Read Online Deadline by John Sandford - Free Book Online

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 YoungBusinessman 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 IGAgoes 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