MatchUp

LISA WANTED TO USE DETECTIVE Regan Pescoli from Grizzly Falls, Montana, in this story. The character is central to her ongoing To Die series. One of John’s most popular characters is Virgil Flowers. He’s an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but he’s also an avid fisherman and sportswriter.

So John had an idea.

Send Virgil on a fishing trip to Montana, Regan Pescoli’s home turf, where a crime would draw the two characters together.

Lisa freely admits that John started the story and ran with it. They didn’t toss it back and forth, or pit one scene against the other. John wrote the entire draft, then Lisa added scenes, filled in details, and tweaked. She’s a huge fan of John’s Lucas Davenport series, but she’d never read any of the Virgil Flowers books. To prepare herself, during the months between agreeing to write the story and actually finishing it, she devoured five Virgil Flowers’s novels.

Here’s another interesting detail.

At the end of Lisa’s 2017 novel, Expecting to Die, a pregnant Regan Pescoli finally has a baby. But when this short story was written (in 2016), Lisa had no idea of the child’s sex, as that was to be determined through a contest her publisher was running. Since this story would be released a few months after Expecting to Die, Lisa had to go ahead and make Regan a lactating mother of a newborn, sex unknown.

A final thought.

Lisa loved the way John ended the story. It actually provided her with some great grist as she continues the Regan Pescoli series.

Now it’s time to found out just who—

Deserves to Be Dead.

DESERVES TO BE DEAD

VIRGIL FLOWERS AND JOHNSON JOHNSON sat on the cabin’s narrow board porch, drinking coffee and looking out at the empty golf course. A fine mist was sweeping down from the mountains and across the tan grass of the first fairway. The dissected remnants of three newspapers lay on the table between them. Four fly rods hung tip-down from a rack on the wall.

Two other fishermen, whom they’d met the day before, wandered by in rain jackets, aiming in the general direction of the bar, and Johnson said, “We got like a gallon of hot coffee.”

“We’ll take some of that,” Rich Lang said, the shorter of the two guys.

He looked soft around the middle with about a week’s worth of graying stubble on his face. The two guys took the other chairs on the porch, and the four of them sat around talking about fish and politics and personal health, as they admired the rain.

The other guy, Dan Cain, said, “Shoulda gone to Colorado.”

“Can’t afford Colorado,” Lang said. “Besides, the fish are bigger here.”

The personal health issue involved Cain, who’d taken a bad fall on a river rock the day before, shredding the skin on his elbows and upper arms. Nothing serious, but painful, and his arms were coated with antiseptic cream and wrapped in gauze.

“Pain in the butt,” he admitted.

“That’s what happens when us big guys fall,” Johnson said to Cain. They were both six six or so, and well over two hundred pounds. “Virgil falls down, it’s like dropping a snake. I fall down, and it’s like Pluto rammed into the earth.”

“Pluto the planet, or Pluto the dog?” Virgil asked.

It went back and forth like that for twenty minutes, Lang and Cain browsing halfheartedly through the abandoned newspapers.

Cain eventually said, “It’s looking lighter in the west.”

Virgil, Johnson, and Lang said, almost simultaneously, “Bullshit.”

Johnson checked his cell phone and a weather app for a radar image of the area.

“We won’t get out this afternoon,” he said. “It’s rain all the way back to Idaho.”

“What about tomorrow?” Lang asked.

“Thirty percent chance of rain,” Johnson said. “When they say thirty percent chance of rain, that usually means there’s a fifty percent chance.”

“We could go into town, find a place that sells books,” Virgil said. “Check the grocery store, get something to eat tonight.”

“Or find a casino, lose some money in the slots,” Johnson said. “Did I ever tell you about the casino up in Ontario? I was up there last month with Donnie Glover, and it was raining like hell.”

Johnson launched into a rambling story about a Canadian casino in which the slot machines apparently never paid anything, ever.

The four of them were at WJ Guest Ranch outside of Grizzly Falls, Montana, possibly the smallest dude ranch in the state at seventy acres. Sixty of those were dedicated to a homemade, ramshackle executive golf course. The other ten acres had nine tiny chrome-yellow cabins, a barn with four rentable horses, the equine equivalent of Yugos, the owners’ house, a larger cabin with a bar that had six stools, three tables, one satellite TV permanently tuned to a sports channel, and a collection of old books and magazines that smelled of mold. The place had two secret ingredients. Access to a trout stream stuffed with big rainbows and browns, and price. The WJ was cheap.

They were all half listening to Johnson’s story when a girl started screaming, her shrill voice rising from the owners’ house.

Not screaming in fear. She was out-of-control angry.

Johnson broke off the story to say, “That’s Katy.”

“Sounds a little pissed,” Cain said.

Katy was the oldest of the owners’ kids, a skinny blond fifteen-year-old about to start high school. She was in charge of horse rentals and, on sunny days, ran a soda stand on the fifth hole of the golf course. At night, she worked illegally as a part-time bartender. They hadn’t had much contact with her, but from what they’d seen, she wasn’t a girl you’d want to cross.

“More than a little pissed,” Lang said. “Hope she doesn’t have a gun.”

The angry screaming, peppered with a few choice swearwords, continued, and Jim Waller, the owner, stuck his head out of the bar, then trotted over to his house, holding a piece of cardboard box over his balding head to fend off the rain. Tall and lean, he disappeared into the house, where the shouting got louder.

Two minutes later, the side door exploded open and Katy charged out, heading straight for their cabin. Rain splattered the ground around her, creating puddles, but she didn’t seem to notice. A moment later her father ran out behind her, trying and failing to catch her. She climbed up on the porch, looked straight at Johnson, and demanded, “Did you steal my money?”

Jim Waller arrived, shouting. “Katy. Stop it.” And to Johnson Johnson and Virgil he said, “I’m sorry, guys.”

“I want to know,” Katy said, her eyes snapping fire. “Did you?”

“Shut up,” her father shouted.

“You shut up,” she yelled back.

Johnson Johnson jumped in. “Whoa. Whoa. Why do you think I stole your money?”

“We know everybody else here, and they wouldn’t do it, and you look like a crook,” she said.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Her hair was damp, darkening the blond strands, rain drizzling down her face.

Jim Waller grabbed his daughter’s arm and tried to drag her off the porch.

Virgil shouted, “Hey, hey. Everybody stop.”

He could see Waller’s wife, Ann, and another one of the kids, a girl, peering at them from the screen door of the owners’ house.

He was loud enough that everybody stopped for a moment, so he said, to Katy, “Johnson does look like a crook, but check his truck. It’s a Cadillac. He’s rich. He owns a lumber mill. He doesn’t need your money. And I’m a cop.”

Johnson turned to Virgil. “Wait a minute, did you say—”

Virgil said to Johnson, “What can I tell you, Johnson?” And to Katy, “What about this money?”

She was still boiling. “My pop money. From selling soda pop all summer. More than six hundred dollars and it’s all gone.” She was getting mad again, glaring at the men.

“Somebody took it out of her chest of drawers,” Jim Waller said.

Then Katy asked Virgil, “What kind of cop are you?”

“I’m an investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“It’s like a state version of the FBI,” Johnson added.

Katy didn’t care. She just seized on the word cop and focused on Virgil. “Could you find out who took the money?”

Her father said, “Katy, goddarnit, he’s here to fish.”

“We’re not fishing with this rain,” Cain said.

Johnson nodded. “He’s right: Why don’t we take a look, Virgie? It’s something to do.”

Damn that Johnson.

They were all looking at him, and Virgil said to Katy, “You know, it’s enough money that you should call the local cops.”

“That’s not gonna help,” she said. “The deputy we got out here, he couldn’t catch a cow on a golf course. His main job is giving speeding tickets to tourists.”

“Let’s take a look,” Johnson said, as Lang and Cain made their way back to their own cabin.

Katy led Virgil and Johnson back to the house, trailed by her father, who kept saying to Virgil, “We really appreciate this, but you don’t have to do it.”

Virgil agreed, but shook his head and said, “It’s okay.”

He asked Katy when she’d last seen the money.

“Day before last. I got ten dollars off the golf course and stuck it in there.”

The Wallers had six children, four girls and two boys. Their house, made of two cabins joined together, had three small bedrooms for the six kids, and one shared bathroom for all six. Virgil guessed those rooms and half of a long living area had been one cabin, while the dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, and another bath had probably originally been in another cabin with a common wall.

On their way to Katy’s bedroom, Jim Waller explained to his wife that Virgil was a cop. To that she started saying, “Oh, geez,” and didn’t stop until Virgil was inside the girls’ room. The bedroom had two beds, a wooden chair, and a chest of drawers, with a window that looked out the back of the cabin toward a line of trees that hid the trout stream.

Virgil, Johnson, Katy, and her parents all crowded into the bedroom and Katy pointed at the bottom drawer of the chest. It contained a couple of flannel nightgowns, winter wear, some shirts, a couple of belts, and a dozen pairs of socks rolled into balls. Three pairs of white athletic socks had been unrolled. Two pair were lying on top of other clothing in the drawer and one pair was lying on the floor.

“I put the money in a pair of white socks. That’s where I always keep it,” Katy said. “It’s gone. It’s mostly in one- and five-dollar bills, so it makes a big lump. I couldn’t believe it when it was gone. I checked all the socks, even the black ones.”

