Paradise Valley

by C. J. Box

  Kyle thought that was mean but true. And if it worked he was fine with it.

  Kyle noticed that the vehicle had slowed down significantly but it didn’t stop. He guessed they were passing through a small town.

  “Tell you what,” Raheem said, “how about after you let us go me ’n Kyle will get jobs somewhere. When we earn money we’ll send it to you. We’ll keep sending it until we’re all square. You can name the price but don’t get crazy. It’s not like we’ll ever make a million dollars or anything like that. How does that sound to you?”

  “Stupid,” Ron said.

  “Man, I’m running out of ideas so you tell me. Tell me what we gotta do to get out of this damn truck. Kyle, if you got any ideas now is the time to chime in.”

  The tape over Kyle’s mouth was tight and all he could manage was “Mmmff.”

  “You talk a lot,” Ron said to Raheem. It was a flat statement.

  Raheem apparently didn’t know how to respond.

  The truck sped back up. Apparently they were back on the highway.

  Finally, Ron said, “I was wondering what I was going to do with you anyway.”

  Kyle’s heart lept. Then he wondered if “you” meant them both or just Raheem.

  The pickup slowed down and soon Kyle could hear gravel instead of pavement under the tires on the right side. Ron was pulling over.

  “You okay, Kyle?” Raheem asked, sotto voce.

  “Mmmff.”

  “Hang in there, bro.”

  * * *

  RON DIDN’T REMOVE KYLE’S HOOD, so what he would remember about what came next would stay with him as a series of sounds burned into his memory. Maybe that was why reliving that day seemed so real.

  The truck stopped but the engine continued to run. Kyle heard Ron shove the transmission into park and apply the emergency brake with a ratcheting sound. Then he got out and his boots crunched on the gravel on the side of the road. The rear door opened and Kyle felt fresh air on the exposed skin of his hands. He also thought he smelled hay and fresh dirt.

  “Get out,” Ron said to Raheem.

  “I’m trying, man,” Raheem said, grunting. He heard Tiffany mewl again as Raheem struggled over her toward the opening.

  “Stand still,” Ron said.

  “All right, I will. But don’t forget Kyle.”

  No response.

  Ron said to Amanda, “Take that off. That’s right, I’ll pull that stud out with these pliers and you reach up and unbuckle it and hand it to me.”

  “Are you sure it won’t go off?” she asked. Her voice trembled.

  “Do what I tell you,” Ron said.

  A moment later, Raheem said, “What you puttin’ around my neck?”

  Silence.

  “Hey, don’t pull it so tight.”

  Kyle felt his whole body go cold. He could remember Ron unbuckling the dog collar from Tiffany before he taped her up and put the hood on her. Kyle was afraid Ron was fastening it around Raheem’s neck.

  “That ain’t that damned collar is it?” Raheem’s voice was high. He was scared.

  “Take off your clothes,” Ron said.

  “What?”

  “Take ’em off. Everything except your underwear.”

  “That’s messed up, man.”

  “Do it.”

  “How can I do it with my hands and legs all taped up?”

  “I’ll cut you free.”

  Kyle heard sharp zips that sent chills through his bowels.

  After a beat, Kyle heard Raheem say, “Well, shit,” as if resigned.

  Apparently, though, the zips were from a sharp blade cutting through tape.

  “Your shoes, too.” Ron said.

  “Okay, okay.”

  Kyle was supercharged with energy. He tried to pull his hands apart. The tape bit into his skin. He rolled his head manically from side to side, trying to catch an edge of the tape to the fabric on the inside of his hood so it would peel back. He would beg for Raheem’s life.

  “Hey, settle down in there,” Ron said, apparently to Kyle. Then to Raheem: “Your friend has got this figured out.”

  What? Kyle thought. He’s got what figured out?

  To Raheem: “You want to go? Then go.”

  “I can’t see nothing.”

  There was an unfurling sound of cloth snapping free.

  “Now you can,” Ron said. “Now run. Run toward that haystack out there. I’ll bet you can run pretty fast.”

