Rough country

2

The moon was dropping down toward the horizon, the bottom edge touching the wisps of fog that rose off the early-morning water. Virgil Flowers was standing in the stern of a seventeen-foot Tuffy, a Thorne Brothers custom musky rod in his hand, looking over the side. Johnson, in the bow of the boat, did a wide figure-eight with an orange-bladed Double Cowgirl, his rod stuck in the lake up to the reel.

"See her?" Virgil asked, doubt in his voice.

"Not anymore," Johnson said. He gave up, straightened, pulled the rod out of the water. "Shoot. Too much to ask, anyway. You ain't gonna get one in the first five minutes."

"Good one?"

"Hell, I don't know. Flash of white." Johnson looked at the moon, then to the east. The sun wouldn't be up for ten minutes, but the horizon was getting bright. "Need more light on the water."

He plopped down in the bow seat and Virgil threw a noisy top-water bait toward the shore, reeled it in, saw nothing, threw it again.

"With the fog and stuff, the moon looks like one of those fake potato chips," Johnson said.

"What?" Virgil wasn't sure he'd heard it right.

"One of those Pringles," Johnson said.

Virgil paused between casts and said, "I don't want to disagree with you, Johnson, but the moon doesn't look like a Pringle."

"Yes, it does. Exactly like a Pringle," Johnson said.

"It looks like one of those balls of butter you get at Country Kitchen, with the French toast," Virgil said.

"Ball of butter?" Johnson blinked, looked at the moon, then back at Virgil. "You been smokin' that shit again?"

"Looks a hell of a lot more like a butterball than it does like a Pringle," Virgil said. "I'm embarrassed to be in the same boat with a guy that says the moon looks like a Pringle."

You need a good line of bullshit when you're musky fishing, because there're never a hell of a lot of fish to talk about. Johnson looked out over the lake, the dark water, the lights scattered through the shoreline pines, the lilacs and purples of the western sky, vibrating against the luminous yellow of the Pringle- or butterball-like moon. "Sure is pretty out here," he said. "God's country, man."

"That's the truth, Johnson."

Vermilion Lake, the Big V, far northern Minnesota. They floated along for a while, not working hard; it'd be a long day on the water. A boat went by in a hurry, two men in it, on the way to a better spot, if there was such a thing.

WHEN THE SUN CAME UP, a finger of wind arrived, a riffle across the water, enough to set up a slow motorless drift down a weedline at the edge of a drop-off. They were two hours on the water, halfway down the drift, when another boat came up from the east, running fast, then slowed as it passed, the faces of the two men in the boat white ovals, looking at Virgil and Johnson. The boat slowed some more and hooked in toward the weedline.

"Sucker's gonna cut our drift," Johnson said. He had no time for mass murderers, boy-child rapers, or people who cut your drift.

"Looks like Roy," Virgil said. Roy was the tournament chairman.

"Huh." Roy knew better than to cut somebody's drift.

The guy on the tiller of the other boat chopped the motor, and they drifted in a long arc, sliding up next to the Tuffy.

"Morning, Virgil. Johnson." Roy reached out and caught their gunwale and pulled the boats close.

"Morning, Roy," Johnson said. "Arnie, how you doing?"

Arnie nodded and ejected a stream of tobacco juice into the lake. Roy, who looked like an aging gray-bearded Hells Angel, in a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, if a Hells Angel ever wore one of those, said, "Virgil, a guy named Lucas Davenport is trying to get you."

"You tell him to go fuck himself?"

Roy grinned. "I was going to, until he said who he was. He told me to break into your cabin and get your cell phone, since you wouldn't have it with you. He was right about that." He fished Virgil's cell phone out of his shirt pocket and passed it across. "Sorry."

"Goldarnit, Roy," Johnson said.

"Probably got no reception," Virgil said. He punched up the phone and got four bars and Roy waggled his eyebrows at him.

"I tell you what, Virgil, there ain't many things more important to me than this tournament, so I know how you feel," Roy said. "But Davenport said there's a murdered woman over at Stone Lake and you need to look at her. That seemed more important."

