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 l
ooking 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.”