Paradise Valley (Highway Quartet #4)

SHE CONSIDERED BYPASSING THE LOBBY on her way down to avoid Lottie but the thought overwhelmed her with guilt.

Lottie stood up expectantly when the elevator doors opened, and Cassie said, “Let’s talk tomorrow morning and review the facts on Kyle. Will you be home?”

“I’ll either be home or right here in this lobby.”

“I’ll come by after breakfast, but keep in mind I’m no longer with the department. So it isn’t like an official interview.”

Lottie clasped her hands together and said, “Bless your heart.”

“Lottie, I’m not sure you understand what I’m saying here. I’m no longer a cop anymore. I’m a civilian just like you. The best I can do is listen, take notes, and maybe offer a recommendation to the sheriff.”

“At least you’re doing something,” Lottie said with a mist of tears in her eyes.





CHAPTER

ELEVEN

CASSIE PADDED INTO HER HOME office at three in the morning and closed the door because she couldn’t sleep. Her “office” consisted of a chair, a battered card table, and a space heater in the only spare bedroom. While her laptop booted up she rubbed her eyes and wished she could go back in time and relive the previous day but with a different outcome.

Dinner had been awkward. Cassie had brought home pizza—Ben’s favorite food—and they’d all eaten at the breakfast bar with the television providing background noise in the living room. When the evening news on KXN came on and led with Tibbs’ press conference in Bismarck, her mother Isabel rushed away from the counter. With her robes flowing behind her, she searched for the remote control in the living room, found it, and turned the television off.

“What was that about?” Ben asked when his grandmother returned.

Rather than answering, Isabel implored Cassie with her eyes to explain.

Cassie had sighed. “I was going to tell him in my own way.”

“Tell me what?” Ben asked, looking from his mother to his grandmother.

“I quit the sheriff’s department today,” Cassie said to him.

After a moment, Ben asked, “You’re not going to be a cop anymore?”

“Not for a while, I don’t think.”

Isabel said, “I knew it would come to this. It’s a corrupt system and you have been wasting your time being a part of it.”

“Please mom,” Cassie begged, “Not now…”

Ben was crushed. “But I like it that you’re a cop.”

She knew that was true because he’d told her the older kids at school who bullied or teased others left him alone. He attributed it to their fear that he would report them to his mother.

“Does this mean we’re moving again?”

“I don’t know,” Cassie said. “I’m trying to figure everything out.”

“Did you get fired?”

“Technically, no.”

“What does that mean?”

Isabel said, “It means your mom was thrown to the wolves by a male-dominated institution. That’s what those people do.”

“Please, Isabel.”

Isabel sat back in a huff and looked away. Ben’s eyes bored into Cassie and she could see that he wasn’t far away from tears.

“We’ll figure things out,” she said to him.

He threw the uneaten slice of pizza on his plate and said, “First my dad dies, then we move from Montana. Then Ian dies and Kyle leaves. And now this.”

She didn’t know he could be so dramatic. Despite how upset he was, it almost made her smile.

When Ben stormed into his room and slammed his door shut, Cassie turned to Isabel and said, “Thanks for getting that started. I would have rather handled it on my own.”

“I was trying to help by shutting off the news.”

“You didn’t. Instead you called attention to it. Do you think Ben pays attention to the local news?”

In what Cassie would deem a righteous snit, Isabel said, “He would have found out on his own at school tomorrow. Everybody at my pottery class was talking about it before you even got home.”

*

“… and Kyle leaves.”

The words hung in the air as Cassie tapped on the keys of her computer.

The Grimstad Tribune’s Web site was a poor one—the publisher obviously wanted people to subscribe to the print version, not read it online—but she did find a small item about the search for Kyle and Raheem next to their school photos. She ignored the extensive coverage of the industrial park explosion and the photos of the dead and injured deputies, as well as her own photo.

Kyle looked small and feral, and Raheem wore a big confident smile. Kyle was described as five-foot-four and 110 pounds, Raheem five-ten and 175.

If anyone fitting those descriptions saw them, the article said, they should immediately contact the Bakken County Sheriff’s Department.

The few comments under the piece were unhelpful as anonymous comments often were, but she read them anyway. She knew of multiple instances in both Montana and North Dakota where newspaper commenters—often inadvertently—provided intel and even leads to investigators working particular cases. In a couple of instances commenters fingered suspects who turned out to be guilty but until that moment had not been suspects. Often, though, locals used their false identities to post disparaging things about law enforcement, or they used the article to further ride their personal hobby horses. Back in Helena, she recalled cops laughing at one particular citizen who cited global warming as the root cause of every arrest or traffic accident.

The first post commended the boys for “being smart enough to get the hell out of Grimstad while they still could.” The second lamented the fact that if Raheem didn’t come back, the quarterback of the Vikings wouldn’t have anybody good to throw to. The third blamed racism for why Raheem must have left. The rest of the comments argued with the commenter who played the race card.

Two days later, on September 18, another missing persons item appeared. According to the story, forty-seven-year-old Amanda Lee Hackl was reported missing by her husband, Harold.

Harold was extensively quoted.

“She just wouldn’t do something like this,” Hackl told the Tribune.

“Amanda is a homebody. She wouldn’t just wander off so somebody must have come in the house and taken her. There were dishes in the sink and hamburger thawing on the counter when I got home from work.”

Hackl said Amanda didn’t have use of a car that day and her clothes and suitcase weren’t missing.

“Some sicko got her,” he said.

Amanda Lee Hackl is described as being 5-foot-3 and 190 pounds. She has dark hair, brown eyes, and wears bifocal glasses. According to her husband she was likely dressed in a Christmas sweatshirt.

“Come home, honey,” Harold Hackl said in a direct plea to Amanda. “If I done something wrong I’m sorry and I’ll fix it. And if whoever might have taken her hears this you can bring her back now and I won’t press no charges.”

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