Virgil dug around in the drawer for a moment, then turned and asked Ann Waller, who was watching from the doorway, “Could you get me a little wad of toilet paper?”

“You find something?” Katy asked.

“Dunno.”

He was kneeling by the chest, and a moment later, Ann Waller reached over and handed him the toilet paper. He touched his tongue to it, then dabbed at the side of the drawer.

He asked Katy, “When you were digging around in here, did you cut yourself? Cut your hands?”

She examined her hands, front and back. “No, I didn’t. Why?”

He held up the toilet paper. “There’re some spots of blood in the drawer, and it’s fairly fresh.” He then approached the window and saw that it was unlocked. “You lock this?”

“All the time, when it’s down. It’s always down, unless it’s a really hot night, but then, we’re always here when it’s up, me’n my sister, Liz. The screen’s always hooked, though, all the time. It should have been locked.”

He pushed the window fully open and checked the nylon screen, which had a hook lock at the bottom. The hook was undone and when he pressed his finger against the screen, he found a slit right along the bottom of it.

“The screen’s been cut, to get at the hook,” he said.

Jim Waller was astonished. “Son of a bitch. Somebody broke in? That doesn’t happen around here.”

Virgil said, “You really need to report this.”

Jim Waller said, “To who? Katy’s right about the deputy. Couldn’t you do something?”

“Out of my jurisdiction by about two states,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. How about if Jim and Ann come and sit on my porch for a few minutes. And then Katy, separately. To talk. Johnson can wait in the bar.”

Back on the cabin porch, Virgil said to the Wallers, “I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but with this kind of thing the money is usually taken by somebody in the family. Do you think somebody in the family, maybe one of the kids, might have borrowed it?”

The Wallers looked at each other and then Jim Waller blurted, “No way.”

Ann said, “We don’t have much money, but we’ve been harder up than we are now. Katy was saving that money for school clothes and makeup and things. She’s getting to be that age. We wouldn’t take it.” A lean woman with springy blond hair and big eyes, she was nearly a foot shorter than her husband. She looked tough. Tanned, a little weathered, not an ounce of fat on her. She stood in front of him, arms folded under her breasts, faded blue work shirt tucked into equally faded jeans.

“What about one of the other kids?”

They both shook their heads.

“Never,” Ann said. “We go to church and the kids never miss Sunday school. Even little Nate knows his bible.”

Virgil doubted a three-year-old could quote much out of Proverbs or St. Mark, but kept his opinion to himself. He also did not mention that the church might frown on a fifteen-year-old serving alcohol.

He was told that the four daughters were “good girls” and the only one who’d ever given them any trouble was Katy, the oldest. Liz, Ellie, and Lauren were model children, did well in school, obeyed their parents. As to the boys, eight-year-old Jimmy was “a bit of a handful” but Nate, the baby, near perfect. In fact, that boy had slept through the night at two months and to this day rarely cried.

They talked for a few more minutes, but the Wallers were adamant.

Nobody in the family took the money.

Jim and Ann wanted to stay and listen to Virgil talk with Katy, but Virgil insisted that he speak to their daughter alone, and unhappily they shepherded the rest of their brood inside and closed the door. The girl was still angry as she settled into the chair across from him on the porch, one thin leg bouncing in agitation, rain still drizzling from the sky and gurgling in the leaky gutters.

“Here’s where we have the problem, Katy,” Virgil said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Somebody cut the screen, which means he or she probably entered the room from outside the house. But you say the window is always locked, and it’s not broken, which means somebody from the inside had to unlock the window. Why would somebody cut that screen to push the screen hook out, if he or she could open the window from the inside? It doesn’t make any sense. So here’s my question, do you know if somebody was in your bedroom, who might have unlocked the window without your knowing it, and who then might have come back some other time and cut the screen to get in? Maybe while you were tending bar last night?”

Her eyes went sideways, a hand went to her throat. “Oh, no.” She was slowly shaking her head, almost as if she were trying to convince herself.

“That’s probably the person who took it,” Virgil said. “Who was it? A friend?”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “You can’t tell my dad or he’ll kill me. I mean it. Besides, nothing happened. But he won’t believe it.”

“Tell me.”

She hesitated, then sighed and looked away.

The night before, she said, the rest of the family had gone into town to shop. A boy who lived up the road had come over and they’d sat in her bedroom to talk.

“Like I said, nothing really happened. We were just hanging out.”

She was looking at Virgil directly, nodding, her blond curls bobbing around her face. She seemed earnest.

“I believe you.” But he wasn’t sure. “Do you want to go talk to this kid?”

She nodded again. “Like I said, nothing happened. He’s cute, and we’re friendly, but that’s all.” She must’ve sensed Virgil’s doubts, because she added, “Really. But if he took my money—” Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed as she considered what she’d do to the thief. “I just want my six hundred dollars back. That’s all.”

“Okay.”

The kid’s name was Phillip Weeks, a sixteen-year-old who lived with his father in a mobile home a half mile up the dead-end road that passed the WJ Ranch.

“The place is owned by a rich guy named Drake from Butte, and Phil and his dad are caretakers,” she said. “I don’t go up there because his father creeps me out. Kinda scares me, ya know? I think he beats up Phil, too. Last year, Phil had these big black eyes and he wouldn’t say where he got in a fight, and nobody in school knew of any fight. I think it was his father.”

“The old man’s name?”

“Bart Weeks.” She gave a little shudder.

He hoped she wasn’t right, but her instincts were probably dead-on. “Let’s go talk to your dad and tell him what we figured out. See what he wants to do.”

“Don’t mention that Phil was inside. Liz doesn’t even know. No one does. No one can. If Mom and Dad found out, they’d freak. So just say that we figured it out.”

“I got it.”

Inside the house, the older boy was wrapped up with Legos in his bedroom, the baby asleep, and Virgil caught a glimpse of Liz, one of Katy’s younger sisters hovering near the doorway, pretending to read a book, but probably eavesdropping. Ann braced herself against a counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area and Jim sat in a recliner angled to an oversized but bubble-faced TV tuned into a muted baseball game. Virgil and Katy explained what they thought happened. Without admitting that Phillip had ever been in Katy’s room. The parents bought the story without too many questions, so Virgil didn’t have to lie.

“Never liked that guy,” Jim Waller said, flipping down the footrest of the recliner and getting to his feet. He eyed his oldest daughter and shook a finger at her, “If I ever see that kid around here . . .” He let the sentence trail off, but by the looks of it, Katy got the message just about the time Johnson showed up.

What Jim and Ann Waller wanted Virgil and Johnson to do was to go up the road and confront Bart Weeks, the father of Phillip.

Virgil said, “I’m not a cop here in Montana, I’m just a guy. A guy who’s up here to fish.”

“But you’re a police officer,” Ann Waller said, glancing nervously at her husband. “Wouldn’t someone with authority scare him? Make him tell the truth?”

“It’s not like it looks like on TV. People just don’t open up to cops because they flash a badge.”

“Jim and I, we’re not good at confrontation.”

“We aren’t?” her husband asked, perplexed. Scratching at his beard stubble, he glared at his wife, and Virgil noticed their younger daughter, Liz, shrink farther into the shadows.

Hiding?

“We have a business to run,” Ann reminded him. “Neighbors to get along with.”

“Hell, we’re great at confrontation,” Johnson said with a wide grin. “We’ll be glad to do it.”

“We will?” Virgil asked.

“Absolutely. C’mon, it’s raining, we got nothing to do. Don’t be a pussy.” Johnson glanced at Ann and Katy and said, “Sorry about the language there.”

VIRGIL DIDN’T WANT TO DO it. “That’s why I go fishing, so I don’t have to do this shit,” he told Johnson as they trudged back to the cabin to get their rain suits. The drizzle had increased, puddles widening in the sparse gravel yard, the big Montana sky opening up. “I don’t appreciate you signing me up for this shit.”

“But we’re helping out a hardworking girl,” Johnson said. “I don’t understand how you could even think of saying no.”

“Fine.” But Virgil was still burned.

When they got out to Johnson’s Escalade, Katy, now in a rain jacket herself, was leaning against the rear passenger-side door.

“I’m going,” she said.

There was some talk about that, but she went, because she said if they didn’t take her, she’d walk, and making her walk in the rain would be mean.

The Drake place consisted of a two-story log cabin that sat on a high rocky bank over the trout stream. A hundred-yard-long pool backed up into a natural stone dam. There were two outbuildings. A machine shed, in which they could see the back of a BMW truck and an older Jeep, and another square log building that might be a guesthouse. A huge silvery RV was parked on a gravel spur off the house and a wrist-thick black electric cable snaked from the house to the RV.

“Nice place,” Johnson said, nodding his approval.

“Yeah, he’s rich, Drake is,” Katy said. “The Weekses live right at the end of the road, a little farther.”

They drove on and found the Weeks place, a broken-down single-wide mobile home set up on concrete blocks, well back in a notch in the woods. A stream of smoke seeped out of a can-size chimney on top. Virgil pulled in, and they all got out. He led the way up to the front door, climbing the graying stoop while Johnson and Katy waited below, and rapped on the door.

He heard feet cross the floor inside, and then a man yanked the door open, peered out, saw Johnson and Katy behind him, looked back at Virgil and asked, “Who are you?”

