Paradise Valley

by C. J. Box

  Which meant her search would have to expand beyond the Missouri River states to include the entire nation. That’s where NIBRS, NCIC, and ViCAP should come in. But she’d already looked at those the night before. Maybe she’d used the wrong criteria, she thought.

  The most implausible theory she could come up with was that the boys got in their boat and went upriver.

  She’d assumed from the start that they would be at the mercy of the river flow and could travel no faster downriver than that. But what if they somehow obtained an outboard motor with enough horsepower to push them against the flow? The river near Grimstad was wide and slow. Steamboats had at one time sailed upriver.

  Even though it made no sense to her, she accessed RIMN—the Rocky Mountain Information Network that included Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It was the database she’d used the most when she worked for Lewis and Clark County in Montana.

  Upriver was Montana, her home state, where the headwaters of the Missouri River originated.

  She scrolled through incident reports from Montana and gasped when she found an item from three weeks before from the tiny (population 332) town of Ekalaka in Carter County, the most southeastern county in the state.

  The Carter County Sheriff’s Department is seeking information on the September 22 discovery of a headless body discovered south of town. The victim was a young African American or dark-skinned Native American and/or Hispanic male in his late teens or early twenties. The victim was found 180 feet from County Road 154 wearing boxer briefs (lg.) and no other clothing. Victim is estimated to have been five-eight to five-ten and 160 to 175 pounds. There are no identifying marks on the body except for a two-inch (apparent) surgical scar on the inner left ankle. Cause of death, according to Sheriff (and Coroner) Bebe Verplank, was not determined due to possible post-mortem decapitation. There were no other wounds on the body. Montana DCI is involved in forensic pathology procedure.

  Cassie reread the post and sat back, her heart whumping in her chest.

  One victim, not two. Ekalaka was a town so small and isolated that it listed only three law enforcement personnel: a deputy, an undersheriff, and a sheriff named Bebe Verplank who also served as the coroner. Confusion over whether the body was African American, Native American, or Hispanic.

  The timing—three weeks—kind of worked. Did Raheem have a surgical scar on his ankle?

  But Ekalaka was the absolute wrong direction: west. And it was found over two hundred miles due south of Wolf Point and the Missouri River in Montana.

  It made no sense. None. But it was the only thing she’d found in hours of searching that might be a lead.

  As she spun out scenarios in her head her cell phone burred and skittered across the top of the card table. She snatched it up.

  Sheriff Kirkbride was returning her call.

  She couldn’t wait to talk to him. She wanted to know if Kirkbride knew of Bebe Verplank in Ekalaka, or if Raheem had a scar on the inside of his ankle.

  * * *

  FROM THE SECOND HE SAID, “Cassie, it’s Jon,” she knew something was wrong on the other end. It came through in his tone.

  “Thanks for calling me back.”

  “Sure,” he said. Then: “Well, it’s over. Avery Tibbs won and I lost. I’m in here cleaning out my desk.”

  “What?”

  “I came to an agreement with the county commission. I really didn’t fight very hard. They’re letting me retire as of today with my full pension. Tibbs is putting Deanna Palmer in charge until the next election. She’ll do fine…”

  Cassie didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m not even all that pissed off at Tibbs,” he said. “He wanted me out more than I wanted to stay. That’s how the game is played at this level. It’s pure power politics and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty damn good at it myself back when I was rising through the ranks. That’s just how it goes.

  “I guess I’ll finally get the chance to spend some quality time with my horses,” Kirkbride said. “I can’t say I mind that one bit.”

  Cassie asked, “How much of this had to do with the explosion?”

  Kirkbride hesitated for a moment. “That was the thing Tibbs could latch onto,” he said with a sigh. “We’ve never lost any officers before, so someone had to take the fall. I don’t mind that it’s me.”

  Cassie said, “I’m just so sorry you have to leave because of me—because of what I did. You trusted me and I let you down.”

  “Stop it. Just stop it,” Kirkbride said with a flash of anger. “I was your supervisor and I was all in. Nobody could have prepared for what happened because we were up against a guy using his own sick set of rules. I’m sure we both have had plenty of sleepless nights where we ask ourselves what we would have done differently. But there was no way anyone could have guessed he’d blow himself up and take as many of us with him as he could.”

  “Did you tell the commissioners that?” she asked.

  “Not really. I’ve pretty much lost my enthusiasm for another political fight after all these years. I did fight for you, though.”

  Cassie sat back in her chair. “You did what?”

  “I told them they ought to come to you on bended knee and beg you to stay. That they really don’t want to lose the best investigator in the department.”

  “I’ll bet Tibbs loved that,” Cassie said.

  “He wasn’t too happy about it,” Kirkbride said. “But I’m afraid if I was you I wouldn’t wait for them to show up at your door.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She was going to say more but she could feel her emotions taking over. For the second time in two days she didn’t want the sheriff to know she was going to cry.

  “But that’s not what you called about,” Kirkbride said.

  “No it isn’t but never mind,” she said. Something was burning in the back of her throat.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Kirbride said with his usual good cheer. “Come by the place and have a cup of coffee if you don’t have anything else to do. And if you want a good laugh you can watch a fat old guy try to ride around on his horse.”