"You know her?" Johnson asked.

"No, I don't," Roy said.

"Then how in the heck could she be more important?" Johnson asked. "People die all the time. You worry about all of them?"

"Kinda wondered about that myself," Arnie said. To Roy: "We're losing a lot of fishing time, man."

ROY AND ARNIE MOTORED OFF and Virgil sat down, Johnson bitching and moaning and working his Double Cowgirl as they continued the drift. Virgil stuck a finger in his off-ear and punched Davenport's home number on the speed dial. Davenport answered on the second ring.

"You on the lake?" Davenport asked.

"Yeah. Two hours," Virgil said. "We've seen two fish."

"Nice day?"

"Perfect." Virgil looked around in the growing light: and he was right. It was perfect. "Partly cloudy, enough breeze to keep us cool, not enough to bang us around."

"Virgil, man, I'm sorry."

"What happened?"

"A woman got shot by a sniper at Eagle Nest Lodge on Stone Lake, over by Grand Rapids. Her name is-was-Erica McDill. She's the CEO of Ruff-Harcourt-McDill, the ad agency in Minneapolis."

"I've heard of it," Virgil said.

"So two things-she was a big Democrat and the governor would want us to take a look no matter what. Plus, the sheriff up there, Bob Sanders, is asking for help."

"When did they find her?"

"Right at sunup-an hour and a half ago. Sanders is out looking at the body now."

"Where are the Bemidji guys?" Virgil asked.

"They're up in Bigfork, looking for Little Linda," Davenport said. "That's why Sanders needs the help-his investigators are all up there, and half his deputies. A woman on the Fox network is screaming her lungs out, they're going nightly with it-"

"Ah, Jesus."

Blond, blue-eyed Little Linda Pelli had disappeared from her parents' summer home, day before last. She was fifteen, old enough not to get lost on her way to a girlfriend's cabin. There were no hazards along the road, and if her bike had been clipped by a car, they would have found her in a ditch. Nobody had found either Little Linda or her black eighteen-speed Cannondale.

Then a woman who worked at a local lodge had reported seeing an unshaven man "with silver eyes" and a crew cut, driving slowly along the road in a beat-up pickup. The television people went bat-shit, because they knew what that meant: somewhere, a silver-eyed demon, who probably had hair growing out of all his bodily orifices, had Little Linda chained in the basement of a backwoods cabin (the rare kind of cabin that had a basement) and was introducing her to the ways of the Cossacks.

"Yeah," Davenport said. "Little Linda. Listen, I feel bad about this. You've been talking about that tournament since June, but what can I tell you? Go fix this thing."

"I don't even have a car," Virgil said.

"Go rent one," Davenport said. "You got your gun?"

"Yeah, somewhere."

"Then you're all set," Davenport said. "Call me when you're done with it."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Virgil said. "I've got no idea where this place is. Gimme some directions, or something. There're about a hundred Stone Lakes up here."

"You get off the water, I'll get directions. Call you back in a bit."

THEY SHOT A ROOSTER TAIL back to the marina and Virgil showed the dock boy his identification and said, "We need to keep this boat handy. Put it someplace where we can get at it quick."

"Something going on?" the dock boy asked. He weighed about a hundred and six pounds and was fifty years old and had been the dock boy since Virgil had first come up to Vermilion as a teenager, with his father.

"Can't talk about it," Virgil said. "But you keep that boat ready to go. If anybody gives you any shit, you tell them the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told you so."

"Never heard of that," the dock boy admitted. "The criminal thing."

Virgil took out his wallet, removed one of the three business cards he kept there, and a ten-dollar bill. "Anybody asks, show them the card."

HE AND JOHNSON walked across the parking lot to Johnson's truck, carrying their lunch cooler between them, and Johnson said, looking back at the boat, "That's pretty handy-we gotta do that more often. It's like having a reserved parking space," and then, "What do you want to do about getting around?"