Weeks was a tall, thin man, with ropy muscles in his arms and neck, big battered hands, and small suspicious blue eyes.

“I’m with the MBCA,” Virgil said.

“What the hell is that?”

“The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“Minnesota?”

And Virgil gave him a look at his badge.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Y’re a long way from home.”

He ignored that and said, “Katy Waller here lives and works down at the Wallers’ ranch.” He turned and motioned at Katy. “Somebody stole more than six hundred dollars from her chest of drawers, probably last night. We’re hoping that Phillip Weeks could help us figure out who took it.”

“Can’t help you,” Weeks said. “Little asshole ran off last night, said he ain’t coming back, took his clothes and he’s outta here. And he ain’t coming back. He shows up here again, I’ll kick his ass and throw him right back out. Time he was workin’ on his own anyway.”

At sixteen. Sure.

Weeks started to close the door, but Virgil said, “Do you know if he took the money?”

“Shit. I don’t know about any money,” Weeks said. “I didn’t take it, and I told you, he’s gone. Now get off my fuckin’ porch.”

“Do you know where he might be headed?”

“I don’t know and I don’t give a shit.”

A Montana cop might have had more to say about that, but Virgil didn’t, because he wasn’t one. Weeks slammed the door and Virgil backed down the steps and said to Katy, “I think I believe him. I don’t have any resources here to try to track the kid. If he really took off with that money, he could be on a Greyhound halfway to California or Seattle by now.”

“Goddarnit,” she groaned. “I was gonna buy clothes.”

“On the way out,” Virgil told Johnson, “let’s stop at the Drake place. I’ll ask if anybody talked to Phillip before he left.”

Back down the short road Johnson pulled in behind the RV, gave a low whistle, and said, “A Rosestone recreational vehicle. Never seen one in the flesh, but I thought about buying one of ’em. Those are the Cadillacs of RVs.”

“But you’ve got the Cadillac of Cadillacs, why would you want the Cadillac of something else?”

“Think of where you could go with that thing,” Johnson said, eyeing the big rig, practically salivating.

“No place too far from an interstate highway or a gas station,” Virgil said. “Almost as close to nature as Grand Central Station.”

Virgil and Katy walked up to the door of the cabin, while Johnson made his way slowly around the RV, giving it a closer look, running his fingers over the smooth finish. Virgil knocked, and a minute later, a youngish, soft-faced man opened the door, looked out, and asked politely, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Mr. Drake.”

“I’m Michael Drake.”

He was an inch or so over average height, slender, and older than he looked at first impression. Somewhere around forty-five, he was wearing black slacks with pleats, a black dress shirt, and tasseled black loafers. An expensive-looking watch circled one wrist, a turquoise bracelet on the other.

Virgil told him about the missing money and looking for Phillip Weeks, and halfway through the explanation, Drake started shaking his head. “I haven’t seen Phillip at all this trip. Don’t see him much anyway.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “Have you asked his father about him? He lives with Bart.”

Drake hitched his chin in the direction of the mobile home.

“Yeah, not a lot of help. He thinks Phillip might be off looking for a job.”

There was a fuss out at the RV. A small, round woman in jeans and a sweater had come to the back door. Her short, dishwater hair was spiked and she wore half glasses. Her eyes, over the lenses, were focused like icy lasers on Johnson. “You get away from there. You hear me? Move. Who the hell are you?”

A flustered Johnson backed away, said, “Sorry, there, just interested in the RV.”

“Yeah. For the love of God, don’t go peeking into our windows.”

And she slammed the door.

Virgil said to Drake, “Sorry about that; Johnson really does like the RV.”

“Cheryl gets a little spooky,” Drake explained, casting a what’re-ya-gonna-do smile at Virgil. “She’ll cool off. No worries.”

Virgil nodded, not thinking the woman was going to calm down any time soon. Spooky? More like going ape shit. She was mad. “Thanks for your time, we’ll be on our way.” He motioned to Johnson and they headed to the Escalade.

As Johnson drove Virgil twisted so he could see Katy in the backseat. “Listen, even if the local deputy isn’t any good, you’ve got to report the theft. If they can show this Phillip kid took the money, and he’s not eighteen yet, his old man might be held responsible by a court, and you’d get the money back. Some of it, anyway. Or if your father has homeowners’ insurance.”

“That could take forever,” she said, lower lip extending, looking miserable. Lost in her thoughts she drew on the condensation on the Escalade’s window, and Virgil decided to give her some space as the Escalade bounced down the rutted road to the dude ranch.

They dropped off Katy, then headed into Grizzly Falls, the local town, where Virgil bought a copy of every newspaper the convenience store had, and Johnson bought some tourist crap that he planned to give to his girlfriend. The town was tiered, a newer section built on the crest of a hill, homes and businesses running along the ridge, the older part of town in the lower section spread out on the shores of the river where falls fell across shelves of flat rocks.

They stopped at a restaurant called Wild Wills where a stuffed grizzly bear stood on display in the lobby. Not only did the thing seem to be on guard near the front desk, it was dressed in a witch’s costume, black hat tilted jauntily on its head, the brim dipping below a glass eye, black cape tossed over its huge shoulders, a broom tucked under one forearm. A black pot with steam rising from inside sat beside the thing’s huge feet.

“What the hell is that?” Johnson asked, recoiling as he stared at the bear’s shining claws and teeth gleaming, frozen in a perpetual scowl.

“The official greeter,” Virgil guessed.

“Man, this is one weird fuckin’ town. All those statues of Big Foot lining the street and now this.” It was true, they must’ve passed half a dozen statues of Sasquatches on their way into town, including a ten-foot-tall wooden image in the parking lot of the convenience store where Johnson had bought the touristy crap.

They ordered cheeseburgers and fries and ate them in silence.

On the way back to the dude ranch, Virgil said, “You’ve gone kinda quiet. What’s with that?”

“I dunno,” Johnson said. “Thinking things over, I guess.”

“That doesn’t sound like Johnson Johnson. Thinking things over.”

On the way back, the Rosestone RV passed them, going in the opposite direction.

They didn’t wave.

At the ranch, Johnson said he was going to take a walk.

“In the rain?”

“I can’t tell it’s raining; this is a seven-hundred-dollar rain suit,” Johnson said.

“Still thinking things over?”

“Yep.”

Johnson rubbed the back of his neck and looked across the golf course where two men in Gore-Tex were chipping near a soggy green.

The door to the owners’ cabin burst open and Katy, carrying a waterproof bag, leaped across the porch to dash through the drizzle. Ignoring the rain, she grinned widely. “You guys won’t believe what happened.”

“From the way you’re smiling, I’d say you found your money,” Virgil said.

“Nope.” She was shaking her head. “Phillip’s dad came down here.”

That didn’t sound like good news.

She went on, “He said Phillip called from the bus station and said he was going to Minneapolis and wasn’t coming back. He told his dad he’d taken the money for a bus ticket but felt bad about it. And then Bart Weeks told my dad he didn’t want any trouble, and he wanted to pay it back.” Her grin widened and she blinked against the rain, oblivious to the fact that she was getting wet. “So he did, every penny of it. In cash.”

Virgil said, “That’s a little hard to believe.”

Johnson spread his arms and said, “Hard to believe, but we’ll take it. We’re gold.”

Katy said, “Yes, we are. I want to thank you guys for what you did. Thank you so much.”

Then she looked directly at Johnson.

“I’m sorry I said you look like a crook.”

THE NEXT DAY WAS COOL, the sky still tinged with darkness, the remaining clouds occasionally spitting some drizzle, but they could see stars far to the west, the cloud cover breaking up as night surrendered to dawn. Virgil and Johnson got their gear together and pulled on rain jackets, then took the insulated bag from Ann Waller who had made sandwiches and filled a thermos with coffee for them.

“An extra thanks for helping with Katy,” she explained. “It’s a big deal to her. To us.”

They were on their way to the Escalade for the trip to the river when Dan Cain stepped out on the porch of his cabin with a cup of coffee in his hand and called after them, “Good luck. Leave a couple fish for us.”

Johnson stopped, turned, and asked, “You coming?”

Cain shook his head. “Not yet. That fuckin’ Lang had one too many last night. He’s just getting up now. We’ll be a half hour behind you.”

The river was shallow and quick, with occasional pools, and it was gorgeous, with the stone-cut bank on the far side looking like a piece of petrified wood rising a hundred feet above them, the dawn coming, sunlight glinting on water. As dawn gave way to daylight Virgil spent almost as much time looking at the landscape as he did fishing, and the fishing was decent. A little after eight o’clock they stopped to sit on a rock and eat the egg-salad sandwiches that Ann Waller had made them for breakfast, when they heard a pop from upstream.

The report of a rifle echoed over the water.

They both stared downriver and waited.

No second shot.

Nothing to disturb the silence but the lapping of the water and the cry of a blackbird, its red wing visible in the brush on the shore.

“That was a rifle, a center fire,” Johnson said with a frown. “What the hell was he shootin’ at?”

Virgil didn’t know, and he had no idea what was in season for a hunter here in Montana. “If that was target shooting, the shooter was easily satisfied.”

“I don’t like the idea of people shooting around in heavy brush when there are lots of folks out on the river, fishing,” Johnson said. “It gives me an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. Like we oughta be wearing our blaze orange.”

