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.