The Highway (35 page)

Cassie felt a flush of embarrassment in her cheeks.

“Not that I know of.”

Sally Legerski nodded, and said, “Well,
okay,
” as a polite way of saying,
Then why are you here?

Cassie took a deep breath and chanced a concerned smile. She said, “I should probably just come clean with you.”

Sally cocked her head slightly to the side, puzzled.

“I want to ask you some questions about your ex-husband, Trooper Rick Legerski.”

At the sound of his name, Sally’s eyes and expression iced up. It was a visceral reaction, Cassie thought. Sally pushed back from the table and folded her arms over her breasts.

“What about him?”

“Mind if I sit down?” Cassie asked, gesturing to a folding chair on the side of the table.

Sally nodded her okay.

Cassie sat down so the two were much closer, so it would seem more like a conversation than an interrogation.

“I met with him this morning about the missing girls since he’s the only patrolman on this stretch of highway,” Cassie said. “I guess we didn’t hit it off very well. I came away with the feeling he was holding something back on me. I got the feeling there were things going on behind the scenes he didn’t want to tell me about. I’m new to this job and I’m a stranger down here in Park County. So I was wondering…” she faltered. What is it exactly she wanted to know? Did she want an ex-wife to dish dirt on her ex-husband? What was the point of that? To get revenge on the man who called her a horrible name?

“Let me guess where you met,” Sally said, “The First National Bar in Emigrant, right?”

Cassie nodded.

“And was the owner there? A tall creepy guy who kind of hovered around the whole time saying inappropriate things?”

“Jimmy.”

“Yes, Jimmy,” she said, and her top lip curled slightly as she said the name. “If I ever see Jimmy again for the rest of my life it’ll be too soon.”

“I didn’t like him, either,” Cassie said.

“He’s bad news. I always hated going in there, even with Rick. Those two…” She didn’t finish, but looked up suddenly at Cassie. She seemed startled at her own vehemence. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re dredging up some bad memories for me.”

“That’s not my intention,” Cassie said. Although it was.

“What do you want to know about Rick?”

“I’m not sure,” Cassie said. “I guess I want to know what kind of man he is.”

A shadow passed over Sally’s face and it turned into a mask.

She said, “I’ve closed that chapter in my life and I really don’t want to open it up again. I’ve moved on, and I’m not the kind of woman who gossips about her ex-husband. I’ve got no respect for women who trash their ex-husbands as if they didn’t bear any responsibility for choosing them in the first place. I hope that’s not what you expected of me.”

“I’m not meaning to pry.” Cassie took a breath, unsure how to proceed.

“It sounded like you were.”

“No. Let’s keep this entirely professional and not personal. You were with him as he advanced in rank and moved around the state. So he must be a good highway patrolman?”

She spoke as if reciting. “Rick was a great law enforcement officer. He worked hard, put in more than his share of hours, and he didn’t cut many corners. He likes to throw his weight around a little—make sure everyone knows who’s boss—but that isn’t unusual with some state troopers. He maintained that it was part of his job. After all, those men are usually out there on the highway all alone. They don’t have partners and in a state like Montana, backup could be twenty minutes away. Asserting authority defuses situations that might become volatile.

“Believe me,” she continued, “moving around the State of Montana with him through the years, I met a lot of highway patrolmen. I guess what I’m telling you without saying it very well is his job comes first.”

Cassie nodded for her to go on.

She didn’t. “Are we done here?”

“Yes. Unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

“I really don’t. It’s personal.”

Cassie was ashamed of herself. She didn’t know what direction to go. In her mind was a furious tangle of different threads and none of them came together in any logical way. There was Cody’s disappearance, the presence of the church compound, the cigarette butts, the rebuffs by both Legerski and the Park County sheriff, the missing girls out there …

Sally said, “No one can ever really understand what goes on in the marriage of other people without being there. It’s the most complicated thing in the world. I’ve completely stopped trying, you know? There was this wonderful couple who live right behind me. Married forty-three years. Every time I saw them they doted on each other. The man, Walt, called her ‘honeybunch’ instead of Wilma, her name. I really envied them. Then one day, he says he’s going out for groceries and he never comes back. She won’t talk about what happened, and I have
no
idea.”

