The Highway

by C. J. Box

  She looked down, still not quite there, and saw that the object that had rolled into her foot was a bottle of water. There were several other bottles on the floor as well, scattered when the bag broke open. It looked like convenience store food: packages of burritos and sandwiches and candy and nuts and a tin of Altoid mints.

  Although it was impossible to determine if it came from outside the structure or simply from the other side of the door, she heard a scream, then a pop.

  “Oh Jesus, we’ve got to get out of here,” Gracie said with urgency.

  Danielle didn’t respond.

  Gracie thought, We will escape. We will survive.

  She would find a way. And it was up to her, and her alone.

  29.

  6:25 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

  CASSIE DEWELL WAS WIRED and tired. She sat fuming in the predawn in the county Ford Expedition last used by Cody Hoyt to plant evidence at the Tokely crime scene. It had been a bad morning so far and she couldn’t anticipate the day getting better. She’d parked in an alcove of skeletal aspen trees on the shoulder of the county road as the sky turned a rose color over the western mountains. An icy breeze rattled the dried leaves and sent them skittering down on the hood of the Ford and the asphalt of the road. Through her windshield, she surveyed the vast immensity of Sheriff Tubman’s frosted lawn and the magnificent home at the top of the hill flanked by tall Austrian pines.

  Wired and tired, she thought.

  Inside, it was as if Cody were sitting next to her. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke, fast food, and Cody’s lingering musky male odor. On the way there on the winding mountain road, she’d spilled half the go cup of coffee from McDonald’s on herself, and she’d cursed the girl who hadn’t fitted the plastic lid on tightly before passing it through the drive-through window. The sting of the hot liquid on the skin of her inner thighs had ceased, but her slacks were stained and she sat in a soggy puddle. Cody was very particular about keeping the Ford neat and free of detritus that was a given in a vehicle used for long drives and stakeouts. He’d glare at her if she didn’t properly dispose of a wrapper and he’d bark if she forgot to clear the cup holders of empty cans or bottles whenever they stopped to get out. They’d spent hours together inside the Ford and this was the first time she’d been alone in it or spilled anything inside. She didn’t like it, either.

  The empty Ford only reminded her she was on her own. Although she’d found the strength to raise a child and pursue her career without a husband around, this was something new. It was so much easier to second-guess Cody than it was to take the lead and Cody was right: she didn’t have the experience to confidently make the right moves. Lacking experience, she had to draw on a well of strength that, she hoped, wasn’t running dry.

  Steam from the spilled coffee fogged inside of the windshield, and she reached forward and cleaned a loopy circle of it with the few dry McDonald’s napkins she had left. Through the circle, she could see the long circular driveway that cut through the lawn to the Tubman house and exited fifty yards farther on the county road. The house was three stories and built of varnished logs. It had a steep roof, gables, and knotty pine columns out front hung with arts-and-crafts-style iron lanterns. On the side of the house was a trailer topped with four four-wheelers and another trailer with snow machines. A gigantic fifth-wheel recreational trailer nosed out from the trees from behind the structure.

  The whole scene reminded her of a description she’d heard Cody Hoyt use more than once: “That’s a pile of Montana money.” Meaning the place was ostentatious in a laid-back, rural mountain way. But there was no doubt it cost a bundle.

  She’d kept the Ford running but placed it in park to keep warm. Far up on the driveway, near the porch of the sheriff’s home, was a small orange cylinder-shaped object. That morning’s copy of the Helena Independent, delivered while it was still dark. She knew how important the newspaper was to Tubman, how he pored over every item and article that might mention the department, the county, his rivals, or him in particular. She assumed he’d come out soon to retrieve it.

  When he did, he’d be in the open. And, she hoped, surprised by her presence and subsequent request.

  A light came on in one of the upstairs windows. No one looked out. She waited, and another light lit the windows on the bottom floor on the right side of the house. She assumed it was the kitchen. Tubman was probably making coffee. Retrieving the paper would be next.

