Deadline

by John Sandford

  “That’s not a very charitable thing to say about a neighbor,” Virgil said. “Why would he kill his only employee?”

  “That’s for you to figure out, right?”

  “I could use a little help . . .”

  “Well, I don’t have any, about that,” McComb said. “But it only makes sense. Nobody else in town really had much to do with Clancy. He was not a big socializer, especially since he quit drinking. Didn’t have any real friends, that I know of.”

  “You’re sure he quit drinking?”

  “I’m sure. I last saw him, mmm, maybe a week ago. He was dry. He wasn’t even worried about it—about going back. Didn’t even talk about it anymore.”

  They chatted for a while, but she didn’t have much that was relevant, other than her belief that Vike Laughton had something to do with the killing. Virgil finally closed his notebook and stood up, fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Think about everything that Conley ever talked about—if you could point me at that story he was working on, or somebody who might know about it . . . just keep thinking about it, and call me if anything occurs to you. Especially if you can think of the singer.”

  “I will,” she said. As they walked to the door, she asked, “Did anybody tell you what I do for a living?”

  “They shared some rumors,” Virgil said.

  “You don’t care?”

  “I don’t like it, because I think it messes people up, but I’m not interested in doing anything legal about it,” Virgil said. “It’s a situation I don’t have a good answer for.”

  “Yeah, well, if you ever start feeling lonely, you could inquire about the law officer introductory discount,” she said.

  Virgil stopped. Dark underbelly. “Does that coupon get used much?”

  “Everybody has his needs,” she said, sounding like a therapist. “Even cops.”

  —

  BACK IN THE CAR, Virgil thought: Laughton and Purdy both had ridiculed the idea that Conley might have been involved in a serious story—but he apparently had been, if he’d been telling the truth to McComb. And if he’d been telling the truth to McComb about drinking, then Laughton had been lying to him. On the other hand, he might have been a hapless loser, bragging to the only woman he could get in bed, to give himself a little shine.

  He got on the phone and called a BCA researcher. “Sandy, I’ve got a murder down in Buchanan County—”

  “I heard.”

  “I’d like you to take a look at the victim’s state tax returns, see how much money he had coming in. Dig around, see where else he worked, you know, as far back as you can go. Maybe check his Social Security records. His name was Clancy Conley. . . .”

  He also asked her to peek at the tax returns from Vike Laughton: “He says most of his income flows from a paper he runs down here, the Republican-River. I’m mostly interested in what other sources of income he has, investments and so on. And take a look at his deductions for property taxes, see if he owns other property.”

  “You think he might be trying to hide some income?”

  “He’s doing something, but I don’t know what it is,” Virgil said. “When you check his tax records . . . I’d like you to keep that between the two of us.”

  “You mean, instead of going to the Department of Revenue and asking nice, I should hack into them,” she said.

  “I don’t really want an explanation of how you do it,” Virgil said. “I just want them quick, and I don’t want to have to play ring-around-the-bureaucrat.”

  “You don’t want an explanation of how I’d do it, because that might be a criminal conspiracy.”

  “Sandy . . .”

  Every day in every way, he thought, it seemed harder and harder to get anything done.

  —

  VIRGIL CONTINUED DOWN Thunderbolt Road, which eventually crossed the levee and rolled down into the port. The port didn’t look like anybody’s picture of a port, because it wasn’t much—just a half-mile-long line of wharfs that ran parallel to the riverbank, with tie-up posts every hundred feet or so, and a dozen corrugated buildings in various stages of disrepair. A small marina had been built into an indentation in the shoreline; twenty small boats rose and fell with the waves coming in from passing towboats.

  Virgil crossed the levee and rolled along until he saw a Fuller’s Barge Service sign on two big steel Quonset huts, one enclosed and one open. Both were surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence, with three strands of barbed wire on top.

  He could see flickering welding torches in the open hut, but couldn’t see what was being done. The closed hut had a white sign on it that said: “Office.” Somebody had written “Wipe your feet” below the “Office” with a Sharpie, which was apparently a joke, Virgil thought, because most of the area outside the door was a mud hole.

  Avoiding as much of the mud as possible, he stepped inside and found himself in an open space, partly filled with welding equipment and a couple of Bobcats. A balding man was working in a cubicle off to the left; he’d turned to look when Virgil walked in.

  Virgil said, “I’m looking for a Mr. Fuller.”

  “That’s me,” the man said cheerfully. “What can I do you for?”

  Virgil identified himself and said that he was investigating the murder of Clancy Conley.

  “Oh, boy, that’s just a disaster,” Fuller said. “First murder we had down here in quite a while, and it had to be my tenant.”

  Fuller said that Conley had been living in the trailer for two years. “Never had a bit of trouble with him. I heard that he was a slacker, but he stayed employed, and never caused anyone any trouble. He was handy with a wrench, and that helped.”

  Fuller cleared up some of the mystery of how Conley survived on a minimal salary: “I didn’t charge him rent. Our deal was, he’d keep the place clean, make sure it didn’t get broken into, and maintain it, and pay the utility bills. During deer season, he’d move out, and my buddies and I would move in. I own that woodland around there, two hundred and forty acres, and there are three of us hunt over it. We stay in the trailer. Last year, while we were up there, Clancy came down here and bunked out in one of our sheds that the tow crews use from time to time. Got a toilet, sink, and a couple cots, but that was good enough for him.”