"If you could run me over to the scene, that'd be good," Virgil said. "I'll figure out something after I see it-if it's gonna take a while, I'll go down to Grand Rapids and rent a car."

"Think we'll get back out on the lake?" Johnson asked, looking back again. Everybody in the world who counted was out on the lake. Everybody.

"Man, I'd like to," Virgil said. "But I got a bad feeling about this. Maybe you could hook up with somebody else."

At the truck, they unhitched the trailer and left it in the parking spot with a lock through the tongue, and loaded the cooler into the back of the crew cab. Johnson tossed Virgil the keys and said, "You drive. I need to get breakfast."

SINCE THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS BROKEN, they drove with the windows down, their arms on the sills, headed out to Highway 1. Davenport called when they were halfway out to the highway and gave Johnson instructions on how to reach the Eagle Nest.

Johnson wrote them down on the back of an old gas receipt, said good-bye, gave Virgil's phone back, threw the empty Budweiser breakfast can into a ditch, and dug his Minnesota atlas out from behind the seat. Virgil slowed, stopped, backed up, got out of the truck, retrieved the beer can, and threw it in a waste cooler in the back of the truck.

"Found it," Johnson said, when Virgil got back in the cab. "We're gonna have to cut across country."

He outlined the route on the map, and they took off again. Johnson finished a second beer and said, "You're starting to annoy the shit out of me, picking up the cans."

"I'm tired of arguing about it, Johnson," Virgil said. "You throw the cans out the window, I stop and pick them up."

"Well, fuck you," Johnson said. He tipped up the second can, making sure he'd gotten every last drop, and this time stuck the can under the seat. "That make you happy, you fuckin' tree hugger?"

VIRGIL WAS LANKY and blond, a surfer-looking dude with hair too long for a cop, and a predilection for T-shirts sold by indie rock bands; today's shirt was by Sebadoh. At a little more than six feet, Virgil looked like a good third baseman, and had been a mediocre one for a couple of seasons in college; a good fielder with an excellent arm, he couldn't see a college fastball. He'd drifted through school and got what turned out to be a bullshit degree in ecological science ("It ain't biology, and it ain't botany, and it ain't enough of either one," he'd once been told during a job interview).

Unable to get an ecological science job after college, he'd volunteered for the army's Officer Candidate School, figuring they'd put him in intelligence, or one of those black jumping-out-of-airplanes units.

They gave him all the tests and made him a cop.

OUT OF THE ARMY, he'd spent ten years with the St. Paul police, running up a clearance record that had never been touched, and then had been recruited by Davenport, the BCA's official bad boy. "We'll give you the hard stuff," Davenport had told him, and so far, he had.

On the side, Virgil was building a reputation as an outdoor writer, the stories researched on what Virgil referred to as under-time. He'd sold a two-story non-outdoor sequence to The New York Times Magazine, about a case he'd worked. The sale had given him a big head, and caused him briefly to shop for a Rolex.

Davenport didn't care about the big head or the under-time-Virgil gave him his money's worth-but did worry about Virgil dragging his boat around behind a state-owned truck. And he worried that Virgil sometimes forgot where he put his gun; and that he had in the past slept with witnesses to the crimes he was investigating.

Still, there was that clearance record, rolling along, solid as ever. Davenport was a pragmatist: if it worked, don't mess with it.

But he worried.

"YOU KNOW," JOHNSON SAID, "in some ways, your job resembles slavery. They tell you get your ass out in the cotton field, and that's what you do. My friend, you have traded your freedom for a paycheck, and not that big a paycheck."

"Good benefits," Virgil said.

"Yeah. If you get shot, they pay to patch you up," Johnson said. "I mean, you could be a big-time writer, have women hanging on you, wear one of those sport coats with patches on the sleeves, smoke a pipe or something. Your time would be your own-you could go hang out in Hollywood. Write movies if you felt like it. Fuck Madonna."

"Basically, I like the work," Virgil said. "I just don't like it all the time."