  She reached up and grasped the shifter and engaged the transmission and rolled slowly forward. If this didn’t go as she envisioned it, she thought, she might be doomed within the department and out on the street looking for work. Her stomach burbled and she set her mouth.

  Wired and tired …

  * * *

  Earlier, Cassie was at home at the kitchen table in front of her laptop at four forty-five in the morning when her mother had flowed into the room. She’d spent the last three and a half hours digging deeply into Google and ViCAP and RIMN, both law-enforcement databases, finding what she could on the principals from the Church of Glory and Transcendence.

  Cassie found it notable how information about the church, its membership, and its leadership had stopped abruptly following the death of founder and leader Stacy Smith three years before. Prior to her death, communication from the church was everywhere. Smith was quoted in local newspapers, national newsmagazines, and radio and television interviews. She seemed warm, kindly, and charismatic. Citizens in the area around the church seemed to tolerate and even like her and her membership in a “live-and-let-live” manner. But when Smith died, it was as if a clamp had been placed on the outflow of information. As if the new leadership wanted to operate in secrecy, or at least keep their heads down so they wouldn’t be noticed. There was also a dearth of statements from ex-members as there had been before Smith’s death.

  She wondered if the membership, once burned, was quietly stocking up and rearming again for the apocalypse. Only this time, they wouldn’t let their neighbors in on the date? Arming up, Cassie knew, wasn’t an unusual phenomenon at all in the state and throughout the Rockies. With the poor economy and national financial crisis, sales of guns and ammunition were at record levels. She’d read departmental memos about it. More and more people were dropping out, arming up, and stockpiling food and gear.

  Cassie speculated that the remaining membership was literally bunkered in. All indications were that the membership had foresworn interaction with the locals, and they’d made a conscious decision not to engage in any outreach. Since the membership had been built in the first place through aggressive proselytizing, this new tact seemed to go against the grain. How would the church survive and pay the mortgage on the property, Cassie wondered, if they didn’t grow?

  Maybe, she thought, they were adding to their ranks by abducting young, lost people found along the nation’s highways?

  She felt sorry for the parents of the Sullivan girls who were no doubt entertaining terrible scenarios of their own. She tried to put herself in their place. What if Ben was missing?

  It was too horrible to contemplate.

  * * *

  She’d also delved deeply into the information provided by the FBI’s Highway Serial Killer Task Force. She’d been reading about a trucker named Bruce Meersham who’d been arrested and convicted of killing and dismembering a truck stop prostitute the previous year. Meersham had been caught by happenstance by a highway patrol officer at Interstate 24 near Nashville. The trooper had been hidden in a speed trap and couldn’t be seen from the highway, and the truck hadn’t been speeding. But as a tractor trailer passed by, the highway patrolman observed a plastic bag thrown from the window that landed twenty yards away.

  The trooper noted the license plate of the semi, then checked out the bag of refuse and found a pair of severed female hands. He called it in, and Meersham was arrested fifty miles away at a weigh station. Inside the cab of his Mack, law enforcement found three more tightly wrapped plastic bags of body parts
all belonging to the same woman. Meersham was arrested and later convicted of murder, and he refused to cooperate further although it was highly suspected he’d been involved in multiple similar crimes across the country. He entered prison at age fifty-seven. Cassie shook her head. There was no way a man started doing that at age fifty-seven. She wondered how long he’d been at it, how many women he’d kidnapped, raped, mutilated, and scattered across the country over the years, and how many others like him were out there. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t tear herself away from that line of inquiry in regard to the missing Sullivan girls. But the more she read, the more agitated and angry she became.

  When this was over, she vowed, when the girls were located and Cody was found, she wanted to learn more about the phenomenon because it chilled her. She knew from the academy and her limited experience that when someone was missing or a body found, the investigation became intensely local. Who knew the victim? Who might want to harm the victim? Who might know the history of the victim and their interaction with others in the area? That’s where they started. In fact, that’s exactly the methodology Cody used to target B. G. Myers.

