“Not your usual brand.”
“Mr. Kumbaya, huh.” She shrugged. “If you do happen to stumble across something, armed or not, I’ll be on my cell.”
“Me ’n’ Johnson will talk about it,” Flowers said and he actually seemed faintly amused at her ire.
• • •
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.