JOHNSON WAS AN OLD FISHING PAL, going back to Virgil's college days. A lean, scarred-up veteran of too many alcohol-related accidents in vehicles ranging from snowmobiles to trucks to Ever-glades airboats, Johnson had grown up in the timber business. He ran a sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota, cutting hardwood flooring material, with a sideline in custom cutting and curing oversized chunks of maple and cherry for artists. A lifelong fisherman, he knew the Mississippi between Winona and LaCrosse like the back of his hand, and was always good for an outstate musky run.

Johnson wore jeans and a T-shirt. When it got a little cooler, he pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt. When it got cooler than that, he pulled on a jean jacket. Cooler than that, a Carhartt. Cooler than that, he said fuck it and went to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of T-shirts and a Speedo bathing suit that he called the slingshot.

NOW HE DIRECTED VIRGIL across the back roads between highways 1 and 79, generally south and west, over flat green wet country with not too much to look at, except tamarack trees and marshy fields and here and there, a marginal farm with a couple of horses. As they got closer to the Eagle Nest, the woods got denser and the terrain started to roll, the roads got narrower and lakes glinted blue or black behind the screens of trees.

"Wonder how long it took them to think of the name Eagle Nest?" Johnson wondered. "About three seconds?"

"They could have called it the Porcupine Lodge or the Dun Rovin or Sunset Shores or Musky Point," Virgil said.

"You're getting grumpier," Johnson said. "Back at the V, I was the one who was pissed."

"Well, goddamnit, I've been working like a dog all year," Virgil said.

"Except for the under-time," Johnson said.

"Doesn't count. I was still working, just not for the state."

"You oughta model yourself after me," Johnson said. "I'm a resilient type. I roll with the punches, unlike you fragile pretty boys."

"Fragile. Big word for a guy like you," Virgil said.

Johnson grinned: "Turnoff coming up."

ON THE WAY DOWN, Virgil had formed a picture of the Eagle Nest in his mind: a peeled-log lodge with a Rolling Rock sign at one end, at the bar, a fish-cleaning house down by the dock. A dozen little plywood cabins would be scattered through the pines along the shore, a battered aluminum boat for each cabin, a machine shed in the back, the smell of gasoline and oil mixed with dirt and leaf humus; and on calm nights, a hint of septic tank. Exactly how that fit with a rich advertising woman, he didn't know-maybe an old family place that she'd been going to for years.

When he turned off the highway, into the lodge's driveway, he began to adjust his mental image. He'd been fishing the North Woods for thirty years, ever since he was old enough to hold a fishing pole. He thought he knew most of the great lodges, which generally were found on the bigger lakes.

He'd never heard of an Eagle Nest on a Stone Lake, but the driveway, which was expensively blacktopped, and which swooped in unnecessary curves through a forest dotted with white pines, hinted at something unusual.

They came over a small ridge and the forest opened up, and Johnson said, "Whoa: nice-looking place."

The lodge was set on a grassy hump that looked out over the lake; two stories tall, built of cut stone, logs, and glass, it fit in the landscape like a hand in a glove. The cabins scattered down the shoreline were as carefully built and sited as the lodge, each with a screened porch facing the water, and a sundeck above each porch. An expensive architect had been at work, Virgil thought, but not recently: the lodge had a feeling of well-tended age.

There were no cars at the cabins. As they rolled down toward the lodge, the road jogged left and dipped into a hollow, where they found a parking lot, screened from the lodge and the cabins by a fifteen-foot-tall evergreen hedge. Four sheriff 's cars were parked in the lot, along with twenty or so civilian vehicles, and a hearse. There were no cops in sight; a lodge employee was loading luggage into a Mercedes-Benz station wagon from a Yamaha Rhino.

Deeper in the woods, on the other side of the parking lot, Virgil saw the corner of a green metalwork building, probably the shop. Neither the parking lot nor the shop would be visible from the lodge or the cabins. Nice.

"Where're the boats?" Johnson asked, as Virgil pulled into a parking space.

"I don't know. Must be on the other side of the lodge," Virgil said.