They finished their sandwiches as the sun rose over the eastern horizon, then climbed back into the boat and went down the river. Fishing. Catching nothing for half an hour.

And then a man started screaming.

“Virgil Flowers. Where the hell are you?”

The voice sounded frantic, scared as hell.

They both looked back upstream, trying to pinpoint its location.

They’d just pulled their boat to the side of the river and were heading toward the sound of the shouting, when Jim Waller, driving a John Deere Gator on what was little more than two ruts in the brush, found them. His face was grim, his lips compressed.

He didn’t bother climbing off the idling utility vehicle but shouted, “Dan Cain’s been shot. He’s dead. For the love of Christ, some dumb ass shot him in the back.”

“You call the cops?” Virgil asked as he and Johnson slogged through the reeds, mud, and bitter brush to Waller’s vehicle.

“Yeah, but they’ll be half an hour.” Waller said. “We told them you were here, they want you to go up and take a look at the body.”

There was nothing to see.

No crime scene.

Virgil’s gaze swept up and down the river as he stood over the body and listened to a barely coherent Lang who had been fishing with Cain, the men in separate boats.

“I don’t know what happened. I mean, he was trailing me down the river about a hundred yards or so.” He was sweating and breathing hard, though it wasn’t from the temperature. Exertion and adrenaline had turned his face beet red. Fear rounded his eyes and he kept swiping at his forehead, wiping away the sweat.

The man was freaked.

As was Johnson.

He wasn’t good with dead bodies, and at the first chance he took off along the road, heading back to the spot where the car was parked.

Virgil listened as Lang explained in short bursts, his gaze traveling from the body to Virgil, along the river’s edge and back to the body.

He had looked Cain over, the shot had gone through his back, exited his chest, probably caught him right through the heart. Good shot, Virgil thought, if Cain really was the intended victim. If the whole thing was an accident, then both Cain and the shooter were damned unlucky. But if it were an accident, why hadn’t the shooter showed himself? Run for help?

A kid? Or just a coward?

Or a cold-stone killer?

Cain had been trailing Lang down the water by a hundred yards. Lang had gone around a bend in the river when he heard the shot. He’d gone on, but when Cain hadn’t reappeared around the bend, Lang, now worried, went looking for his friend and found him out of the boat, in the river, already dead, aground on some shallow rocks.

Lang said he’d dragged Cain’s body to the riverbank and pulled it up on shore. He believed Cain was dead, but wasn’t sure, and he’d run to get help.

“I found Jim, here,” he said, pointed at the owner of the ranch who was standing near his Gator, taking in the entire scene. “And we called 911.”

“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 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 was 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.”

“I’ll call them on the phone.”

“And blow a perfectly good excuse to go to Vegas?”

“Nice try. I’m on my way in. Find out what you can about a guy named Virgil Flowers. Surfer-dude type who works for the MBCA.”

“Already done. I figured you’d want background on the guy you were meeting.”

“And?” Regan asked, spying a coffee kiosk and turning in.

“He’s kind of a big deal. One of their best cops.”

“Really,” she said. “Thanks.”

She ordered two oatmeal cookies and a coffee, then zipped across traffic and ended up following the slowest pickup on record up Boxer Hill. So Virgil Flowers was a big deal in Minnesota, she thought heading up the hill.

Who would have guessed.

The truck in front of her lugged down even farther, and she considered flipping on the light bar to get him out of the way. Instead she called and checked on the baby, talked with her husband a few minutes, hung up and ate one of the cookies all the while following the lumbering truck.

Finally, back at her desk, she picked at the second cookie and sipped at the coffee while she fired up her iPad and clicked onto Google maps. She found out that Las Vegas was fourteen to fifteen hours away, if driven straight through. Flowers and Johnson had seen the RV on the road almost twenty-four hours earlier. When she called the Luxury America, the manager of the RV rental company told her, “Got it back at eleven o’clock this morning. That was three days early, actually. Surprised me. But they paid an early-return penalty, no problem.”

“Credit card?”

“Let me look.” She heard clicking as he worked his own computer. “No. They paid cash, but they had to provide a credit card and government ID before they could take it out. Hold on a sec. Wait. You’re sure you’re a cop?”

“I looked at my badge about three or four minutes ago, so I’m pretty sure.”

“I’d give you the information, if I could see it, but I can’t see it.”

She provided the guy her badge number and invited him to call the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department. She’d just taken the final bite of her second cookie when her desk phone jangled and she answered it. Sure enough, Luxury America was calling, the manager having satisfied his need to verify that she was who she said she was.

“Sorry about that. We have to be supercareful. These days with all of the hacking and identity theft and fraud.”

“I get it,” she cut in. “Tell me what I want to know.”

“The credit card you’re asking about was issued to Clark and Delores Foley of Riverdale, California.”

“Was there another woman with them, named Cheryl?” She checked her notes. “In her fifties, dirty-blond spiked hair, under five five, a little on the heavy side. Sometimes wears half glasses?”

“No other woman that I saw, but that sounds a lot like Delores.”

She scribbled down the address and a contact number. “Did they have any kids with them?”

“Yup. Good-looking kids, too. A boy and three girls. I think. Tweens or younger. I asked them if they were in the movies.”

“What’d they say?”

“Mmm, nothing. Their mom hustled them off to their car.”

“Delores? A little old for kids that age, isn’t she?”

“Could be their grandmother, I s’pose.”

“You got a tag on the car?” she asked. “In your rental agreement somewhere.”

“No, but the car was registered in California, I remember that much. It was an SUV, Japanese, I’m thinking.”

“That’s pretty broad.”

“Yeah, sorry. But let me tell you what I do have. When somebody comes in to rent an RV, we’ve got a video camera out of sight behind the desk. We don’t tell ’em we’re taking their picture, but we are. It goes back a month. We’ve got them on video.”

Finally, a break.

“Find that video. Somebody will come by to pick it up, either the Vegas cops or the FBI.”

“You got it.”

They talked for another minute, but the manager didn’t have much more. As soon as she hung up she rang the FBI, identified herself, got switched to the Violent Crimes Against Children program, identified herself again to the woman who answered the phone, got switched to an agent, identified herself a third time, and told him about the sequence of events.

She hadn’t always had the best of luck with the feds, and wasn’t that crazy about them. But in this case the agent named David Burch said, “I’ll get on to the Vegas office and have them pick up the tape and get the manager to ID these guys. If we’ve got good head shots, we’ll run it through a facial ID program and see what pops up. Most of the time, nothing does, but if this is as high end and well organized as you’re making it sound, then maybe something will. These people sound like they’ve been doing it for a while.”

“How long before I hear?”

“Tomorrow morning, probably. We’ll push it hard. I hate these guys. Hate ’em,” Burch said.

“Amen.” Her anger hardened at the thought of the kids trapped in whatever the hell scam it was. “So, David. Can I call you David?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you can call me Regan or Pescoli. The ma’am thing makes me feel old. The thing is, I need to talk to you off the record.”

“We’re off.”

No hesitation.

Deciding to trust him, she launched into her story and told him about Virgil and Johnson, and about Phillip Weeks. “I have a feeling that the Weeks kid may be running from whatever was going down. The sex, or porn, movies, pictures, whatever.”

“Nothing good.”

“You got that right. I’m going to try to corner him tonight and see what he knows. He’s also running from his old man, who could be in on it. I think the dad uses his son as a punching bag.”

“Needs to be put in jail.”

Agreed. “While I’m handling the kid, Flowers and Johnson are going up to snoop around the Drake place where they saw the RV. Anything in particular they should look for?”

“If they were making movies or taking photos, we could use pictures of the inside of the studio, or whatever they’re using as a studio. We got a million miles of digitized film. What we’d be looking for is identifiable marks or structures inside the studio, like an identifiable window with a particular kind of latch. Anything like that. We can run a new image against the digitized film and it’ll kick out any exact matches. If we get a match, we’ll be all over them.”

“I’ll tell Flowers. I don’t know exactly how reliable these two are.”

“I started running Flowers as soon as you mentioned his name,” Burch said. “The DEA has been trying to recruit him for years. He’s been involved in some heavy stuff in Minnesota. There’s a note here that says he doesn’t much care for guns.”

“That’s the guy,” she said.

“Looks to me like you can lean on him,” Burch said.

“Good to know,” Regan said.

So Mr. Hang Ten was the real deal.

“Something else. He’s a part-time writer, mostly for outdoors magazines, but he’s had stories in both the New York Times magazine and Vanity Fair. Play your cards right—”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she said dryly.

She rotated the kinks from her neck and decided she had to head to Butte, which was about a hundred and fifty miles from Grizzly Falls. That meant over two hours by car. She didn’t look forward to the drive, but had to go for it. The case had taken a serious enough turn that even the feds were scrambling. She stopped by Alvarez’s office. Before her maternity leave she and Alvarez had been partners, but they hadn’t been reassigned together.

Not yet, anyway.

Alvarez, always thin and lithe, was doing some yoga pose over her desk, her jet black hair rolled into a tight bun and gleaming under the ever-humming fluorescent lights. The position looked painful and ridiculous, but Alvarez swore by it. Alvarez had always been Regan’s diametric opposite. Into health foods, green tea, worked out at a gym and, of course, yoga.

