Deadline (5 page)

“Hell, just take it—we’re not gonna get anything off it,” Alewort said.

Virgil thought that himself, so he took the camera and slung it over his shoulder. On the way out, he noticed another thing that he hadn’t seen on the way in—sitting on a kitchen chair, half under the table, was a plastic computer stand, of the kind used to lift a laptop to eye level, while the user typed on a keyboard at hip level. Virgil wouldn’t even have known what it was, if he hadn’t once had one
himself. He reached under the edge of the kitchen table and felt an under-desk keyboard tray. He pulled it out and found a Logitech wireless keyboard and wireless mouse; the keyboard was a Mac version.

“What?” Purdy asked.

“He was home from work, and went for a run, but didn’t bring his laptop home. At the same time, he has a pretty complete workstation here. That’s . . . odd.”

“Probably left it at work,” Purdy said. “Ask Vike about it.”

“Mmmm.” Virgil thought,
Vike
.

“Wouldn’t have an Internet connection out here—no cable, and the only satellite dish is for TV,” Alewort said.

They moved back outside, not to mess up the place any more than they already had, and Virgil told Purdy, “I’ll get in touch with the people on the list. You should send a couple deputies around to talk to neighbors, see if any of them heard gunfire in the last few days.”

“I’ll do that,” Purdy said. “Call me when you get done with the interviews, and we’ll trade information.”

Before he left, Virgil gave Purdy and Alewort a lecture on tires and tire swings.

“You see this?” he asked. “You know what this is?”

“A tire swing?” Alewort guessed.

“Good guess, but wrong,” Virgil said. “It’s a mosquito hatchery. If you were to hire a really expensive engineer to design a mosquito hatchery, he’d spend a couple million bucks and come up with a used tire. They are sturdy, they are protective—no mosquito fish, no purple martins getting in, no bats—they collect water, and
because they’re black, they absorb the sun’s rays and keep the water warmer than it might otherwise be. Unless you’re in the middle of a drought, you cannot find a tire laying out on a riverbank or hanging from a tree that doesn’t have water inside it, and mosquitoes.”

“Well . . . thank you for that,” Purdy said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

—

B
ACK IN HIS TRUCK,
Virgil hauled his laptop out of the back, plugged in the memory card, called up the Lightroom program. Lightroom began loading the contents of the card, and a moment later Virgil was looking at eighty photographs of a computer screen with a different bunch of numbers on each of them, but nothing that identified where it was from, or what the numbers meant. Johnson’s office sawmill was only about a mile away, and he had a decent-quality printer, so Virgil drove over and walked into the office.

Johnson was out in the woods, but his girlfriend, Clarice, was there, and she made prints of the photos: “That’s an Excel spreadsheet, but I can’t tell you what’s on it. It’s about expendables. The codes will go out to the various products. The last part might be diesel fuel.”

Virgil looked down at the meaningless lists and asked, “How’d you figure that out?”

“Because there’s a category called DF, and then there’s some numbers on the right which is about what we pay for wholesale diesel fuel for the trucks,” she said. “Maybe a little higher, but close.”

Virgil underlined the DF category and Clarice, leaning over the counter, tapped one of the photos—“He was being sneaky about it. You never did say who took these.”

“No, I didn’t,” Virgil said. “But it was Clancy Conley, who was found shot to death in a ditch over on Highway A. Been dead a few days.”

“Really,” she said.

“You don’t seem shocked.”

“Didn’t really know him,” she said. “But maybe I am a little shocked.”

“You said he was being sneaky. Why do you think he was being sneaky?”

“Well, if you look around the edges of these pictures, you see it was dark. He was taking pictures in the dark,” she said.

“Maybe you should have been a cop,” Virgil said.

“Nah. I couldn’t put up with the bullshit,” Clarice said.

“You’re living with Johnson Johnson, and you can’t put up with bullshit?”

“Got me there,” she said. “He is a bullshit machine. But he gets things done.”

—

V
IKE
L
AUGHTON WAS
a short, fat man with a pale, jiggly face who should have gone to Hollywood to get acting roles as corrupt Southern politicians. He sat in a wooden office chair with worn arms, in front of a rolltop desk with a laptop sitting on an under-desk shelf, and hooked into a big Canon printer. Framed photos hung on the wall behind the desk, all with a light patina of dust. Some of them were news shots, others were pictures of Vike as a younger man, getting plaques for one thing or another—Jaycees Young
Businessman of 1984, Kiwanis Distinguished Service Award. None of them were recent; things must have slowed down since the turn of the century.

