Badlands Read Online Free PDF Page A

task.
    *   *   *
    BACK IN the SUV on the way into Wilson, Rhodine said to Cassie, “So have you done a lot of interviews with suspects?”
    â€œWhat kind of question is that?” she snapped back.
    â€œNo offense,” he said, raising his palms to her in a gesture that read, “Calm down, lady.” She hated when men did that to her.
    â€œI read up on her,” Behaunek said to Rhodine from the backseat. She had a pair of reading glasses perched halfway on her nose and looked over them at the FBI agent. “Dewell here put down the Lizard King’s partner in a shoot-out. Hit him six times and killed him dead. I think she can handle an interview.”
    Cassie appreciated the defense. But the fact was she hadn’t done more than a dozen interviews in her career, and none as important as this.
    â€œOkay, okay, I get it,” Rhodine said to Behaunek with mock sincerity. “I just want to make sure she’s comfortable with this.”
    â€œYou two talk like I’m not sitting right here,” Cassie said. “I know the situation we’re in.”
    *   *   *
    THE SITUATION was dire, as Behaunek had explained to her the day before on the phone. They couldn’t prove that Dale Spradley was, in fact, Ronald Pergram, aka the Lizard King. Spradley was approximately the same size, shape, and age. He had the same profession and he had a kill room in his truck. But he didn’t look the same in the photo Behaunek had e-mailed her of the suspect in custody.
    Dale Spradley had jet-black hair, a thick Fu Manchu mustache, and horn-rimmed glasses. He had heavy jowls and was thirty to forty pounds heavier than Ronald Pergram’s most recent commercial driver’s license shot. Still, Cassie could see a resemblance that couldn’t be disguised: the wide Slavic face, the flat expression, the soulless eyes.
    It didn’t help that Dale E. Spradley had what appeared to be proper documentation proving who he was, including a valid CDL, a social security card, load insurance, a medical examiner’s report, and a federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) score sheet that showed he had a clean record.
    Cassie had asked Behaunek if Spradley’s DNA matched that of Pergram and the answer dismayed her. There was no Pergram DNA to match. None had ever been taken and since he’d burned his childhood home and all of his possessions to the ground when he left Montana, there was no way to get any. The only blood relative Pergram had that could have produced similar DNA was his mother who had died in the fire. No sample was taken of her remains. The same with fingerprints or dental charts: no record of Pergram.
    But there was a hole in Spradley’s story, Behaunek said. It wasn’t enough to invalidate his identity but it was enough to hold him in custody until Cassie could arrive. No one in Oakes, North Dakota, could be found who could corroborate Spradley’s claim that he was from there. It was thin, but it was something. Spradley claimed that he’d always kept to himself and had long ago left Oakes for a nomad’s existence on the nation’s highways, but not a single person could remember him in a small farm town of less than two thousand people?
    So, Cassie was told, they had to tie Spradley to Montana and to the events that took place there two years before. If Cassie could get him to admit he lived there, get him to react in a way that would break character, they could arrest him and hold him long enough, they hoped, that the FBI super techs could come through with damning evidence of what Spradley-Pergram had done in the secret room of his semi-trailer. Additional time and publicity might even produce a witness who could place Spradley in Montana, or better yet connect him to the abduction of a truck stop prostitute.
    *   *   *
    â€œDOES HE know I’m coming?” Cassie asked as the SUV