AS THEY CLIMBED out of the truck, the lodge worker, a middle-aged woman in a red-and-blue uniform, stepped over and asked, "Can I help you, gentlemen?"

"Where's the lodge?" Virgil asked.

"Up the path," she said, and, "Do you know this is ladies only?"

"We're cops," Johnson said.

"Ah. Okay. There are more deputies up there now." To Virgil: "Are you a policeman, too?"

Johnson laughed and said, "Yeah. He is," and they walked over to stairs that led to a flagstone path through the woods, out of the parking lot to the lodge.

THE LODGE and its grassy knoll sat at the apex of a natural shoreline notch. The notch was filled with docks and a variety of boats, mostly metal outboards, but also a few canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats. A hundred yards down to the right, two women walked hand in hand down a narrow sand beach that looked out at a floating swimming dock.

Twenty women in outdoor shirts and jeans were scattered at tables around the deck, with cups of coffee and the remnants of crois sants and apple salads, and looked them over as they went to the railing. Down below them, two uniformed sheriff's deputies were standing on the dock, chatting with each other.

A waiter hurried over: a thin, pale boy with dark hair, he had a side-biased haircut that he thought made him look like Johnny Depp. "Can I help you?"

Virgil said, "I'm with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. How do we get down to the dock?"

The waiter said, "Ah. Come along."

He took them inside, down an interior stairway, through double doors under the deck, and pointed at a flagstone walkway. "Follow that."

The flagstone path curled around the stone ledge, right at the waterside, and emerged at the dock. Two women, who'd been out of sight from the deck, were standing at the end of the path, arms crossed, talking and watching the deputies. Johnson muttered, "I've only been detecting for ten minutes, but check out the short one. And she's wearing a fishing shirt."

Virgil said, quietly as he could, "Johnson, try to stay out of the way for a few minutes, okay?"

"You didn't talk that way when you needed my truck, you bitch."

"Johnson…"

THE WOMEN TURNED and looked at them as they came along, and Virgil nodded and said, "Hi. I'm Virgil Flowers, with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I'm looking for Sheriff Sanders."

"He's out at the pond," said the older of the two. A bluff, no-nonsense, heavyset woman with tired eyes, she stuck out a hand and said, "I'm Margery Stanhope. I own the lodge."

"I need to talk to you when I get back," Virgil said. "I noticed that somebody was checking out when we were coming-a lady was loading luggage. I'll have to know who has left since the… incident."

"Not a problem," she said. "Anything we can do."

The younger woman was a small, auburn-haired thirty-something, pretty, with a sprinkling of freckles on her tidy nose; the kind of woman that might cause Johnson to get drunk and recite poetry, including the complete "Cremation of Sam McGee." Virgil had seen it happen.

And she was pretty enough to cause Virgil's heart to hum, if not yet actually sing, until she asked, "Are you the Virgil Flowers who was involved in that massacre up in International Falls?"

His heart stopped humming. "Wasn't exactly a massacre," Virgil said.

"Sounded like a massacre," she said.

Stanhope said, "Zoe, shut up."

"I feel that we have to take a stance," Zoe said to her.

"Take it someplace else," Stanhope said. She looked past Virgil at Johnson: "You're also a police officer?"

Virgil jumped in: "Actually, he's my friend, Johnson. We were in the fishing tournament up at Vermilion and I got pulled to look at this case. The guys who'd normally do it are on that Little Linda thing. Johnson's not a police officer."

"Pleased to meet you," Stanhope said, and shook with Johnson. "What's your first name, again?"

"Johnson," Johnson said.

She said, "Oh." Not sure if her leg was being pulled. "What's your last name?"

"Johnson," Virgil said. When Stanhope looked skeptical, he said, "Really. Johnson Johnson. His old man named him after an outboard. Everybody calls him Johnson."

Zoe was pleased, either with the double name, or the concept of a name based on an outboard motor. "You get teased when you were a kid?" she asked.

"Not as much as my brother, Mercury," Johnson said.

Stanhope said, "Now I know you're lying."

