Rough country

3

WITH THE BODY out of the water, the sheriff talked to the two deputies who were looking for bloodstained lily pads, and told them to wait at the pond until he called them, or until the crime-scene crew arrived and sent them back. Then the rest of them pulled out, led by the sheriff in his boat, Virgil, Johnson, and Don in theirs, George Rainy, the guide, by himself, and the boat with the body.

At the pond, Virgil had only one flickering bar on his cell phone, but he had a solid four when they got back. As soon as Don cut the motor and started cutting a curve into the dock, he called the Bemidji office and talked to the duty officer.

"You got a crime-scene crew headed my way?"

"Should be there," the duty officer said. "Let me give them a call." He was back a minute later. "They ran into a closed bridge. They should be there in ten or fifteen minutes. They gotta go around."

"You still got guys up in Bigfork?"

"Oh, yeah. It's getting worse. You heard about Fox…"

A DOZEN WOMEN were standing on the dock, watching with the combination of curiosity and dread that you got at murders. Virgil tossed a line around a cleat and snugged the boat up to the dock and climbed out, holding it for Johnson and Don. When the sheriff had clambered out of his boat, Virgil relayed the news about the crime-scene crew and said, "Let's go see if we can spot the trail in-where the killer left the road."

"Sounds good."

To Johnson: "Why don't you go up to the lodge and see if you can get us some sandwiches; I'm starving to death."

"What're you doing?"

"I'm going to take a look at the body," Virgil said.

Johnson nodded and headed up the dock. Virgil walked over to Rainy, who was tying up his boat, and asked him to stick around until they could talk. The guide nodded and said, "Yessir," and followed Johnson into the lodge.

The funeral home guys hoisted the body bag out of the boat and Virgil had them unzip it. McDill was lying faceup, the front of her face stained red by hypostasis, the settling of blood in a dead body, under the influence of gravity. She'd gone into the water facedown, and apparently had stayed that way overnight.

The entry wound in her forehead was the size of Virgil's little fingernail, but the bone was pulped, as though the slug had exploded. The exit wound had knocked out the back left part of her skull, exposing some brain matter, which, washed overnight by the lake water, resembled gray cheese. To Virgil, it looked like she'd been shot with a small-caliber rifle, maybe a.223, or possibly a.243, with hollow-point bullets. She was wearing jeans, and he reached around to feel her back pockets, where she might be carrying a wallet, but she wasn't.

"You see any other wounds?" Virgil asked.

The funeral home guys shook their heads. "Not a thing," one of them said. "We'll check at the office, before we pack her up for the medical examiner. Let you know."

The body would be sent to Ramsey County, in the Twin Cities, for the autopsy.

"Zip it up," Virgil said. He duckwalked over to the edge of the dock, reached down, and washed his hands in the lake water.

STANHOPE HAD SEEN THEM coming in and now edged out onto the dock, and when Virgil stood up, she cringed away, unable to look, and asked, "Is that her?"

Virgil nodded and said, "You really don't have to be here. Why don't we go inside?"

She stepped away, still looking at the bag, and shuddered, and led the way along the path to the lodge door and up the interior stairs. Virgil asked, "You got the Internet here?"

"Oh, sure. Every cabin, and wireless all over the lodge."

The Eagle Nest office was a quiet suite of three rooms with two clerks at wooden desks with modern flat-screen computers and a bunch of file cabinets. Two fish replicas, framed photos of well-known guests, and a set of moose antlers hung on the knotty-pine walls. A Scots-plaid woman's beret dangled from one of the antlers. Virgil used Stanhope's computer to download and then call up Google Earth, focus on the lake, and then spot exactly where the body had been, and the shortest land-route into the pond from the loop road.

"Pretty good tool," the sheriff said, looking over his shoulder.

"Not only that, it's free," Virgil said. He grabbed the screen and printed it out.

THE SHERIFF LED THE WAY in his Tahoe, Johnson driving his truck while Virgil ate a cheese-and-bologna sandwich. Between bites, Virgil said to Johnson, "You looked a little green out there. At the body."