  “Where in the hell are we? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Like I said, you talk a lot.”

  “You’re gonna use that collar thing on me.” Raheem’s voice was reedy. “You’re gonna use that thing on me.”

  “Hey, it may not work. It probably depends on the distance. There may not be enough of an electrical charge in the detonator to set off the C-4 if you get out of range.” Ron sounded calm like he was puzzling out a science problem.

  “Look,” Raheem said, “Put that hood back on. I’ll get dressed again and I’ll get back inside the truck and I’ll keep my mouth shut and you won’t ever hear another goddamn word out of me. I swear it. Just let me back in the truck.”

  After a long pause, Ron said, “Nah. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you anyway. You’re sort of a wild card and you’ve got a mouth on you.”

  “I’ll be good, man,” Raheem begged. “I sit in class and I don’t say nothing. I sit there for hours. I can do that here.”

  Kyle had never heard that sad tone in Raheem’s voice before. It ripped his heart out.

  “I said ‘go.’”

  “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me.”

  “At least this way you’ll have a chance. Otherwise, I’ll just put a bullet in your head and leave you here on the side of the road.”

  “Please, man…”

  “Go.”

  The last words Raheem ever uttered were “Fuck it.”

  Kyle heard Raheem start running. Bare feet thumped the ground until the sound of footfalls faded away.

  A second passed, then two. Then five.

  BOOM.

  Amanda screamed in the front seat.

  Kyle tried to cry out but his voice was muffled and he sounded to himself like a wounded cat.

  Ron climbed back in the front of the truck, closed the door, and said, “That worked better than I thought it would.” Pride in his voice.

  Before he put the truck into gear he said, “Relax, back there. It was a just a matter of time anyway.”

  Amanda’s sobbing was muffled as if she’d buried her head into the floorboard.

  “Everybody relax,” Ron said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

  Through his anger and tears, Kyle smelled something sharp and strong: urine. Tiffany had apparently heard what Kyle had heard and she’d voided herself.

  Ron smelled it, too, and said, “You people are disgusting.”

  PART FOUR

  PARADISE VALLEY

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  CASSIE TURNED OFF U.S. Highway 89 onto a fading two-track road that cut through the sagebrush before she reached Emigrant. She was immediately haunted by a sense of déjà vu from four years before. That was the last time she was there in what was known, ironically to her, as Paradise Valley.

  Despite how vast and scenic it was—the snowcapped Crazy Mountains to the north, the Absaroka Range to the east, Yellowstone Park via Yankee Jim Canyon to the south—she could only remember the horror that had occurred there. It seemed to hang like vapor just a few feet above the brush.

  The day was cool and overcast, which muted the early fall colors. A small herd of pronghorn antelope flowed across the high-desert steppe in the distance.

  There were ghosts here, she thought. Ghosts only she could feel. The ghosts of dozens of women who had been picked up on the highway by the Lizard King and delivered to a bunker that served as a torture chamber just a few miles north of where she was now. Women whose bodies had still never been found.


  And there was the ghost of Cody Hoyt, her troubled mentor. He’d left Helena on his own to investigate a report of two missing girls. Both the girls and their car had disappeared between Gardiner and Livingston. It was the last time she saw Cody alive.

  Even though she’d identified his body after it had been dug up in a field near the bunker and attended his funeral in Helena, she still had the odd feeling from time to time that any day he could walk through her door, sit at her table, crack open a beer, light a cigarette, and say something outrageous and politically incorrect.

  His presence was still with her as well as his advice and admonitions. Especially here.

  And now she was back in this valley.

  She topped a gradual rise and the wide flat swale opened up before her. There was a black smudge in the small sea of sagebrush and it looked exactly as she remembered it.

  The two-track led her there.

  * * *

  UNLIKE THE LAST TIME, when the collapsed pile of black wood was still smoldering, there was no need to watch her step or be wary of disturbing evidence or remains.

