“Here it is.” Yttri read, “ ‘Authorities in Allamakee County, Iowa, seek information about a missing minor, female, possibly seen outside the Ease Inn truck stop in Farmstead on August twelfth. Area residents with any information should contact . . .’ ”
He interrupted himself, noting her intense focus on the screen. “What’s up? Is our missing girl on the board yet?”
She couldn’t find the words. She turned her screen so he could see it. Yttri leaned in. She pointed out the blue butterfly barrettes, the gold necklace that said Sophie. She showed him his own cell phone photo of the items from Walt Beavers’s shelf. Then, her nerves about to shatter, she dropped the snapshot of Harley and the blond girl in front of him.
Yttri leaned over it. She stared with him, focusing on the girl’s heavier chest, her ponytail, no barrettes.
“This picture was taken at the Ease Inn on August twelfth,” she said. “But that’s not her, right?” She felt her face flush and turned it quickly away, worried he could feel the heat. “Is there any way that’s her?”
After a long silence, during which she knew her deputy was inspecting the two photographs minutely, looking from the computer screen to the snapshot, Yttri cleared his throat and said, “That’s a different girl.” She looked at him. “Heidi, no. Absolutely not. It takes more than one girl to have a party. Right now, we need to know who talked to Allamakee County about Sophie Ringensetter.”
“Right.” She exhaled. “Turn back to the sports page. She was last seen on the day of that Rattlers game against the Dells, the one Pepper Greengrass and Dale Hill were betting on when Harold Snustead got punched. Something else happened that night, at a stag party, and I have to guess it happened to this girl . . .”
Yttri scanned the article again and sat back, scowling deeply at his own fists.
“So there are two girls missing in the Bad Axe. One, if we can find her at all, we’re going to find her dead . . .”
“Yes,” she said. “And the other one, unless . . .”
She trailed off.
Pepper Greengrass. I will find you.
44
The handcuffs go to a chain. The chain wraps around her waist and meets itself at a padlock around the back side of a tree that stands amid other trees beyond the flooded ditch of the deserted gravel road. An hour, maybe two hours, she has waited in the rain. Three times so far she has lunged to the chain’s length and shit hot liquid. Here it comes again.
When the cramp is gone and her vision clears, Pepper can see through the trees and underbrush to the edge of the ditch. She can see the ribbon fluttering on the overhanging branch, marking where she is.
Now she hears an engine, a diesel truck. The truck rumbles into low gear. As it strains uphill, its headlights illuminate rain falling through the treetops over Pepper’s head. Then the truck’s black shape appears at the ditch. It is a long-haul tractor, no trailer attached. It stops with the same hiss as Felton Henry’s truck. But that can’t be. Can it?
For a few long minutes nothing happens. Rain keeps falling through the treetops. Pepper’s ass still burns while a new cramp spiders through her guts. Her teeth clack together. Stuffed between them, her tongue feels thick.
At last a door slams. Boots hit gravel. A branch snaps. A stranger’s voice, not Felton Henry’s, twangs out, “Darlin’? My precious little Pepper Pot?”
Strange relief. “You can’t hurt me!” she announces through the distance.
“Say what?”
“I cannot be hurt!”
NIGHTFALL
Jerry Myad @thebestdefense
@BadAxeCountySheriff should not be allowed to breed more little feminazis #dairyqueen #huntingseason #doyouknowwhereyourchildrenare
45
The trucker who picked Pepper up, face like a hatchet with a bad beard, turns on his dome light and opens a dirty palm. He is showing her two small silver keys. One is for the handcuffs connecting her right wrist to the chicken handle above the passenger door. One is for the chain lock, which he left at the tree. His voice twangs. His sideburns are groomed to knifepoints. He is uniformed like Felton Henry—jeans, wallet chain, big belt buckle, pointed boots, mesh cap that says Redneck Lives Matter, plaid Western shirt that he rolls up to show tats like fungus on his hairy arms.
“Keys to my heart, darlin’.”
A minute ago he smashed the semi cab through what looked like a pond, beyond a sign that said WATER OVER ROAD. It keeps raining. All that snow and ice keep melting. His windows are cracked open. Between the engine and the rain hitting the cab and the splashing and hissing outside, he has to yell.