"Believe it," Virgil said. "Mercury Johnson. He suffers from clinical depression."

"Thank God Mom decided to quit after two," Johnson said. "Dad wanted to go for a daughter and he'd just bought a twenty-five-horse Evinrude."

"I don't know," Zoe said. "Evvie's kind of a nice name."

That made Johnson laugh, and, since she was pretty, laugh too hard; Virgil said, "I'll talk to you ladies later. I gotta go see the deputies."

Stanhope said, blank-faced, to Johnson, "This isn't a laughing matter. This is a terrible tragedy."

Virgil nodded and said, "Of course it is."

Virgil and Johnson turned toward the dock, and Zoe asked, "She's dead, isn't she? Little Linda?"

"I don't know," Virgil said, over his shoulder, still miffed about the massacre question. "I don't know anything about it."

"I wonder if it's connected to this death?"

Virgil paused. "Do you have any reason to think so?"

"Nope. Except that they happened only two days apart," Zoe said.

"And about forty miles," Virgil said.

"Don't you suspect it, though?" She had warm brown eyes, almost gold, and he forgave her.

"No. I don't. Too many other possibilities," he said.

She nodded. "Okay. I see that. Kind of a stupid question, wasn't it?"

Stanhope answered for Virgil. "Yes. It was."

WALKING OUT TO THE DOCK, Johnson said, "The old bag kinda climbed my tree."

"One rule when you're dealing with people close to a murder victim," Virgil said. "Try not to laugh."

VIRGIL INTRODUCED HIMSELF and Johnson to the deputies and one of them said, "You're the guy who was in that shoot-out in International Falls."

Virgil bobbed his head and said, "Yeah, I was there. I understand that the body is at a place called the pond?"

"Boy, I wish I coulda been there," the cop said, ignoring Virgil's question. "That must've been something. My dad was in Vietnam, and he must've read that story about a hundred times, about the shoot-out. I bet he'd like to meet you."

The other cop said, "Sheriff 's been looking for you. He's out at the pond now. They haven't done anything but look at the body, try to keep it from floating away. Don't want to mess with the scene. One of your crime-scene crews from Bemidji is on the way… I could run you out there."

"Floating away? She's in the water?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah. She got shot right in the forehead, bullet exited the back of her head." The cop touched himself in the middle of the forehead, two inches above the top of his nose. "Really made a mess. She fell backwards out of the boat-it's kinda like a kayak-but her foot got twisted under the seat and that held her up on the surface. She was still floating there, last time I was out."

"Doesn't sound like there'll be much of a crime scene," Virgil said.

"Not much," the cop said.

"Who found her?" Johnson asked.

"Guide. From the lodge. George Rainy, he's out there, too."

"Then let's go," Virgil said.

Johnson asked, "Am I coming?"

"You can," Virgil said. "Or you could wait at the lodge with Miz Stanhope."

"I'll go," he said.

THEY TOOK one of the Lunds, the standard Minnesota lodge boat, Virgil and Johnson in the front, the second deputy, whose name was Don, at the tiller of the twenty-five-horse Yamaha. The run was short, no more than a half-mile. There were no cabins along the way; Virgil could see cabins and boathouses on the other side of the lake, and down at the far end of it, but the shore elevation west of the lodge dropped quickly and became low and marshy around the outlet creek. They passed the mouth of a shallow backwater, and a line of beaver lodges, like haystacks made of small logs and sticks, turned around a point into the outlet, dodged a snag, went down a narrow channel, and emerged into the pond.

Four more boats, with seven people, were floating along the eastern shore, and Don took them that way. "The guy in the white ball cap is the sheriff," Don said. "The guy in the boat by himself is George, the guide. The two guys in the green emergency vests are from the funeral home; they're here to pick up the body. The other three are deputies."

"How'd George happen to find her?" Virgil asked. "Anybody know?"

