The Highway (28 page)

Then, “You’re wondering if I was the last person to see him.”

She nodded her head.

“That I can’t tell you for sure. I don’t know who he ran into after he left here. But yeah, I met him last night. Right here, in fact. We’d been in touch for a few hours and he swept the highway from Livingston south and I covered Yellowstone north to here. Neither one of us found that Ford Focus.”

She thought he answered her question but without an ounce of elaboration. Obviously, he’d testified many times in court and had learned to keep things short and to the point.

She listed to the side and reached down to her handbag near the chair. “Do you mind if I take some notes?”

Legerski said, “Is this an official interview?” He seemed put out by the prospect.

“Nothing like that. I’m just trying to establish a time line for my own benefit.”

She opened her notebook to the page she’d begun back at her house. Times were noted from when Justin Hoyt entered the bar to when Cody left Helena. Since there had been no contact or incidents from that point on, the time line ended at Cody’s last text.

“It takes two and a half hours to drive from Helena to here,” she said. “So what time did you meet with him?”

Legerski looked toward the ceiling for a second, and said, “He got here at two thirty. Yeah, that’s right. That’s a half hour after Jimmy usually closes, so I’m sure of the time.”

She scribbled it down.

“So you asked Jimmy to stay open late?”

“Yes. He owes me a few favors.”

“How long did you and Cody talk?”

He hesitated, again being very deliberate. Then he turned in his chair. “Jimmy, do you remember what time it was when that Hoyt fellow left here?”

Jimmy looked up sharply, and she found his reaction surprising. He seemed alarmed.

“What, like twenty minutes?” Legerski asked Jimmy.

“Something like that,” Jimmy said after a beat.

Cassie wrote down that Cody left the bar at approximately two fifty.

“That’s not very long,” she said.

Legerski shrugged again. “There wasn’t that much to discuss. I told him I hadn’t found the car or the girls, and he told me the same thing. I knew there was a statewide and regional alert out by then, so we weren’t the only ones looking.”

She gestured toward Jimmy with a nod of her head toward the owner. “I’m surprised he can’t remember how long you two were here. It seems to me that if he was waiting to close he might pay more attention to the exact time than usual.”

“That’s Jimmy,” Legerski said, as if it explained everything.

“Did you discuss any other possibilities of what might have happened to them during your twenty-minute talk?”

“Like what?”

She looked up and met his eyes, trying to figure out if he was playing games with her. He held her gaze.

“Like maybe people at the Church of Glory and Transcendence might have something to do with the disappearance?”

“Yeah,” Legerski said quickly, and leaned forward on the table and clasped his big hands together and lowered his voice. “I threw that one out there. The reason being we’ve had a few missing girls in a hundred-mile radius over the past few years and those folks out there on that compound keep to themselves. I probably shouldn’t have said anything to him because I’ve got no evidence at all to back this up, just like I shouldn’t be repeating it to you. But yeah, I speculated some—” he cut himself off in midsentence.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. I’ve said too much already, probably.”

For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she didn’t tell Legerski she’d spent hours researching the church and had speculated the same thing.

“Are you the one he was texting?” Legerski asked.

It took her by surprise and she didn’t respond.

“When he was sitting here last night, every time I turned my back he’d be tapping away on his phone,” he said. “Was that you?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s my partner. But if he was texting anyone else? I don’t know that.”

Legerski opened a packet of white sugar from a bowl on the table and poured it out on the surface. Then he took his big forefinger and drew a line through the spill, severing it in half. She determined there was no point to his actions, other than impatience with her and her questions.

“Deputy,” he said, almost sadly, “I don’t know you at all but I’m getting tired of you because you’re asking a lot of pointed questions and you aren’t being up-front with me. I don’t really have time for this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, and felt her face flush.