“You wanna know what I paid to get these?”
“I wanna know what you’re gonna pay me,” Pepper responds.
“Say what?”
“Unless this road goes to Montana.”
“Say what, Pepper Pot?”
He spills the handcuff key back into the shirt pocket that gapes over his hollow chest. He chucks the other key out the window. “Are you sassing me?” His twang comes out shrill between those knifepoints sideburns. “Because I do like some sass. I do like it hot.”
He leaves the dome light on. The road seems to disappear behind reflections in the windshield. He is a busy driver. He tweaks his blower, his wipers, and his window gaps, spits tobacco into a liter Mountain Dew bottle, restashes the Dew bottle in his crotch, shifts gears, puts his high beams on and off, tweaks and spits and stashes and keeps reaching for her left knee, pulling it toward him, which spreads her legs because her right wrist is hung by the chicken handle.
“I seen your pictures, fresh out there, and I jumped for five large, girl. You’re gonna fetch me back boocoo many times that. You got a big old black bush. You got gumdrops, girl.” He shows his small gray teeth. He decelerates with a thunderous Jake brake. “We’re gonna stop just a minute.”
They have emerged from total narrow darkness into lesser wider darkness. This is a crossroads with a two-pump gas plaza and a small-windowed store with bundles of firewood and bags of salt and bark chips piled along the face of it. He waits as headlights on a larger road approach both left and right—Pepper thinks to reach out, smack his horn—then the headlights are gone. She watches how he shuts down and leaves the truck, gear in first, emergency brake knob out, just like Felton Henry. He bowlegs toward the store, passes under the pump plaza, his head looking a size too small beneath the mesh cap.
Inside the store five minutes, then he comes out trailing the clerk, who is a big man in a rain slicker pushing a pallet of bottled water on a hand truck. He twangs small talk while the clerk loads the pallet into the sleeper cab. Then he hops back into the driver’s seat with a fifth of brown booze and a small plastic sack that he slings up on the dash. Soon they are rolling again along the larger road.
Pepper reminds him, “You can’t hurt me.”
“I like it.” He cracks the seal on the bottle, a long-neck fifth, and takes a swallow. “I like your spice.”
“You’re supposed to take me to Amtrak.”
“I’ll take you to the moon, girl, you’ll see.”
He fits the Dew bottle with his chew spit into a console cup holder. She can smell the whiskey as he takes another swallow. She sees it’s George Dickel sour mash No. 8. He jams the bottle between his legs. “You keep that up.”
“I will.”
“I like mine spicy, as do gentlemen in general.”
“I’ve never met a gentleman.”
“Oh, you’re gonna meet boocoo plenty.”
A few miles down the road, exactly at a sign that says NO JAKE BRAKES BY TOWN CODE, he Jake brakes again. Down the tunnel of his headlights Pepper sees three houses, two of which appear abandoned, and across the road some kind of store that is definitely abandoned, and a bit farther ahead a dump truck and a school bus parked in front of a structure that has burned down. At the far reach of the headlights is a gravel pit in a hillside.
This time with the Dickel in hand, he heads out into the rain and enters the house with li
ghts on. Stretching to the end of the handcuffs, Pepper can reach the plastic sack on the dash. She awkwardly fishes inside for the stuff he got at the store, finding a plastic sleeve of three Bic pens, a Sharpie permanent marker, a packet of baby wipes, and a snap-blade box cutter. She thinks, Whatever. She thinks, You can’t hurt me.
He is gone a long time. The rain slacks. Pepper nods and enters some kind of fatigue-charged daydream where she is stripping at the casino. Her brother Bennie is in the audience, cutting himself to bleed every time she takes another piece of clothing off. Then Dale Hill is there, soothing Bennie, wrapping him in mummy’s gauze.
Then the dream is done, and out of the house the trucker drags a fat lady. She is circus-level fat, a human parade blimp yanked by the wrist and paddling after him in flesh-and-aqua-colored billows across oily puddles that stipple and glow in the red sidelights of the tractor. He opens the door and pushes Dickel breath inside.