Cassie shook her head.

“You always hear the arguments are about money or sex, and that’s probably true. But sometimes it’s just about a bad vibe. Sometimes you can look across the table at someone you’ve been with for years and realize to your horror you know
nothing
about them. That they are living another life right in front of your eyes. That you have absolutely
no idea
what he’s doing out there away from home and he won’t even offer a fake explanation why sometimes he’ll roll in looking flushed and used up.”

Cassie felt her scalp twitch.

Sally said after a beat and without prompting, “I’ll tell you one thing: he keeps some
strange
company for a cop.”

“You mean Jimmy?”

“Him, too,” Sally said.

Before Cassie could ask, the silence of the shop was filled with the clatter of a clattering diesel engine outside on the street.

“This is what I meant earlier,” Sally said, raising her voice to a near shout to be heard, “it’s a great location to catch the tourist traffic but a lousy one when you’re trying to concentrate or carry on a conversation. Especially when it’s those big trucks.”

Cassie followed the shop owner’s line of sight and turned in her chair. A massive black truck with a long silver trailer was right outside on the other side of the Expedition. It was stopped in the street. She leaned down and tried to see the driver through the lace curtains but the cab was too high from her angle. The truck had stopped in the street near Cassie’s Expedition. She waited for the truck to move on so they could resume their conversation.

Cassie stood up and walked around the fabric tables to the window and pushed aside the lace and looked outside. A stout, heavyset man in jeans and an oversized tan coat pulled himself up into the cab of the truck and shut the door. She couldn’t see his face or even a quarter profile—only a band of light-colored hair beneath the band of a greasy cap. Why had he stopped and gotten out of his truck?

With a hiss of air, the truck lurched and rolled away.

“What was that guy up to?” Cassie asked.

“I don’t know,” Sally said from behind the table. “I can’t see.”

The clatter of the truck subsided as it vanished from sight down the street. It made a wide turn on the end of the block and Cassie strained to see the license plate but all she could discern was it was commercial and from Montana.

She said, “I’ll be right back,” and went out the front door. The bell rang as she stepped out onto the wooden porch. Although she could no longer see it, she could track the black truck by its sound. It had turned and turned again, and was coursing up the next street over, laboring back the direction it had come.

As she walked out to the Ford, she unbuttoned her coat and reached back and rested her hand on the butt of her Glock.

She peered into the vehicle through the passenger side window and could see something on the driver’s seat. She hadn’t locked her door and someone—no doubt the truck driver—had opened it and placed it inside.

Cassie walked around the car and looked in. On top of the seat was a misshapen white square package. She pulled on her left glove and opened the door to retrieve it.

Three square white envelopes bound by a rubber band. She recognized them as the kind that covered CD or DVD disks. And on the white smooth surface of the outside envelope was spidery writing:
There at the Schweitzer place.

40.

12:51
P.M.
, Wednesday, November 21

C
ASSIE RETURNED TO THE QUILT
shop with her briefcase and the package just as Sally Legerski rotated the hanging sign in the window from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
. She paused on the porch but Sally waved to her through the window to come in.

“That’s for my customers,” Sally said as Cassie closed the door behind her. “What happened out there?”

“That truck driver left me something.”

“You’re kidding,” Sally said. “Do you know him?”

Cassie stopped. She hadn’t even considered it. “No. But it’s just weird because I’ve been thinking a lot about long-haul truck drivers lately.”

Sally nodded, understandably unsure what she meant.

“He left this,” Cassie said, gesturing with the envelopes.

“Oh, my.”

“Can I use the table here to check them out?”

“Sure, let me clean it off.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Cassie said, dragging the folding chair over to a table covered with folded yards of fabric. She opened her briefcase and withdrew the county laptop and opened it on top of the fabric. Sally hovered behind her, and Cassie turned her head and said, “You might not want to see this.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve got a very bad feeling about it.”