  Cassie got out of her Escape and pulled her open coat tight across her as if it were a shield. She stepped carefully through the debris. She was a little surprised the site had never been cleaned up. It was as if local law enforcement had simply forgotten about it.

  Bits of yellow crime scene tape had blown loose in the howling winds that were ubiquitous to the valley and were snagged within the black tumble of the collapsed house as well as on clumps of sagebrush. There were items in the burned remnants that were recognizable—balls of aluminum foil and even charred newspapers—but no grass or weeds had grown up through the ashes. It was as if, she thought, the place was so cursed and wretched that nothing could ever live there again.

  This was where Ronald Charles Pergram had grown up. Although he’d spent nearly all of his adult years on the road as a long-haul trucker, it was the only real address he’d ever had, the only place he’d ever called home. His mother Helen had lived there alone after her husband left.

  Cassie saw a thin square that looked like a folder and she bent to retrieve it. It was caught between two burned timbers and she grunted as she shimmied it out. The item was a picture frame. The cracked glass was still largely intact. She spit on the glass and used the edge of her sleeve to wipe away the soot.

  The photo behind the glass was the official U.S. Marine induction photo of a young woman. She had clear blue eyes gazing out with a sense of purpose as straight as her jawline.

  Cassie recognized the soldier as JoBeth Pergram, Ronald’s sister. She’d died in action in Iraq when the Humvee she was piloting was destroyed by an IED.

  From questioning neighbors in the area, Cassie later learned that Helen had doted on JoBeth all her life. JoBeth had been a star athlete at Gardiner High School, a straight-A student, and vice president of her class. Helen’s kitchen wall was filled with awards and ribbons JoBeth had won.

  After JoBeth was killed, Helen became a different person. She withdrew from the community, gained a tremendous amount of weight, and became a hoarder—or “collector” as she called it—to the point that moving through her house was like navigating through tunnels.

  The same neighbors had very little to say about Ronald. He was quiet, nonathletic, and a poor student. He didn’t hunt or fish, which made him an outlier among his male classmates. He seemed to have virtually no interests anyone could recall. He’d made very little impression on anyone, other than as JoBeth’s younger brother.

  JoBeth was popular in school and close friends with a pack of other girls. When one of them went missing no one suspected Ronald at the time. Cassie speculated that JoBeth’s friend was his first victim.

  Helen’s remains had been found in the burned house. The coroner estimated she weighed three hundred fifty pounds. Cassie recalled the coroner saying there was so much fat on the body that it smoldered for more than twenty-four hours.

  Everyone suspected that Ronald had started the fire as he left for the last time.

  In her face-to-face confrontation with Ronald Pergram in North Carolina, Cassie was getting nowhere until she brought up his relationship with his sister and his mother. It was the only thing she said that got a reaction from him other than contempt.

  His response to her needling was to throw himself across the table and try to strangle her in the interrogation room. Officers responded and pulled him off before he could kill her.

  * * *

  CASSIE TOOK THE FRAMED PHOTO of JoBeth back with her to her car, opened the hatchback, and put it inside. She wasn’t sure why, but she thought of it as an act of defiance toward the Lizard King—if he was out there.

  And he was out there, she was sure. She’d spent five and a half hours and four hundred miles of driving from Ekalaka thinking about him.

  She leaned back against the squared-off snout of her Escape and slowly took in the panorama of far-off mountains in every direction. The cold breeze teased at her hair.

  Ronald Pergram had spent all of his adult life on the road, as she’d told Leslie. He’d been virtually everywhere in the country and possibly Canada and Mexico as well. He was familiar with hundreds of thousands of miles of roadway.

  But that life had limited his knowledge as well, which was something she hadn’t thought about when she talked to the North Carolina prosecutor the night before. It had come to her as she drove across I-94 and I-90 through the state.

  Cassie had learned from her father, an over-the-road trucker, that driving an 18-wheeler was like piloting a ship on the ocean. The captain of that ship had the entire blue-water sea in front of him and he could go anywhere on it. But when it came to approaching land the captain was handicapped. He couldn’t land his ship on the beach or navigate up a river. He had to stay in the deep water.