“I’m stopping at home to see the kids and Santana for a sec, then heading for Butte. On the Daniel Cain case, the fisherman found shot in the river near the WJ Guest Ranch.”

Alvarez nodded.

“It’s gone from homicide to a much wider investigation. Got the feds involved. Zoller can bring you up to speed. Aside from what I’m doing we’ll need to look into who would benefit from Cain’s death. Insurance, wife involved in an affair, him involved in an affair, business problems, known enemies. The working theory was that he was killed by mistake, but I want to cover all my bases.”

Alvarez rolled back her desk chair, rotated her neck, then her shoulders. “I’ll work with Zoller.”

“If you find anything interesting, call my cell.”

After stopping by the house, depositing the bag of breast milk into the refrigerator and spending half an hour feeding and cuddling the baby, she kissed her husband good-bye, assured him that she would be fine and that, though she missed her family terribly, she loved her job and would call them from the road.

“We have to talk about this,” Santana said.

He was taller than she by half a foot, a cowboy type who actually worked on a ranch and was tough as nails. His hair was black, his eyes dark above a hawkish nose, his smile, when he rained it on her, an irreverent slash of white.

“We already did.”

“Then we need to talk about it again. You’re exhausted, the baby needs you, the older kids, too. Hell, I need you.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Make it sooner,” he said and kissed her on the lips, a long slow kiss that turned her inside out, just as it had the first time. She weakened, wanted to melt against him, wanted the feel of him inside her, but that would have to wait.

“I’ll try,” she promised.

Then she took off.

On the way to Butte, she called Flowers and brought him up to speed as the miles rolled by. She told him what FBI agent Burch had said about getting photos of the inside of the studio.

“That’s what we need. Pictures of the place. Something that will nail them, connect the RV or house or some landmark up there to pictures that have already been taken.”

“We’ll go up there after dark,” Flowers said. “Give us a call later on, around midnight.”

IN BUTTE, REGAN FOUND PHILLIP weeks sitting in the corner of a drunk tank, where the Butte cops had put him after picking him up at the bus station. A Butte detective named Charlie Tarley unlocked the door and pushed it open. Weeks, looking terrified, slowly rolled to his feet.

Tarley, African American and looking as if he worked out regularly, said to him, “You got a visitor.”

She stepped forward, into the kid’s range of vision, and held up her badge. “Detective Regan Pescoli. Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department.”

Fear showed in Weeks’s eyes.

He was tall, unnaturally thin, weathered in the way of street people, farmers, and lumberjacks. He bore a fading bruise below one eye.

Tarley said in a calm voice, “C’mon out, Phillip. Detective Pescoli made a long drive to see you. We all need to chat.”

“What’d I do?” Weeks asked.

“You probably took six hundred dollars from a young girl at the WJ Ranch, but your old man paid it back, so that’s not it,” Regan said. “But I think you might know why you want to talk.”

Weeks shoved both hands in his jeans pocket and stared at the floor a second, then looked up through the dark strands of the hair falling over his forehead. Pinning Regan with his suspicious gaze, he said, “He paid it back?”

She nodded.

Weeks shook his head. “Where’d he get the money? He was drinking and didn’t even have enough cash to buy a box of cereal. I know he didn’t have six hundred dollars.”

“He gave it back. All of it. So you’re good on that score,” she said. “C’mon out of there.”

Shuffling reluctantly Weeks followed Regan along a short hallway to an interview room, Tarley trailing behind, talking on a cell phone. The square, windowless room had a table and four chairs. Regan sat directly across from the boy with his downcast eyes, Tarley on her right.

“I’m going to read you your rights,” Tarley said.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Just listen,” she ordered. “Hear him out. This is all part of the deal.”

Weeks sullenly let Tarley go through his spiel. When the detective finished, the room was silent apart from the rush of air through the vents. She peered at Weeks for a long intense moment and remembered when her own son had been held for questioning. She felt some empathy for this kid, whatever he was wrapped up in.

“Tell me about Michael Drake, and what he’s doing up there in the woods.”

Weeks’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. He brushed his long hair back from his eyes and shrugged. “He comes up and fishes.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

A muscle worked in the boy’s jaw. He looked at Tarley and said, “My old man paid the money back. You heard that. Can I go now?”

Tarley said, “If you burglarize a place, you don’t get a free pass for giving the money back. And then there’s the murder.”

Weeks’s mouth dropped open. He blinked and stared at Regan again. “Who was murdered?”

“A completely innocent fisherman from North Dakota,” she said. “We believe whoever did it shot the wrong guy. The man they were trying to shoot saw a nearly naked girl in that RV at Drake’s, and whoever was behind it decided they had to get rid of him.”

Weeks stared at the table. “Oh, God. Shit.”

“What do you know, Phillip? Who are those people?”

He glanced wildly around the room, as if searching for a way out. “They’ll kill me, too. If I talk. They said it. That they’d kill me if they ever saw me talking to a cop.”

Tears welled in his eyes.

She said, “It’ll be hard for them to kill anyone, when they’re doing life without parole.”

“You can’t keep me safe.”

“I can.”

He looked to Tarley who nodded his assessment.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay.”

A moment of silence passed.

“What happened to them kids?” Weeks asked. “The girl that the guy saw. The one who was almost naked. What happened to her? Is she there? Is she okay? Are the other ones okay?” He was frantic now, both legs bouncing crazily under the table. “Carla and Al are mean people. Are the kids still up there?”

“I thought the woman’s name was Cheryl,” she said. “Or maybe Delores.”

“Not if they were in that RV. That was Carla and Al,” he said urgently.

All his arguments about not talking seemed to have vanished.

“Do Carla and Al have a last name?”

“I think Al’s is Dickens or, no, Dicker. That’s it. I don’t know Carla’s. I never heard. I don’t know much about them.” He squeezed his eyes closed in concentration. “Except maybe they’re from Nevada. I think I heard that once, but I’m not sure.”

“How often have you seen them at Drake’s?”

“A bunch. They come up four, maybe five times a year, in the RV.”

“And what do they do?”

He looked at Regan as if she were slow on the uptake. “They make movies, ya know, and take pictures either in the cabin, Drake’s house, or out in the woods around there.”

“You’ve seen them?”

He nodded.

“Children having sex?”

“Sometimes, the older ones with Al, mostly, and with each other,” Weeks said, his voice going low.

“Were you ever involved in that?”

Weeks looked away, scared, maybe, shamed for sure. Then he nodded. “Not for a long time. Not for a couple of years. I got too old. Are you going to put me in prison?”

Her heart bled for the kid, for what he’d been through. Who knew where his mother was, or if she was alive or dead. The old man abused and beat him, then used him for profit, forcing him to pose and have sex.

“No, Phillip. What we’d like to do is to get a complete story from you. Everything you know about Michael Drake and Carla and Al, and then, someday, we’ll want you to talk about it in a courtroom,” she said. “But you won’t be going to prison. You’re a victim here.”

But the people who did this?

Hell wasn’t bad enough for them.

Tarley got sandwiches, chips, and soft drinks, and though there was an out-of-sight recorder covering the interview room, he’d also brought out a small digital recorder that Weeks could see. They talked for an hour, leading the kid through a basic statement. As Regan had expected, Weeks had left his home before Flowers, Johnson, and Katy Waller had been to Weeks’s father’s trailer and to Drake’s log cabin, so Phillip knew nothing about the events that led to the shooting of Cain. His father knew about the child porn but had nothing to do with its production.

“He doesn’t know anything about cameras or lights or any of that shit,” he said demolishing a ham and cheese, then washing it all down with a huge swallow of Dr Pepper. “He just took care of the property when Drake wasn’t there.”

His father had guns, Weeks said. Both rifles and handguns, and he was a hunter.

“It’s not a big deal though. Everybody up there’s got guns. Everybody hunts. That’s why you’re up there,” he said, then finished the final half of his sandwich and tore open a small bag of Doritos.

“So Drake has guns?” she asked.

“I never seen one. Maybe he’s the one guy around Grizzly Falls who doesn’t hunt. He fishes, though. And he runs the cameras.”

“Is he sexually involved with the kids?”

“He doesn’t do the sex. He makes the movies and sells them.”

“Where does he get the kids?”

“Dunno.”

“You never spoke to any of ’em.”

“If I did, my dad would beat me. He’s got a special belt.”

She couldn’t wait to put Bart Weeks behind bars.

She asked a few more questions, but Phillip had told them everything he knew. When they were done, Tarley told Weeks that he’d be placed in a cell by himself, for his own protection. He’d be allowed to have most of his own belongings in the cell and would be fed separately.

“Almost like a motel,” the detective said. “Keeping you safe. You’re too valuable to be walking around where somebody might hurt you.”

After Weeks had been put away, Tarley walked Regan outside where night had fallen, the sky stretching dark above the illumination of the streetlights.

“I think you got ’em.”

God, she hoped.

She checked her watch. Just after ten p.m. Flowers and Johnson would probably be in the woods around Drake’s place. Given Phillip Weeks’s statement, and the probable imminent arrest of the RV couple, they had enough evidence to raid Drake’s place, could easily get a warrant, and probably didn’t need anything that Flowers and Johnson might turn up.

She called them from the front steps of the police station, but there was no answer. She left a message and went to look for a motel where she could wait for them to call back.

