Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands

by C. J. Box

  Cassie kept her car running and the heater on high as she walked down the embankment into the prairie. The car that crashed had rolled a surprisingly long way, which meant it had been going at a high rate of speed when it went off the road.

  She walked in the depressed tire track of the tow truck as she approached the place where the car had stopped rolling. Although the crash had been cleaned up, there were still telltale signs: a small sliver of red plastic from the broken taillight, a foot-long length of tread that had been sheared off one of the tires.

  Cassie stood in the field with the cold worming its way down her collar and up her sleeves. Her feet were freezing.

  She turned and looked back at Grimstad and thought, Yes, if Tollefsen was on the edge of town he could be out there in minutes. It wasn’t far at all, just as Foster had said.

  Then before turning and going back to her car, she looked to the west. A half mile beyond the brush-covered field was a bluff partially obscured by falling snow. On top of the bluff was a slew of newly constructed homes and houses in the process of being finished. She wondered if anyone had been up that morning looking out their window at the highway. Then she thought, No, too far to see much in the dark.

  She ventured into the high brush, careful not to snag her coat on the sharp thorns of the Russian olives. That’s where she noticed a white line in the snow. The thin line extended from a V in the bluff and continued across the field toward her, bending around high clumps of brush. If it weren’t covered by a thin layer of new snow, she thought, it wouldn’t have been obvious to her at all in the short grass.

  Despite how cold her feet were—she needed her heavy pack boots from Helena!—she walked west. The snow was littered with heavy boot tracks for the first twenty yards. She guessed it had been trampled by the first responders Tollefsen and Foster, as well as the EMT crew and the tow truck driver. Cassie walked farther to where the snow was untrammeled to the end of the thin white line. It was a trail. Either a wildlife trail or a bike trail or both.

  And she could see beneath the growing layer of cottony snow the depression of a single narrow knobby tire. The track didn’t proceed any farther toward the road from where she stood. Whoever had been on the bike had stopped there. In fact, when she looked a few feet to the right of the trail she could make out where they had turned and gone back toward the bluff.

  Cassie had learned on the job in Montana how snow could preserve a story if the investigator learned how to read it. Cody Hoyt, her mentor, had taught her that.

  The track had been laid down on top of the last significant snowfall three days before, which was the day of the one-car rollover. It would remain there until it was covered by new snow or melted away. But it had been too cold to melt.

  She squatted to her haunches, then to her hands and knees. The track was between her two gloved hands in the snow. She took a deep breath of icy air and blew hard, removing most but not all of the fresh snow from the narrow trail.

  Someone, probably a kid, had ridden his or her bike down the trail from the bluff two days before when the rollover occurred. Maybe they’d seen the accident happen, or maybe they arrived well after. But school was in session, she recalled. Because of the short days, students went to school in the dark and came home in the dark. Kids wouldn’t be out riding their bikes around during daylight hours. Something, she thought, had drawn the biker across the field from the housing development. Since the wreck had been cleared away during the day, it didn’t make sense that there would be anything to look at later that night.

  She withdrew her cell phone to take several shots of the bike tire track before the snowfall obscured it for the rest of the winter.

  Unfortunately, the screen of her phone was fogged over from the cold and she couldn’t view it well enough to get a good shot.

  She stood and cursed. By the time she hiked back across the field to her car and returned to the law enforcement center to borrow a camera, whatever that procedure entailed, the track would be covered up.

  Cassie thought about covering the exposed tire track with something so she could return later with a camera. She looked around, saw nothing she could use, then sighed and removed her parka and unfurled it over the trail.

  The cold was vicious. Her arms and neck were stinging as she trudged across the field toward her Honda. It snowed harder. It was melting in her hair and on her exposed face and neck. She was glad she’d kept her car running and the heater on full blast.

  When she looked up she saw that another vehicle had pulled over to the shoulder behind her Honda. It was a sheriff’s department SUV.

  Cam Tollefsen was at the wheel. He grinned and shook his head at her.

  As she climbed the embankment toward her car, his passenger window slid down. “Kind of chilly for a nature walk, isn’t it, Miss Montana?”

  Before Cassie could respond, the radio inside his unit squawked loudly and the Bakken County dispatcher said, “All units, there is a report of another severed body part located on the southwest corner of Taco John’s…”

  “Gotta go,” Tollefsen said to Cassie as his window rolled up. “Somebody’s gotta do some real work around here…”

  He hit his lights to stop the truck traffic on the highway, then shot through an opening in the trucks and turned on his siren as he roared back toward town.

  Cassie lost her footing climbing the embankment and rolled back to the bottom. She angrily slapped snow from her clothing once she was on her feet again, and a trucker tooted his air horn and gave her a laughing thumbs-up through the window.

  She raised her hand and extended her middle finger at him and she could see him still laughing in his side mirror as he passed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LATER THAT night, Cassie sat exhausted in the parking lot of the law enforcement center in her new sheriff’s department Yukon. She’d kept the motor running and the heater on and she leaned back in her seat and briefly closed her eyes. She was too tired to jump out and face the cold and walk across the snow and ice to her apartment building. She had to rest and regroup.

