by Lee Child
caught since returning to work three days earlier and already Blackwater, the prick, was stepping into it. She’d never gotten used to working with the acting sheriff of Pinewood County, but she had no choice.
She parked next to a newer Cadillac SUV with Minnesota plates. The driver, a big man, was just getting out, hopping to the ground and trying to avoid stepping in a puddle. Thankfully, for now, the rain had stopped and sunlight, filtering through the stand of pines surrounding the cabins dappled across the sparse gravel.
She slammed the door to her Jeep and asked, “Are you Virgil Flowers, from Minnesota?”
“No, I’m Johnson Johnson from Minnesota. Trust me, I’m much larger, better looking, and more intelligent than that fuckin’ Flowers.”
“Johnson Johnson?” she repeated.
“Right.”
“You with Flowers?”
A nod. “I’m his fishing partner. He’s probably inside the cabin.”
“Is he a bullshitter too?”
“Bullshitter? I speak nothing but the honest truth. Who’re you?”
“Detective Regan Pescoli, Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department.” To prove her point, she opened her wallet and flashed her badge.
“Okay. Good. Get this off Virgil’s back, will ya? We got more fishin’ to do. C’mon in.”
She followed Johnson Johnson up the steps, across the porch, and through a screen door. Inside, a tall surfer type with damp blond hair was buttoning his shirt. He was barefoot, apparently just out of the shower.
Johnson introduced them.
Regan and Flowers shook hands, and Flowers asked, “Have you been down at the scene?”
She gave a quick nod. “Just now. Talked to Mr. Lang. He seems freaked enough that I buy his innocence. For now. Until I learn different. The sheriff tells me you think it might have been a murder, not an accident.”
“The more I think about it,” Flowers said.
“Then we’re on the same page,” said Regan. “You told him the shot was a few minutes after eight o’clock?”
“I looked at my watch,” Flowers said. “The sun was up.”
She pulled out a notebook and jotted down the details as Flowers laid them out. Including what Cain had said to them as they passed the cabin earlier in the morning, where they all were relative to each other, the timing of the shot, when Lang raised the alarm, the arrival of the first deputy.
“We didn’t work through the woods looking for the brass. One shot from a rifle, I suspect it was a bolt action,” Flowers said. “If it had been a semiauto, the killer would have pulled the trigger again.”
She glanced down at her notes for a moment, then said, “If it was a bolt action, probably won’t find any brass. Not near the scene, anyway. Cain was almost certainly shot from this side of the river.”
“How do you know that?” Johnson asked.
“The slug hit him in the middle of the back and came out on the same level in front,” she said. “If the shooter had been on the other side of the river, he would have had to have been on that high bank, and the shot would have been angled down.”
Flowers nodded. “You looked at the wound?”
“Yeah. Looks to me, and the ME should be able to tell us for sure, that it was a pretty heavy caliber. Not a .223 or anything like that.”
“Wasn’t a .223,” Flowers said. “It went boom, not bap.”
“Probably a hunting rifle,” she said. “The crazies around here usually go for those .223 black rifles with the rails and all that crap on them, but maybe this was something different. You seem to think so.” Flowers clearly knew about guns, that much was obvious. “Regardless of the caliber, I think this was a hunter.”
“Who mistook Lang for a bull elk?” Flowers asked.
“Who shot him, either by mistake or intentionally. First we find the guy, then we find the motive.” Her smile was ice. “Unless it works out the other way around.”
She checked her watch and frowned.
That feeling again.
Time to stop by the house and feed the baby, or find an out-of-the-way place to pump her breasts.
“Look, I gotta go work the phones for a while. Thanks for this. I might need to come back and talk some more.”
She started for the door, but Johnson raised a hand and said, “I kinda need to tell you something. May be nothing, but I’m worried.”
She asked, “About this?”
“Yeah.” Johnson looked down at the floor, guilty of something but she couldn’t guess what. “The shooter might have made a mistake. I’ve been thinkin’ about it, and I believe that maybe he thought he was shooting at me.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
Flowers was shaking his head and staring at his fishing buddy, reading the other guy, guessing something, and it wasn’t good.
“Johnson,” Flowers said, “what have you done?”
They all took chairs around the kitchen table and Johnson, appearing slightly shamefaced, rubbed his knees nervously, looked at Regan and said, “First, I’ve got to tell you about a break-in we had here at the ranch. Somebody stole six hundred dollars from the lodge owner’s daughter.”
She listened as Johnson told the story of the theft, how they’d gone to Weeks’s mobile home, meeting Bart, who’d thrown them off his property. How they’d stopped at the Drake residence and met Michael Drake, the rich dude who owned the log cabin. How he’d looked at the high-end Rosestone RV parked nearby, and how Weeks had shown up later in the day to repay the stolen money.
