C. Box: The Highway

“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.

Fast-forward-fast-forward-fast-forward

Staggering and spent, the man lurched to his feet and stood there, the girl curled up on top of the bed. He breathed hard, glowered at the camera. Then he lurched toward the screen and went out of view.

The girl lay on the bed in a fetal position, hugging her knees, her back facing the screen. Cassie could see her bent spine, her shoulders heaving from crying. On the small of her back was a tattoo and Cassie recognized it as the Harley-Davidson logo. She remembered one of the missing girls had the tattoo …

Then he returned, holding a long bladed knife that looked like a bayonet. He lurched across the screen toward the girl in the bed, and stopped to look back over his shoulder and smile.

Fast-forward-fast-forward-fast-forward

Blood, everywhere.…

* * *

Cassie felt as disgusted and abused and as horrified as the murdered missing girl as she removed the headphones, closed her eyes, and croaked, “Holy Mother of God.”

“What?” Sally said, alarmed. “You look like you’ve seen the devil himself.”

“I have,” Cassie said and wiped furiously at her face as if it would remove the images. It didn’t.

“Something’s bleeding,” Sally said.

“What?”

It took a moment for Cassie to realize Sally wasn’t referring to the girl in the video, but to her own hand. She’d balled her fist so tightly when she watched that she’d cut into the palm of her hand with her fingernails. She had smears of blood on her face.

“Here,” Sally said, approaching with a Kleenex.

Cassie slammed the laptop closed, even though the video was over so Sally couldn’t see it.

“What?” Sally asked again, as Cassie clutched the Kleenex with her right hand and opened the laptop and restarted the disk and then froze it during the opening minute. She froze the image of the spare bedroom itself before the girl was brought in.

“I need your help,” Cassie said. “I want you to look at something.”

Sally looked scared.

“Don’t worry,” Cassie said. “I’ve paused it. I just want you to identify a location for me if you can. You’ve lived around here for a while and you may recognize it as local.”

Sally Legerski took a deep breath and came around the table. She leaned down so closely Cassie could smell her scent.

“Do you know this room?” Cassie asked. She watched Sally’s face and saw a twitch of recognition in it.

“What happens in that room?”

“Never mind that. Do you recognize it?”

“Possibly.”

Cassie felt an electric charge fire through her. She tried to remain calm.

“Where is it?”

“I said possibly. ”

“Is it connected to your ex-husband?”

“I just don’t know without seeing more.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Cassie said firmly.

Sally sighed. “Rick bought this place, this old abandoned ranch not long after we moved down here. I thought it was idiotic at the time and I still do. He made noises about fixing it up for our retirement home, but the house was a wreck and the well hardly worked.”

“This bedroom is in the old house?”

“No,” she said, “the man Rick bought it from built this underground shelter. I don’t know how much it must have cost, but he claimed it would withstand a nuclear war. It’s right outside the house, the entrance, I mean. This looks like the bedroom that was down there. I never spent more than ten minutes in that shelter because it creeped me out and I was mad at Rick for blowing our savings on it, but this sure looks like the bedroom but I can’t swear to it.”

Sally pointed toward the screen. “I recognize the concrete walls but those ring things are new…” her voice trailed off when she seemed to realize what she was saying. “What happened in it?”

Cassie ignored the question and said, “Is it known as the Schweitzer place?”

Sally said, “How did you know?”

“I think it’s where the girls are,” she said.

It wasn’t “There at the Schweitzer place” as written in the ungrammatical scrawl. It was: “ They’re at the Schweitzer place.”

Sally reached out for the side of the table so her knees wouldn’t buckle beneath her.

* * *

Cassie walked toward the back of the shop, through a packed storeroom, and through a storm door into a tiny backyard. She needed air, and she needed a few minutes. There was a chain link fence along the end of the yard. Just a few feet beyond the fence was the rim of the canyon where the Yellowstone River roared far below.

She gripped the top rail of the fence with both hands and closed her eyes. When she did she could see the terrified face of the girl on the video looking back, then the set of his shoulders when he approached her with the bayonet. She’d read enough and learned enough at the academy to know most serial killers kept trophies of some kind to remind them of their victims. Photos and videos weren’t unusual. But she’d never actually looked at them, and she wished she could somehow unwatch what she’d seen. She wondered how many victims were on the second and third disks.