Free Deadline by John Sandford Page A

down again. “He was as happy as I’d ever known him to be.”
    “How about the drugs?” Virgil asked.
    “He used some. He had one of those orange pill bottles, and it never changed. It said Prozac on it, but it wasn’t Prozac. But it wasn’t powder, it was pills, and I believe it was some kind of speed. I don’t think he was dealing, though—never tried to sell me anything, anyway. I never heard from anybody else that he was a dealer. We do have a few dealers around town. I don’t use myself, except a little pot on Saturday night.”
    “Vike Laughton kinda hinted to me—”
    “There’s a snake in the grass. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could spit a brick,” she said.
    Virgil said, “Hmm.”
    “What did he hint to you?” she asked.
    “That Conley was dealing. He said he’d started drinking again.”
    “I bet Vike did it. Killed him,” McComb said. “He was trying to direct you away, to make you think Clancy got killed in a dope deal.”
    “That’s not a very charitable thing to say about a neighbor,” Virgil said. “Why would he kill his only employee?”
    “That’s for you to figure out, right?”
    “I could use a little help . . .”
    “Well, I don’t have any, about that,” McComb said. “But it only makes sense. Nobody else in town really had much to do with Clancy. He was not a big socializer, especially since he quit drinking. Didn’t have any real friends, that I know of.”
    “You’re sure he quit drinking?”
    “I’m sure. I last saw him, mmm, maybe a week ago. He was dry. He wasn’t even worried about it—about going back. Didn’t even talk about it anymore.”
    They chatted for a while, but she didn’t have much that was relevant, other than her belief that Vike Laughton had something to do with the killing. Virgil finally closed his notebook and stood up, fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Think about everything that Conley ever talked about—if you could point me at that story he was working on, or somebody who might know about it . . . just keep thinking about it, and call me if anything occurs to you. Especially if you can think of the singer.”
    “I will,” she said. As they walked to the door, she asked, “Did anybody tell you what I do for a living?”
    “They shared some rumors,” Virgil said.
    “You don’t care?”
    “I don’t like it, because I think it messes people up, but I’m not interested in doing anything legal about it,” Virgil said. “It’s a situation I don’t have a good answer for.”
    “Yeah, well, if you ever start feeling lonely, you could inquire about the law officer introductory discount,” she said.
    Virgil stopped. Dark underbelly. “Does that coupon get used much?”
    “Everybody has his needs,” she said, sounding like a therapist. “Even cops.”
    —
    B ACK IN THE CAR, Virgil thought: Laughton and Purdy both had ridiculed the idea that Conley might have been involved in a serious story—but he apparently had been, if he’d been telling the truth to McComb. And if he’d been telling the truth to McComb about drinking, then Laughton had been lying to him. On the other hand, he might have been a hapless loser, bragging to the only woman he could get in bed, to give himself a little shine.
    He got on the phone and called a BCA researcher. “Sandy, I’ve got a murder down in Buchanan County—”
    “I heard.”
    “I’d like you to take a look at the victim’s state tax returns, see how much money he had coming in. Dig around, see where else he worked, you know, as far back as you can go. Maybe check his Social Security records. His name was Clancy Conley. . . .”
    He also asked her to peek at the tax returns from Vike Laughton: “He says most of his income flows from a paper he runs down here,the
Republican-River
. I’m mostly interested in what other sources of income he has, investments and so on. And take a look at his deductions for property taxes, see if