  It had stopped snowing during the day but the temperature outside was twenty-two degrees below zero, according to the digital temperature display in the corner of her rearview mirror. An untouched bag of McDonald’s hamburgers and fries sat on the seat next to her, as did a six-pack of beer and a bottle of red wine she’d bought at a discount liquor store. It was a typical cop’s dinner, she thought: bad food and bad wine. The beer was simply so she’d have something in her refrigerator.

  She knew what it was that had affected her so: lack of sleep the night before, mental exhaustion from the first day at her new job, and a fourteen-hour day filled with horror after horror. She’d rarely experienced a day like it.

  * * *

  EIGHT OR nine sheriff’s department vehicles responded to the call that morning about the finding of a human hand behind the Taco John’s fast-food restaurant. Cassie had joined them after returning to the county building. Judy Banister had met her in her office with a set of keys to a department GMC Yukon as well as a heavy-duty Bakken County Sheriff’s Department parka. The parka was too large, but Cassie didn’t complain since she’d left her coat in the field. Before leaving, Cassie filled out a request for the evidence tech to make a cast of the bicycle tire track, then located the big new Yukon in the lot behind the building.

  When she arrived at the Taco John’s on Main Street, she found nearly a dozen deputies standing around in the snowfall in the alley talking about the hand.

  Without examining it closely before the medical examiner arrived, the consensus among the law enforcement personnel was that the hand had belonged to the same body as the foot found earlier. It looked cleanly severed, it was Caucasian, and it was frozen into a meaty claw. Although the skin was discolored, she could see there was a tattoo of a rat holding a saber on the top of the hand and letters on the top of the first joint of each finger that spelled R-I-D-E. On the top joint of the thumb was either an O or
a zero.

  Before the examiner arrived, another call came in. Schoolchildren at the elementary school had discovered what looked like a severed human leg frozen to the gravel of the playground. The principal had placed the school on lockdown until the police could arrive, and the word was getting out to parents what had happened. It was pandemonium.

  It hadn’t stopped there.

  Throughout the day, the sheriff’s department responded to call after call of discovered body parts. The victim’s other hand was found on the roof of the Work Wearhouse as if someone had driven by during the night and tossed it up there. A severed ankle was identified in the parking lot of Walmart, even though it was barely identifiable because it had been run over so many times by shoppers. A stay-at-home mom called from a house in a new southside development saying that when she let her Labrador in from the backyard he showed up with “a human arm in his mouth.” She was on the brink of hysteria.

  Sheriff Kirkbride had canceled his meetings with the county commissioners and he now managed his department on-site, dispatching teams of deputies to each discovery to secure the scene until the techs could catch up.

  “We need to postpone our meeting,” Kirkbride said to Cassie.

  “Of course,” Cassie said.

  He sent Cassie to the stay-at-home mom’s house, where she sat with the woman in her living room until she calmed down. While she did, they both tried not to stare at the discolored upper arm—again, covered with tattoos—while it thawed on the fabric of the new carpet.

  The headless trunk was discovered impaled on a metal fencepost on the edge of the town park. Somehow, it had been missed all day as officers drove right by it responding to calls of other body parts.

  Kirkbride complained that no matter what he did or said, the word was out that someone had dismembered a body and thrown the parts around Grimstad “like the Rotary Club throwing out candy during the Fourth of July parade.”

  Kirkbride issued an order to all of his deputies that became a mantra throughout the day: “Find that head before a member of the public does.”

  Find that head.

  It was grim, cold, and horrible. Cassie wasn’t surprised when a couple of deputies dealt with the discoveries with macabre humor.

  “It looks like Joe’s head,” Deputy Jim Klug said over the radio from the location of another body part discovery near the Dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant.

  “Joe, Joe, are you okay?” someone else responded.

  Even Cassie laughed.

  * * *

  BUT THE body parts—sans head—didn’t belong to Joe. According to Deputy Ian Davis who was working undercover, they matched up with a man named Rufus Whiteley, a local biker and suspected meth dealer.

  Whiteley was not at his home—a double-wide trailer on the west side of town—and no one had reported him missing. But Davis said the local drug subculture had all but vanished into hiding, and the word was someone had gotten to Whiteley the night before. Davis described tattoos on Whiteley that corresponded with tattoos on the body parts. Specifically, Davis said Whiteley had B-O-R-N T-O R-I-D-E inked on the top of his fingers and the phrase stretched across both of his hands.

  Deputies on site at the Work Wearhouse confirmed that the letters B-O-R-N-T were tattooed on the fingers and thumb of the hand found on the roof.

  At the sheriff’s request, the driver’s license photo of Rufus Whiteley was e-mailed to every law enforcement cell phone. Whiteley had a round squat head, stringy black hair, a flat nose, and a full dark beard. He looked like trouble.

  Of special interest to Cassie was Davis’s statement that Whiteley was rumored to be starting a chapter of the Sons of Freedom in Bakken County. And the fact that although he no doubt preferred riding one of his fleet of the three Harleys parked next to each other in his garage, he also drove a black Dodge Challenger that had been found burned to the ground and was still smoldering on the road next to the wastewater treatment facility.

