Rough country

4

VIRGIL WALKED BACK to the lodge, nodding to a couple of women along the way, picked up his duffel bag, found Margery Stanhope, and asked, "Have you heard anything from Miss McDill's friends?"

"They called from the air. They decided to fly up, which wound up taking longer than driving would have."

"Maybe I'll see them at the airport?"

She shook her head. "No. One of the things that took so long is that they apparently had the impression that we're way deep in the woods. They got a floatplane out of St. Paul; they'll be coming straight into the lake."

Virgil looked out at the lake, which was not an especially large one, a couple of thousand acres at most, cluttered with islands. Pretty, but not exactly a landing strip. "You land floatplanes?"

"From time to time," she said. "It annoys people-one cranky old man in particular, who'll be calling me tonight and the county commissioners tomorrow."

"All right. Well, if I can find your accountant…"

"She's down at the shed-you get there through the parking lot."

"I saw it. Okay: I'll see you later. I'll want to talk to Miss McDill's friends," Virgil said.

"You find out anything?"

"Maybe," Virgil said, going for the enigmatic smile.

ZOE TULL WAS TALKING to a Latino man who'd been working on a gas-powered weed whip, which he'd disassembled on a workbench. She saw Virgil and waved, went back to talking to the Latino. Virgil fished McDill's keys out of his pocket, pushed the unlock button, and saw the lights flash on a silver SL550.

He popped the driver's-side door, squatted, and looked inside: car stuff, Kleenex, a cell phone charger plugged into the cigarette lighter, a bottle of Off!, a box of Band-Aids, breath mints, chewing gum, two lipsticks, an ATM receipt that showed a checking account balance of $23,241 at Wells Fargo, pens, pencils, a checkbook, a utility knife, an LED flashlight, two empty Diet Pepsi bottles, a sweater, a cotton jacket, an umbrella, a dozen business cards in a leather case.

He was thinking, What a pile of shit, when Zoe said over his shoulder, "She keeps her car pretty neat."

Virgil stood up, said, "I was hoping for a blackmail note. You all done?"

"Yes. Getting more numbers."

Virgil glanced over at the Latino, who'd gone back to working on the weed whip. "He illegal?"

"Would you arrest him if he was?" she asked.

Virgil laughed. "If I started arresting illegal Mexicans, I wouldn't have anyplace to eat."

"Well, he's not-I think Margery runs a few illegals in and out, paying them off the books, but since Julio's name was right out there, I wanted to get his green card number," Zoe said. "That way, the feds'll think we're on the up-and-up."

"I don't want to disillusion you, but the feds don't think anybody is on the up-and-up."

"And they wouldn't be wrong about that," she said. "I know a judge who deducted a wife and daughter as dependents for three years after the divorce and they moved to California."

"He do time?" Virgil asked.

"He never got caught," she said, adding, "He wasn't a client of mine. I heard about it from an accountant friend who was reviewing his returns. He was like, 'Well, I didn't know.' Idiot."

"Seems to be the excuse du jour when you've committed a major crime," Virgil said.

"My," she said, "he knows French."

ZOE DROVE A RED HONDA PILOT with a metal file box behind the driver's seat, and a clutter of empty water bottles and ice cream wrappers in the passenger-side foot well. She put the file folder in the metal box, snatched up the ice cream wrappers and bottles and threw them on the backseat, and they took off.

"So-who did it?" she asked. "Any ideas?"

"Some," he said. "But let's not talk about the murder-let's talk about you. Your life and your boyfriends, and all of that. Say, those are nice shoes. Are they Mephistos?"

She glanced at him, puzzled, and said, "What?"

"Just trying for a little friendly conversation," Virgil said. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Zoe, he could smell a floral scent, light and vanilla-y.

"Virgil, are you on drugs? Is this something I should know about?"

"They're not Mephistos, are they?" She glanced at him again, then lifted her left foot off the floor so he could see the Nike logo. "I wouldn't know a Mephisto if one bit me on the ass," she said.

"Now there's a war crime for you," Virgil said.

She smiled and said, "Bob Sanders told me that you were sort of full of it."

"I'm shocked," Virgil said, the uninterest set deep in his tone. "Shocked."

"You don't seem like somebody who would have perpetrated a massacre," she said.

"I didn't."

THEY'D GOTTEN TO THE END of the driveway, and when Virgil looked left, he saw the crime-scene van rolling toward them. He said, "Hold on for a second, will you? I want to see if these guys got anything else."