Johnson bobbed his head and looked out the window into the forest. "I told you about that body I found on the river."

"About a hundred thousand times," Virgil said.

"So after I found it, I called the cops. This Wisconsin river cop came over, and he knew who it was. Some guy from Lake City who fell out of his boat-"

"Yeah, yeah, you told me." He spit a piece of pimento out the window.

"What I didn't tell you was, this cop wanted to anchor the body until we could get a bigger boat out there to do the recovery," Johnson said. "So he tied a line around it, so he could pull it over closer to the shore and tie it off to a tree. But the thing is, it'd been in the river for a week, and was all bloated and full of gas, and when he pulled on the line, the body came apart and the gas came out and rolled right over me."

"Ah, jeez," Virgil said. "You know what you do in a situation like that? Course, I don't suppose you had any Vicks…"

"Hang on a minute," Johnson said. "Anyway, I started barfing. I barfed up everything I had and then I kept barfing. Nothing was coming up but some spit, but I couldn't stop. The cop was barfing, too, and I got out of there and went back to the cabin, and I kept… trying to barf. I couldn't get the smell off me. I took a shower and washed my hair and I even burned the clothes, and I could still smell it and I'd start barfing again. That went on for a week, and then, like three weeks later, it started again, and went on for another couple of days. So, you know, this morning, I thought a murder scene might be interesting, but when I saw her in the water… I smelled that gas again."

"I didn't smell much of anything, except lake water," Virgil said.

"It's not real," Johnson said. "It's stuck in my brain. That smell."

"I've heard of that," Virgil said. "People getting stuck with a smell or a mental image."

"The image doesn't bother me-never saw that much of the guy's body," Johnson said. "But when I saw you get your face right down on top of her, and her hair floating out like that, I about blew my cookies. I don't see how you do it."

"Job," Virgil said.

"Yeah, well…" Johnson sighed, turned around, dug a Budweiser out of the cooler, popped it open. "Think you better find yourself a ride, Virgil. I'm going back up to the V. This murder shit-I'm done with it. I thought it would be interesting, but it's just nasty."

AT THE CLOSEST APPROACH to the pond, they pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, and the sheriff and Virgil walked one way, and Johnson the other, because Virgil knew that he'd spot the trail, and so would Johnson, but he wasn't sure about the sheriff. He and the sheriff had walked thirty yards along the gravel road when he saw it: "There." He turned and shouted, "Johnson!"

Johnson jogged over and Virgil said, "Stay back from it-we'll want the crime-scene guys to walk it."

There'd been no way the killer could have gotten in without leaving a trail: the soil was firm enough underfoot, but damp, and the plants were the soft, leafy, easily broken kind that you saw in the shade, on the edges of wetlands.

"The question is, where'd he leave his car?" Virgil asked. The road was narrow, and there were no obvious turnoffs. "Couldn't park it here; too many people would have seen it."

The sheriff said, "There's some empty cabins up the way. He could park back there, and not get seen. But what if he dropped off a gun, then parked up at the lodge? You could walk down here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Gravel road like this, you could hear a car coming. A little care, you could just step into the woods before it went by."

"A guy would be noticed at the lodge, a stranger," Virgil said. "Maybe a woman?"

Johnson said, "If it was a woman, especially if it was one who was staying at the lodge, she'd see McDill going out in the boat. She might even have asked her where she was going… run down here, boom."

Virgil looked into the woods. "If that's right, the gun might still be in there. Unless she came down last night and picked it up, but that'd really be taking a chance. If they saw her, people would remember."

"We'll check everybody on this road," the sheriff said. "Every swinging dick."

Car coming; they heard it before they could see it, and when they saw it, it was an oversized white van. "Crime scene," Virgil said.

THERE WERE FOUR GUYS with the crime-scene crew, led by Ron Mapes, who'd last run into Virgil while they were looking at the murder of an Indian cop from the Red Lake Chippewa reservation.

Virgil ran them through what had been done, including the marker buoy out on the lake, and all four of them looked down the track toward the lake. "We're gonna need head nets, metal detectors…" Mapes began.