"Nobody saw her at dinner last night, but sometimes, people will cook something up in their cabin, though Miz McDill usually didn't do that," Don said. "Anyway, nobody really looked, but then early this morning, some of the women were going on a paddling trip and one of the boats was missing. One of them said, 'My gosh, didn't Miz McDill take one out last night?' So they went and looked at her cabin, and she wasn't there, and they knew she liked to paddle down and look at the eagle's nest"-he pointed at a white pine that stood over the end of the pond, with an eagle's nest a hundred feet up-"so George jumped in a boat and he came down here and says, 'There she was.' He came back and they called us."

Don killed the motor and they coasted down on the cluster of boats. As they came up, Virgil stood and looked over the bow, saw an upside-down olive-drab plastic boat, with a body in a white shirt bobbing in the water next to it. The sheriff stood up and asked, "You Virgil?"

"Yeah, I am," Virgil said, and they bumped gunwales and shook hands. The sheriff was a tall, fleshy man with a hound-dog face, wrinkled like yesterday's tan shirt; and he was wearing a tan uniform shirt and brown uniform slacks, along with heavy uniform shoes that weren't right in a boat.

"I read those stories you wrote for The New York Times," he said. "Pretty interesting."

"Couldn't miss-it was an interesting case," Virgil said.

Sanders mentioned the names of the other cops and Rainy, and said, nodding at the two men from the funeral home, "These guys are here to pick up the body."

"What do you think?" Virgil asked.

"It seems to me like a murder, but it could be suicide, I suppose," Sanders said, looking back at the body. "But you don't see women like this one, shooting themselves in the head. Too messy. So… somebody got close and shot her. Might possibly be an accident, I guess."

"Murder," Virgil said. "Small chance it could be a suicide, but not an accident," Virgil said, looking around.

"Why's it not an accident?" Johnson asked.

"Too many trees," Virgil said. "It's too thick in here. To get a slug through the trees, you'd have to be right on the edge of them. Then you could see her. So it wasn't like somebody fired a gun a half-mile away, and she happened to be in front of it. And if it was somebody in a boat, who met her here, and they were both bobbing a little bit, they had to be really close to hit her."

Johnson nodded, looked at the white shirt floating around the body, like a veil, and turned away.

Virgil asked the sheriff, "Is there a time of death? Did anybody hear any shots?"

"Not that we've been able to find."

Virgil nodded and said, "Don, push us off the sheriff 's boat, there, get me a little closer."

They got close, and Virgil hung over the boat, getting a good look at the body. He couldn't see her face, but he could see massive damage to the back of her head, and looked back over his shoulder and said, "If you don't find a large-caliber pistol at the bottom of the pond, then it was a rifle."

The sheriff nodded. "Thought it might be."

"Gotta have the crime-scene guys look for a pistol, though. If the shooter was in a boat, he might have dumped it over the side; or if it's a suicide." No other signs of violence. One shot, and the woman was gone. Virgil pushed himself upright and asked, "Where's the nearest road?"

The cops looked around, then one of them pointed. "I guess it'd be… over there."

"How far?"

"Probably… a quarter mile? There's a town road around the lake, and it crosses this creek about, mmm, a half-mile down, then hooks up a little closer to the lake and then goes on around to a cluster of cabins right on the west point of the lake. You probably saw them when you were coming in."

"Could you paddle up the creek?" Virgil asked.

"Naw. It's all choked north of the culvert," the cop said. "Be easier to walk, 'cause the creek's not that deep, but it's got a muck bottom… I don't know. I don't think you could walk it, either. Not easy, anyway."

THEY FLOATED AND TALKED for a couple of minutes. They hadn't taken the body in, the sheriff said, because they wanted the BCA agent, whoever he was, to take a look and say it was okay: "We don't have a hell of a lot of murders up here."

Virgil said, "You can take her. There's enough current here to drift her a bit, and if there was any wind at all… no way to tell exactly where she was hit, unless we find some blood spatter." He looked around, and then said, "You might have a couple guys slowly… slowly… cruise the waterline, all the way from the channel to the far end of the pond, look at the edge of the weeds and the lily pads, see if there's any blood on the foliage. If she'd been right up against the weeds, there should be some."