He hopped out of the car, and when the van driver saw him, he pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Mapes climbed out of the passenger seat carrying a small plastic bag, which he handed to Virgil. Virgil held it up to the sky, to get some light on it.

"A.223," he said. The shell's brass was still bright.

"Hasn't been there long-I could still smell the powder burn," Mapes said. "It was caught in some logs, a couple inches above the water. The shooter couldn't have looked for it long-it was right there."

"Off to the right? Like it was thrown out by an autoloader?"

"Ah, yes-off to the right, but the extraction marks look like they came from a bolt action. I'm sending Jim"-he jabbed his thumb back toward the truck-"back to Bemidji with it, see what we can see. The other guys are still working the beaver lodge."

"Good going, man."

"Well, it was right there-even you could have found it," Mapes said. Pause. "Maybe."

Virgil handed him McDill's car keys and said, "I knew you were going to insult me, so I carefully contaminated the car. See if you can find something anyway."

VIRGIL GOT BACK in the Pilot and told Zoe about the shell. "Now all I have to do is find a rifle and some Mephistos, and we've got it."

"You'll be able to tell the rifle from just one shell?"

"Not me, the lab. But, yup. Extraction marks. And if we're lucky, she pushed the cartridge down in a magazine with her thumb, and there'll be a big ol' thumbprint. Brass takes good prints."

"Mmm. Well, I for one have no Mephistos," she said. "Why'd you ask?"

"Because the woman who killed Erica McDill may be local-she knew exactly when and how to get into the pond to catch McDill alone. And she may wear Mephistos."

"You thought I did it?"

"You've been sort of hanging around. A psychopath might do that," Virgil said.

"I've been hanging around because I'm curious," she said. "Also, I'm not a psychopath. I'm an obsessive-compulsive."

"That's what a psychopath would say," Virgil said. "The case of the curious accountant-a woman for whom blood was just another cocktail."

She brushed the chatter away, as though it were a fly. "You know for sure it's a woman?"

"Pretty sure," he said.

"And local."

"Possibly. You could make a good argument that it comes from the lodge, too," Virgil said. "Would you like to suggest a name or two?"

"No, no. But it makes you think," Zoe said.

"It does make you think," Virgil agreed.

After a moment, she asked, "Should you be telling me all of this?"

"Why not?" Virgil asked. "I've got nothing to hide."

"Well, God. What if I blabbed to everybody?"

Virgil yawned, tipped his seat back a couple of inches, leaned back, and closed his eyes. "Go ahead," he said. "I don't care."

AT THE AIRPORT, Zoe pointed him at a metal building; inside, he found a guy with a pilot's hat half asleep on a couch, who got grog gily to his feet and asked, "You the state trooper?"

"Close enough," Virgil said. He rented a Chevy Trailblazer, got his duffel from Zoe's car, and threw it in the back of the SUV.

"How come you don't have a gun?" she asked, through her open car door. "Aren't cops required to carry guns? I read that somewhere."

"In my experience, bad things can happen if you carry a handgun," Virgil said. "For one thing, it causes your shoulder to slope in the direction of the pocket you carry it in. Over the years, that could cause spinal problems."

"I can't tell whether this is some hopeless attempt to be charming, or if you're just being weird," she said.

"Can you tell me where the Wild Goose is? I want to take a quick look."

"Well, follow me. I'll take you over," Zoe said. "It's mostly a women's bar. You might feel a little odd being there by yourself. Lonely."

THE WILD GOOSE was a mile or so north of the Grand Rapids city limits, a standard North Woods country bar-orange-stained peeled-pine logs set on a rectangular concrete-block foundation, a pea-gravel parking lot, a tin chimney, a low wooden porch outside the front door, and a carved wooden upright black bear guarding the front door, an American flag in its paw.

There were four other cars in the front lot, and two more that Virgil could see around the side. Probably the bartender's and the cook's, around to the side-at most country bars, the employees tried to park where their cars wouldn't get hit by drunks.

Inside, the bar was a little softer than most, with lots of booths and only a few freestanding tables, four stools at the bar, and a small stage on the other side of a dance floor; a jukebox. Three of the booths were occupied by women, two in one, three in another, four in the third. One of the bar stools was occupied by an elderly man who was peering into a half-empty beer glass.

They stopped at the bar, and Zoe said, "Hey, Chuck," to the bartender, who took a long look at Virgil, not unfriendly, and Zoe ordered a beer and Virgil got a Diet Coke. Zoe asked, eyebrows up, "Little problem with alcohol?"