  “So the trailer’s actually a hunting shack.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  He repeated Wendy McComb’s statement that Conley had quit drinking, and hadn’t gone back. “He told me once that he didn’t really like booze all that much—and he didn’t like beer at all. He liked to get cranked up, not pulled down. He told me his dream was to get some fast hot car, like a Porsche, and see if he could drive across Nebraska from Omaha to the Wyoming line in four hours. He had it all planned out, he had the highway patrol radio frequencies, so he’d know where they were at, where he’d make his gas stop . . . he even figured out how to make a trucker bomb, you know, so he could pee in a bottle and wouldn’t have to stop.”

  “Did he ever say anything to you about a big story he was working on?” Virgil asked.

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Nothing at all unusual, then? Just Clancy Conley, as everybody knows and loves him.”

  Fuller opened his mouth and then his eyes clicked away, as if he were thinking over what he’d been about to blurt out. Virgil said, “As you were about to say . . .”

  Fuller leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head.

  “My daughter was having a kid a while ago, back in early July. July eighth, to be exact. She was going over to La Crosse to have it, and so, sure enough, she starts into labor at three o’clock in the morning. My wife and I drive over to her house in our Suburban, and we pick up her and her husband, and haul ass for the bridge. I’m going through town at about a hundred miles an hour, and all of a sudden we catch Clancy in our headlights
getting into his car with his camera. He had his camera in his hand. I didn’t pay much attention to it, just kept going for La Crosse, but it stuck in my mind, because he looked kinda scared. Or guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Yeah. Guilty. So I see him about a week later and ask him what he’s doing wandering around the streets with his camera at three o’clock in the morning. I asked him if somebody was out there with their bedroom window shades up. He started to deny that it was him, and then he pretended to remember and said he’d been shooting the shit with some friends and it got late and he just had the camera with him. . . . I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, but he seemed kinda flustered. That’s probably nothing, but like I said, it stuck in my head. He was acting . . . furtive. Like he’d been caught doing something.”

  “Where was this? That you saw him?”

  “Right in the middle of town, across the street from the QuikTrip. Right where the high school lawn comes down to Main Street.”

  “You didn’t really think he might have been peeping in somebody’s window?”

  “Oh, no. No. He wasn’t that kind of guy. But when I think about it now, it seems like something was going on.”

  —

  WHEN VIRGIL LEFT FULLER, he drove up Main Street to look at the QuikTrip and the high school. Trippton was built on a series of river terraces that rose step-like from the water. The high school was built on the fourth terrace up, above Main Street, which was on the second terrace. The school had a wide sloping front lawn, with a big concrete walk and concrete steps leading up to the early twentieth-century brick building. A four-by-eight red, white, and blue sign on the front lawn said: “Vote ‘Yes’ on the new High School Sports Arena bonds.”

  The QuikTrip was on a corner, on a street that dead-ended at Main Street. If Clancy had parked across from the QuikTrip, he’d either been down in the residential neighborhood behind the QuikTrip or at the high school. Virgil made a mental note: find out if Clancy really did have some friends that he hung out with at night, and if so, where they lived.

  Next stop was at G&Ts, a bar on Main Street, three blocks up from the high school. The owner, Gary Kochinowski, had gone to La Crosse to watch the Loggers play baseball, but his wife, Tammy, was working the bar.

  “What an awful thing—everybody’s talking about it,” she said. She hadn’t seen Clancy in several weeks, she said, and then only on the street. “He don’t come in anymore, since he quit. It’s a shame, because this was his whole social life, right here.”

  “When he was drinking, how bad was he?”

  “Oh, he got drunk from time to time, but he wasn’t like a full-blown alcoholic,” she said. “I mean, he was an alcoholic, but it wasn’t like he was a stumbling drunk. We never found him in the gutter. Gary would drive him home every once in a while, but most of the time he could drive himself. He used to say he’d like to drink more, but he couldn’t afford it.”

  “Be a lot cheaper to buy his own bottle.”

  “Well, that’s the thing that kept him from being a stone-cold alkie—he didn’t do that. He didn’t get a bottle and sit home and drink it. If he was going to drink, he wanted to talk to people.”

  “Did he talk to anyone in particular?” Virgil asked. “Were some people better friends than others?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. There were just a bunch of regulars who’d come in every night, and he’d come in and shoot the breeze and sip through four or five rounds . . . and go home.”

  “Did he ever mention anything about a big story he was working on?”

  “Not to me, but you might check with Gary when he gets back. Gary talked to him more than I did, but like I said, we haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “Huh.”

  “Not helping you much, am I?”

  “Everything helps a little,” Virgil said. “It’s putting it all together that’s hard. A couple people told me he’d gone back to drinking, but now a couple more have said that he didn’t.”

  “I think we would have heard about it if he had,” Tammy said. “That kind of thing gets around, and pretty quick, in a small town. If he was drinking again, I think he would have done it here.”

