Rough country

15

ROBERT PLANT AND ALISON KRAUSS were working their way through "Please Read the Letter" as Virgil backed his boat down the ramp into Stone Lake. The music suited the morning and his mood, and he sat and listened to the last bit of the song before he cut the engine.

Another day with flat water, but the sky had turned, showing a flat gray screen of cloud that could make some rain before the day was gone. He climbed down from the truck, into the smell of fish scales and backwater, clambered up on the trailer tongue and walked out to the bow of the boat, grabbed the bow line and pushed it off. The boat slipped off the trailer and he pulled it around to the side of the ramp and tied it off to a bush.

After parking the truck and trailer, he locked up, unlocked again, got his raincoat, peed on a shrub, climbed in the boat, pulled it out with the engine, then swung around and headed for the south shoreline.

There were muskies in the lake, but he wasn't going to worry about that. Instead, he went looking for a weedy bay, something with lily pads and snags, found one and started flipping out a weed-less bass lure, looking for either northern pike or bass. He wouldn't keep anything, so he didn't much care what he caught, or, indeed, whether he caught anything at all.

FISHING CALMED HIS MIND, slowed him down: the sheer, unimportant repetitive quality of it, flip and reel, flip and reel, worked as a tranquilizer, but the possibility of a strike kept him alert. The combination of alertness and quietude was good for thinking in general. Sometimes, when he was buried in facts, he couldn't see the forest.

And he knew how to work that state of mind.

Instead of attacking the facts, he let them float across his consciousness as he worked the bait around the flat purple-and-green lily pads. Halfway down the bay, a white heron watched him with its yellow-rimmed snake eye, until it decided that Virgil wasn't a threat and stalked on after a breakfast frog.

A wise man-a cop named Capslock-once observed that he'd never seen a murder with a large amount of money attached to it, in which the money wasn't important. On the other hand, Virgil hadn't ever seen a murder that involved an intense sexuality in which the sexuality wasn't involved.

The same was not true with the mentally challenged: he'd seen lots of cases that involved obviously crazy people, the first suspects in everyone's minds, in which the crazy people weren't involved at all. But that was no guarantee-sometimes obviously crazy people did do it.

SO: he had a murder case in which there was large money involved in at least two unrelated ways.

1. McDill's lover, Ruth Davies, was apparently about to be dumped and disinherited by McDill. By killing McDill, Davies would inherit a hundred thousand dollars and whatever she could loot from the house, which, Virgil thought, might include a few expensive artworks. If McDill had lived, she wouldn't have gotten a dime.

2. Zoe Tull was apparently trying to scratch together enough money for a bid on the Eagle Nest, and McDill may have been a threat to that plan. Though Virgil liked Zoe, he couldn't eliminate her as a possibility. She'd complained about the door of her house being forced, but there was no apparent reason that anyone would do that. Had she faked the break-in as a naive tactic to distract him, to suggest another agency working in the murder? Possibly. But, he had to confess to himself, he didn't think she'd killed anyone. He simply liked her too much to think that.

AND: sex was all over the place.

Zoe and Wendy. Wendy and Berni. Wendy and McDill. McDill and Davies. McDill and Jared Boehm. The Deuce and the dogs? Maybe not. But how about one of the Slibes, and Wendy? Odd things happened on those remote farm sites in the long dark winters…

Berni might fear that she was about to be dumped by both her employer and lover; she must have some idea that if the band was going to make it, she wouldn't be making it with them… or with Wendy. And she had no alibi for the time of the McDill killing; and Constance Lifry had been a threat to move the band, as well.

Virgil had also gotten a bad vibration from the Deuce, when the strange man had talked about the dogs. What had he said? "Them bitches want it all the time, when the heat's on them."

Sounded like a line from a rap song. And he'd said it with a little too much relish.

Of course, he was talking about bitches. Virgil had noticed in the past that country people tended to use specific words for the different sexes of specific animals: goose and gander, ram and ewe, boar and sow, dog and bitch, words generally felt to be archaic in the now-urban populace.

Or maybe they just like using the word bitch in public.

FINALLY: he had at least one, and perhaps two, people with uneven mentalities, to be politically correct about it. The Deuce and Wendy, brother and sister. The Deuce wore his problem like a cloak. In Wendy, Virgil had only seen it as a quick flash, but it was there, he thought.

Which meant that Slibe I should be on the list as well, since he was probably the force that bent Slibe II and Wendy.

Slibe.

Slibe had said something that had tickled Virgil's brain a couple of times. He thought about that, about what he'd been doing when he heard whatever it was, still couldn't find it, and let it go.

HE LET ALL of it cook through his brain as he worked down the bay, around the corner of it, past the docks of a half-dozen lake cabins. Mind drifting.

A fish of some kind took a slash at the lure, but Virgil missed it, went back to the same spot a minute later, got hit again, but this time, hooked up. Small bass, maybe a foot long. He unhooked it, slipped it back in the lake, leaned over and rinsed his fingers in the cool lake water.

And thought: Davies.

I can eliminate her, if I stop fucking around.

He looked around, trying to figure where he was from the Eagle Nest. Not far… He checked his cell phone and got two bars, looked at the time: 7:45. Davenport wouldn't be at the office yet. He called Davenport's home, got his daughter, Letty, told her to take the phone back to Davenport's bedroom.

"This better be something," Davenport groaned into the phone. "Do you know what time it is?"

"Yeah. Time to get up. Everybody else has been up for hours: so shut up, and call Jenkins or Shrake. I need those guys to lean on somebody for me."

"Aw, man… all right, all right. I'll get one of them to call you back. You're on your cell?"

"Yeah. Quick as they can."

HE HUNG UP and at that instant, he got it-what Slibe had said that tickled him.

Slibe had said that he was thinking of going to Wyoming to shoot prairie dogs. Said it like he'd done it before. But a real dog-shooter wasn't going out there with a worn-out semiauto.223 with open sights that couldn't shoot inside four inches at a hundred yards. Nor would he be taking the pump.30-06, or the twelve- or the twenty-gauge shotgun, or the.22 or the old Ruger pistol that had also been in the gun safe. Could possibly take the.308, he supposed, but that wasn't usually used on prairie dogs. Too big, too expensive.

So Slibe had a prairie-dog shooter. Very likely a.223, but a bolt action with a big scope on it. Nothing like it had been in the gun safe.

Slibe, Virgil thought, had another gun. And since he should not have known what kind of gun was used to kill McDill, he shouldn't have had any reason to hide it.

And he was hiding it.

Virgil started to whistle. The ice was going out…

What else?

HE FISHED HIS WAY past the Eagle Nest dock and was coming up on the pond where McDill got shot, when his phone jingled. Shrake. "Whatcha need, big guy?"

"I need you and Jenkins to lean on an emotionally fragile lesbian."

"We can do that," Shrake said. "What do you want from the miserable bitch?"

Virgil told him, and Shrake said, "Okay. Now, let me ask you something, since you're the resident cop-genius. I'm thinking if I got some fake stainless-steel braces for my teeth, you know, that I could put on and take off, they'd make me look way crazy. I saw a guy my age yesterday, walking through the skyway, talking on a cell phone, with braces. He looked like a complete fruitcake. If I got some and grinned at people, showing these things off…"

"Two thoughts," Virgil said. "One: people already think you're nuts, so it'd be a waste of effort. Two, if you put braces on, and somebody busted you in the mouth, they'd break off all your teeth, instead of maybe one."

A moment of silence. Then Shrake said, "Maybe I should recon ceptualize my attack persona."

"Whatever," Virgil said. "You wanna break down this woman for me?"