“Tell me how you got him to agree to come here,” Tibbs said.
“He’s an independent trucker,” Cassie said. “That means he doesn’t work for a long-haul firm and he doesn’t even contract with a dispatching service that takes a cut of every load he delivers. There are reasons for that beyond the fact that he likes to be his own boss. He is an Indy because there’s nobody out there tracking his movements through GPS or the other devices trucking companies use. That means he can travel across the country and stay off the grid. He’s on nobody’s clock but his own. That gives him the space he wants to abduct, torture, and dispose of the women he picks up.
“Independent truckers have to survive by their wits,” she said. “They get their freight jobs from log-board monitors found in just about every truck stop in the country or on the Internet. It’s all about keeping that trailer full at all times to maximize income. If they’re lucky, they find a job close to where they unloaded their last freight so they aren’t deadheading anywhere.”
When Tibbs cocked his head to indicate he was puzzled, she said, “Deadhead means driving with an empty trailer. It’s a money-suck for a driver.”
“How do you know so much about truckers?” Tibbs asked.
“My dad was a trucker,” she said. “I used to go on runs with him. Anyway, an Indy always hopes he can fill his trailer with a full load from one place. That way, he doesn’t have to travel LTL—less than a load—for very long. But it doesn’t happen very often. Indies have to constantly look for freight that will fill them up along the way.”
She gave the example of a Washington State farmer who had fifteen pallets—truckers called them “skids,” she said—to deliver to a small grocery chain in Boston. Most trailers could handle twenty-three skids before they were full. Rather than contract with a large trucking firm for a once-a-year job the big firm wouldn’t be enthusiastic about because of the “short” load, the farmer posted the information on a log board specifying the quantity of apples, the number of skids, where the apples were to be picked up, and when they had to be delivered. If an independent trucker was in the Pacific Northwest and saw the post he could call the farmer and negotiate a rate. If both parties agreed, the trucker would load the apples into his refrigerated truck first and start driving cross-country.
“But the trucker only has fifteen skids,” she said to Tibbs. “He won’t make much money on the run unless he can supplement that load with eight skids of something to fill his truck. Let’s say he sees that a sugar beet processor in Wyoming has eight pallets of pulp to deliver to a warehouse in New Bedford, Mass., fifty-nine miles from Boston. The Indy does the math: If he drives south into Wyoming en route to Boston and picks up the pulp he can drop it off in New Bedford and get paid on the way to Boston. That’s the kind of situation an independent trucker is in every single day on the road and the good ones can make a lot of money by avoiding LTL situations.”
“Okay…” Tibbs said impatiently.
She said, “Our target is independent—we know that. He doesn’t have a home and he’s constantly on the move. He’s scouring the log board every single day. Our plan was to put a small but profitable offer out there: ten skids of remanufactured oil field parts to be picked up in Grimstad for delivery in Portland, Oregon. It’s an easy run especially for a trucker already going east to west. We were banking on the possibility that he’d be coming through with room in his trailer one of these days.”
“But that’s crazy,” Tibbs said. “How did you know this particular trucker would bite?”
Cassie shrugged. “We just played the odds. There aren’t that many purely independent truckers out there anymore. It’s too tough a business on your own unless you just aren’t capable of working for anyone or you have another agenda. So every few days my friend Leslie in North Carolina would bait the trap on the log board. The number to call was this dedicated cell phone,” she said, showing him the phone. “I got hundreds of calls I had to turn down at all hours of the night. We hoped that he’d call eventually.”
Tibbs shook his head. “How did you know it was him?”
Cassie and Kirkbride exchanged a look, and Cassie said, “I’m probably the only woman who has ever heard his voice who is still alive to identify him.”
Tibbs turned to Kirkbride for affirmation. Kirkbride nodded.
“This is the first time everything has fallen into place,” Cassie said. “After he called we got the video clip from Eau Claire, so we know he’s got a victim. Then we tracked his truck in Hudson so we know he’s on his way. I was always worried that he’d finally show up here and the FBI would search his truck for trace evidence and find nothing again. But this time we know he’s got a girl with him.”
“What if he already dumped her?” Tibbs asked. “Then what?”
“It’s possible,” Cassie said, “although the timeline works against him if he’s on his way here. The Lizard King steam cleans his kill room in his trailer and power washes his cab so there’s no evidence. That’s why we couldn’t nail him when we had him the first time. But he hasn’t had time to do that since last night and still get here when he agreed to show up. Even if he killed her and dumped the body along the highway, the FBI will find traces of her in his rig. And we’ll nail him.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” she said, backing away, “we have a lot of work to do before he gets here.”
“Hold it,” Tibbs said. “How sure are you it’s him? All you have to go on is his voice.”
She thought about it. “Ninety-eight percent.” She thought, I’ll never forget that voice.
The Lizard King—aka Ronald Pergram aka Dale Spradley—had a naturally high-pitched prairie voice he tried to disguise by lowering it to guttural level and speaking slowly and deliberately with an indecipherable drawl. He’d gotten quite good at it over the years, and only when she confronted him in North Carolina did he let it slip. He, like Cassie, was from Montana. He had a flatness to his words and a cadence while speaking she was familiar with from growing up around it.
“And if you’re wrong?” Tibbs asked. “Then we arrest an innocent trucker in a huge display of force and find out there’s no evidence in his truck to prove he did anything wrong. At best it’s a public embarrassment and at worst we’re talking about a civil suit for assault, battery, and false arrest or a Section 1983 claim.”
“I’ll take that chance,” Cassie said.
Tibbs jabbed his finger at Cassie. He said, “If I go down I’m taking you down with me.”
“Understood.”
Tibbs wheeled around and faced Kirkbride. “You too,” he said.
*
CASSIE’S PERSONAL CELL PHONE BURRED and she looked at it. Both Tibbs and Kirkbride observed her carefully.
She took the call, listened, and punched off.
She said, “A state trooper east of Dickinson just ID’d his truck. He should be here in two hours.”