“He wasn’t your partner anymore. He was suspended yesterday. He told me himself he was on his own, investigating as a private citizen. Even though that was the case, I not only met with him on my own time but I cased the highway looking for those girls. And this morning when you called, I dragged my sorry ass out of bed after not enough sleep to meet with you before I went on shift. And the whole time you’ve been here you’ve been interrogating me like I’m a suspect or something. I don’t know how you do things in the state capital, but that’s not how we do things around here.”

With that, he sat back, dug a wad of bills out of his front uniform pants pocket, and tossed them on the table between them.

“I’ve got to get to work,” he said.

She was stunned, and felt both guilty and incompetent. Everything he said, she thought, was true.

As he started to push away from the table, she reached out and touched his hand. He glared at her, but didn’t push back further.

“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m new at this and I feel like the world is crashing down on me. I’m under pressure and I’m probably in over my head. I came on too strong. I don’t mean to offend you, I really don’t.”

“Am I a suspect?” he asked indignantly.

“Of course not,” she said. “I don’t know anyone around here and you do. There are two missing girls and a missing cop. I really need your help if you’ll give it to me.”

He didn’t respond, but she thought she saw something soften in his eyes.

“So as far as you know,” she said, “after Cody left here last night he was going to drive to the compound?”

Legerski nodded. “That’s what he said, anyway. I can’t vouch for where he actually went.”

She thought that through for a few seconds, but before she could ask he said, “He wanted me to go with him because I’ve got a live badge and he didn’t. But I told him I wouldn’t go down there without probable cause. So as far as I know, he went there alone.”

“It doesn’t surprise me he’d go there without a search warrant,” she said with a weak smile.

“We discussed that. He said he’d go to the gate and ask for entry. If they didn’t give it, he somehow thought that might convince a judge to write up a warrant.”

That sounded right to her.

“Do you know a friendly judge?” she asked.

“You mean now?”

“Yes.”

He seemed slightly flustered. “Well, yeah, there’s Judge Graff in Livingston. I’ve worked with him a lot over the years and he’s a good guy.”

“It seems to me,” she said, “if you go to him and tell him about the missing girls and the fact that Cody vanished last night after he said he’d go there we’ve got probable cause to search the compound.”

The trooper looked pained. “There’s no telling if Judge Graff is around or if I’d find him. Hell, he might have left the state already for the holidays.”

“But you’ll try?” she asked.

It took him a moment to agree. “Yeah, I can stop by the courthouse on my way through town. But, lady, I’ve got to get to work.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And one more thing.”

“What?” he asked, looking away.

“If you can see the judge and get the process going, please brief the Park County sheriff about what’s going on. I’ll call my boss and remind him that he agreed to ask the local sheriff for cooperation. Maybe we can get four or five deputies down here to help with the search.”

Legerski seemed reluctant. She noticed his neck seemed flushed where it wasn’t earlier, even when he was angry and ready to leave.

“If we do what we can to apply pressure around here and let everyone know we’re serious, someone might tell us something we don’t know,” she said. “Will you do it?”

Legerski showed his teeth—not really a smile, but a facsimile of a smile, she thought—and said, “Yeah. I’ll do it. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I realize that,” she said. “We don’t have much to go on. But we also don’t have time to waste.”

He took a deep breath and held it in and stared hard at something over her head. She got the feeling she should be bracing herself for some kind of “experienced cop tells the newbie how it really is” speech. She was right.

“Deputy,” he said.

“My title is Investigator,” she said sharply.

“Okay, Investigator,” he said with a tiny smirk, “I’ll break it to you. These girls have supposedly been missing for less than fourteen hours, right?”

She nodded.

“Officially, this isn’t even a missing persons case yet. And your friend Cody—who knows? You haven’t talked to him in seven hours, that’s all. From what I know about him, he’s probably curled up with a bottle in his pickup somewhere sleeping it off.

“What I’m saying is that what’s urgent to you right now won’t seem urgent to anybody else until more time has passed or until we get some kind of new information. You seem to think that everyone in Park County should drop everything they’re doing and rush here and start kicking down doors. But how do we even know the two things are connected? We don’t even know
that.
”

Legerski stood and clamped his trooper hat on his head. To Cassie, he said, “Not enough time has passed for the kind of reaction you want, is what I’m saying.”