“My handwriting might as well be Chink scratch for what it looks like, so, darlin’, stand down here on the running board, there you go, now bend in over the seat, ’cuz I can follow-draw OK, but I can’t handwrite for shit.”
Her wrist feels about to pull apart up at the chicken handle. He twists her hips and pulls her skirt down. The fat lady touches her back above her tailbone with the Sharpie.
“Write it pretty for me, that’s my girl, there you go.”
This big woman is silent, smells like mildew, wheezes hard, does not return his salutation through the thickening rain.
“Real good friend of mine,” he lets Pepper know, driving off. “No bullshit, no sass, just a real good friend.”
46
She waited for the Head Trauma Unit nurse at Gundersen Medical Center in La Crosse to come on the line. Finally here she was. How could she help?
“This is Bad Axe County sheriff Heidi Kick. We need to talk to Walt Beavers at the absolute earliest moment possible. I can be there within an hour. Can we make that happen?”
“He has regained consciousness, Sheriff, but whether he can talk is Dr. Patel’s call.”
The sheriff glanced behind her. Her printer was working from a remote command, sent by Denise from the dispatch room.
“Is that the same Dr. Patel who works the ER at Vernon Memorial?”
“Dr. Alka Patel is the supervising physician in rotation tonight, yes.”
“Could you give her my number, and have her call me right away?”
Olaf the Handsome was studying a printout of Sophie Ringensetter’s Missing/Runaway bulletin. “This witness is ‘unconfirmed,’ ” he said. “But the newspaper says someone from around here told Allamakee County that they saw her at the Ease Inn.”
“You’re on that. We need the name of that witness, and everything else that Allamakee has on this girl. Something they have might get us to Pepper Greengrass.”
Denise appeared in the doorway, flushed and breathless.
“The bridge washed out on Sandhill Road over Clover Creek in the town of Blackhawk Locks. That’s the shortcut people use to get from the river to Highway 14. It’s dark as hell in there. We need a barricade and a detour. I tried State Patrol but they’re too busy. Our friends in Vernon County, same. Schwem is still at Turkey Hill, so he’s nearby.”
The sheriff’s blank mind must have showed on her face. Turkey Hill?
“The trailer that’s under the mudslide,” Denise reminded her. “We’re still looking for the guy that lives in it.”
The sheriff glanced at Yttri. They had forgotten all but dead and missing girls.
“Send Schwem right away to get flares up on both sides of the bridge. Send a Roads truck to put up barricades.”
“I thought you’d say that. It’s done already.”
“Find out if La Crosse PD can assist Turkey Hill with a search-and-rescue dog.”
“Also done. They have to find their dog handler. Waiting to hear.”
But Denise still stood there.
“Something else?”
“Heidi, sorry, I know it’s crazy right now, and I know you don’t want to be bothered with the social media stuff, and honestly it’s mostly just cranks and one girl who defends you, but since Harley called earlier, and since the board has a policy that if any of this stuff ever gets to the family level . . .”
“What?”
“On Twitter. I think you need to see it. Pull that off your printer.”
The sheriff rolled her chair back and pulled two pages from the printer. Denise had collected tweets with the department’s handle and circled one. Someone calling himself “Jerry Myad @thebestdefense” had tweeted:
@BadAxeCountySheriff should not be allowed to breed more little feminazis #dairyqueen #huntingseason #doyouknowwhereyourchildrenare
Instantly, her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Deputy Yttri leaned in to see. She felt his heat rise as he read aloud, “ ‘Do you know where your children are?’ Is that a threat?” His face was close to hers, his eyebrows up, his hands in fists, his chest inflated. She shook herself free and looked at Denise.
“Can we find out who this is?”
“It’s possible. Shit like that usually comes from a fake profile. But Twitter has an emergency request form for law enforcement. We can ask for IP logs.”
“Hell yes, it’s a threat.” Yttri rose and paced the floor. “ ‘Hashtag hunting season’? ‘Hashtag do you know where your children are’? That’s a threat of violence against your kids.”
