Maxfield, the undersheriff. Everyone calls me Max.”

  Then, “And I’m Judy Banister,” she said.

  “She’s the one you want to talk to if you really want to know anything that goes on around here,” Kirkbride said, turning to Banister. “Judy has been with the department since before I came on the scene. She knows where all the bodies are buried, don’t you, Judy?”

  Banister demurred and shook her head, but Cassie could tell she appreciated the recognition. In Cassie’s experience, every sheriff’s department had a Judy Banister, and every department needed one. She was the individual who kept the place running and who provided institutional knowledge as employees came and went. Along with Sheriff Kirkbride himself, Cassie thought, she vowed to never cross Judy Banister.

  Kirkbride gestured to Maxfield, and said, “Take it away, Max.”

  * * *

  “BEFORE WE get to the new stuff,” Maxfield said, “there are a couple of updates.”

  Cassie listened as Maxfield went over cases and crimes that were familiar to everyone in the room except her. “Honchos from Halliburton” were putting more and more pressure on the department to both find the thieves who were stealing their equipment from their facilities and to recover the stolen vehicles. A long-running property and mineral rights dispute between a local farmer and a drilling company could result in trouble between the farmer’s sons and company employees. A restraining order had been granted by the judge for an ex-wife against her ex-husband who she swore she’d seen sneaking around the neighborhood.

  Although her eyes were on Maxfield, she had trouble concentrating on the initial part of the briefing. She was running primarily on a combination of adrenaline and caffeine and there was a dull headache growing in the back of her head. Some of the details she’d read in the files on the two unsolved homicides had horrified her and set her on edge.

  The two Sons of Freedom victims had obviously been tortured, and by professionals. The coroner speculated that both men had been kept alive for hours while the murderer snipped off their fingers joint by joint, severed the tendons of their legs, drilled into their kneecaps, mutilated their sexual organs, gouged out their eyes, seared their skin with blowtorches, and finally beheaded them. The abuse was systematic and well-planned, it seemed, and specific tools were used to carry it out. It was awful, she thought. There was no way to know if the murderer was trying to get information, send a message, or he was simply enjoying himself. Maybe all three. She wasn’t easily shocked or sickened, but reading through the files and seeing the photos had gutted her.

  She contrasted the Sons of Freedom victims with the body found at the rollover. That vic appeared to simply be on the losing end of a fatal car wreck. There were no outside injuries beyond those occurring from the crash itself, although his body had practically been severed in two.

  If there was a gang war taking place, she thought, she knew which side she’d bet on.

  * * *

  MAXFIELD FINISHED up with status reports and updates before turning the pages in his binder.

  “New items,” he said. “First, somebody found a foot.” He paused and his silence attracted the attention of the entire room, including Cassie.

  “Just a foot?” someone asked.

  “Mine’s right here,” someone else said, and half the room laughed.

  “Just a foot,” Maxfield repeated. He didn’t smile. “Four miles east, in the middle of the prairie between two pumping units. Couple of Schlumberger guys found it this morning when they reported to a well to replace a part. They nearly ran it over in their truck.”

  “Just a foot?” one of the deputies echoed.

  Maxfield held up an eight-by-ten color photo, displayed it, then handed it to a deputy in the first row to pass along. Cassie noted that it was a man’s bare foot cleanly severed at the ankle. The photo was taken against a background of blood-flecked snow.

  Maxfield said, “Because it’s bare and not still in a boot, it indicates something other than a run-of-the-mill oil field accident. We’ve checked at the hospital, and nobody walked in on a bloody stump. We’re checking hospitals and clinics in a two-hundred-mile radius, but so far no hits.”

  “What happened, then?” a deputy asked Maxfield.

  “Too early to say,” the undersheriff responded. “All we know is the coroner packed it in snow and brought it back to the building. He says it was barely frozen, which says it might have been cut off last night or early this morning. No one has called in and reported missing a foot as yet.”

  Cassie saw several deputies repressing smiles at that.

  “Seriously, though, the lack of significant blood on the ground where the foot was found suggests it was cut off postmortem. So keep your eyes open for other body parts, gentlemen.”

  Kirkbride gestured to Ian Davis, the undercover cop, and Davis nodded that he understood. Cassie watched the wordless exchange: Davis should ask around on the street about who was missing a foot … or missing in general.

  “Item two,” Maxfield said, “is another weird one. The morning man at the Missouri Breaks Lodge called in to say the night shift manager was missing when he showed up to relieve him at the registration desk this morning. Just wasn’t there. The missing man is Phillip Klein, thirty-four. There are no signs of foul play, but the computer server that stores all the video from the interior and exterior closed-circuit cameras is missing as well.”

  Cassie could tell from the murmuring in the room that item two aroused more puzzlement than interest, but she didn’t know why.

  “Here’s his photo from his company ID,” Maxfield said, handing around a second print.

  “I don’t get it,” one of the deputies said. Cassie recalled his name as Jim Klug. “Guys go missing all the time from administrative positions. They decide they can make more money out in the oil field, and they just take off for the hills like old-time gold prospectors.”