  She discontinued the call and lowered the phone to her lap.

  Then she closed her eyes and took a ragged breath. She thought she knew how Lottie Westergaard must feel: that something unusual had happened and the aftermath was unfair and unjust.

  Cassie pushed back from the card table and opened the blinds of the window and looked out on the quiet street. A knot of grade-school kids were on the sidewalk coming home from school. Ben should be on his way home as well.

  As for Kyle Westergaard and Raheem Johnson …

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Location Unknown

  KYLE HAD NO IDEA where he was but he knew it was different from any place he’d ever been before.

  The air was thinner. He’d thought at first when he got there it was the hood over his head that made it hard to breathe, but when it finally came off he realized he couldn’t seem to get a full breath—more like half a breath. It gave him a headache and made his lungs hurt and when he stood up too quickly he became dizzy.

  The trees were different, too. He could see them through the cloudy window cut into the log wall as well as the window above the old-fashioned sink. Tall and skinny—really skinny trees. Christmas trees, sort of. Not like the kind of full trees he was used to, the ones that looked like upside-down pears. And he could smell a waft of pine on the rare occasions when the front door opened.

  It got cold faster when the sun went down and it warmed up more quickly in the morning.

  And there were very few normal sounds outside. No traffic, no voices, no train whistles. A few times he heard a jet airplane high in the sky and the sound of it passing seemed to wash down through the air, crescendo, and vanish again.

  The cabin they were being held prisoner in was old, dark, and small with a close ceiling. It was built of logs that had been there so long they’d tu
rned as hard as stone and gray in color. It was essentially two rooms. The main room had a woodstove and propane stove for cooking, a table, cupboards, nails and pegs inserted into the logs to hold coats and clothes, and a double bed pushed up against one wall and a single bed pushed up against the other. There was only one door and two windows. Adjacent to the main room was a smaller bedroom Ron occupied. There was no door between the main room and his bedroom but it had been established early on that no one was to enter his room for any reason or they’d be severely punished.

  When Ron was gone, like he was now, the only sound inside the small structure was when the wind rattled something above the rafters or on the roof. It sounded like a playing card clipped to a bike frame so the spokes would make it go rat-rat-rat-rat-rat. And the pop of flames in the potbellied stove.

  That, and the two women talking.

  * * *

  “HE’S BEEN GONE a really long time,” the older woman named Amanda said to Tiffany. Her voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Maybe he’s not coming back. What do we do if he doesn’t come back this time? What if he gets in an accident or something?”

  Her voice and accent were familiar to Kyle, kind of like a cross between Grandma Lottie and his mother. Amanda had a round face and tight curls and she had large hands. She was a heavy woman with big thighs encased in jeans. She wore an oversized sweatshirt with a jolly Santa face sewed on the front of it. There was a smear of black soot on Santa’s beard from her feeding lengths of wood into the old stove.

  “Oh, he’s coming back,” Tiffany said. “He always fuckin’ comes back.”

  “But what if they arrest him, you know? Do you think he’d tell the cops about us?”

  “What do you think?”

  She was younger, Tiffany was. Really thin, too, almost bony. She had narrow shoulders, improbably large breasts, long stringy blond hair, big brown deep-set eyes, and a hard-edged husky voice. She was always complaining that she was cold no matter how much wood Amanda stuffed into the stove. She’d staked out her spot on the iron-framed bed in the corner nearest to the heat. Linty blankets covered her bare legs. Tiffany had lost one of her long dangly earrings somewhere along the way but the right one was still attached to the lobe. She was still wearing her short black skirt.

  “What if he doesn’t come back, though?” Amanda asked her.

  “Then we can get the hell out of here, I guess,” Tiffany said.

  “What about the bolt and the lock in the door?”

  “What about it?”

  “How do we break it?”

  “Shit if I know.”

  Amanda chinned toward the window on the wall above them. “If we got that open could you squeeze out?”

  “I know you couldn’t.”

  Amanda ignored her and said, “Maybe if you could get outside you could use an ax or something to break the door down and let us out.”

  “So it’s up to me, huh?” Tiffany said. She shot a look at Kyle to take his measure. He knew his shoulders were too wide for consideration. She sighed when she realized it, too.

  She turned to Amanda. “So it’s my job to get out of that window, find an ax, and chop you out of this cabin? All the while Ron is someplace out there. What if he comes back when I’m halfway out the window? What if he comes back when I’m trying to chop the door down?”

  Then Tiffany’s mouth twisted up into a cruel grin. She had two rows of small, dark-yellow teeth. “Maybe you can go lose some weight and climb out through that window yourself. If he doesn’t blow your head clean off I’ll follow you. How’s that?”

  “Don’t be so mean,” Amanda said, hurt. “Why are you always so mean?”

  Tiffany crossed her arms over her chest and looked away, obviously annoyed.

  “Really,” Amanda said. “We’re in this together. We should work together, shouldn’t we?”

  Tiffany refused to answer.

  “Well?” Amanda asked.