  But if the killer wasn’t local, if he was simply passing through the state and would be gone again in hours, how could law enforcement track him down? And if a serial killer was strategic and diabolical, what better profession to take up than becoming a long-haul trucker?

  She shivered and felt the hairs on her arm rise.

  * * *

  And Cody hadn’t checked in with her. She’d expected a reply of some sort to her text telling him she was on the way. Either warning her off or telling her where to meet him. But there had been nothing.

  Her mother walked heavily across the linoleum in the kitchen in her bare feet, her robe billowing around her.

  “Your constant clacking is keeping me awake and giving me a headache,” her mother said dramatically. “I hope I haven’t used up all the Tylenol.”

  “My clacking?”

  “What you do on your computer,” her mother said, mimicking Cassie by holding her hands up and waggling her fingers as if typing manically on a keyboard.

  “I’ve tried to be as quiet as I could.”

  “Plus, I can hear you moan. And sometimes you snort.”

  Cassie sighed and sat back, her concentration broken. She stared at her mother. She was wearing the robe Cassie disliked, the one with the huge batik face of Che Guevara wearing his beret across the front. “I know,” her mother said, gesturing at her robe. “I know you hate it.”

  “He was a totalitarian and a cold-blooded murderer.”

  “You have your opinion,” her mother said, sniffing.

  “It’s not my opinion. He was a brute. Do some research, Mom. He’s nobody to celebrate. Around Ben, especially.”

  “It’s just a sentimental thing to me,” her mother said. She’d once claimed she bought the robe from a vendor on the way to Woodstock in 1969. Around the time she’d changed her name from Margie to Isabel because Isabel sounded more exotic and revolutionary. Cassie knew Isabel’s participation at Woodstock never happened, although she had no doubt her mother had come to believe it over the years. If all the people of her mother’s generation who claimed to have been at Woodstock had actually been there, Cassie knew, the concert would have hosted millions more kids than were actually there. But there was no point in getting into that argument again.

  Isabel looked down at her robe and said, “Besides, he’s very handsome.”

  “For a killer.”

  “How did I raise a girl to be so judgmental?” her mother said, distracted by the difficulty of the childproof cap on the bottle of Tylenol.

  Cassie bit her lip. She wanted to say, You never raised me at all. You dumped me with Grandma and Grandpa while you chased around the country for your causes. Sometimes I saw more of Bill than I saw of you. But it was a fight she couldn’t have, because she needed her mother there for Ben. Isabel had spent the first half of her life neglecting her and the second half engaging in unspoken extortion.

  “Let me open it,” Cassie said, and her mother handed over the bottle.

  Cassie unscrewed the cap and gave it back.

  “What’s so important that you need to keep me awake all night with your clacking?” her mother asked, shaking three tablets into the palm of her hand.

  “I’ve got a pair of missing teenage girls and now a missing partner,” Cassie said flatly.

  Her mother paused and looked at her with discomfort. She was sixty-two years old, wide-faced and blousy, with once-red hair that was so infused with gray it looked pink. She didn’t like uncomfortable subjects, like missing people.

  “Here in town?” her mother asked.

  “No. Somewhere out on the highway.

  “Why is it your concern?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “I know,” her mother said, turning to fill a glass of water, “I just like to pretend you aren’t.”

  “What would you rather have me do?” Cassie asked, feeling the heat rise in her neck. And immediately regretting she’d asked.

  “I don’t know,” her mother said with a sigh, and Cassie was grateful she’d diffused the question. Anything to avoid an argument with her strong-willed daughter. After all, nasty little asides and innuendos worked better for her over the long run and always had.

  “Mom,” Cassie said, “I’ll probably have to go out of town for the day.”

