Paradise Valley

by C. J. Box

  Cassie didn’t mind the name because she liked to think she had the protective qualities of a she-bear when it came to her family and her principles. Nevertheless, she told no one including Ian about the nickname she’d been given by an angry truck driver.

  “You’ll need to get your people out of the building,” Cassie said. “I don’t want any of them to get hurt, including you. If we could borrow some uniform shirts for my guys that would be great, too. I’ll write you a receipt for them.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Judi said, waving it off.

  “I’m sure one of our deputies knows how to drive a forklift. If not, we might need to ask your driver to give us a quick tutorial.”

  Judi agreed. “Any of the guys can do that. They load and unload about a dozen trucks a day. It used to be that all of the dirty equipment was coming in for us to clean up and retrofit for the Bakken. Now, we’re shipping most of the pallets out. Things have changed, you know.”

  Cassie nodded. The boom had come so fast that it was hard for many of those who’d lived through it to grasp the fact that the oil field exploration activity had slowed to almost nothing. Judi Newman, though, had adapted her business to the new reality. She was now an oil field parts exporter rather than an importer.

  “I’ll call you as soon as it’s over,” Cassie said. “Will you be at home?”

  “I’ll be at the Wagon Wheel drinking dirty martinis,” Judi said. “Maybe you can join me.”

  “Maybe,” Cassie said, trying to grin. But she was so tense her mouth wouldn’t let her.

  “Looks like you need one now,” Judi said, gathering up her coat.

  * * *

  SHERIFF KIRKBRIDE AND COUNTY ATTORNEY Avery Tibbs had entered the warehouse together and were striding toward the loading dock. Kirkbride was in his department fleece and Stetson. Tibbs wore a long overcoat that was usually open as it was now, Cassie observed. She speculated that Tibbs liked the coat because of the dramatic figure he cut when it flowed behind him as he walked.

  It was an odd juxtaposition to see them together, Cassie thought. She knew they didn’t get along at all. Kirkbride had vocally supported the old county attorney who’d been challenged by Tibbs in the past election. It had been a nasty campaign that was unusual in Bakken County, where elections had previously been low-key coronations of incumbent politicians. Tibbs had outspent the previous county attorney seven-to-one and had brought in political consultants from Bismarck to help sharpen his attack on the old man. It had worked and Tibbs won the seat by twenty-seven votes.

  At his victory party, Tibbs had vowed to continue to “clean up Bakken County,” which everyone took to mean that one of his goals was to replace the sheriff who’d been in office over twenty years. Kirkbride had backed the wrong horse.

  “There she is,” Tibbs said when he saw Cassie come out of Judi Newman’s office. He turned on his heel toward her and the sheriff reluctantly followed.

  Tibbs wore a dark gray suit and a lime-green tie. He had close-cropped hair, a thin face, tiny dark eyes that were usually in a squint, and a downturned mouth without visible lips. It was no secret that Tibbs planned to run for North Dakota’s single U.S. Congressional seat within a year as a law-and-order candidate.

  “Chief Investigator Dewell,” Tibbs said as he approached Cassie, “you’ve got some serious explaining to do or I’ll shut this whole thing down right now.”

  Cassie looked to Kirkbride who was a few steps behind Tibbs. Kirkbride rolled his eyes. He’d been trying to get along with the new county attorney but he wasn’t very good about disguising his true feelings toward him.

  Tibbs said, “I’m not real fond of the idea that I’ve got a cop who has been conducting a one-man vendetta against a target without ever once informing the County Attorney’s office. I don’t like finding out about it with two hours’ notice and the FBI on the way.”

  He stopped so close to Cassie she could smell his bodywash. It smelled pretty good, she thought. Maybe she could get Ian to …

  “I don’t like it either,” she said. “I’d just about given up on the chance that it would ever happen, much less this quickly. This is the first time everything finally fell into place.”

  Tibbs took a deep breath and when he did his narrow eyes squeezed together so tightly Cassie couldn’t tell if the man could see her.