Virgil said to Mapes, "Could you guys go in there right now, take a quick look at the track? See if anything pops up? At Red Lake, you told me the killer was a small guy, and that got me started in the right direction."

"We can look," Mapes said.

The crew all had fifteen-inch rubber boots and head nets and cotton gloves to protect against the mosquitoes, and they took it slow, pushing down the track, looking for anything along the way, checking for metal. While they were doing that, Virgil, the sheriff, and Johnson walked farther down the road, looking at the driveways branching off to the sides. The driveways were gravel-and-dirt tracks leading uphill, away from the lake: hunting cabins, the sheriff said, usually empty until the fall.

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW had been in for ten minutes, out of sight, when they got back, and the sheriff called the Grand Rapids airport Avis and reserved an SUV for Virgil. He'd just rung off when they heard somebody coming in, and then Mapes pushed delicately through the brush beside the killer's track, still searching it with his eyes. When he got out on the road, he pulled off his head net and said, "The mosquitoes are thick in there… gets wet about a hundred yards in."

"So…"

"I can't promise you that she's the killer, but I can tell you that whoever walked back there is a woman," Mapes said. "She maybe went in more than once, or maybe there were a couple of them, because it's tracked up."

"Scouting tracks," Virgil said.

"Anyway, we got three partial footprints so far, the instep of a woman's boot or shoe. Maybe a shoe, because there's a low heel," Mapes said. "We won't be able to give you an exact size because we're mostly seeing that instep, but it also looks to me like there's a capital M in the instep, a logo. One of the guys thinks it's for Mephisto shoes. He said Mephisto shoes run about three hundred bucks a pair."

"Not something you'd see every day," Virgil said.

"Heck, I don't even know if you could buy any locally, I mean, closer than the Cities," Mapes said. "Though you could order them on the Internet."

"What else?" Virgil asked.

"Well… nothing. But I thought that was quite a bit," Mapes said.

"Nothing on the beaver lodge?"

"Not there yet. I'm going back in."

"Done good, Ron," Virgil said.

The sheriff looked at Virgil and said, "Gotta be somebody at the lodge. A woman, shoes from the Cities." Sanders had relaxed a notch: this was more of a Cities problem than a local deal, and he was happy to have it that way.

"Let's go back and talk to Stanhope," Virgil said. "Then if you could have one of your guys give me a lift down to Grand Rapids, we could let Johnson go."

"I can do that," the sheriff said.

ON THE WAY BACK to the lodge, Johnson said, "I feel like I'm ditching you."

"You're not. This isn't your job. Catch a fish for me, up there," Virgil said.

"Not gonna catch any fish," Johnson said gloomily. He ducked his head over the steering wheel, looking up at the bright sky. "This trip is cursed."

At the lodge, Virgil hopped out, got his duffel bag, walked around to the driver's side, and said, "You stay off that Budweiser when you're driving."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"I mean it, Johnson. I got enough goddamn dead people on my hands."

Johnson cracked a smile: "First turn I get around, I'm gonna throw a beer can out the window. I'll call it the Virgil Flowers memorial beer can. It'll still be there when the next glacier comes through."

And he was gone.

VIRGIL TOLD SANDERS that he needed to talk to Rainy, the guide, and then to Stanhope, and then to anyone that they might suggest. "Gonna be a while," he said.

The sheriff shrugged, "Well-it's a murder, so I guess that takes a while," and a couple of seconds later, "You're not gonna get much from George."

"Yeah?"

"George is a drunk," Sanders said. "Every day that he works, he stops at the liquor store and picks up a fifth and he takes it home and drinks it. He's trying to drink himself to death. He did that last night. He was in no shape to ambush anybody."

"Any particular reason he's doing that?" Virgil asked.

"Not as far as I know. I think he's tired of being here," Sanders said.

THEY FOUND RAINY and interviewed him in a room called "the library," a cube with three soft chairs and a few hundred hard-backs with sun-faded covers, and six geraniums in the window, in terra-cotta pots. Rainy lived fifteen minutes away, toward Grand Rapids, but outside of town. He worked a half-dozen lakes in the area, guiding fishermen in the summer, deer and bear hunters in the fall. He got a hundred dollars a day plus tips, had worked on another lake the day before the killing, and had been scheduled to take out a couple of women in the morning and teach them how to fish for walleye.

