C. Box: The Highway

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.

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

Cassie 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.