“What do you see?” Cassie asked.
“I see someone who looks a lot like Ron Pergram putting gas into a truck.”
Cassie closed her eyes. She felt both elated and terrified in equal measures
Leslie asked, “Where did you get this?”
“Here, in Ekalaka.”
“When was it taken?”
“September sixteenth of this year.”
There was a pause. Leslie said, “But he blew himself up on the fifteenth. Can there be a mistake on the time stamp?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My God, my God. What can this mean?”
Cassie said, “I have a theory but it’s pretty off the wall. But first I want to catch you up.”
“I couldn’t go back to sleep now if I wanted to,” Leslie said, letting her drawl creep in. “But first I need a glass of wine.”
*
AFTER SHE’D COVERED the investigation thus far, Cassie said, “I’m waiting until morning to find out if the body has the identifying scar on the ankle. If so, I’ll ask the sheriff to proceed with a DNA request from Mr. Johnson so we can get a positive ID.”
“And if so, what?” Leslie asked. “Even if it turns out to be Raheem Johnson I don’t see how you can connect him to the Lizard King. Or if that even is the Lizard King.”
“I understand,” Cassie said with a sigh. “I know you have to look at everything from a prosecutorial point of view. Right now, all I’ve got is a video clip and an unidentified body. You’re asking me to connect them and I can’t. All I can do is speculate.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“There are advantages to working as a civilian,” Cassie said. “I don’t have to follow any protocol and I don’t have to deal with politics and red tape. And I don’t have to build a case like I would if I were planning to turn it all over to the DA for prosecution. So I can go farther out on a limb.
“But the downsides are obvious,” she said. “I’m at a real disadvantage at times like this when I need to access evidence techs and light a fire under different law enforcement personnel. I got lucky that Kirkbride knows Sheriff Verplank and was so nice about everything…”
“It’s amazing that you live in a place where everybody knows each other hundreds of miles away. That must be smothering at times.”
“Anyway,” Cassie said in her let’s-get-back-on-track voice, “listen to my theory and then shoot all the holes in it you want to.”
“Okay.”
“Start with the date September fifteen. On that day a lot happened in this area. Too many things occurred to dismiss them all as random.”
“Go on,” Leslie said after taking an audible sip.
“On September fifteenth a lot of things happened within a few hundred miles of each other. First, the Lizard King drove across the entire state of North Dakota from Wisconsin so he could blow himself up in Grimstad. That event was so terrible for everyone that it overshadowed other events—or crimes—that went on that same exact day.”
“Keep going.”
“Kyle Westergaard and Raheem Johnson started floating the Missouri River and vanished. Amanda Lee Hackl was later reported missing by her husband. In Sanish, seventy-three miles away, Floyd T. Eckstrom burns down his own home and disappears as well. From what I was told, Eckstrom’s house is right on the river.
“Leslie, I see how you could say that all those incidents are unrelated but keep in mind we’re talking about western North Dakota and eastern Montana. There aren’t many people around here at all—it’s probably the least populated area in the lower forty-eight—and most of them look out for each other. There aren’t any trees like you have, so you can see for miles. People can’t hide as easily, is what I’m trying to say, and they can’t just all disappear on the same day.”
“But they did,” Leslie said.
“They did. And on September sixteenth, a man who appears to be Ronald Pergram fills up with gas in Ekalaka driving Eckstrom’s truck—”
“Hold it,” Leslie interrupted. “Did you just say that was Eckstrom’s truck?”
“Yes, but that isn’t Floyd Eckstrom on the camera. And if you watch that clip as many times as I have you’ll see the form of a woman in the passenger seat. She’s unidentifiable because of the camera angle but she’s there. And when Pergram gets back into his truck to pull away he says something into the back of his cab like there was a person back there. Watch it again and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll wait.”
While Leslie Behaunek ran the clip again on her screen, Cassie saw that the battery on her phone was running critically low. She fished the power cord out of her briefcase and plugged it into an outlet under the desk. Unfortunately, the cord tethered her to one place so she could no longer pace.
“Okay,” Leslie said. “I see what you’re talking about. But are you trying to say that the Lizard King scooped all these people up and piled them in Floyd Eckstrom’s truck and drove off—after he killed himself?”
“No, I’m saying the driver of Pergram’s truck has never been positively identified as Pergram. We all assumed it was him, of course. But what if it was Eckstrom?”
“Whoa,” Leslie said. “You’re giving me a headache. You’re saying that Pergram somehow coerced Eckstrom to drive his truck to Grimstad and commit suicide?”
“I don’t know what happened,” Cassie said. “I’m wracking my brain on that one. The only thing that makes any sense is that Eckstrom didn’t know there were explosives wired into the truck. Only the Lizard King knew that.”
“So Pergram set him up,” Leslie said. “He sent him to his death.”
“Which sounds a lot like something our man would do, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Not to mention that this wouldn’t be the first time he burned down a house to hide his tracks.”
“But where do the others come in? This Amanda, or Kyle and Raheem? How do they fit?”
“Again, I don’t know,” Cassie said. “But Sanish is downriver from Grimstad. I worked it out and it’s about an eight-hour float. Think about that.”
Leslie did and Cassie waited.
“Pergram was there at the Eckstrom house,” Leslie said. “He somehow encountered Kyle and Raheem that night.”
“It works in my timeline,” Cassie said.
“Why wouldn’t Pergram just let them float on by? He’s never targeted teenage boys before that we know about.”
“I agree it doesn’t fit his profile. But it could be something else. Maybe they got a good look at him and he couldn’t risk letting them go. Maybe they caught him in the act of something. Or maybe he wanted hostages just in case law enforcement moved in. It’s one of the parts of my theory that doesn’t have a good explanation … yet.”
Leslie asked, “But what about Amanda Hackl? From what you told me she doesn’t fit his profile either. Didn’t you say she vanished from Grimstad?”
“That’s what her husband reported.”
“Do you know when?”
“What hour?—no. Sometime between when he went to work in the morning and when he came back that night. She disappeared in the daylight hours.”