  He said, “The sheriff said you’ve been baiting this trap for quite some time.”

  “Four years,” Cassie said. “I briefed the former CA on it when we began. I assumed…”

  “Never assume,” Tibbs interrupted. “When you assume you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ If you didn’t get that, I just spelled ‘assume.’”

  Behind him, Kirkbride rolled his eyes again.

  Cassie said, “I’ve got to get our team in place and we’ve got a lot of work to do here. I’m going to run out of time explaining everything. What do you want to know?”

  Tibbs jabbed a single finger at Cassie. “Do not use that tone with me.”

  “What. Do. You. Want. To. Know?” she said. She wanted to reach up and bend his finger back.

  Tibbs said, “I know about the Lizard King or whatever he’s called. The sheriff told me all about him on the way over and he told me you had a traumatic experience with him back in Montana. He told me you killed a dirty Montana State Trooper in a shoot-out but the Lizard King got away. And he told me that you were flown to North Carolina two years ago when they had a suspect in custody they thought was your guy, but the case against him was botched from the start.

  “What I need to know,” Tibbs said, “is if that’s going to happen again here. Are we going to bring this guy in under false pretenses only to have him released again? You know who will be on the hook if that happens, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Cassie said.

  “That’s right—me. You’re handing me a case that could make or break me in the eyes of the voters.”

  She nodded.

  He paused. Behind him, Kirkbride looked away.

  “Tell me how you got him to agree to come here,” Tibbs said.

  “He’s an independent trucker,” Cassie said. “That means he doesn’t work for a long-haul firm and he doesn’t even contract with a dispatching service that takes a cut of every load he delivers. There are reasons for that beyond the fact that he likes to be his own boss. He is an Indy because there’s nobody out there tracking his movements through GPS or the other devices trucking companies use. That means he can travel across the country and stay off the grid. He’s on nobody’s clock but his own. That gives him the space he wants to abduct, torture, and dispose of the women he picks up.

  “Independent truckers have to survive by their wits,” she said. “They get their freight jobs from log-board monitors found in just about every truck stop in the country or on the Internet. It’s all about keeping that trailer full at all times to maximize income. If they’re lucky, they find a job close to where they unloaded their last freight so they aren’t deadheading anywhere.”

  When Tibbs cocked his head to indicate he was puzzled, she said, “Deadhead means driving with an empty trailer. It’s a money-suck for a driver.”

  “How do you know so much about truckers?” Tibbs asked.

  “My dad was a trucker,” she said. “I used to go on runs with him. Anyway, an Indy always hopes he can fill his trailer with a full load from one place. That way, he doesn’t have to travel LTL—less than a load—for very long. But it doesn’t happen very often. Indies have to constantly look for freight that will fill them up along the way.”

  She gave the example of a Washington State farmer who had fifteen pallets—truckers called them “skids,” she said—to deliver to a small grocery chain in Boston. Most trailers could handle twenty-three skids before they were full. Rather than contract with a large trucking firm for a once-a-year job the big firm wouldn’t be enthusiastic about because of the “short” load, the farmer posted the information on a log board specifying the qu
antity of apples, the number of skids, where the apples were to be picked up, and when they had to be delivered. If an independent trucker was in the Pacific Northwest and saw the post he could call the farmer and negotiate a rate. If both parties agreed, the trucker would load the apples into his refrigerated truck first and start driving cross-country.

  “But the trucker only has fifteen skids,” she said to Tibbs. “He won’t make much money on the run unless he can supplement that load with eight skids of something to fill his truck. Let’s say he sees that a sugar beet processor in Wyoming has eight pallets of pulp to deliver to a warehouse in New Bedford, Mass., fifty-nine miles from Boston. The Indy does the math: If he drives south into Wyoming en route to Boston and picks up the pulp he can drop it off in New Bedford and get paid on the way to Boston. That’s the kind of situation an independent trucker is in every single day on the road and the good ones can make a lot of money by avoiding LTL situations.”