Possibly, Virgil thought, he was being unfair, but he doubted it.

“I was sorry to hear that he was killed,” Laughton said. “The sheriff called and told me, and I can’t say I was completely surprised. The only reason I kept him around was because he did good work when he was clean, and I paid him shit—but he was an addict, and he was buying drugs, and I suspected he’d come to a bad end. I thought he’d die of an overdose, or in a car accident. Getting shot, that’s something else. . . . I don’t know where he was buying his dope, but I knew he was doing it. If you hang around with those kinds of people . . .”

“You know any of the local dope dealers?”

“No, I don’t pay attention to that,” Laughton said. “There’s some around—marijuana, anyway. We had a kid suspended from the high school when they found a bag of weed in his locker. We’re a river port, so there’s always a few lowlifes going through. Those guys who work on tows, they’re a different breed entirely.”

Conley’s job, Laughton said, was to write about a hundred and fifty inches of copy a week, on any subject, and provide a half-dozen photos of anything. They didn’t do online. “We’ve had more mist-on-the-river shots than you could shake a stick at,” he said. “When he’d go off on a toot, I’d have to do his job, along with mine. I’ve put everything in the paper except the dictionary.”

Laughton’s main job, he said, was collecting the advertisements from local stores. “We’re one of those papers where, if the IGA
goes out of business, I’ll be working as a Walmart greeter the next week. So Clancy wrote two-thirds of the copy and took all the pictures, and I wrote the other third and collected the ads.”

“I wondered about the possibility that he might have been working on a story that got him in trouble,” Virgil said. “Would you know anything about that?”

“Virgil, Conley didn’t do anything serious. He was incapable of it. He was a lost soul, trying to get through life as easy as he could. And I have to tell you, there are not many stories in the
Republican-River
. That’s not what we do here. We have obits, and the occasional drowning, sometimes a house burns down, and boys go off to the army and navy, and we do the county commission and the town council and the school board . . . election night is always big. But we’re not up there investigating the president.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t wandering off the reservation? Trying to redeem himself, or something?”

Laughton looked perplexed for a moment, then said, “No, no, no. Something else, Virgil, that you should know about, from the wider world of journalism. Journalists get killed in wars, and by accident, but they don’t get hunted down by people they’re investigating. Not in the USA, anyway. That’s movie stuff.”

“All right.” Virgil looked around the office and asked where Conley worked—there wasn’t much room and only one desk—and Laughton heaved himself to his feet and led the way through a curtained doorway into a wide dim room at the back, filled with piles of undistributed papers. A metal military-style desk sat in a corner, with a table next to it. Plugs for another Canon printer and a couple small speakers lay on the desk. Vike nodded at it. “Feel free.”

Virgil went through the desk, found a checkbook with a couple of unpaid utility bills tucked under the cover, a book of stamps, a few pieces of computer equipment—a dusty USB hub, some cables, a CD disk containing an obsolete copy of Photoshop—and other desk litter. No laptop.

“Couldn’t find a laptop up at his trailer,” Virgil said. “You know where it might be?”

“He carried it around in a black nylon backpack. He did half his writing down at Stone’s Coffee Shop. Should have been at his house, or in his car, anyway.”

“Wasn’t there,” Virgil said. “A Macintosh, right?”

“Yeah, one of those white ones. Older. You think that means something?”

“Yes, I do,” Virgil said. “He was out jogging when he was killed. Could have been some crazy guy, looking for somebody to kill—but not if Conley’s laptop is missing. They would have had to stop at his house, and risk breaking in to get it. Though, there was no sign of a break-in. Might want to look for somebody with a key . . .”

“Well . . . I don’t know,” Laughton said.

—

L
AUGHTON HAD ONLY ONE
suggestion for the direction of the investigation: “Like I said, I paid him shit, and when he wasn’t working, I didn’t pay him anything. Still, he managed to hang on, buy gas, pay the rent, and drink. I don’t know exactly how he did that. I don’t think he got enough money from me. I’m wondering if he might have been your dope dealer? He knew everybody in town, so he’d know who the local buyers would be.”