Sally returned to her chair behind the counter. From where she sat, Cassie didn’t think Sally could view the screen.

As Sally started ringing out the register for the day, Cassie slid the first disk from the envelope and fed it into her DVD drive. There was no label or marking on the disk, and she thought it might contain fingerprints. She decided to save the other two for the evidence techs if necessary and not handle them further. She found her headphones in the briefcase and plugged them in. If there was sound accompanying the video, she didn’t want Sally to hear it.

Without preamble, the video launched. A man’s face masked in a balaclava filled the screen. She could see his eyes but they were so close to the lens they were blurry and unrecognizable. He wasn’t looking into the lens. Instead, he seemed to be fiddling with the camera itself. There were thumping and static noises. Then he stepped back and turned with his back to the camera and came into focus. Cassie unconsciously placed both of her hands on the sides of her face.

He looked large and blocky, wearing a black long-sleeved sweater and black sweatpants and lace-up boots. A huge belly extended out over the waistband of the pants. Large white hands extended from the cuffs of his sweater. She looked for a distinguishing mark or wedding ring but saw neither. Still, she was struck by the size of his hands. He had Legerski’s frame, she thought, but so did a lot of men.

The masked man turned slightly, stepped aside, and swept his arm to present a stark bedroom of some kind. He said, “And here we are once again. This ought to be a good one because it stars …
me!
” His voice was electronically altered and sounded disembodied, inhuman.

Cassie noted the camera was at shoulder height, likely on a shelf or tripod. It wasn’t high-quality video or audio and the lighting was bright but garish.

“Wait just a second until I bring out the talent,” he said, and went off-screen. The camera didn’t move with him.

After a minute of nothing but still life, the man reappeared holding what looked like a leash. No, Cassie saw, not a leash. A chain. It snaked out of his hand and extended behind him. Then he gave it a sharp yank.

A skinny naked woman was pulled into the shot and she sat down on the bed and glanced at the camera. The chain was attached around her ankle. She looked terrified. Cassie stared back at those haunted eyes. The man in black took his end of the chain and snapped it to get her attention, then fastened it to a ringbolt on the wall next to the bed. She could see the chain was long enough to allow movement around the bed but no further.

As he did, Cassie tried to see the girl better. Her face seemed familiar, Cassie thought. Then it came to her: she was one of the missing three local girls she’d researched the night before. She couldn’t remember which one, couldn’t attach the name, but she knew she’d be able to connect them when she had her files in front of her.

For the next few minutes, time stood still and Cassie was transported into a real-life version of hell. Even as she watched it, she knew she’d never be able to scrub the images from her mind for the rest of her life. She had to remind herself to breathe.

The man seemed jaunty and cruel at the same time. When he glanced back at the camera—there was a second of wide-spaced deep eyes—there was no doubt he seemed to be enjoying himself.

It came in horrible flashes, and Cassie found herself fast-forwarding, getting the gist but not dwelling a second longer than necessary on the actual details.

The man shoved his crotch into the girl’s face and grabbed at his zipper with one hand and her hair in the other …

Fast-forward-fast-forward-fast-forward

The camera never moved or zoomed in, to Cassie’s relief, and she assumed there was no one else in the room even though the monster liked to address the lens himself as if hosting a show.

At one point, after he’d turned the girl over facedown on the bad and waddled up behind her, he addressed the camera with a flushed red face and jabbed his finger at it and said, “Don’t fuck with me again, Lizard King!”

Lizard King?
she wondered.

Fast-forward-fast-forward-fast-forward

The poor girl, Cassie thought, feeling her own eyes fill with tears as the girl cried and begged for him to stop. He backhanded her hard enough that she fell off the bed. As he bent down to pull her back up, Cassie noticed a large discolored mark of some kind on the skin of the small of his back. Like a stain or a botched tattoo. As if he realized the same thing himself, he self-consciously reached back and tugged down the hem of his sweater, hiding it again.