"Got down to the dock, and they was runnin' around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. They thought Miz McDill might of gone down toward that pond. So I says, 'Well, why don't I go take a look?' So I jumps in a boat and runs down there, and there she was. Wasn't like I investigated-I come out the pipe and there she was. I spotted her as soon as I come out, the boat and her shirt."

"You touch her?" Virgil asked.

"Shit no. I watch TV," the guide said.

Virgil nodded. "Okay. No ideas?"

Rainy shook his head: "Nope. Well… one. Don't mention it to Miz Stanhope; I need to work here."

"I can keep my mouth shut," Virgil said, and the sheriff nodded.

"The women here, you know, a lot of them are singing on our side of the choir," Rainy said.

Virgil looked at the sheriff, who did a little head bob that suggested that he agreed, but hadn't mentioned it out of politeness.

"You think…"

Rainy nodded. "Rug munchers," he said. "The thing is, you know, they'd go on down to the bars-the Goose in particular-and you'd hear that there were some fights when they got the liquor in them. I don't mean like, out in the parking lot, but you know, screaming at each other. Fighting over who was munchin' who. So… it could be a sex thing."

Virgil asked the sheriff, "Miss McDill…?"

"Don't know. I do know that a lot of the women who come up here aren't gay," Sanders said. "Margery told me once that a lot of them want to come up here without having to put up with macho North Woods bullshit. Don't mind men, they just want to get away for a while, get back to nature on their own."

"How'd that come up?" Virgil asked. "About who was gay?"

"Somebody made a comment at the Chamber of Commerce, and she was steamed about it," the sheriff said. "I bumped into her, purely by accident, and she let it out. We've known each other since grade school."

"Huh."

The sheriff chuckled. "You just said, 'Huh,' like a cop."

"No, no… but you wonder, if this was done by an outsider, somebody who was staying here at the lodge, how'd they know exactly how to walk in there? To the pond?" Virgil asked.

"Could have looked on Google Earth, like we did," Sanders suggested.

"One possibility," Virgil admitted.

"Could have scouted it," Sanders added.

"Or it could be a local," Virgil said.

"Look, if you'd asked me how to get in there, to the pond, off the road, I'd have to take a long look at a map and maybe get a compass, and I've lived here all my life," Sanders said. "The killer either knows this exact area a lot better than I do, or she looked at Google Earth. Or a map. Maybe used a GPS. And probably scouted it. So it's just as likely to be an outsider as a local. Either way, they'd have to scout it."

"Or was a deer hunter," Rainy chipped in. Virgil and the sheriff turned back to him. "After it freezes up, it's not so bad back there. No bugs, no mud. You go a couple hundred yards back, and you can see the pond. John Mack has a couple of tree stands maybe a five-minute walk west of there. Guys around here'll push that piece of woods, from the road over to the lake, up toward Mack's place."

"Must take a lot of guys to push it," Virgil said.

"Naw, it's not so bad. Like I said, you can see better. You get six, eight guys across that neck, about noon on opening day, and push 'em west, the deer'll funnel between two little ponds," Rainy said. "The kids on the stands will usually take one or two. The guys put their kids up on the stands, to give them a crack at a good one."

"I'll keep that in mind," Virgil said. "Thank you."

As they were leaving the library, the sheriff leaned close to the guide and said, "Long as you're working here, I'd go easy on that 'rug muncher' business."

Rainy's Adam's apple bobbed a couple of times. "I'll do that. I will."

OUT IN THE MAIN LODGE, Sanders said to Virgil, "I don't want you to get the idea that people up here are antigay. Some of the women at the lodge might be gay, but it doesn't bother anyone. We want them to come into town, shop, go to the restaurants-these women have money. This resort's gonna cost them two thousand dollars a week, and some of them come up for a month. It's not like they buy a bucket of minnows and sleep in the back of the truck."

