Deserves to Be Dead (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“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.