“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