“What in God’s name does all that have to do with the shooting?” Flowers asked. To Regan he said, “Johnson has a tendency to bullshit a little.”
“Okay,” she said, but sensed the guy was getting to something. To Johnson she said, “I’m listening.”
Johnson turned to Flowers and asked, “You remember that woman who screamed at me from the RV? What was her name? Cheryl?”
“Because you were peeking in the window. Yeah, I remember.”
Johnson’s face reddened, which surprised her. For one thing Johnson was so tanned that a blush would normally have been invisible. “I didn’t mean to peek,” Johnson said to Regan. “I’ve thought about buying an RV like that and I wondered how it was finished inside. I’m tall enough that I could see through the window, and when I looked, there was this girl, and she didn’t have much clothes on. She wasn’t naked but pretty close.”
Flowers said, “Uh-oh.”
“Yeah,” Johnson said. “I probably woulda never said anything to anybody, because it was embarrassing. I was peeking, even though I didn’t mean to. But I’ve got this image in my head of this kid, she was maybe twelve or eleven. Shit, maybe even younger. But she was wearing one of those things that you see at Victoria’s Secret, this red thing, real low V in front, almost down to her crotch.”
He waved his hands around, trying to demonstrate, and finally Regan helped him out. “A teddy.” She took out her cell phone, tapped a bunch of keys with her thumbs, waited, then turned it around so Johnson could see the photos that came up.
He nodded. “That’s it. It was one of those. And the thing is, she was all made up, you know. Rouged cheeks, eye shadow, lipstick.”
“Jesus, Johnson,” Flowers said. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because it was embarrassing, and you know how it is with girls these days, all made up, you can’t really tell how old they are, but it bothered me. I was going to tell you after I thought it over some more. Anyway, I’d decided to let you know, today, I swear. Later. When we got back.”
Flowers glared at him, and Johnson went on, “Anyway, so we’re out on the river this morning, right? All of us. All wearing rain suits, and fishing and all.”
“Yeah?” Regan said, wondering where the hell this was going.
“The thing is, Cain, he looked like me, if we were all in rain suits and geared up, you know? Big guy, my size, staying at the ranch to fish.”
“Oh, man,” Flowers said, leaning
back in his chair.
Regan glanced at Flowers. “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, that our shooter was aiming for Johnson, here, and not Cain and it’s because of what he saw, then we’ve got ourselves a motive and it’s not pretty.”
“I hate this shit,” Flowers said.
“Not as much as I do.”
Inside she was coldly furious. She’d dealt with a lot of sickos in her day, lowlifes who preyed on weaker victims, but the ones who targeted innocent children? Those fuckers could go straight to hell and Regan would be glad to help them along.
“I had a bad feeling about some of this,” Flowers said, leaning forward again. “Let me tell you about this Weeks character. Giving six hundred bucks back is the last thing I would have expected. He didn’t want any cops up there poking around. If we’re both thinking the same thing, he’s in on it.”
She said, “I need to talk to some feds. And that kid who ran away, we need to find him. He could be key here.”
Flowers rubbed the back of his neck, appeared to be mulling things over. “You know, I’d be willing to give you whatever help you need, but this isn’t my territory.”
“You want to just step away? Hide behind legality and jurisdiction?”
She was incensed. What a prick.
“I’d like to get back to fishing. Not to be rude, but this is really your problem, not mine.”
“It’s not entirely my problem,” she said, getting to her feet.
Damn. Her breasts hurt. She really needed to get to a spot where she could pump.
“Johnson’s still alive. When the shooter finds out he got the wrong guy, he could be back.”
“Could have gone all day without hearing that,” Johnson said. “Might be time to fish somewhere else.”
She said tautly, “Look, Flowers, this is child porn and homicide. You’re a pro. Or supposed to be. I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around for a couple days. You and Johnson are the only ones on our side who’ve seen the woman, or the RV, or even that Drake character. And without Johnson’s statement about seeing the girl in the teddy, we don’t have a lot to go on.”
Flowers didn’t argue. “So, look, I’m going to try to run this kid down, this Phillip, and try to find that RV.” To Johnson she said, “I don’t suppose you took a cell-phone picture of it . . . one that would include the tags? Was it local? Montana plates?”
Johnson was shaking his head. “Didn’t notice and no, no picture, but I did see an advertising plate on the side. It said Luxury America Motor Tours, or something like that. I believe it was a rental: I kind of made a mental note, in case I wanted to try one out.”
She jotted the name in her notebook. “You’re smarter than you look.”
Johnson said, “I’ll have to think about that for a while.”
