7:26 A.M., Wednesday, November 21 RONALD PERGRAM DROVE his mother’s white 1986 Buick Riviera past the unmanned National Park Service window at the north entrance to Yellowstone and goosed it on the straightaway before beginning the switchback climb to Mammoth Hot Springs. The car, like his mother, was repulsive. It was low-slung and underpowered and its 3,300 lbs of steel rocked atop a mushy suspension that gave him the feeling of driving a car with four flat tires. The top of the coupe was peeling tonguelike strips of faux leather and the paint job looked sandblasted. The windows were cloudy with grime. The backseat was filled with garbage bags and newspapers and he’d had to clear the front seat of empty Big Gulp containers just to squeeze inside. The trunk contained two dead bodies wrapped in plastic, one on top of the other. Although there was a CCTV camera mounted on the side of the entrance station, he knew there was no reason to worry about being identified. The NPS operated on banker’s hours during the off-season, and they rarely had a ranger on duty to collect entrance fees before eight in the morning, much less someone viewing the monitor at park headquarters.