  * * *

  CASSIE RESPONDED to the call in the early evening—when the temperature really began to drop—that something had been found at the iconic old drive-in on the north side of town.

  “Did we find the head?” Kirkbride asked over the radio.

  “Not quite,” the deputy on the scene answered.

  “I’m on my way,” Kirkbride said wearily.

  She’d seen the old drive-in earlier in the day. As she drove under an ancient marquee that read CLOSED FOR THE WINTER, it brought back memories of going to the double feature with her father during the rare summer nights when he was off the road. He’d pop enough popcorn to fill a grocery bag, load in blankets and pillows for the backseat, and watch both movies although Cassie rarely made it through the second.

  She’d arrived to find Sheriff Kirkbride and two other departmental vehicles already there at the far end of the lot near the base of the old screen. The men were outside but they’d kept their vehicles running, the tailpipes puffing out blooms of exhaust. She slowed her Yukon as she approached them, the wheels bucking up and over row after row of small berms where moviegoers parked for the best viewing angle. She passed by dozens of frost-covered metal poles where the speakers were mounted.

  As she pulled behind Kirkbride’s vehicle, she saw the sheriff look back at her and shake his head.

  Puzzled, she got out.

  “You probably don’t want to see this,” Kirkbride said. He spoke loudly because one of the many mile-long oil tanker trains was passing by a half mile away on the tracks.

  “What is it?”

  Two of the deputies suddenly found the tops of their boots fascinating.

  “What do you think?” Kirkbride said. “More parts.”

  “Did you find the head?”

  “Worse.”

  She hesitated. It was so cold that when she breathed in she could feel the hairs freeze inside her nostrils. Kirkbride’s expression warned her off, but she was curious. The man had shown her the severed body of the MS-13 victim the night before. What could be worse?

  At that moment a deputy who’d been out of earshot walked out from around the back of the screen with his long Maglite flashlight and shot the beam toward something stuck to the white screen about eight feet from the ground.

  She thought at first it was viscera. Then she realized with a shudder that the bloody mess was a man’s penis and testicles. She could see where it had hit the white screen and slid down its face until it froze solid on the surface.

  Kirkbride said, “I know the guy who owns this drive-in. It’s been a money-loser for years and he was trying to dump it until the boom hit. Now I hear Halliburton bought the land from him for three million so they could put in another equipment yard. It’s kind of sad to think that the last thing on the movie screen was Rufus Whiteley’s family jewels.”

  One of the deputies fake coughed to disguise a laugh.

  Cassie closed her eyes and took another deep breath of frigid air.

  * * *

  AT AN impromptu debriefing held under the marquee of the drive-in, Sheriff Kirkbride stood in the middle of a loose circle of twenty-five of his men—and Cassie. It was so cold she could no longer feel her face. The men huddled close together without embarrassment to keep warm. Clouds of condensation from their breath rose over the group and hung there like their own private snow cloud. She realized she was standing next to Cam Tollefsen. The events of the day had been so all-consuming and wild she’d almost forgotten about him.

  She knew her request to the evidence techs to go out to the rollover site and make a foam cast of the bike tire track had been rightfully shunted aside.

  Cassie recognized a few of the deputies—Lance Foster, Max Maxfield, Ian Davis, Jim Klug—and already felt a little more part of the team.

  “It’s been a long day,” Kirkbride said, “and I’m proud of you all. I always told you you’d get ten years of experience in law enforcement in your first six months here, but I may have to change it to one day.”

  A few
men laughed and Cassie tried to smile but her mouth was too frozen to move.

  “Obviously, we’ve got a lot to sort out. It looks to all of us that somebody cut up Rufus Whiteley and drove around town and threw out the parts. They didn’t try to cover up what they did—just the opposite—which says to me it’s some kind of warning or message. Whether that message is to us or to someone else, who knows?

  Kirkbride paused and said, “Damn, it’s cold.”

  “Yeah,” Maxfield said through chattering teeth, “Too bad we don’t have someplace warm like the briefing room of the law enforcement center or something.”

  Which brought some rough laughter and a couple of calls of “Hear, hear.”

  “The reason we’re out here,” Kirkbride said, “is because the horse has already left the barn. What happened today in Bakken County is all over the wires and Facebook and Twitter and everything else. I’ve got a dozen calls from reporters stacked up on my desk and television vans from Bismarck, Fargo, and Minot downtown waiting for me to show up for a press briefing. We’ve got hysterical parents and pissed-off county commissioners and I don’t blame them one bit.

  “What I want to tell all you guys is let me handle the press and handle the heat. That’s my job. Your job is to do damned good police work so we can put this all together and throw the bad guys in a cage. Whatever you were doing before today goes on the back burner. The first order of priority is to find the guy—or guys—who did this. Are you all on board?”

  Cassie saw no signs of disagreement, although Tollefsen remained mute. She thought she detected somewhat of a smirk on his face, but it could be the cold, she thought.

  As they broke up and returned to their vehicles, Cassie realized Kirkbride was walking alongside her.