Deserves to Be Dead

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  LISA JACKSON AND JOHN SANDFORD

  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 ba
ck 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.”