VIRGIL AND JOHNSON HAD WALKED up the road to Drake’s cabin, staying to the side, where they could step back into the brush if anyone came along. Nobody did, and when they crept up the road across from the cabin, they couldn’t see the BMW they’d noticed on their first visit, though the Jeep remained in the open garage.

Virgil whispered, “Garage first. See if the other car’s here.”

They made a long circle through the forest around Drake’s cabin, pausing every minute or so for one of them to tell the other to be more quiet. That was almost impossible. The brush was so dense that they were constantly tangled up in it. Virgil finally took out a flashlight and splashed its beam on the ground at his feet, tilted back enough that Johnson could see where to step. They emerged behind the garage, with the secondary cabin to their left. The garage had a back window and, through it, they could see that the second and third stalls were empty. Nothing inside but some lawn-care machinery and the Jeep.

“Now what?” Johnson whispered.

“Let’s take a look at the small cabin.”

“Could be alarmed.”

“If it is, we run.”

Johnson handed Virgil a piece of cloth.

“What’s that?”

“Bandanna. Cover your face. Like a cowboy outlaw. In case there are cameras.”

“Jesus, Johnson. Just because we’re in Montana.”

But Virgil did it anyway.

He was carrying Johnson’s gun, not because he wanted to, but to keep it away from Johnson. A tire iron was Johnson’s weapon because he didn’t want to go unarmed. Virgil also had his Nikon, with the 14–24 zoom lens, in a day pack.

At the corner of the garage, they sat and waited, watching the house. There were two lights on inside, one in back, one in front, but none on the second story. A satellite dish sat on the roof, but there was no visible light from an operating TV. The lights never flickered, as they would if somebody walked between them and a window, and after five minutes, Virgil whispered, “Let’s go.”

They snuck, bent over, to the cabin, and stopped, crouching, by the corner and out of sight from the house, listening again. Nothing but the sounds from crickets and frogs, along with a bit of wind sighing through the trees rimming the property. Not a peep from within the house. After a while, Johnson said, “Weird.”

“What?”

“No windows on this side. I didn’t see any windows or a door on the back, either. Only windows in this place are on the front.”

“Cover me,” Virgil said.

“With what? A tire iron?”

He laughed. “Okay. Keep an eye out.”

Silently, Virgil crawled past the front of the cabin, staying in shadow, to the first window. He sat still for a moment, then rose up to look through the pane.

Couldn’t see anything.

A minute later was back with Johnson.

“What’d you see?”

“Nothing. It’s a fake window. It’s a board with some curtains painted on it.”

Johnson said, “Cover me.”

“What?”

But Johnson was already headed for the front of the cabin. A minute later, Virgil heard a crackling sound, like wood splintering and then Johnson saying, low voiced, “C’mon.”

Through the still damp weeds and grass Virgil crept the length of a cabin, where he found that Johnson had jimmied the door with the tire iron and had gone inside.

Virgil followed. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Let me close the door.”

With that done, Johnson turned on the flashlight app of his iPhone and panned the illumination around the inside of the cabin. There was a bed in one corner with an end table and a couple of rolled-up carpets next to it. Three rolls of seamless paper lay along one wall, and a fourth roll was mounted on a roller behind the bed. Camera stands with umbrellas and soft boxes were crowded across the room along with their power supplies.

Virgil turned on his own cell-phone light, and said, “I need photos of the bed and the walls.”

“The walls. That oughta do it,” Johnson said, looking at the knotty pine planks that crawled up the sides of the room. “They’re like the world’s biggest fingerprints.”

Virgil pulled off his pack, took the camera out, mounted the compact flash, set everything for automatic, and started shooting.

Quickly.

Efficiently.

He shot everything twice, then packed up.

Two minutes later they were gone, and twenty minutes after that they were talking with Pescoli.

THE PHONE RANG JUST AS Regan was getting out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, picked up her phone, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“It’s Virgil. I’ve got the photos.”

“Send ’em.”

“I will. But the connection out here at the ranch, in the bar, is slow. Wi-Fi’s not the latest in technology. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be sending you nine shots.”

“I’ll move them to the FBI guy.”

“Call me in the morning, when you hear back.”

“First thing,” she said and couldn’t wait.

She threw on her pajamas and waited, pumping milk again, of course. Fortunately, the motel had a minibar fridge.

The last of the photos came in a half hour later. They were, she thought, some of the most boring photographs she’d ever seen. But they were sharp, and exactly what the feds had asked for. She sent them on. After a quick call to Santana explaining that she was staying over and would be home the next day, she charged her phone, turned in, and thought about her family, her job, and the balancing act that was her life.

The feds called at seven o’clock the next morning.

Regan was still asleep and for a second was disoriented, fumbling her phone off the nightstand before answering.

“What time is it?”

Burch, the FBI agent, said, “Nine o’clock.”

“Or seven o’clock, Mountain Time,” she said around a yawn.

She needed coffee.

Then remembered she was still on decaf.

“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” she said into her cell. “Did you see those photographs?”

“I saw them two hours ago, at seven o’clock Eastern Time, because I get up at dawn.”

“Good for you. What do you think?”

“It’s not what I think. It’s what I know. This is large. We got an ID on the two people in Vegas. We’re not sure we’ve got their real names, but we know them as Carla and Allen Dickerson.”

“I got those names last night from the Weeks kid.”

“We’ve had warrants for the Dickersons for years but haven’t been able to nail them down. We thought they were somewhere in Central America. Anyway, we got their address from the Vegas guys, we’ll be hitting that apartment—it’s a condo, really—in a couple of hours. These are bad, bad people. In fact, the only worse guy I can think of is probably this Drake guy you say you’ve got up there. We’ve got flashes of those knotty pine walls in twenty-three films so far, the worst kind of porn you can imagine, which means he’s probably made a couple hundred of them. We had no idea who was shooting it. We need this guy. Can the Weeks kid identify him?”

“Not only identify him, he’s actually worked for him in a porn film when he was a kid.”

“Ah, shit. There’s a kid who’s going to need some help.”

“Yeah. We got him safe for the time being.”

“So we’re flying in a heavy SWAT team from Denver, but they probably won’t get there until early afternoon,” Burch said. “I’ll be there at the same time; I’m on my way to National right now. The director actually got me a Justice Department jet. We’d like you to wait for us in Butte. That’s as close as we can get to your target, and then guide us up there. We don’t want to spook this Drake guy, but it’d be good if Flowers could check on him. You know, cruise the place. The thing is, we’ve got nobody named Michael Drake on file. We’ve looked at the county clerk’s records up there, and they go back to a post office box with a fake name. If we lose him, we might be losing him for good.”

“Alternatively, I could go up there right now and bust his ass,” she suggested.

“I appreciate that, but one-on-one, too much could go wrong. Like I said, we really don’t want to lose this guy. He’s a genuine, no-shit monster.”

“I’ll call Flowers and tell him.”

“One other thing. I’m sending you an encrypted link to a file here at the bureau. In another e-mail you’ll find a code number to open it. You won’t be able to download it. It’s read only. A selection of clips from the knotty pine films. You ought to know what we’re talking about.”

“I’ll take a look,” she said. Then added, “Maybe.”

“If you want to get in touch with me, it’ll have to be in the next half hour,” Burch said. “After that, I’ll be up in the air and the connections to this phone won’t be good. I’ll have other com equipment, though, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”

Regan didn’t really want to look at the films, but thought she had to. She sat staring at the iPad for a minute, then finally opened the mail from Burch, found the code number, copied it, went to the other e-mail from him, and pasted the number in the small square of the encrypted link.

Six links.

Six minutes.

Children.

She didn’t even want to speculate on their ages.

Mostly little girls, with an occasional weeping little boy.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she whispered, tears in her eyes.

She didn’t know if she was praying or cursing. Her stomach turned over and something ugly took hold of her heart and twisted.

“You sick, sick bastard,” she whispered thinking of the man she’d never met, the man who went by Michael Drake. When she was done, she clicked away and received a warning that said, When you leave this link, you will not be able to reenter without obtaining a new authorization and a new password.

Thank God.

She closed the link.

That was something no one should ever see.

The feds were late, as usual.

Burch had called from the plane in early afternoon.

“Had a problem.”

“Tell me.”

“We hit the condo, the Dickerson-Foley-whoever condo in Riverdale. The Foleys are retirees, eighty-four and eighty-two, respectively. Never had the Visa account the RV was charged to. That account was active, but was paid online, no paperwork, so they never knew. The driver’s license data goes to Clark Foley, but he hasn’t had a license for four years.”

“What, they pulled these old people at random?”

Damn, damn, and double damn.

Her fist clenched the cell phone in a death grip.

“Worse than that. We showed the Foleys the Dickerson photos, and they identified them as a couple named Smith who live in the same building, directly below the Foleys. We got a new warrant and hit that place. But it was empty, except for one of those cheap cell-phone-linked security systems. As soon as our guys cracked the door, a silent alarm went to a cell-phone number. So the Dickersons, whoever they are, could look at full-color moving pictures of our guys coming in. We didn’t find it for three or four minutes after kicking the door.”

“Shit,” she muttered.

“One good thing. We got a quick fix on the cell phone, which was in Green Valley, Arizona, about forty-five miles north of the border. It looks like they’re making tracks for Mexico. We were on to the border guys in ten minutes, and they had pictures five minutes after that. I think we got a good shot at them.”