  —

  HIS LAST STOP was at Buster Gedney’s house, a small two-bedroom place crowded close to the river, right on the leading edge of the second step of the floodplain. In a bad flood year, the property might take on some water. A sign in the front yard advertised a blockbuster sale on turkey fryers, with another sign stuck on the bottom of the first that said: “We Beat All Internet Prices.”

  Buster was around at the side, in a garage full of power lawn mowers, a short, pale man with thinning hair. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with three pens in the chest pocket, and jeans. When Virgil called out to him, he stood and wiped his hands on an oily rag and asked, “Looking for a fryer?”

  “No, I’m a cop, I came to talk for a couple of minutes. . . .”

  Virgil introduced himself, and asked about the silencers.

  Gedney shook his head. “Man, I quit that.”

  “I heard.”

  “I don’t do silencers. Honest to God, those government guys scared the hell out of me. I do lawn mowers. That’s all I do now—lawn mowers.”

  “You can make as much money on lawn mowers as on silencers?”

  “Damn right you can. These idiots can’t get their mowers to start, so they take them out to the landfill and go to Home Depot and buy another one. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all they need is a new gas filter and clean the gas line, maybe put a new air filter in, sharpen up the blade. Takes me fifteen minutes, and they’re good as gold. Ten dollars in parts and a little knowledge, and you’ve got a fifty-to-hundred-dollar lawn mower. Of course, some of them, it’s a different story. This one . . .” He touched a newer-looking blue mower with his toe. “This one, guy changes the oil, forgets to put the plug back in, the oil drains out, he fires it up, and three minutes later the engine blows. All it’s good for now is parts.”

  “I didn’t know about the lawn mowers. I was told you were a machinist,” Virgil said. He waved his hand at the back of the garage. Virgil didn’t know much about machine shops, although he’d once investigated a case where a machine shop had been cleaned out on a weekend by machinery thieves. He knew enough to recognize the CNC lathe and a nice mill in the back of the garage.

  Gedney looked at him sideways and said, “I didn’t know all the legal stuff about silencers. Really, I’m telling the truth. I had a friend—didn’t turn out to be much of a friend—comes over and gives me a burned-out silencer, and asks if I could build one like it. Well, it was a challenge, and I got a little machine shop, you know, so I built one for him. I guess the word got around.”

  “You ever build a silencer for an M15?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t know. I don’t know much about guns. I’d mostly duplicate the things, right down to a thousandth of an inch. They call them suppressors, the gun guys do. They’d already have one, but it’d be shot out, or something, and I’d duplicate it. Never really saw the guns. That’s why I thought it was okay—see, these guys already had permits. At least, that’s what they told me. I told all this to the agents at the BATF.”

  “Any of the gun guys ask you to work on the trigger assembly? Say they needed something fixed, or . . .”

  A woman came out the side door of the house and called, “Buster? Who’s there?”

  “Oh . . . this is an agent with the state police. Virgil Flowers, right?”

  She came up, a tall, thin woman, who was nervously rolling her hands together. Buster said to Virgil, “This is my wife, Jennifer.”

  “Buster’s all done with that silencer business,” she said. “He sells turkey fryers now—”

  “I’m investigating the murder of Clancy Conley,” Virgil said. “Have you heard about it?”

  “A
bout ten minutes ago,” Jennifer said. To her husband, “Jennifer One just called and told me. It’s awful. They found his body in a ditch.” To Virgil: “What does this have to do with Buster?”

  “I’m checking out something about the gun that was used,” Virgil said. “Excuse me for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

  He walked out to his truck, got an iPad out of the seat pocket, brought it back, went out to the ’net, Googled “What does a three-shot burst kit look like?” and showed the pictures to Buster.

  Buster’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times and he muttered, “No, no, never seen anything like that. Not that I recall.” He was so bad at it that Virgil expected a flag to pop out of his ear, on a stick, saying, “I’m lying.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I don’t want to mess with guns anymore,” Buster said. “The BATF guys said the next time I do it, I could go to jail.”

  “Do you have one yourself?” Virgil asked. “An M15. An AR15?”

  “We don’t have any guns,” Jennifer said. “We don’t even have a BB gun.”

  “That’s a pretty nice machine shop,” Virgil said. “That come from making the silencers?”

  “No, no. Not at all. My business is mostly with farmers and car dealers, looking to get parts duplicated. Like, a farm busts a part on a combine . . .”

  His wife waved him silent and asked, “What about Clancy Conley? You getting anywhere with that?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Virgil said. “The killer wasn’t very sophisticated, we already got a bunch of leads. I figure to close it out by the end of the week.”

  “What kind of leads?” she persisted.

  “Can’t really talk about that,” Virgil said. “But with the crime-scene stuff we have now . . . Well, I better leave it at that.”

  He turned back to Buster. “Go online and take a long look at the three-shot burst kit. If you remember seeing one of them, or even an individual piece of one, give me a call. And, Buster . . . if you remember something, you can’t just let it go and hope for the best. You’d be implicated. This is a first-degree murder. Somebody’s going to jail for thirty years, no parole. By the end of the week.”