  “Okay…” Tibbs said impatiently.

  She said, “Our target is independent—we know that. He doesn’t have a home and he’s constantly on the move. He’s scouring the log board every single day. Our plan was to put a small but profitable offer out there: ten skids of remanufactured oil field parts to be picked up in Grimstad for delivery in Portland, Oregon. It’s an easy run especially for a trucker already going east to west. We were banking on the possibility that he’d be coming through with room in his trailer one of these days.”

  “But that’s crazy,” Tibbs said. “How did you know this particular trucker would bite?”

  Cassie shrugged. “We just played the odds. There aren’t that many purely independent truckers out there anymore. It’s too tough a business on your own unless you just aren’t capable of working for anyone or you have another agenda. So every few days my friend Leslie in North Carolina would bait the trap on the log board. The number to call was this dedicated cell phone,” she said, showing him the phone. “I got hundreds of calls I had to turn down at all hours of the night. We hoped that he’d call eventually.”

  Tibbs shook his head. “How did you know it was him?”

  Cassie and Kirkbride exchanged a look, and Cassie said, “I’m probably the only woman who has ever heard his voice who is still alive to identify him.”

  Tibbs turned to Kirkbride for affirmation. Kirkbride nodded.

  “This is the first time everything has fallen into place,” Cassie said. “After he called we got the video clip from Eau Claire, so we know he’s got a victim. Then we tracked his truck in Hudson so we know he’s on his way. I was always worried that he’d finally show up here and the FBI would search his truck for trace evidence and find nothing again. But this time we know he’s got a girl with him.”

  “What if he already dumped her?” Tibbs asked. “Then what?”

  “It’s possible,” Cassie said, “although the timeline works against him if he’s on his way here. The Lizard King steam cleans his kill room in his trailer and power washes his cab so there’s no evidence. That’s why we couldn’t nail him when we had him the first time. But he hasn’t had time to do that since last night and still get here when he agreed to show up. Even if he killed her and dumped the body along the highway, the FBI will find traces of her in his rig. And we’ll nail him.

  “Now, if you don’t mind,” she said, backing away, “we have a lot of work to do before he gets here.”

  “Hold it,” Tibbs said. “How sure are you it’s him? All you have to go on is his voice.”

  She thought about it. “Ninety-eight percent.” She thought, I’ll never forget that voice.

  The Lizard King—aka Ronald Pergram aka Dale Spradley—had a naturally high-pitched prairie voice he tried to disguise by lowering it to guttural level and speaking slowly and deliberately with an indecipherable drawl. He’d gotten quite good at it over the years, and only when she confronted him in North Carolina did he let it slip. He, like Cassie, was from Montana. He had a flatness to his words and a cadence while speaking she was familiar with from growing up around it.

  “And if you’re wrong?” Tibbs asked. “Then we arrest an innocent trucker in a huge display of force and find out there’s no evidence in his truck to prove he did anything wrong. At best it’s a public embarrassment and at worst we’re talking about a civil suit for assault, battery, and false arrest or a Section 1983 claim.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” Cassie said.

  Tibbs jabbed his finger at Cassie. He said, “If I go down I’m taking you down with me.”

  “Understood.”

  Tibbs wheeled around and faced Kirkbride. “You too,” he said.

  * * *

  CASSIE’S PERSONAL CELL PHONE BURRED and she looked at it. Both Tibbs and Kirkbride observed her carefully.

  She took the call, listened, and punched off.

  She said, “A state trooper east of Dickinson just ID’d his truck. He should be here in two hours.”

  “Oh, man,” Tibbs said. “We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”

  “You bet we are,” Kirkbride said.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  “SO WHERE IN THE HELL is he?” Tibbs asked impatiently from the backseat of Sheriff Kirkbride’s unmarked Yukon. “He’s a fucking hour late.”

  “I know,” Cassie said, checking her watch.