She watched him a moment. His outrage helped her find just enough calm.
“So, Denise, let’s . . .”
“I’ve already printed and filled out the form. You autograph, I fax to Twitter. We wait.”
Denise pushed the second printed page toward the sheriff for her to sign.
“But meanwhile,” she said. She glanced at her own cell phone. “Come on,” she said. “Come on, come on,” scrolling and tapping. “Ta-da! Meanwhile, speaking of Hans Kling, I just found him.”
47
Olaf the Handsome drove again. Kling’s van was in the barnyard of Albin Metzger’s farm, twenty miles south at the Crawford County border. How different the logo on the van looked to her now.
KLING KOUNTRY KAMERA
Bridals, Engagements, Weddings, Events, Family, Sports, Pets, Livestock, Rodeos
Kling was here for rodeo glam shots. Albin Metzger bred bucking bulls. In the sheriff’s Dairy Queen days, he had sponsored rodeo teams around the region. She remembered shaking his huge hand and accepting a check for prize money after winning a barrel race. Hans Kling had taken the picture of her that appeared in the Crawford County Independent.
Tonight, Kling had the interior of one of Metzger’s barns set up for bucking-bull porn. Hay bales were artfully stacked before a sky-blue shooting backdrop. A pitchfork leaned against a bale. In the foreground was a phony powder keg stenciled TNT. The keg sprouted a fuse that sizzled with tiny LED lights. Behind the hay bales was Kling himself, crouched, his face made up like a rodeo clown. He had not yet seen the sheriff and her deputy enter the barn.
One of Metzger’s strapping adult daughters steadied a cream-colored bull by its nose ring. The beast was cut with heavy muscles, brushed to a gleam. Metzger’s daughter whispered in its ear, then she let go of the nose ring and walked out of Kling’s shot. He triggered the photograph. A flash popped. The bull never flinched. They all had done this before.
Then Kling saw her and Yttri. When he scrambled upright it turned out he was wearing his rodeo clown face over his usual dumpy-gentleman street clothes. It was hard to say what his real expression was. But he turned suddenly, like he was going to bolt.
“I need to talk to you, Mr. Kling.”
In the meantime, Albin Metzger had seen the cruiser pull into his barnyard, and now he was coming into the barn through a side door, a burly Vietnam vet who walked with a slight hitch and favored fresh denim and white Stetsons. He put his hands on his hips and watched Kling scurry out from behind the hay. He made an innocent joke.
Metzger had a lethal handshake. Yttri could handle it. The sheriff felt her bones fold.
“How you doing, Sheriff? What I hear is that you’re doing pretty darn well. My girls are big fans of yours. How can we help you today?”
“I just need to talk to Hans about a young lady he met at a party last night.”
“Me? A young lady?” Kling made his clown face incredulous. “A party?”
Metzger laughed. “You all talk away. Stacy, let’s give the law some room. Bodacious is done, is that right, Hans? Hon, put him away, will you? And let’s get Freckles next.”
In a minute it was just her and Kling and Yttri.
“Mr. Kling, I’m too busy to let you lie to me. Don’t even think about it. Get a lawyer. Somebody from the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department will be around to pick you up, and you know why. Right now just tell me where she is and I’ll leave you alone with Freckles.”
“Where who is?”
“You bought a girl named Pepper Greengrass from a man named Dale Hill at a party in Emerald Faulkner’s barn. We caught Hill. He told us. Eight hundred bucks. Where is she?”
“I . . . I just gave her a ride. Bought a girl? No way, OK? She had no place to go, so you betcha she spent the night, and then she wanted to go see her sister in Montana, so a nice guy like me, you know, I . . .”
Yttri moved between Kling and the nearest doorway. He kept stammering. “She needed a ride so you betcha I got online and found her a ride. She’s gone. Why? Did something happen to her?”
The sheriff kept her hands gripped together. “I know you took pictures of her. You didn’t pay eight hundred for nothing. Look at me, Mr. Kling. She’s underage, a runaway. This is bad for you already. You’re out of business. But it’s going to be so much worse for you unless I find this girl before she’s hurt or dead.”
Bad Axe County Page 21