  Several deputies agreed.

  Maxfield shook his head. “Klein is a thirteen-year manager with a wife and kids back home in Minnesota. The wife says she hears from him every morning when he gets off his shift—he calls her or texts her—except for this morning. His company vehicle is still in the lot. According to the morning manager, Klein isn’t the type to get oil fever.”

  “So he left with somebody else,” a deputy said.

  “Probably a whore,” Cam Tollefsen said from the back in a weary voice. “She showed up, did her thing with him in the front office, and he panicked when he realized the whole act was caught on video. So he jerked the server out, climbed in her car, and he’s shacking up with her in a double-wide outside of Minot.”

  Several deputies nodded their agreement to Tollefsen’s speculation. Cassie looked from Tollefsen to Maxfield.

  “That could be,” Maxfield said. “Stranger things have happened. But we’ll get copies of Klein’s head shot out to all of you and w
e want you to ask around to see if anyone’s seen him.”

  “Maybe this is his foot,” a deputy said, holding up the first photo. “Maybe it’s connected.”

  The photo finally was passed to the rear of the room and Cassie studied it. There was a crude skull-and-crossbones tattoo on the top of the foot a few inches from where the ankle would have been. But what alarmed her was how similar the amputation looked to the photos she’d seen during the night of the mutilated Sons of Freedom victims. The cut looked to be scored through the flesh with a sharp knife, then the bones cut cleanly with a saw.

  She looked up to find Kirkbride watching her. His eyes said he thought the same thing she did: a third torture-murder victim.

  “According to Klein’s wife, the foot doesn’t belong to Klein,” Maxfield said to the deputy who’d inquired, “unless Klein got the tattoo very recently. When he was home two weeks ago in Bemidji he didn’t have it. So a direct connection between the two cases is pretty unlikely.”

  * * *

  CASSIE STEPPED back as the deputies milled out of the room. She wanted to talk to both Ian Davis and Lance Foster, but not together. She hoped to have a few words with Davis first.

  As the men gathered their coats and left the room, she heard most of a bad joke Jim Klug was telling to another deputy.

  Klug said, “So Ole is walking down the railroad tracks with his wife Lena and he sees a foot and he says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe’s foot!’ Then he walks a few hundred feet further and sees a hand and says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe’s hand!’ Then a trunk, and he says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe’s trunk!’ Finally, Ole sees a head on the tracks and picks it up by the ears and shakes it and says, ‘Joe, Joe, are you all right?’”

  The other deputy laughed but stopped abruptly when he noticed Cassie was watching them.

  “Cop humor,” Klug explained, “mixed with Norwegian humor.”

  “It’s okay,” Cassie said with a smile. “I kind of like that one.”

  * * *

  LANCE FOSTER went by in a scrum of other deputies and Cassie let him go. She didn’t want to single him out.

  Cam Tollefsen gave her an inscrutable dead-eye cop stare as he passed her and she gave it right back although she felt a shiver go up her spine. She didn’t even know the man but she knew, right then, that he’d be a challenge to her. And maybe worse.

  Ian Davis shouldered on a ratty backpack and was one of the last to leave.

  “Officer Davis, could I talk to you for a minute?”

  He gave her the once-over, then chinned toward the far corner of the room, and ambled over there. She followed.

  He stopped and turned. He was Cassie’s height—short—and had soulful brown eyes that were slightly suspicious. But he looked the part he played, she thought. Scruffy, a bit down on his luck, like he’d recently walked off the Amtrak train at the station.

  After introducing herself again, she said, “How long have you been working the street here?”

  “A year and a half. Six more months and I go back to patrol. Believe me, I never thought I’d look forward to shaving in the morning and putting on the uniform again, but I am. It’s pretty raggedy-ass out there.”

  “So would you say you’ve got a pretty good handle on the local players?”

  Davis shrugged, but said, “Yeah. It’s harder than hell to keep track of the transients through here these days—there’s a lot of them. But there were knuckleheads here before the boom and a few of them are still around. They’re like the farmers—if they stuck they’re getting rich.”

  “Interesting. Are you talking about dealers in particular?”

  “Yes. Everything pretty much starts and ends with drugs around here.”

  “Is there a go-to local guy? Someone you’d point to who has his ear to the ground?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Davis said. “Willie Dietrich. The sheriff’s run him out of the county more than once but he keeps coming back. He’s learned how to operate in the shadows, you know? He’s got guys to take the fall for him so he can still look clean. I’ve sort of met him and I know he’s got his fingers in everything around here. My goal before I go back on patrol is to nail that douche bag.”

  “Willie Dietrich,” she said, committing the name to memory.

  “What else do you know?” she asked, careful not to reveal why she was asking. “What are they talking about on the street?”

  He looked away for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. Then, “It’s kinda weird out there right now. I told the sheriff about it last week, and it’s nothing I can put my finger on. But it’s like all the players are bunkered in and keeping their mouths shut. They’ve gone all low profile. Do you watch movies?”

