C. Box - The Highway

Even though it was the wrong time, the absolute wrong time, he felt his insides stir and his blood rise.

“You ready to go?” Legerski asked him.

Pergram nodded reluctantly. First things first.

* * *

As Legerski jammed Jimmy’s possessions into a plastic bag in the other other room, he said, “We’ll be better off without him.”

“Yeah. I never wanted him involved in the first place.”

The trooper looked up. “I know that. I wish I wouldn’t have brought him in. But you know what happened. He started asking me questions about our comings and goings. I knew he was a deviant, but I didn’t know he’d be reckless.”

“I did.”

It had been an unbelievably stupid move on Legerski’s part. Six months before, Jimmy had asked why it was the trooper kept ordering food to go in quantity when there was only one of him still left in his house. Asking him things like, “You got a dolly you ain’t telling me about?” Things like that. One night when the trooper was drunk and off duty, Jimmy showed him his porn collection, which was extensive and revealed his rough inclinations. Legerski noticed a few items that could only be trophies-locks of hair, panties, a pair of glasses. One thing led to another, and the next time Pergram and Legerski went to the bunker for a session Legerski had brought Jimmy along.

Pergram thought letting Legerski in had been his first mistake, although he didn’t feel like he had a choice at the time. Letting Jimmy in compounded the problem.

* * *

“It is what it is,” Legerski said, knotting the plastic garbage sack. “No one around here will be very shocked that Jimmy just closed up and hit the road. He’s done it for months at a time before.”

Pergram nodded, but a bad thought was forming.

“You mean you don’t have a real cover story for Jimmy going away?”

“Not really.”

“You’re just winging it? I thought you were supposed to be the great planner?”

“We didn’t have no choice. Jimmy was going to go in there and get them girls before we could get to them first. That was never the deal. He got greedy and stupid. Plus, we don’t have the time for that now. We’ve got to take care of our situation first and get the heat off.”

Pergram nodded for the sake of nodding.

“Look,” Legerski said, “I’ve got to get to Livingston and see that judge. That cunt cop is probably wondering where the hell I am now. I’ve got to get up there and cover my ass.”

“And leave mine hanging,” Pergram said.

“No, it’s not like that.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“Ronald,” the trooper said, “you’ve got to step up now. I’ve been doing all the dirty work. It’s time you stepped up.”

Pergram leaned back and looked at Legerski through slitted eyes, waiting. The bad thought was turning into a freight train headed right at him.

“That Helena cop knows me,” Legerski said. “She don’t know you. You can get close enough to her to hit with a roofie. You can either take her to your secret spot in the park or bring her back here, I don’t care. But we’ve got to get her off the street before she stirs things up around here and asks too many questions and starts putting things together.”

Pergram said, “You saying you want me to kill the lady cop?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Won’t that bring down seven kinds of hell on us?”

Legerski stepped back from the table. “It could,” he said, “but not if we do it quick and thorough. The Park County sheriff’s deputies aren’t due for hours. She’s completely on her own. If we take her out now, it’ll be a mystery but no one will know jack shit unless we screw it up.

“In fact,” Legerski said, warming to it, “I can steer things a different direction. I can say I saw the two of them-Hoyt and Dewell-getting intimate in a car on the side of the road. Who’s to say they didn’t just run off together? The disgraced cop and his lover and partner? It sounds like something Cody Hoyt would do. It’s just crazy enough people will believe it.”

Then he grinned, and said, “I’ll work on the story. I’ve got between now and seeing the judge to work on it. I can plant the seeds with the Park County guys I know. There might be some holes but for now I’m liking it.”

Pergram didn’t say he did, didn’t say he didn’t. All he knew was that everything he’d built over the years was piled up between the tracks and that freight train was coming. All he’d accomplished was coming apart and spinning wildly out of control and the person running the show was standing right in front of him with a trash bag of a dead man’s remains in his hand.

Legerski grasped the handle of the ammo box Pergram had delivered with one hand and held the plastic bag with the other. For a moment, Pergram refused to let go and the two men stared in each other’s eyes. Then Pergram released his grip and let Legerski take it.

“You know I’ve got more copies,” Pergram whispered.

“I’ll need them, too.”

“Not until I decide to give them to you.”

“You might get us arrested if you keep them.”

“Yeah,” Pergram said, “but if that happens it’ll be the both of us. We’ll go down together.”

Legerski gave Pergram his best cop dead-eye, but Pergram didn’t crack. He’d been on the receiving end of cops and their looks for years.

Pergram gave it a beat, didn’t want to ruin Legerski’s good time. He changed the subject and said, “What does this cop look like and what is she driving?”

The trooper described the Ford Expedition and the Lewis amp; Clark County plates. He said, “Midthirties, heavy-set, medium-length brown hair, brown eyes, wearing a dark pantsuit and a white blouse.”

And added, “She has a pretty face.”

10:38 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

Cassie sat in the parked and idling Ford Expedition on the shoulder of the highway and thought about Thanksgiving, churches, and God.

The compound for the Church of Glory and Transcendence was across the river on the other side of Yankee Jim Canyon. She’d seen it years before as she passed by but she’d never studied the layout or paid much attention to it overall. Now, she looked at it through field glasses, building to building, hoping to find something that would lead to solving the disappearance of the Sullivan girls and Cody Hoyt. She saw no fresh tire tracks on the moist dirt road leading to the compound or on the roads within it, and she saw no red Ford, no sign of Cody’s pickup.

The morning sun, fused through winter storm clouds, came soft and late to the valley. Colors, shadows, and contours appeared flat. There were so many days of sunshine in Montana that a day without it always felt odd to her, and it somehow dampened her earlier enthusiasm that she was doing the right thing and that the investigation was going somewhere.

A hundred yards up the road was a closed gate. The road beyond the gate wound down her side of the river to a two-lane bridge over the river to the compound. It looked to be the only way in and out, although she couldn’t tell if there were roads into the mountains from behind the buildings, and guessed there must be.

The compound was laid out on a huge bench of land directly across from her. Sharp-walled foothills rose in back and to the sides, and it looked as if the mountains were cradling the compound in the palms of its open hands. There was a kind of military precision to the layout. To the left, there were four or five long neat rows of small white single-family houses, all with green roofs. In the middle of the assemblage was a massive chapel marked by a pointed steeple. The four rows of stained-glass windows indicated there were at least four floors within it, or at least the front half. The chapel was also painted white. A two-level clapboard building served as the school, she guessed, based on the playground equipment in a fenced area adjacent to it. To the right were large anonymous buildings, garages and equipment sheds and storage facilities, she guessed. That would be the place to look for the missing vehicles, she thought. The rest of the bench to the right was a plowed field that was fuzzy green with early shoots of winter wheat.