The sheriff pointed at the cops in one of the boats, and they pushed off.

WHILE THEY WERE TALKING, the two funeral home guys had moved over to the body. They had a black body bag with them, and were discussing the best way to hoist the body into the boat without hurting their backs. Virgil noticed that Johnson wouldn't look at the body.

Sanders said, "I'm gonna really have to lean on you and the other guys from the BCA on this thing-all my guys are up working on the Little Linda case. That thing is turning into a nightmare. Linda's mom is some kind of PR demon; she's holding press conferences, she hired a psychic. It's driving us crazy."

"No sign of Little Linda?"

"No, but the psychic says that she's still alive. She's in a dark place with large stones around her, and she's cold. He sees moss."

Johnson: "Moss?"

"That's what he says," Sanders said.

"You're investigating moss?"

THEN ONE OF THE COPS who'd gone looking for blood called from fifty yards up the pond, toward the lake: "Got some cigarettes here." And then the other one said, "There's a lighter."

Virgil nodded at Don, and the sheriff told the rest of them to stay where they were, and Don started the motor and Virgil's boat and the sheriff's drifted up the pond. There, they could see what appeared to be a nearly full pack of Salem cigarettes floating on the surface and, a little beyond it, the bottom end of a red plastic Bic cigarette lighter.

"She a smoker?" Virgil asked.

"Don't know," the sheriff said.

"We need to mark this-this may be close to where she was killed." He called back to the guide, who motored over. "You got any marker buoys?" Virgil asked.

Rainy dug in the back of the boat and came up with a yellow-plastic dumbbell-shaped buoy wrapped with string, the string ending in a lead weight. "Toss it right about there," Virgil said.

Rainy tossed it in; the weight dropped to the bottom, marking the spot for the crime-scene crew.

"Leave the cigarette pack and lighter. Maybe crime scene can get something off them," Virgil said. To the cops: "Keep looking for blood."

BACK DOWN THE POND, the funeral home guys were hoisting the body into the boat, with some trouble. The sheriff said to the cop on the tiller, "Get me back there."

Virgil said, "I want to take a look at that other shore-where somebody might walk in. Cruise the shoreline."

"I'll be here," the sheriff said.

THEY STARTED where the creek drained out of the pond, moving at a walking pace. Virgil looked down the creek, and as the cop had said, it was choked with dead trees, sweepers, branches. He doubted that you could walk along it, and a boat would be impossible. They moved out, along the edge of the pond, scanning the shoreline until Johnson said, "There you go."

"Where?"

"See that dead birch, the one with the dead crown?" He was pointing across the weed flat at the wall of aspens and birch trees. "Now look about one inch to the left; you see that dark hole in the weeds? I see that all the time, in the backwaters on the river-somebody walked out there… over toward that beaver lodge."

"Okay." Virgil looked back at the boats around the body. "Could have set up on the lodge."

"Eighty-yard shot. Maybe ninety," Johnson said. "Looks about like a good sand wedge."

"Could be fifty, depending on how she drifted," Virgil said. "Good shooting, though."

Don said, "Not that great. Eighty, ninety yards. That's nothing, up here."

"I'll tell you what," Virgil said. "He had one shot, no warm-ups, and he put it dead in her forehead. She was probably moving, at least a little bit. And he was shooting a human being and had to worry about being caught, about being seen, about getting out of there. With all that stress, that's damn good shooting. He knew what he was doing."

Don looked from the shore back to the boats, back to the shore, then nodded, and said, "When you're right, you're right."

Looking at the beaver lodge, a low hump of bare logs, twigs, and mud just off the shoreline, Johnson said, "About impossible to get there from here. Might push a boat through to the beaver lodge, but even then…"

Virgil shook his head: "Better to come in from the same side the shooter did. Have to do that anyway." To Don: "Let's go see the sheriff."

THE FUNERAL HOME GUYS had McDill in a body bag and were zipping it up when they got back. The sheriff looked at their faces and asked, "What?"

Virgil said, "I think we got ourselves a crime scene."