  “Less since my son was born,” Cassie said.

  “You know how in The Godfather the bad guys all ‘go to the mattresses’ before a war? It’s like that.

  “But the biggest topic of conversation,” he said, “is that meth and heroin are at a premium right now and that’s unusual. I have to say that as hard as we work it, there’s usually like a flood of drugs coming in from every direction. But the flow’s been cut off and nobody is saying why because I think they don’t know. I wish it was because we’ve done a huge bust or put the screws to the douche bags, but that isn’t the case. When the supply goes down the price goes up, and tweekers get desperate.”

  Cassie asked, “Has the supply line been cut?”

  Davis shrugged. “It seems like it, at least temporarily. Blue meth has gone from two hundred a gram to four hundred in the last week. Funny thing is it isn’t really blue at all. The cookers make it blue with food coloring because of that TV show. But whether it’s white or blue, that’s a big jump in price. Same thing with heroin. I’m sure they’ll figure a way around it, though. They always do.”

  She thanked him and asked for his cell phone number.

  He nodded and told it to her which meant, she thought, he felt he could trust her at least to some degree.

  “Don’t worry if I don’t answer it right away,” he said, “I’ll call back when I can. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a situation and I can’t have the caller ID come up, ‘Bakken County Sheriff.’”

  “I understand,” she said with a chuckle, and gave him her cell number. “It’s my private phone and it has a four-oh-six Montana prefix, not the department. If something of interest comes up, call me direct.”

  He said he would.

  * * *

  CASSIE CAUGHT up with Sheriff Kirkbride in the hallway as he was headed for his office.

  “How’s the apartment?” he asked. “Did you get settled in?”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m fine. I was wondering if you had a minute to talk about a couple of things. Plus, I want to know about a guy named Willie Dietrich.”

  Kirkbride shot out his arm and looked at his watch. “Willie, huh? He’s a piece of work. But I can’t meet now. I’ve got a county commission meeting starting in ten minutes. They have an item on the agenda to ban any further man camps in the county, and I’ve got to weigh in what a dumb idea that is.”

  “It is?” Cassie asked, surprised.

  “Think about it,” Kirkbride said as he paused at his door. “We’ve got hundreds of men showing up every week who need a place to crash. They’re building houses like crazy right now but not fast enough to keep up with demand. Those man camps are clean, safe, and well-run—most of ’em, anyway. Where are those men supposed to live while the new housing units are being built over the winter? It’s a dumb idea.

  “Plus,” Kirkbride said, his face flushing red, “they’ve invited twelve damned Red Chinese politicians to the county who say they want to invest. Commie reds, Chicoms—here in North Dakota! The commissioners want me to provide security for them while they walk around in their suits and loafers. Can you believe that?”

  “Anyway,” she said, prompting him. “I read the files and I agree we have a gang problem. And maybe more than that.”

  “I’ll
be back this afternoon,” he said. “Come by after lunch.”

  “Okay.”

  “Cassie”—he grinned at her—“I’m glad you said we.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  KYLE ARRIVED home from delivering newspapers and noticed that T-Lock had finally wrapped a thick chain around the washing machine and secured it with a stout padlock. That meant, Kyle thought, T-Lock was trying to get on his mom’s good side by finally doing what she’d been asking him to do for more than a year.

  T-Lock and Kyle’s mother were sitting at the kitchen table. It was obvious to him they’d been having an argument they didn’t want him to overhear by the way they both shut up the instant he came in through the back door.

  Their silence hung in the air while Kyle untied his pack boots and hung his heavy coat on a peg. His cheeks were numb from the cold and his skin hurt as the warmth from the kitchen enveloped him.

  “Cold out there?” T-Lock asked, fake jaunty.

  Instead of answering, Kyle looked at his mom. She was wearing her McDonald’s tunic and black pants, her hair in a ponytail. Her uniform and the way she put up her hair made her look young. She shot a glance at him and he was taken aback by how she looked. Her eyes were red and half-closed and her face was puffy. She must have realized what she looked like to him because she quickly turned away and stared at the table. She held a coffee mug between her hands as if trying to crush it into powder.

  Kyle said, yes, it was cold.

  “Kyle, why don’t you go get dressed for school now? Your mom and I are in the middle of a discussion,” T-Lock said. Even from where he stood, four feet away, Kyle could smell T-Lock’s morning breath. It hung in the air and it was a rancid combination of coffee and cigarette smoke.

  “I’m hungry,” Kyle said, eying a half-eaten box of powdered donuts on the table. While delivering newspapers that morning all he could think of were two things: eating a hot breakfast when he got home and asking T-Lock for enough money to buy a hand-held GPS. The GPS would come in handy on the river in Raheem’s boat.

  “Here,” T-Lock said as he closed the box and flung the whole thing at Kyle. He caught it against his stomach. “Go eat that—we’re done with it. Just give your mom and me a minute, okay, Kyle?”