C. Box: The Highway

Cassie stepped back from him and said, “I know what Cody would say to you right now if he was here.”

Tubman arched his eyebrows as if to ask what.

“He’d say, ‘I shot a highway patrolman yesterday and got away with it. Now I’ll try for a sheriff.’”

Tubman looked stricken. “That’s not funny,” he said.

“It wasn’t intended to be,” she said. “If they hadn’t taken my weapon from me this morning for the inquiry, I’d blow your head off.”

He tried to grin but couldn’t. He said, “You can’t talk to me like that.”

“I just did.”

He looked out toward the meadow. “Dewell, I’ll pretend this conversation never took place. I’ll chalk it up to stress, and postcombat fatigue, so to speak. I want you to take a few days off after this. I’ll make sure you get paid for them. I’ll ask the therapist to get in touch with you and set up some grief counseling. Now I think I’ll turn around and get back to my Thanksgiving dinner with my family.”

“You do that,” she said.

“You’re taking this all wrong,” he said. “Instead of letting me praise you for solving a tremendous crime that makes all of us proud, you’re taking out your bitter feelings on me personally. I’ve put up for years with one Cody Hoyt,” he said, “I don’t need another one.”

“Get in your car or I’ll borrow a weapon,” she said.

Tubman walked back to his SUV shaking his head. She got a small amount of satisfaction from that.

* * *

Before going back into the tent, Cassie called her mother.

“Oh, we’re doing just fine,” her mother said. She sounded winded but exuberant. “The turkey is just about done and I’m finishing up mashed potatoes and green beans. Ben and a couple of guests are watching football.”

Cassie said, “A couple of guests ?”

“Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you? I invited a couple of friends. They didn’t have any place to go and it’s Thanksgiving, after all.”

“You invited some of your Occupy Helena derelicts to my home?”

“As I said, dear Cassie, they had no place to go. Isn’t that what Thanksgiving should be about?”

“Let me talk to Ben,” Cassie said.

She told her son she’d be home as soon as she could.

* * *

After terminating the call with her mother, Cassie called Jenny Hoyt’s home. It was tough to press SEND.

Justin answered.

“Justin, this is Cassie Dewell. I want to tell you how sorry I am.”

He obviously didn’t know what to say for a moment, and she felt for him.

She said, “Just always remember that he died in the line of duty. He died trying to save the lives of two innocent girls, and if he hadn’t come down here they’d be hurt or worse by now. We probably wouldn’t have ever found them.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “But it’s tough, you know? It’s really hard.”

“Of course.”

“I’m glad you shot the guy. I wish I could have been there to see it.”

“No, you don’t,” she said.

She could hear voices in the background. One sounded familiar.

“Are Gracie and Danielle there with you?”

“Yeah. Their dad, too. He flew in from Omaha. Their mom is coming up later today.”

“Are they doing okay?”

“I guess. Do you want to talk to them?”

“Let me talk to Gracie, if she’s willing.”

When Gracie came on the line, Cassie identified herself and asked, “How are you doing?”

“Fine, I guess. I want to thank you again for-”

“Never mind that,” Cassie said. “I just want to tell you I admire you. You’re tough. I can’t believe you held it together the way you did for someone your age.”

Cassie hoped Gracie was smiling and blushing. Gracie said softly, “Thank you.”

“How is your sister?”

There was a pause. “There are some counselors here. Danielle’s going to need some help. But she seems to be okay, I think. At least she seems to be in the same room with us, which is good. She’ll be all right. I’m fine.”

“I hope that when this is all over we can get together just to talk. You seem like a girl after my own heart. I’ve got a young son but no daughters. If I had a daughter, I’d want her to be like you.”

There was silence for a moment, then Gracie asked, “Have you found that truck driver yet?”

“No, but we will.”

“You need to find him,” she said, her voice cracking.

* * *

The Pergram home was still smoldering when they arrived. Cassie recalled seeing the smoke in the distance the day before but she’d attached no significance to it, and apparently no one had called the county fire department.

“There’s nothing left,” she said as Pedersen drove in close. “And like I told you, his truck is gone.”

“Looks like the son of a bitch covered his tracks,” Pedersen said, shaking his head. “I wish those DCI guys would have let us know the girls claim they were abducted by a truck driver. I guess they thought we knew that already.”

The home had burned hot and completely to the ground. The air stunk of burned plastic and burned fuel. An older model car was close enough to the flames that it had burned as well, and blackened skeletons of Russian olive bushes littered the perimeter of the scene.

“I think his mother lived at home,” Pedersen said. “I hope to hell she wasn’t inside.”

They exchanged glances.

“We’ll find him,” the sheriff said, reassuring her. “You can’t hide for very long in an all-black eighteen-wheeler, for Christ sake. We know his license plate number, and his DOT registration, and the description of his truck. The word is out everywhere. Every trooper in the west is looking for him. We’ll get the son of a bitch.”

Cassie nodded dumbly, but it all came crashing in on her. She’d let him escape by not calling it in when she found the package in her car. She knew it, Pedersen knew it, Ronald Pergram knew it.

“He set up Legerski,” she said, “and he used me to pull the trigger.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You did the right thing. You couldn’t have known,” Pedersen said.

“He thinks ahead,” she said, gesturing toward the smoldering ruins. “He plans things out. He probably has a plan of some kind to get away with this.”

She closed her eyes. “Instead of killing the monster I killed the monster’s sidekick. The monster is still out there.”

And Gracie’s voice echoed: You need to find him .

3:37 A.M., Friday, December 7

Two weeks after Ronald Pergram became Dale Everett Spradley of Oakes, North Dakota, he stood alone under a television monitor at a Love’s truck stop outside Tulsa to check the load board. He’d unloaded thirteen pallets of Washington State frozen salmon at a grocery warehouse at midnight, which left ten skids in his trailer to deliver to Little Rock in the morning. He was looking for a partial load he could pick up in the area to maximize his trip to Arkansas and he found it: ten skids of frozen farm-raised catfish in Inola, Oklahoma, needed to be trucked to Hot Springs, Arkansas. The foray would take him a couple of hours out of his way, but as usual he was ahead of schedule.

He jotted down the telephone number for the dispatch broker, checked his wristwatch, and made the call. It was a nice $4,500 deal and he took it. No reason to run his new truck LTL (less than a load) when he could pick up a partial en route. It was free money.

The truck stop was empty and quiet except for two drivers huddled together drinking coffee in the twenty-hour diner. He nodded at them as he passed and they nodded back. No recognition at all. He smiled to himself. The storm had passed.