Paradise Valley (Highway Quartet #4)
C.J. Box
For boys who dream … and Laurie, always
And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE CONQUEROR WORM”
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad.…
—JIM MORRISON
PART ONE
GRIMSTAD, NORTH DAKOTA
2017
CHAPTER
ONE
“THE TRAP IS SET and he’s on his way,” Cassie Dewell said to Sheriff Jon Kirkbride. She was out of breath from mounting the stairs to the third floor instead of waiting for the elevator.
Kirkbride leaned back from his desk and cocked an eyebrow. His thick gunfighter’s mustache obscured the expression on his lips, but his eyes narrowed. “The Lizard King?”
Cassie nodded her head furiously. She was both excited and scared. She was also hot and she peeled off her Bakken County Sheriff’s Department fleece.
“You’re sure it’s him?”
She said, “I sent you a video link in an e-mail five minutes ago.”
He frowned. The sheriff disliked communicating by e-mail. “What’s in it?” he asked.
“Let me show you,” she said. She shed the fleece in a chair and quickly advanced around the desk, and he rolled his chair back to accommodate her. She reached across him to toggle the space key on the keyboard to wake his computer up. She was aware that her hip was pressed against his right shoulder but she didn’t care. Not now.
*
IT WAS TUESDAY, September fifteenth. Cassie had left the first set of footprints in the frost across the still-green grass of the Law Enforcement Center that morning. She hadn’t even heard the loud honking from a V of geese descending through the river cottonwoods to the Missouri River. All indications were of an early winter.
Thirty-nine-year-old Cassandra “Cassie” Dewell was the Chief Investigator for the BCSD, and she knew the sheriff would be in his office early. He always was. Even though he had horses to feed and stalls to clean out, he was at his desk hours before the morning shift showed up. Judy Banister, Kirkbride’s office administrator and the only other female within the agency, hovered just outside the door.
Cassie had been three years on the job. The apartment unit she’d first moved into when she arrived was in view outside Kirkbride’s window, although it was now occupied by a deputy hired straight out of the law enforcement academy in Minnesota.
Kirkbride had been the sheriff when Grimstad had 8,000 residents and was losing population every year. The demographics of western North Dakota at that time were a mix of German and Scandinavian farmers and a few Scot ranchers. That was before hydraulic fracturing in the Bakken Formation produced twenty percent of the nation’s oil and the county boomed beyond anyone’s imagination. He was still the sheriff when the unofficial census swelled to 45,000 in town and 80,000 in the county, and his department had grown from four deputies to forty.
The sheriff had hired Cassie away from the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department in Helena, Montana, and had made her promise she would stay with him until his official retirement at the end of the year—three and a half months away. Since his announcement, he’d made it clear to anyone who would listen that he wanted her to be his hand-picked successor. What he’d not done was ask Cassie what she thought about that.
Recently, she’d let her short brown hair grow to her shoulders and was debating with herself whether to color it to hide the gray strands that seemed to have shown up overnight. That, along with fifteen pounds that strained at her underwear and once-tailored uniform. Her own body, she thought, had recently conspired to make her unattractive and uncomfortable. Just in time for her wedding.
That’s why she had sat down at her home computer that morning: to compose an e-mail to the dress shop in Bismarck asking them to delay sending her wedding dress until she could get up there and get re-measured. It was a miserable admission to make. But before she keyed in the request an incoming e-mail arrived.
It was from Wilson, North Carolina.
When she opened it an electrical charge shot through her.
Then her cell phone lit up. The call was from Wilson County Prosecutor Leslie Behaunek.
“It’s him,” Behaunek said. She was calling from her cell phone and Cassie imagined her walking fast down the courthouse hallway. “We’ve got him this time…”
Cassie forwarded the e-mail to her address at work as well as to Kirkbride.
*
THE SHERIFF HAD 198 unopened e-mails on his computer. Cassie guessed that was fewer than usual. She scrolled to the top of the list until she found her own address as sender. She clicked on the file.
It took a few seconds to load.
“I really need to get Judy to weed through those e-mails,” Kirkbride grumbled. Then, “Okay, what are we looking at?”
The view was of dozens of tractor-trailers parked shoulder-to-shoulder in a lot. It was obviously nighttime. The viewing angle was from above the vehicles. The video feed was dark and grainy, and it appeared at first to be a still photograph. After watching it for a few seconds, though, exhaust from the stacks of the trucks curled up into the night air and occasionally a curtain would part from one of the sleeper cabs. There was no audio. The timestamp in the bottom right-hand corner said 10:53 PM.
She said, “This is from a closed-circuit security camera at a truck stop outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, last night.”
Kirkbride was still. He was concentrating on the monitor.
“Watch the top left,” Cassie said, pressing the tip of her index finger on the screen on a distant truck cab. Beneath her finger the passenger door opened and there were a few seconds of illumination from the inside dome lights as a thin woman appeared, framed by the door. She wore a short skirt that hiked up her thighs as she climbed down from the cab. In the harsh half-light her pencil-like legs looked as white as chalk. She vanished in the shadows between the trucks for a moment. A meaty naked arm appeared from the sleeper section of the cab and shut the door behind her.
“She’s a truck-stop prostitute,” Cassie said.
“I figured.”
“They call them lot lizards.”
“Got it,” Kirkbride said. “That’s where the guy gets his name.”
“Right,” she said. “Now I’m going to speed it up a little.”
She clicked on fast-forward and the prostitute appeared to comically teeter from truck to truck on high heels. One by one, she sidled up to the driver’s side of each vehicle and apparently knocked on the doors. The driver in the first truck didn’t respond. The second driver flashed on his lights, saw who was out there, and turned them off again.
Before the prostitute could approach the side of the third truck someone—either a wife or companion driver—apparently saw the prostitute coming and unfurled a brassiere out the driver’s side window and pinned it in place by rolling the window back up.