  “You’re trying to get me killed,” Tiffany said finally. “This is bad enough without you trying to get me killed, Grandma.”

  Amanda shook her head and looked down at her lap. Kyle could barely hear her say, “I’m not trying to get anybody killed.”

  They talked as if Kyle wasn’t even in the room. He sat on his very small bed in the far corner of the room. Amanda had addressed him a couple of times since they’d all been together but he’d refused to look at her or answer her questions. He’d done the same once when Tiffany scowled at him and asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? Do you even know what’s going on?”

  Kyle had nodded that he did.

  * * *

  IT HAD BEEN THAT WAY since that night near the river when the man he now knew as Ron showed the pistol and ordered both Kyle and Raheem to pull their boat out of the water into the thick brush. Then the raft.

  In the dark, Ron had marched them toward the old house trailer and made them sit on lawn chairs propped up around a cold campfire.

  On the way there, Raheem asked Ron questions.

  “Why are you doing this?

  “Why do we have to go with you? Just let us get back on the river.

  “Is there a reward for us or something? Who would spend that kind of money, anyway?

  “Are we trespassing or something? What’s wrong?”

  But Ron—Kyle didn’t know his name at the time—never answered.

  Instead, Ron kept his gun on Kyle as he wrapped Raheem’s wrists together with silver duct tape, then his ankles. Then his mouth with a particular flourish. Ron put the gun in his coat pocket as he did the same to Kyle. Kyle didn’t resist.

  Ron wasn’t violent with them, or particularly rough. He said as few words as possible to get the task done.

  Kyle didn’t know what Ron meant when the man said to himself, “Looks like I need a couple more dog collars,” and sent them one by one into the trailer house where Amanda and Tiffany were.

  The two women had simply stared at them for a long time. They weren’t taped up but Kyle noticed in the gloom of the trailer that each had a small green blinking light emanating from a black collar on their necks.

  “Oh this is fucking great,” the skinny one said to the other. “He’s collecting even more people.”

  “Maybe they can help us?” the older woman said.

  “The big one, maybe. That little one—I doubt it.”

  Kyle had ignored them. He managed to stand up with his legs and wrists bound and he watched through the louvred windows that night as Ron fed their clothing and gear from the boat into the fire pit and burned it.

  Ron broke up their boat with an ax he’d found in the shed and threw the staves on the fire. Raheem soon joined him at the window.

  “What in the hell is he going to do with us, man?” Raheem asked Kyle.

  “I don’t know.”

  Hours later, Ron fired up an ancient front-end loader that had been parked on the side of the shed and scooped up the entire smoldering fire pit and dumped the debris and earth into the Missouri River with a loud hissing sound. There had been a lot of sparks as each load hit the water, and Kyle could smell the acrid steam even that far away.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY RON PUT hoods over their heads and taped them on securely. Kyle listened as Ron led Tiffany and Raheem outside and told them calmly to lay down on the back floor of the pickup truck.

  Kyle felt Ron’s presence as he entered the trailer and his grip under Kyle’s arm.

  “You’re next,” Ron said. “You get the seat but you have to lay down on it. Don’t sit up no matter what.”

  Kyle had no idea why he got the seat and Raheem and Tiffany got the floor. He felt guilty about it as he wriggled into the back of the cab.

  “You’re next to me,” Ron said to Amanda, who apparently didn’t have a hood over her head. “Sit there like you’re my wife. Don’t look at anyone and don’t make eye contact. Don’t take off that scarf over your collar. You know what’ll happen if you do.”

&
nbsp; And they drove away from the trailer house. Eventually, Kyle could hear the singing of the tires as well as passing vehicles. Ron didn’t say a word to anyone.

  Kyle wished at the time he knew his directions better. He couldn’t tell where they were headed in the truck, only that it was taking hours upon hours. For a while he tried to count the minutes and then the hours by saying in his head “one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two” so he could figure out how far away from the trailer they would end up. But he messed up his count and couldn’t recall where he’d left off.

  He could hear Raheem breathe at times, and sometimes his friend moaned in frustration. Tiffany was extremely still when she wasn’t quietly crying.

  * * *

  A LONG TIME later Kyle could feel the truck slow down and take a long turn on pavement. It stopped a couple more times and he could hear the ambient sounds of cars around them. He guessed Ron had stopped at a stop sign or under streetlights. Then Ron swung off the street into what Kyle guessed was a gas station or parking lot.

  “You’re coming with me,” Ron said to Amanda.

  The springs in the front seat groaned as Ron turned in his seat to address Raheem, Tiffany, and him in back.

  “Nobody fucking move,” Ron had said.

  Kyle had felt the truck rock a little as Ron and Amanda got out and shut their doors. Then the back door opened and he knew it was Ron.

  “Hold your hands out.”

  There was rustling and Tiffany cried out, “Not so tight!”

  Kyle was confused about what was happening until his own bound hands were jerked away from the seat. He felt the bite of wire being wound around his wrists.

  Ron ran the wire over Raheem and Tiffany and tied it off somewhere under the seat, probably to the frame.

  “Just in case anyone was thinking about getting out,” he said and shut the door tight.

  * * *