  Her mother swallowed the pills one by one before saying, “When will you get home?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “I have my book club at six. You know that. We’re doing a Wally Lamb book and you know I have some things to say.”

  “I know,” Cassie said. “I don’t ask you to do this very often. But I might not be able to get back by five.”

  “This is happening with more frequency,” her mother said. The words weren’t said in anger, but in a kind of martyred resignation.

  “This is important, Mom. I really appreciate you being able to take care of Ben, and I know it’s tough on you. But we’re talking about the lives of two girls, and who knows what with my former partner.”

  Isabel screwed up her face at the mention of Cody Hoyt. They’d not hit it off when they met for the first time the previous summer. Cody and Cassie had been headed toward the Justice Center to clock out for the evening when they saw half a dozen people chanting on the courthouse steps. Cody pulled to the curb to ogle them, and Cassie pointed out her mother, who had brought Ben along to the Occupy Helena demonstration. When Isabel walked over with Ben in tow, Cody had sized her up from head to foot, from stocking cap to Keen sandals, with a sneer on his face. He waited until Ben was out of earshot and told Isabel, “Only lazy slackers on food stamps have the leisure time to chant slogans. The rest of us have to work.”

  Isabel said, “He’s the awful misogynist redneck you work with?”

  Cassie nodded, surprised by the half-smile pulling at her mouth. “He’s not a misogynist, necessarily,” she said. “He hates everyone equally.”

  “Well, if I were you—”

  “You aren’t,” Cassie said, cutting Isabel off. She closed her laptop harder than necessary.

  * * *

  Cassie had dressed and driven her Honda to the Justice Center and exchanged her car for the Ford at the transportation desk. The officer behind the counter was surprised she was in so early and wanted to talk, but Cassie signed out the vehicle, took the keys, waved him off, and walked down the silent halls of the sheriff’s department. She hoped she could find somebody interested in going with her to find Cody, even though the prospects were slim.

  As she passed forensics, she saw a bar of light under the door and knocked. Alexa Manning, the young crime scene tech, let her in. They were both surprised to see each other. Alexa was tall and slim with bone-white skin and short-cropped black hair and small brown eyes. Cassie didn’t know Alexa well, but the two had a bond because they were both single women in the depart
ment and had each heard grumbling and whispered asides about their unavailability because “one was fat and stuck up and the other one’s a dyke.”

  Alexa was working late on the Tokely case, she said, because her vacation started that day and she wanted to get as much work done as possible before she and her partner went to Moab for the holiday weekend. Cassie sighed, resigned to the fact that Alexa wouldn’t be able to go with her either, and asked Alexa what she’d found out. Alexa beamed.

  “We’ve got B. G. Myers at the scene,” she said.

  Cassie sighed. “I know about the wrappers you found in the trash can.”

  “We’ve got more.”

  “Really? What?” Cassie was genuinely surprised.

  “On the south side of the house there was a set of tire tracks and boot prints frozen into the mud. Do you remember seeing them?”

  “No.”

  “Cody pointed them out to us and we made plaster casts. And guess what? The tire treads match up with the tires on Myers’s pickup. And the boot prints are the same size and sole as Myers’s work boots.”

  Cassie took that in. “So that means…”

  “We’ve got that guy dead to rights that he was absolutely there at Roger Tokely’s house.”

  “So the wrappers and the stuff we found in the trash?”

  “That’s good, too, but we can’t use them because Cody put them there. Luckily, they steered us in the right direction and we found more to corroborate the theory. The more evidence, the better, right? That’s what you guys always tell us.”

  Cassie looked at the plaster casts on the workbench and the photos Alexa had taken of the tires and B. G.’s boots. They matched up.

  “Good work,” Cassie said.

  “You don’t sound that excited. Shouldn’t you be more excited? I am. This is the first murder investigation I’ve been on and we cracked it, man.”

  “I am excited.”

  Alexa laughed uncomfortably, as if she couldn’t figure out what she’d done wrong.