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 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.”