Lee Child - MatchUp

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.