To Jimmy, who was hovering behind the bar looking ashen, Legerski said, “Money’s on the table.”

Jimmy nodded.

She wondered again what the relationship was between them because it seemed both intimate and disquieting.

As the trooper went out the door, she felt immense relief. Something was happening. She’d set things in motion, and that’s all she could hope for at this point. Cody called it “flooding the zone.”

She snatched up the wad of cash Legerski had tossed on the table and matched it with bills from her purse. Clutching the bills, she followed the trooper out the door and caught him before he slid into his cruiser. When he looked up and saw her pursuing she thought she caught a quick reaction of startling contempt. But it was gone as quickly as it had been there and she hoped she was mistaken.

“Here,” she said, handing him the cash. “The least I can do is buy you breakfast.”

He shook his head and made no move to retrieve it. “Not necessary,” he said.

“I know it’s not necessary, but let me do it. I’m grateful.”

“You’re pushy,” he said, then caught himself. It was as if it had slipped out.

“A little,” she agreed. “Hey, I’ve got one more question.”

He didn’t turn toward her, but looked straight out the windshield. But he didn’t slide his window up.

“Cody asked me last night to check on those missing girls you mentioned. I did some research and didn’t find anything to work with, but I was reading up on the FBI Highway Serial Killer task force. It got me to thinking.”

“Thinking what?” the trooper asked with a flat voice.

“That if we don’t find anything on that church compound, we might want to do some interviews around here of long-haul truckers. You probably know them if they exist. What do you think?”

“I think I’m going to be late for my shift.”

“You’ve got my cell number, right? You’ll call when you know about the warrant and the assistance?”

“Got it,” he said. He seemed to be in a hurry to get away from her.

“Thank you again,” she said.

He nodded, backed out, and paused at the asphalt of the highway before turning left toward Livingston.

Cassie was buoyed with herself and watched him go. Before he wheeled out onto the pavement their eyes met in his rearview mirror and he mouthed something that she couldn’t hear but that pierced her like a knife in the heart.

Stupid cunt.

*   *   *

She tried to hold herself together and not react, and she turned sharply on her heel and walked away. Of course, she’d heard the word before. Of course, she’d been called it, especially from criminals she and Cody had apprehended. By the time she reached the end of the small gravel parking lot she was breathing again and she lifted her head.

It was cooling down outside. The wall of mountains on the other side of the valley had simply disappeared as if they were never there. In their place were roiling white clouds and spoors of snow falling toward the river. She hugged herself rather than go back to the Expedition for her coat, and walked aimlessly around the side of the First National toward the back. Her stomach hurt from tension, lack of sleep, the egg-white omelet, and what Legerski had called her. She doubted he knew she could see his mouth in the mirror. Maybe, she thought, he simply didn’t like the idea of a woman in charge of the investigation. Or maybe she had come on too strong, too pointed, too suspicious.

But a man didn’t use a word like that except to demean. And he no doubt meant what he said. It hurt.

As she meandered behind the bar she dug out her cell phone and called Sheriff Tubman.

Tubman was cool and dry, and grunted in affirmation as she updated him. He said he’d already contacted Sheriff Bryan Pedersen of Park County and Pedersen agreed to try and spare a couple of uniformed officers to drive down into Paradise Valley to help serve the warrant at the compound, “If there is one,” Tubman cautioned.

“Is that the best he can do?” Cassie asked sharply.

“It’s his county,” Tubman answered wearily. “He’s got spare guys going off shift early this afternoon for the holidays. He’s got to keep his essential personnel close in case they need to respond to something.”

“Christ,” Cassie said, “what could be more important than two missing girls and a missing cop?”

“Ex-cop,” Tubman said acidly. “And we don’t know where the girls went missing, Cassie. If we knew it was Park County it would be higher priority with him, but it’s all speculation at this point. We don’t know where the hell they were last seen.”