  They were parked tightly alongside an abandoned pipeline distributor building a hundred yards from Dakota Remanufacturing. The location gave them a good view through the windshield of the loading dock but they’d be out of sight to an approaching semi. Kirkbride had checked out two other locations before deciding this one was the best. The sheriff was behind the wheel, Cassie next to him in the passenger seat.

  “Maybe he stopped for lunch or fuel,” Kirkbride offered.

  “Or maybe he got wise to us,” Tibbs said. “Maybe he got scared off? Or maybe he was never even coming in the first place?”

  “Please,” Cassie said. She glanced at her second cell phone—the one she thought of as her “trucker phone”—to see if the Lizard King had called or sent a text about being late. Nothing.

  “Maybe I should text him and ask him for his ETA?” she said. “I mean, it would be normal to do that, right?”

  Kirkbride shrugged. He didn’t know. He said, “Give him another ten minutes. We don’t want him to think we’re too anxious.”

  She agreed with that and raised binoculars to her eyes. She wished she could also raise something to her ears to block out the running commentary from the county attorney in the backseat.

  * * *

  CASSIE WAS FEELING the heat.

  Because all communication was off-channel to avoid the risk of the Lizard King picking them up over the radio, the last hour and a half had been a blizzard of cell-phone calls between all the principals involved in the sting. At one point she was receiving three calls at once.

  The editor of the Grimstad Tribune had left two messages saying he’d heard rumors of a major bust about to occur. Cassie ignored him.

  The FBI’s 727 was due to land in fifteen minutes. Special Agent Rhodine wanted to know who would meet him at the airport and how many vehicles would be available after landing to ferry men and equipment to the industrial park. The answer to that was: None. He’d just have to wait.

  Ian Davis had called to ask how many times he was supposed to pretend he was delivering the tenth pallet to the loading dock after he’d done it twelve times. The idea was to have what looked like normal industrial activity going on when the Lizard King arrived. Cassie had hidden her distress when she learned Ian was posing as the forklift operator since he’d be exposed, but she held her tongue. Pulling him off the detail and replacing him with another officer would result in a hellstorm of controversy and second-guessing about preferential treatment of her fiancé.

  The answer to Ian’s question was: Just keep taking that pallet out over and over like you’re doing it for the first time.

  The remaining six deputies on-site nee
ded to know who was playing the dock foreman, clipboard in hand, who would actually approach the Lizard King in his cab. The other five would disperse with two men hiding within the warehouse on the left side of the loading dock door and three men on the right. All would be armed with shotguns or AR-15s. No one was to fire unless someone saw a threatening move by the driver.

  Answer: Fred Walker was to play the foreman, J. T. Eastwood and Tigg Erger would be on the left, and deputies Jim Klug, Tom Melvin, and Shaun McKnight would be on the right.

  Cassie had briefed all the deputies before leaving with Kirkbride and Tibbs, reiterating that the Lizard King was armed and dangerous. He was known to pack a Taurus .380 ACP semi-automatic pistol as well as tools that included a Taser, hypodermic syringes filled with Rohypnol, an array of knives and bone saws. And who knew what other weapons he may have added recently, she said.

  She’d gone over their roles and asked them all to repeat back to her what she’d said. Walker would ask the driver to climb out of his cab under the pretext there were bills of lading and other paperwork to sign. That act alone might trigger a suspicion in the Lizard King, she explained, because often drivers never even left their vehicle as they were loaded.

  If the driver did get out, the deputies were to rush him from two sides with weapons drawn. Cassie said she wanted their target facedown on the asphalt, searched, and cuffed. No one was to play cowboy. No one was to play hero.

  If for some reason the Lizard King caught on to what was happening and decided to drive away, Kirkbride was to roar out from the side of the abandoned building and block the exit out of the yard. Four deputies in SUVs and two state troopers were on call, ready to flood the yard with vehicles and weapons as needed. Spike strips were unpacked and ready to deploy on the roads leading out of town if it came to that.

  While they waited and minutes passed, she asked her team to repeat the plan back to her one more time.