Virgil smiled. "You mean like me and Johnson?"

"Well-you know, they hang out at the Wild Goose, like George said. Tom Mortensen, he's the owner, if you told him he was going to lose his gay business, he'd have a heart attack," Sanders said. "They keep him going. He likes having them, and they like being there. Hell of a lot less trouble than a bunch of cowboys."

THEY WENT by the office to find Stanhope. Zoe, the woman who thought Virgil had perpetrated a massacre, was sitting at a computer, wearing a pair of black librarian glasses, which meant that Virgil would almost certainly fall in love with her; the near-sighted intellectual look did him in every time. If she'd had an over-bite, he would have proposed.

Stanhope was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder and at a piece of paper in her own hand, and said, "I'm sure we paid him off before July first. The Fourth of July fell on a Friday, payday, and I remember that he wasn't here for the fireworks, because he usually helps set them up-"

"You see the problem, though," Zoe said, tapping the computer screen. "If he slopped over into July, then he has to go on the third-quarter numbers, too."

Stanhope sensed them at the doorway, turned, and said, "Hi. We're trying to figure out an accounting problem."

"When you got a minute," Virgil said, "I'd like you to walk me over to Miss McDill's cabin, talk a bit about her."

"Go right now," Stanhope said.

The sheriff said, "I'll leave you to it, Virgil. I gotta go talk to the TV people."

Virgil nodded: "Go. I would like to fix a ride down to the Avis dealer, though."

Zoe said, "My office is in town-I could ride you down there. I'll be another half-hour here."

"That'd be great," Virgil said.

ALL THE CABINS had names: McDill had been in the Common Loon, one bedroom, with extra sleeping space up a ladder in a second-story loft. The loft also had a doorway out to the sundeck.

In addition to the bedroom, the cabin had a segregated space, like a den, with a computer desk complete with an Ethernet cable and a wall notice about wireless connections, a Xerox laser printer, a high-end business chair, and a two-line phone; a small, efficient kitchen; and a living/sitting room with a fieldstone fireplace. McDill's Macintosh laptop was hooked to an Ethernet cable.

"No television," Virgil said.

"We've got a thing about that. If you want to watch television, you've got to come up to the theater at the lodge. But the basic idea here is you get away from TV and all that," Stanhope said.

"But you've got-"

"We found out that most of the people who come here want to get away from the absolute crap-TV-but a lot of them can't afford to completely isolate themselves. They're businesswomen and they need to stay in touch. You'll notice that your cell phone works here."

"I did," Virgil said.

"Because we've got a low-power repeater in the lodge, which goes to our antenna-it's out by the shop, you can't see it from here-that is line-of-sight to a cell out on the highway," Stanhope said. "So we're all hooked up, we have all the conveniences, but you can't see it. We're looking for feel that's a little more rustic."

Virgil dropped into an easy chair and pointed her at the couch next to it. "I've got some questions that you can probably answer…"

MCDILL HADN'T BEEN seen the night before, but that wasn't unusual, Stanhope said. Some of the women put in strenuous days on the lake, and with a lot of sun, many of them were pooped by the end of the day and went to bed early. Others went into town, and to a bar called the Wild Goose. So exactly who was where, and when, was not an easy thing to pin down.

"To tell you the truth, I didn't even know that nobody saw her last night, until we were talking about it this morning," Stanhope said.

"Was she pretty social?"

"Oh, I'd say… average. A little more aggressive about it when she was being social. She liked to dominate the talk, but there are other women up here who are no cream puffs. So, I'd say, she fit in."

McDill did like to go to the Wild Goose.

"Was she gay?"

"Mmm-hmm," Stanhope said, nodding. "She was, but she really didn't come up here for romance. She has a life partner down in the Cities-she's been notified, she should be coming up-but Erica really came up here to get away. To think. To relax a little bit. She was one of the girls who sometimes drank too much. I mean, not crazy, but she wouldn't be your designated driver down to the Goose."

"I want you to believe that I don't have a problem with gay women," Virgil said, "but I've got to ask: as far as you know, was she involved in any kind of stressful sexual entanglement?"