  It was the same situation for a long-haul trucker. The driver was confined to major highways. His life consisted of loading docks and weigh stations. Truck stops were his ports of call. Because of the massive size of his tractor and trailer, he was confined to the highways. If the driver wanted to go into town at night for a meal, he had to walk, hitch a ride, or call a taxi.

  So even though Pergram knew every road in the country he likely had very little knowledge of what was beyond the highway. He wouldn’t know suburban neighborhoods or downtown streets or unpaved rural roads because he’d never been there.

  So without his tractor-trailer there was only one place Ronald Pergram had ever called home, one place he was familiar with.

  It wasn’t right, she thought, that such a stunning landscape had produced a monster like the Lizard King. He was obviously incapable of appreciating the beauty of it.

  It made her hate him even more.

  * * *

  CASSIE DROVE AWAY from what was left of the burned down Pergram home. She swept her eyes across the valley and studied the rising foothills and the peaks of the jagged mountains. It was huge country under a massive sky.

  If Pergram’s first verifiable stop after he’d left North Dakota was Ekalaka he was travelling west toward the Rocky Mountains.

  Where was he? And was Kyle with him?

  * * *

  WHEN SHE REACHED the top of the ridge her phone chimed with a message. There had been no cell service in the swale.

  It was from Leslie Behaunek and it had been left twenty minutes before.

  Cassie pressed the speaker icon on her phone as she bumped along on the two-track through the sagebrush.

  Leslie’s voice said, “Cassie, I talked to the ME in Montana and he sent me the autopsy photos of the victim. There’s no doubt that a two-inch scar is visible on his inside left ankle.”

  Cassie cursed but kept driving.

  “We’re putting in a request to the Minneapolis Police Department to obtain items from Mr. Johnson that might contain Raheem’s DNA to match it with the victim. If you still have Mr. Johnson’s number you might want to give him a call and fill him in and soften the blo
w. I’d do it but I think it would be better coming from you since you know him. Sorry … that’s no fun at all. Believe me, I’ve done it and it tears your heart out.

  “I’ve also talked to Sheriff Verplank—who sounds like a nice guy—and he’s FedExing the little electronic parts you-all found in the hayfield to us. Maybe we can figure out where they came from.

  “We’ve got calls in to Montana and North Dakota to set up a conference call about creating that joint task force I told you about. So things are rolling.

  “Call me when you get this. Since you didn’t pick up I can only assume you’re somewhere without a signal or you’re busy.” Her voice lapsed into her drawl when she said, “I just hope you’re on your way home where you can get some sleep. I didn’t get any last night thanks to you.”

  Cassie ended the message and nodded her head. Leslie was pulling out all the stops for her and she appreciated it. She knew Leslie was smart and capable and that her plan to create a joint task force investigation was the best way to proceed long-term.

  But it wasn’t the fastest way. She’d asked herself, What if Ben had been taken by the Lizard King?

  If that were the case she’d want the most rapid investigation possible. She’d not want them to waste a minute on phone calls, meetings, or memoranda of understanding.

  And she’d want Ronald Pergram in the ground.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE REACHED THE HIGHWAY Cassie paused. Left toward Gardiner and Yellowstone Park or right to Livingston and Bozeman?

  Not for the first time in her career, she asked herself, What would Cody do?

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  IN BOZEMAN CASSIE STAYED ON Main Street. There was no reason to go anywhere else.

  When she’d left Grimstad for Ekalaka she’d packed an overnight bag and wasn’t even sure if that was necessary at the time. But since she’d continued on without going back home she had no fresh clothing and she’d used up the tiny hotel containers of shampoo, lotion, and toothpaste.

  She used some of Lottie’s cash—she still thought of it as Lottie’s and dutifully kept every receipt—to stock up for at least two or three more days on the road. She dreaded breaking the news to Isabel and Ben.