Burch told her that he’d be arriving after four o’clock.

“My plane didn’t have quite the speed or the range that I thought. I kinda got shuffled off to a cheaper machine. We had to stop in Minneapolis to refuel and it took forever.”

“What about your SWAT team?”

“They should be there before me, but not much.”

VIRGIL GOT THE CALL.

The Dickersons, who were really Ned and Jennifer Boniface, last known address Bakersfield, California, had been picked up, without incident just before reaching the border. The kids with them were safe and being identified, each with a story to tell. No word yet on if they were part of a bigger ring, but the feds were checking. He and Johnson set up across the river from Drake’s house at midafternoon. The BMW was still parked in the yard, but the Jeep was missing.

He called Pescoli to tell her.

“We’ve got the plates, we’ll find them. Problem is, about everybody who doesn’t drive a pickup out here drives a Jeep.”

“You exaggerate.”

But then she drove one. Fairly new, with lots of power, fastest model available.

“Maybe so, but not much,” he said.

“I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I saw some of the film that Drake apparently shot, stuff that was filmed for sure in that back cabin. It’s sick. The worst.” She hesitated, felt that same terrible feeling she had when she’d viewed the porn. “I’ve dealt with a lot in my career as a cop, but this is worse than murder. Drake is worse than a killer.”

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he probably did murder somebody in cold blood.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Pescoli said. “It’s the homicide that will get him the needle.”

“When was the last time someone was executed by the State of Montana?” he said. “I wouldn’t count on that. But we can put him away for life.”

“Not good enough,” she said.

REGAN MET THE SWAT TEAM on the tarmac at Bert Mooney airport. Burch arrived forty-five minutes later. They all shook hands, went to a prearranged conference room where Burch reviewed the action with the SWAT team, which had been briefed before leaving Denver, and then they moved off to three waiting Chevy Tahoes, rented from the local car agencies, loaded the team’s gear, and found the road to Grizzly Falls. She led the way in her own Jeep with Burch in the passenger seat.

He was a slender, tough-looking man who, it turned out, had spent six years with the Navy SEALs before joining the FBI. He skillfully extracted a brief autobiography from her and told her a little about himself. He was smart and engaging, but she got the impression that he badly wanted to be in on the raid for bureaucratic reasons. Taking down the knotty pine filmmaker would be a major coup, a step toward promotion.

Nothing wrong with that, she thought.

Except it annoyed her.

She and the SWAT team would have pulled off the raid in broad daylight, if they’d left without waiting for Burch.

Her cell phone rang.

“Got a break,” Flowers said as she answered and negotiated a curve as they headed west. “Drake just got back. He’s around behind the house where we can’t see him, but I got a good look at him when he came in. He’s there. Where the hell are you guys?”

“We’re still about an hour out,” she said.

“We could take him right now,” Flowers said. “You could get the sheriff to deputize me.”

“Let me check on that,” she said, though it galled her to think Blackwater would be in on the takedown.

She passed Flowers’s suggestion on to Burch, who shook his head. “No way. I spent some more time reading Flowers’s file on the way here, and he has a way of making simple things complicated. Let me talk to him.”

She handed the phone to Burch. “We appreciate what you’re doing, but we mostly need intel. Eyes on the place. You were an army guy, right? So you know what we need.”

She thought she heard a protest from Flowers, but Burch clicked off and she kept driving, her jaw set, her fingers tight on the wheel, the Montana countryside flying past, the sun sinking lower in the sky.

Flowers called back forty minutes later and said, “Drake just went up to Weeks’s place in the Jeep. We could see him turn in, but we can’t see what’s going on.”

“Call us back if anything changes,” she said and Burch nodded.

As the miles had passed he’d grown more silent, his eyes steady on the road, he, like she, getting ready.

Twenty minutes later, another call. “Drake’s gone back to his place. I don’t know, Johnson and I are talking it over, I think he might be packing up or something. We can see him moving around inside the house, but we can’t tell what he’s doing.”

“We’re coming,” she said. “We’re five minutes out. Hold on.” She glanced at Burch, then hit the gas.

“Stay on the line,” she said to Flowers and punched the phone to speaker, so both she and Burch could hear.

Then she drove like hell.

Nothing changed during the last few minutes of the drive. According to Flowers, Drake was still at his house when she, leading the caravan, drove past the dude ranch. The sun was now down below the mountains, but the sky was still bright.

She pulled over when she was certain the vehicles could no longer be seen from the ranch, and the SWAT team armored up and went through a preraid routine, checking weapons, communications, and armor.

Burch, now out of his sport coat and slacks and into jeans, boots, and armor, told her to stay back. “I know you want to go in, but we don’t know you. I don’t mean to be offensive, but we’ve all trained for this and we’ve got communications and lights and there’s lots of firepower out there. We don’t want an accident.”

She was pissed. “No way. That bastard is mine. I’ve been right on top of this.”

Burch put a finger to his lips. “We really need you to wait here. Believe me, you’re going to get a lot of credit in our reports. You wait here, talk to Flowers on your cell phone. If anything critical comes up, we’ll leave a radio. You call me.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about credit,” she said, her lips barely moving, rage burning through her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the porn films again, the scared children, the predatory adults. “I want in.”

But Burch wasn’t having any of it. “We’re doing this military style. You know the area, so you call me. Any communication you get from your office, even from Flowers goes through you. I’m not taking any other calls. Only from you. You got that? Pass it on to Flowers. We have to run this tight. He calls you. You pass on the important information. Same with any calls from your sheriff. We do this my way.”

Five minutes after they pulled over, and five hundred yards down the road from Drake’s house, the SWAT team, with Burch at the point, slouched up the shoulder of the road, looking more like a squad of SEALs in Afghanistan than a bunch of cops in Montana.

And she was stuck back here.

Her teeth ground together and she had trouble reminding herself that being a cop was being a part of a team. Maybe Santana was right, maybe she should quit. She didn’t need this shit.

But she loved it.

Flowers called again. “Where in the fuck are you guys? Something’s going on. You gotta get up here. Drake is ready to move.”

She reined in her frustration and tried to be rational. The important thing was to take down Drake.

“The troops are on the way in, on foot,” she said into the phone. “They’re five hundred yards down the road. They’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Can you call them?”

“I can.”

Virgil said, “Tell them that. Hey, what the hell is he doing, Johnson? What? Sorry, talking to Johnson. What? Fuck. Look, Drake is up to something. He’s loading up the Jeep, if a Jeep comes down the road, that’ll be him.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Regan said. “Hang tight, they’re coming.”

VIRGIL AND JOHNSON WERE ON the far side of the shallow river, up on the bluff, looking down at Drake’s cabin. They saw him throw what looked like a couple of large duffel bags into the Jeep, along with a rifle. Dusk crept through the trees and crawled across the land.

Drake was moving fast, jogging from the house to the studio cabin, where he spent a minute or two, then back to the house and then to the garage. He was carrying something bulky, but they didn’t have binoculars and couldn’t really tell what it was.

“He’s carrying it like suitcases, but they look too small to be suitcases,” Virgil said to Johnson. “I think we’ve got to work in closer.”

“He could see us. The slope’s mostly rock, not much cover. The feds are just down the road. I kinda like this cop shit, as long as I don’t have to look at bodies. Maybe I oughta get deputized when I get back home.”

“You have no qualifications, except possibly some insight into the criminal mind,” he said.

“Don’t need any qualifications to get deputized,” Johnson said. “I’d say about two hundred dollars ought to get me a badge.”

“Where in the fuck are the feds?” Virgil asked, getting a bad feeling about this.

Drake jogged back to the house from the garage, no longer carrying the suitcases. They could see him through the front windows of the houses, apparently waving another set of the squatty suitcases around.

“Ah, Jesus,” he said squinting. “Those aren’t suitcases. Those are gas cans. He’s getting ready to torch the place.”

“And the feds don’t know it.”

He speed-dialed Pescoli.

She picked up on the first ring.

“He’s gonna torch the place,” he warned. “You got no time, tell the feds, they got no time. He’s gonna torch the place right now.”

“I’m calling them.”

And she was gone.

Down below, Drake hurried out of the house with a handful of what might be paper or rags, ran to the garage, lit whatever it was with a lighter, then threw the flaming ball into the garage. With a whoosh, the building exploded into flames.

“Damn,” Virgil whispered as the building was engulfed.

Drake had apparently doused the BMW, which began burning with enthusiasm. The conflagration crackled to the sky, smoke and flames spiraling upward.

“Where the hell are they?” He searched beyond the inferno, looking for the SWAT team. “Where the fuck are they? I gotta do something.”

“You heard Burch,” Johnson reminded him.

Drake’s next stop was the studio.

Johnson said to Virgil, “Gimme my gun. Maybe I can make him dodge around until the cops get here.”

He didn’t stop to think about it and handed the gun over. The range was ridiculous for Johnson’s concealed-carry, short-nosed nine. But Johnson opened fire, and Drake froze for a moment, then threw a handful of burning whatever into the studio. The building exploded just as the garage had, flames twisting and hissing. Johnson fired fifteen times, but Drake ignored it, ran to the house, threw in the last ball of fire, and the house, obviously doused in gasoline as the other buildings went up quick, flames reaching skyward, lighting the area.