Stanhope shook her head: "Not as far as I know."

"No kind of sexual competition with another woman up here?"

"I don't think so. She'd been up here for a week, she was going to be here for one more week. She was participating, yoga in the morning, nature hikes and boating in the morning and afternoon, but I didn't see her pairing off with anyone." She put her hands to her temples, pressing. "I can't figure it out. Believe me, if I had any idea of what happened, I would tell you in an instant. But I didn't see anything."

"Okay. Have you ever had anybody die here?"

She nodded. "Twice. One woman actually came here to die-she loved nature, she loved the place. It was in the fall, after we were pretty much closed down, and we'd wheel her out on the deck so she could see the lake. Then she died, from pancreatic cancer. We had another woman who had a heart attack, this was four or five years ago. We actually got her to the hospital alive, but she died there."

They talked for a few more minutes, but Stanhope seemed befuddled by the killing. Her confusion was genuine, Virgil thought: it was too muddled to be faked.

Last question: "Who was that checking out when I was coming in?"

"Dorothy Killian from Rochester," Stanhope said. "She was scheduled to leave. I don't think you'd be interested in her, but what do I know? She's seventy-four. She's on some kind of art board down in Rochester and they have a meeting tomorrow afternoon, so she had to go."

"Okay. Well, let me spend a few minutes here in the cabin, and then we'll need to lock it up again, until the crime-scene crew can go through it," Virgil said.

Stanhope stood up, sighed, and said, "What a tragedy. She was so young, and active. Smart."

"Well liked?"

Stanhope smiled and said, "Well, she was well liked by the kind of people who'd like her, if you know what I mean. She didn't take any prisoners. So, she put some people off. But anybody who's successful is going to get that."

VIRGIL SPENT TEN MINUTES in the cabin, giving it a quick but thorough going-over.

McDill had brought up two large suitcases. One was empty, with the clothing distributed between a closet and a chest of drawers. The other was still partly full-a plastic bag with dirty clothes, and other bags and cases with personal items, perfume, grooming equipment. None of the clothes, either clean or dirty, had paper in the pockets.

Her purse contained a thin wallet, with a bit more than eight hundred dollars in cash. A Wells Fargo envelope hidden in a concealed compartment had another three thousand. He went through the wallet paper: a new Minnesota fishing license, bought just before she came up to the lodge, insurance cards, frequent flyer card from Northwest, five credit cards-he made a note to check her balances, and her finances in general-a card from Mercedes-Benz for roadside emergency service, and membership cards from a bunch of art museums, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Art Institute of Chicago.

An art lover.

Tucked in with the other cards, he found a folded-over paper, and when he opened it, a lipstick impression of a woman's lips… nothing else. He put the card on the dresser. Interesting.

She had a digital camera; he turned it on and paged through two dozen photos. Most were shots around the lake, but a half-dozen had been taken in a bar, women having a good time, getting loud, like women do when they're loose and safe in a group of friends.

He took the SD card: he'd read the card into his own computer. He put the camera back on the dresser, next to the card. Picked up her keys, including a big black electronic key with a Mercedes-Benz emblem, and dropped them in his pocket.

The computer was password protected. He tried a few easy work-arounds, then decided to leave it to the crime-scene guys.

McDill's cell phone was sitting on the desk next to the computer. He brought it up and found three dozen calls made in the past week, the week she was at the lodge, mostly to one number in the Cities, a 612 area code, which was downtown Minneapolis-the agency?-and several others, both incoming and outgoing, to a separate number with a 952 area code.

He checked her driver's license. She lived in Edina, which would be right for 952, Virgil thought. So, home and office. He took out his pad and jotted down all the numbers she'd called while at the lodge, and all the incoming calls. Nothing local.

Thought about local and picked up the phone on the desk and got a dial tone. All right; she had a direct dial phone. He would have to get those calls from the phone company…

After a last look-around, he wrote a quick note to crime scene, explaining the lipstick card and the cardless camera, and left it on the chest of drawers.

He wrote, DNA on the lipstick? What do you think?