“I think it was a compliment,” Flowers said. “But I’m not absolutely certain.”
She ignored them. “One more thing, if there’s something going on with the girl, there are different possibilities. One would be that she’s been prostituted. The other is they’re making child porn.”
Her stomach tightened at the thought.
“Or both,” Flowers said. He, too, was grim. “But since she’s way out here, I’d say child porn is the better possibility. High-quality child porn. You’d need space, time, lights, decent cameras, plus the kids. And you might want to shoot some stuff out in the woods, as well as interiors. Sex, you could do almost anywhere. Photography, not so much. Especially video.”
“Describe Cheryl for me and Michael Drake,” she asked. “I’ll try to run ’em down.”
They did and she took notes.
“Tell you what. Since Johnson doesn’t want to get murdered, you guys could help out by scouting around up there. I can’t do that without a warrant, which would warn everyone. If you find something, just as tourists walking around in the woods like tourists do, I’ll get a warrant and we’ll swarm the place. We bust everybody in sight, and you guys are good to go fishing. While you’re doing that, I’ll find the Weeks kid and get a fix on the RV.”
“Walking around in the woods could be a little touchy,” Flowers said. “We’re not armed.”
“Maybe you’re not,” Johnson said.
Flowers stepped back. “Ah, Jesus, Johnson, you brought a gun?”
“You can’t go driving around the countryside without at least a nine,” Johnson said. To Regan he said, “Virgil doesn’t like guns.”
“And you’re a cop? Really?”
“Not your usual brand.”
“Mr. Kumbaya, huh.” She shrugged. “If you do happen to stumble across something, armed or not, I’ll be on my cell.”
“Me ’n’ Johnson will talk about it,” Flowers said and he actually seemed faintly amused at her ire.
TRUTH TO TELL, REGAN DIDN’T quite know what to think about the cop and his friend from Minnesota, but they were better help than the local deputies who were like no choice at all. And if the RV was rolling away, and if Phillip Weeks was on his way to somewhere else on a Greyhound, she had to get on it.
She started by talking with Katy and getting a physical description of Phillip Weeks, along with two pictures Katy texted to Regan’s phone. But there was little more. Everything Katy knew Regan had already heard from Flowers. Her parents weren’t any help, either, but she wondered about Jim Waller, a man who admitted to being a hunter, a man who had no trouble showing off his collection of rifles and shotguns.
But why?
He claimed to know nothing about the Weeks family or Michael Drake other than he was “a rich guy and drives a fancy car.” They’d seen RVs on the property a time or two, but had no other information, thought the vehicles probably belonged to friends or family of Drake.
With no answers she drove back to the station and thought about the case, the girl, the murder, the chance that Johnson had stumbled upon the illegal operation and someone had tried to murder him. It all seemed far-fetched, didn’t quite hang together.
Yet.
Back at the sheriff’s department she ordered a be-on-the-lookout for the RV, asked Sage Zoller, a junior detective, to track down Luxury America Motor Tours, then took twenty minutes in the women’s room to pump her damned breasts. Afterward, she placed the bottles in a pouch marked with her name in the refrigerator in the lunchroom and thought about someone finding them.
Like Blackwater. Or Watershed.
Go for it, she thought.
Blackwater would be able to handle it.
Watershed, a misogynist if ever there was one, would freak.
She drove to the Greyhound station, which had been built sometime in the 1950s and looked as if it had never been updated. The clerk at the desk, a girl all of eighteen, hadn’t been working the day before and wasn’t too interested in helping, but the manager overheard their conversation and bustled over. “I think I can help you. I remember him. Tall, thin, long hair, looked like he’d been in a fight? This was the night before last, right?” The manager had a bushy copper-colored mustache and reddish hair that reminded Regan of a cartoon character, though she couldn’t remember which one.
Ah, Yosemite Sam.
“He got here too late to catch the bus that night, so he came back the next morning. He might have slept outside somewhere, because he spent some time in the restroom washing up. Then he bought his ticket, with a full-day layover in Butte. Said he wanted to stop and see his grandma. If that’s the kid you’re looking for, he’d be catching the bus out of Butte tonight at seven o’clock, and will be in LA tomorrow night around eight.”
Good information.
She called the Butte cops and arranged to have a patrol car check for Weeks when the LA bus was loading up that night.
“Could have information on a homicide investigation,” she told the Butte desk sergeant.
“We’ll make it a priority,” he said.
Back on the road, she was driving up Boxer Hill to the upper part of Grizzly Falls when her cell phone rang. Seeing it w
as from the department, she clicked on.
Sage Zoller was on the other end of the line.
“Luxury America Motor Tours rents Rosestone RVs out of Las Vegas,” he said. “I could go to Vegas and check it out.”