Virgil hit speed dial to Pescoli. “He’s on the move.”

“Where?” she asked, her own voice rising. “What the hell is happening?”

“He did it, he burned the place. Where is the team?”

“It’s there. It should be there.”

“Oh, crap. Drake’s gone for the Jeep,” he said, watching as Drake hopped into the rig and tore out, spraying gravel and speeding away, not toward the main road and into the SWAT team.

“He’s in the Jeep, heading away from the main road. Driving toward the dead end. Where is he going?”

He watched the vehicle stop at the Weekses’ place, though with the coming darkness and trees, his sight line wasn’t clear. He heard shouting and within seconds flames shot skyward.

“He just blew up the Weekses’ mobile home.”

“Where is he? Still there?” she asked, her voice tense.

“I can’t see. Call Burch. Tell him.”

She hung up and Virgil said to Johnson, “Bet we find a body in Weekses’ place.”

“No bet,” Johnson said.

Below them, they spied the headlights of what had to be Drake’s Jeep, heading due west, away from the main road, toward the dead end.

“Where the fuck is he going?”

Virgil had a sinking feeling. He called Pescoli and when she picked up, said, “Is there some kind of timber road at the end of the dead end? A logging or mining road? Something that no one uses?”

He heard the yelling of the SWAT team now.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” There was dread in her voice. “Yes. The Long Mining company had some access road here, been closed for years.”

“Why else take off in the Jeep? Why torch the BMW? The faster vehicle.”

“I’ll call Burch.”

Again she rang off.

“You’re probably right,” Johnson, who’d overheard his part of the conversation, said.

“Here come the feds.”

Below them the SWAT team streamed up the road toward the burning buildings, in good military order.

One minute too late.

REGAN WAS WAITING IN HER Jeep when flowers called again. He gave it to her in a nutshell. The burning buildings, the stranded SWAT team, his belief that there might be a back way out.

“And he’s got a rifle. I think he couldn’t let the rifle burn, because we’d still be able to check it, and he doesn’t know we never found a slug when Cain was shot.”

“I’m going,” she said. “No way is he getting out of here.”

“Careful,” Flowers said. He made no effort to talk her out of it, though she’d be one-on-one with Drake. “Don’t forget the rifle. He’s armed.”

She didn’t know of a back road out but knew if there was one, Drake couldn’t go east because of the river and the bluff on the far side. He’d have to go west, sooner or later, to cut the highway, and it probably wouldn’t be far.

She cranked up the Jeep and wrestled it around onto the road, tromped on the accelerator, and sped off. By the time she burned past the dude ranch she was doing sixty. She hit the highway and turned right, skidding around the corner, not caring, then rolled to the top of the nearest ridge, and waited.

She thought about the implications of all that fire. No fingerprints, no DNA, no knotty pine. Thoughts swirled. Adrenaline pumped.

To hell with the feds.

Again, she thought of the innocent kids, of the pictures she’d seen, the images she could never erase from her mind. Then her own kids, the older two when they were in elementary school, the baby.

Her back teeth ground together and she heard a rushing in her ears, her own blood pumping through her veins. For a second, everything went dark with the insidiousness of it all.

She blinked again. Focused. Amped up.

No way would she let that sick fuck get away.

She had her window down, listening for the sound of an engine. She squinted and smelled smoke. Although the sky was bright, the woods were getting darker, and Drake had to turn on his headlights to plow out of the timber road. She saw him coming when he was still fifty feet back, and then he bounced out of the trees, down through the roadside ditch and up on the highway. He turned right, as she had, and sped away from her. She followed, staying back for a minute, then hit her flashers and dropped the hammer. She knew these roads, that was her advantage, that and a bigger engine in her Jeep.

Drake made a run for it.

Speeding through the ever-closing night, his taillights burning bright.

She drove faster, feeling the tires hum and her heart pound as images of those innocent kids played through her mind.

On a straightaway, heading to a sharp corner, she roared up behind the older, overmatched Jeep until she was no more than six feet behind him. At the corner he swung wide, hit gravel on the far shoulder, a tire catching on the edge of the asphalt. As she slowed she watched his Jeep spin back across the road, headlights arcing, cutting through the night.

“Die, you bastard,” she said, hitting the brakes.

Drake’s Jeep slid off the side of the road, the front-right headlight smashing against a pine, the hood crumpling with a groan, an axle breaking.

Her vehicle slid to a stop on the shoulder.

Service weapon in her hand, she stepped onto the asphalt and screamed at his vehicle.

“Get out. I want to see your hands, and I want you out.”

He didn’t move.

“Now! Get out.”

She advanced, crouching, wishing she was wearing a vest.

He kicked open his door, then slowly, hands over his head, he emerged from the Jeep. He was dressed in black from head to toe. Black dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes.

“What’s this about?” he called out. “You nearly killed me. You some kind of psycho cop?”

“It’s about all those children,” she said, her throat raw. “Keep your hands over your head, and back away. I want you out in the headlights, or, I swear to God, I’ll shoot you.”

“I don’t know anything about any children,” he called to her, but did as he was instructed, and backed away. “I got a bad fire up there, my phone doesn’t work, I was going to get the volunteer fire department. Could you call them for me?”

“Shut up,” she said.

She was at the back of his Jeep and saw through the plastic window the rifle stacked up between the two front seats, ready to use.

“You were going to shoot your way out, if you didn’t get clear, weren’t you?”

So why hadn’t he tried to shoot her? Something wasn’t computing.

“I wasn’t going to shoot anybody,” Drake said, hands still over his head. “I’ve never committed a crime in my life. The worst thing I’ve ever done is let that fire get out of control, and I don’t even have insurance. I think that goddamn Weeks started it, I found out he was doing something in my cabin while I wasn’t here.”

“That’s not what Phillip Weeks told me,” she said.

She pushed the Jeep’s door open, switched hands on her pistol, and used her right hand to fish the rifle out of the Jeep.

“Phillip Weeks is a crazy, drug-addled boy,” Drake shouted. “His old man has fed him opiates since he was ten years old. Nobody’s going to believe a doper like him.”

She looked at him and said, “You’ve almost got me convinced. You might walk.”

“Might, bullshit. I’ve got the best attorneys in California. You’re going to be lucky to have your job when they’re finished with you. The best thing you could do right now is forget all this.”

She looked down at the rifle.

Large-caliber bolt action, like the gun that had killed Cain. She pulled the bolt back an inch, then shut it, seeing the brassy flash of the cartridge going back into the chamber.

“You know, you killed the wrong guy down in the river. The guy who saw the girl in the RV. He’s still back there.”

In a split second Drake reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol.

She fired.

He went down, his handgun flying from his grasp.

The rush in her ears was overpowering, the anger flooding through her veins nearly blinding her. Without thinking, she turned and using one hand, brought the rifle up and fired a single shot through the windshield of her Jeep.

Glass shattered.

“What are you—” Drake began, sputtering as he watched, white-faced, bleeding. “No. Wait. I didn’t do anything.”

She wiped down the stock and trigger with the bottom of her shirt.

“Wait,” Drake said as the sound of sirens cut through the night. “Those kids. They were better off with me. They wanted to do it. I gave them a place to live and food and made them movie stars. They lived like kings and queens.”

Rage swelled.

Blackness pulled at her vision.

Her finger curled over the trigger of her service weapon.

“For Christ’s sake.” Drake scrambled for his gun.

She shot him twice in the chest.

VIRGIL SHOUTED DOWN AT THE Feds, “He’s gone up the gravel road, away from the county road.”

The SWAT team, in the light of the fires, started jogging up the road toward Weeks’s cabin.

“He’s not there anymore,” Johnson muttered.

He and Johnson crashed through the brush on the bluff, waded the shallow river, and ran down the road to the dude ranch, where everybody staying at the ranch, Katy, her siblings, and her parents, were all standing on the edge of the golf course, looking at the fire in the sky.

Jim Waller called to them as they passed, “Is that the Drake place? What’s going on up there?”

They didn’t bother to answer, but piled into Johnson’s Cadillac and headed out to the highway.

“Gotta be a right turn,” Johnson said.

A mile up the road, they found Pescoli sitting next to the right front wheel of her Jeep. She was holding a tissue next to her eye, showing a little blood. Up the road, they could see Drake, spread-eagled in the headlights of his Jeep.

He and Johnson jumped out of the Cadillac and they hurried up to her. She was white faced, her eyes a little glassy, but she answered.

“I’m not bad. I shot him twice, maybe three times. He thought we had him. He had nothing to lose by trying to take me out.”

Her hand was shaking a little.

“He was right about that,” Virgil said and saw the smashed-up Jeep and the body lying in the grass near the shoulder. “You check him?”

“Enough to know we don’t need an ambulance,” she said, chalk white, her voice distant, almost disembodied. She cleared her throat and focused on Virgil, as if seeing him for the first time. “I wish we could have taken him alive. I wish we could have gotten him in court.”

“Probably better this way,” Johnson said, avoiding looking at the corpse. “What if he’d gotten off? If what everybody says is true, the cocksucker deserves to be dead.”

He and Regan both gave Johnson a look, and he muttered, “Okay. Sorry about that ‘cocksucker.’ ”

Virgil stood up from checking the body and looked at Regan and Johnson.

“But you’re right. He deserves to be dead. And now he is.”