“I’ll check into that,” Virgil said. “Thank you. That’s a possibility.”

—

V
IRGIL DIDN’T LIKE
two things about the interview. The first was his sense that Laughton had processed Conley’s murder too thoroughly, in too short a time—didn’t ask enough questions about it, didn’t ask about the investigation, didn’t speculate about alternate explanations of what might have happened. At the same time, he seemed exactly like the kind of McDonald’s-coffee-drinking hangout guy who’d do all of that.

The second thing was, Laughton had spent a good part of the interview poor-mouthing, and judging from the paper itself, and Laughton’s shabby office, he might have had reason to do that. Which didn’t explain why there was a very new Nissan Pathfinder parked outside his office.

Virgil had been shopping for a replacement for his five-year-old 4Runner, and knew that the Pathfinder—which looked pretty optioned-out, including a navigation system—cost something north of $40,000.

But who knew? Maybe Laughton had inherited money or something. And the possession of money, or the ability to get a truck loan, didn’t seem to have much to do with a guy getting shot in the back.

—

V
IRGIL HAD INTENDED
to drop in on the other people on his list, but before he could get started, Johnson called and said, “We got a mutiny going on. We need to meet with some of our guys.”

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“They know about the dogs on the south hill. They’re getting their guns together, they’re going in.”

“Aw, Jesus, where are they?”

“At Tom Jones’s place.”

Virgil got the location and drove over in a hurry. At Jones’s house, he found Johnson arguing with four men in camo, including Winky Butterfield.

All of them turned to look when Virgil drove in, and when he got out of his truck, Butterfield said to Johnson, “Goddamnit, you weren’t supposed to tell him.”

“I got no choice. Virgil’s my guy and I can’t turn my back on him,” Johnson said. “He’s got his reasons for working the way he is.”

“What reasons?” one of the men asked. Virgil found out later he was Jones.

Instead of answering, Virgil asked Johnson, “Can you trust these guys? They got any relations up Orly’s Creek?”

The men all looked at each other, then Butterfield said, “No, none of us do,” and Johnson said, “Yeah, you could trust them. Are you going to tell them?”

Virgil said, “Listen, men. This is supposed to be top secret, but I’m telling you anyway. You tell anybody else, you could go to prison for a long time. Anybody not want to hear what I’m going to say, you better walk away. If you listen, and you tell anyone, including your wives, and the word gets out, we will track it down, and you will go to prison.”

The men all looked at each other again, then Butterfield said, “What the hell are you talking about, Virgil?”

“Anybody walking away?” Virgil asked.

They all shook their heads, and Virgil said, “Okay. Johnson and I went up there and scouted the valley.”

“Didn’t know that,” Jones said.

“’Cause we didn’t tell you. We didn’t find the dogs, but we did find a commercial-sized meth lab. The place is under surveillance by the federal government right now. As soon as we nail the people running the lab, we’ll go looking for the dogs.”

One of the men smiled and said, “My goodness. That is a reason.”

“But what about the dogs?” Butterfield asked. “Goddamn meth labs are all over the place—the goddamned dogs are like my goddamn children.”

“Look: that’s the reason we have you guys sitting out by the river, watching people coming and going—we don’t want to let the dogs out of there,” Virgil said. “We think they’re up on the south hill, which is hard to get at, but we can hear them barking at night. So as soon as the feds move, which has to be any day now—I’m kind of surprised that they haven’t gone already—we’ll be up there after the dogs. And if somebody tries to move them before then, we should see them.”

“They could be torturing them,” Butterfield said.

“Probably not, if they’re gathering them up to sell them,” Virgil said. “Look, guys, give me a couple more days, and we’ll be all over the dogs.”

Once again, they all looked around, then Jones said, “Two days, Virgil. Then we’re gonna have to do something.”

—

J
OHNSON CAME
and sat in Virgil’s truck while he made a call to Gomez: “Anything happening up there at all?”

“Yeah, we saw a guy go up there yesterday in one of those Gator utility vehicles,” Gomez said. “He was dropping stuff off, it looked like. I think they’re getting ready to roll some smoke. You getting antsy?”