Deserves to Be Dead

by Lisa Jackson

  “That’s good.” He paused. “You own a gun?”

  “A rifle?” Lang asked.

  “Any gun?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t keep one in the car.”

  “No, and Dan didn’t either. Neither one of us hunt and I don’t believe in that self-protection crap. Too many people get killed with their own weapons.” His gaze strayed to the body again. “Oh, Jesus, who would do this? Why? God, it must’ve been an accident, right? Some asshole with a rifle.”

  “That’s what we’ll have to find out,” Virgil said. “Now, everyone step back onto the road. Clear this area.”

  He could do nothing but keep people away from the body, keep them out of the woods along the river, where the shooter might have been.

  And wait for the local cops.

  • • •

  A deputy arrived a few minutes later, parked away from the area, and walked in. He was a tall man and introduced himself as Pete Watershed. He wore aviator sunglasses and a scowl. Virgil told him what he’d done, which was almost nothing aside from clear the area around the body and where a shooter might have been potentially hidden. A couple more deputies arrived, then the sheriff, Hooper Blackwater. About six feet, he was all compact muscle and carried himself as if he were in the military. Short-cropped black hair, coppery skin, and high cheekbones suggested he might be part Native American. He was all business. He surveyed the area, frowned, barked out some orders to his men, took a closer look at the body, then pulled Virgil aside and after checking his ID said, “You’re an investigator? You do this kind of thing all the time?”

  “When I’m on the job.”

  And often, when he wasn’t. Like now.

  Blackwater asked, “What do you think? What happened here?”

  “Haven’t figured out where the shooter was or if this was an attack or an accident. If it was intentional, it’s hard to figure out why. Random target? Paid assassin? Some nutcase getting his rocks off? Someone with a grudge? So far that’s all unknown. I talked to Lang; he and Cain are from Bismarck, and they really don’t know anybody here but the Wallers. They’ve been at this camp a couple of times. This trip up they haven’t left the camp since they got here, day before yesterday. They fished the first day, sat out the rain yesterday, and got back at it today. Mr. Waller said there’d been no trouble at all at the camps, no arguments, nothing like that.”

  “And you and your friend think it was a rifle shot.”

  “We both have experience with all kinds of firearms. It was a rifle.”

  “What happened to the guy you were with?”

  “He went for the car. He doesn’t do well with this kind of thing.”

  “Not a cop.”

  “Lumber business. You can catch up with him back at the WJ Guest Ranch if you want, but I’ll vouch for him. He was with me the whole time.”

  The sheriff rubbed his forehead. “We’ll want to talk to him.” Then he asked, “Got any theories?”

  “Too early. Lang found him in the river, dragged him out. Cain’s a big guy. Would have been easy to see in the woods, as it was light. There was only one shot. I suppose somebody could have been poaching deer. We’ve seen a couple.”

  “That’s pretty thin. One shot, hits the guy through the heart from the back, and the shooter disappears.”

  “It’s thin,” Virgil said. “I kinda think he was murdered. You need to get an investigator in here, soon as you can. Start looking at their backgrounds. Lang doesn’t really have an alibi. He seems real. I mean, looking and listening to him, I buy his story. Still, I’d hate to think it was something else, that you might have a crazy out there.”

  “We’ve got a detective on the way,” Blackwater said. “I’ll ask her to stop and talk to you, your friend, Cain, and Waller when she gets here, which ought to be pretty soon.”

  The sheriff’s lips compressed as he surveyed the area again.

  “This is bad business. Real bad business.”

  • • •

  Johnson Johnson wasn’t at the cabin when Virgil got back and his Cadillac was gone, so Virgil grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and went into the bathroom to shave, shower, and put on fresh clothes. He was just pulling on his pants when he heard a truck pull up in front of the cabin, and then a second one. He looked out the window and saw Johnson Johnson getting out of his Escalade and a woman shutting the door of a Jeep.

  She was tall and solidly built. She had a good figure but wasn’t slim. Nor was she heavy. Just solid and athletic-looking. Her hair was light brown with hints of red, pulled away from her face and tied at her nape. Her lips showed a hint of gloss and when she shoved a pair of sunglasses onto her head, he saw that her eyes were greenish, with flecks of gold. From habit he noticed the gold band on her left hand.

  Married.

  Had to be the detective.

  Here to do her job.

  • • •

  Regan Pescoli was pissed as she drove into the parking area of the WJ Guest Ranch.

  She’d already stopped by the river where deputies had blocked off what appeared to be the crime scene. She’d viewed the body, got all the particulars from Blackwater, then headed here to talk to Virgil Flowers.

  This morning wasn’t the first time she’d been here. Her daughter Bianca knew the oldest Waller girl, Katy, and had spent some time here a few years back. The dude ranch and golf course hadn’t improved much. In fact, it looked more dilapidated than ever, as if surviving on a shoestring.

  The apparent homicide of a fisherman was the first case she’d 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 l
ooking 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.”