"No, I just don't drink much," Virgil said.

The old man at the bar said to Virgil, "If you gotta ask, it's half empty. Not half full."

"Looks more like four-fifths empty to me, partner," Virgil said. The drinks came, and they carried them to a booth. Virgil checked out the women, and the bar in general, saw the bartender watching.

"What do you think?" Zoe asked.

"It's a bar," he said, smiling. "Must pick up at night-mostly people from Eagle Point?"

"Eagle Nest."

"Right, Eagle Nest. Mostly women from the Eagle Nest? Or half-and-half with locals, or…"

"More locals than Eagle Nest. It's just that if you're at the Eagle Nest and you want to get out, you probably come here."

"Gay or straight?"

"Gay or straight," Zoe said. "Same with locals-mostly women, gay and straight. They can come down here, do some serious drinking, and not have to put up with being hit on, or pushed around. Chuck keeps all that runnin' smooth. Most local guys know that this isn't where they want to go."

"You come down here?"

"Sure. Like I said, it's safe and friendly," she said.

A woman came in the door wearing cutoff jean shorts, a tight halter top, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and sunglasses. She was short, but well rounded, with dark hair twisted in a single braid. She had an Andy Warhol "Marilyn" tattoo on one tanned shoulder. She looked around once, scratched herself between her breasts, wandered over to the bar, and asked, "Seen Wendy?"

"Not in yet."

"Ah, man-we were supposed to meet down at the Schoolhouse," the woman said. She glanced over at Virgil and Zoe, her gaze lingering on Virgil for a moment, then flicking to Zoe, and her mouth turned down. The two women stared at each other for a moment, then the other woman turned back to the bartender. "We're working up 'Lover Do.' If you see her, tell her we're down there, waiting."

Virgil watched her go, and when she was gone, Zoe leaned forward and said, "She's a drummer."

"My type, too," Virgil said.

"Not your type," she said. "She lives with the lead singer."

"Yeah? Maybe they're breaking up," Virgil said, hitting on the Diet Coke. "Musicians lead tumultuous lives."

"The lead singer is Wendy-it's an all-girl band," Zoe said.

Ah, he thought. "Okay."

"You're supposed to say, 'What a terrible waste.' "

"Hey, I'm sophisticated-I went to college," Virgil said. "Anyway, the way you sounded, it's not being wasted."

"Ahhh, poop." Zoe finished her beer in a gulp.

"Ahhh poop, what?" Virgil asked.

"Ahhh…" She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. "Wendy. The singer."

"She's pretty good?"

"Very good. Country, some crossover jazz stuff," Zoe said. "Mostly country, though, Dixie Chicks."

"Really not my type, then, even if she wasn't gay," Virgil said. "Give me a choice between listening to a whole Dixie Chicks album, or sticking a gun in my ear, I'd have to think about it."

"Well, she's my type," Zoe said. "And that's my big problem."

Virgil looked at her for a few seconds, then dropped his forehead on his arms. "No."

"Well, it was gonna come out sooner or later, Virgil," Zoe said, laughing. "We're getting friendly, but I don't want you to get any ideas."

"Poop," he said.

He looked toward the bar and saw the bartender smiling and shaking his head, then hold up a finger, pull another Diet Coke, and bring it around the bar. "On the house," he said, when he put it on the table.

"Coulda put a little rum in it," Virgil said.

VIRGIL SAID TO ZOE, "You know, I can usually pick up on it? I apologize if I've offended you along the way."

"No, no, you were fine," Zoe said, "and I've had boyfriends. Maybe that's why you didn't feel it. But I… like women better. Always did and I finally admitted it to myself. I can still be attracted to some men. I mean, you're attractive in an obvious, superficial way. When I'm attracted to a guy at all, they usually have strong feminine characteristics. Like you, with the long blond hair, and you've got sort of a delicate face."

Virgil said, "Okay-you've guaranteed my shrink's income for another two years."

"You've got a psychiatrist? I think that's very interesting. It shows an unexpected psychological sensitivity."

"I don't really have one," Virgil said. "I was lying."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I lie a lot," he said.

She said, "Sorry about this. I mean, the lesbian thing. I didn't mean to lead you on, if I did."

"That's okay. The band doesn't have a straight saxophone player, does it?"

HE GOT HER LAUGHING AGAIN, then asked, "Why don't Minnesota women wear makeup? There are ten women in here, and a couple of them are pretty good-looking, including you, and none of you wear lipstick. Is it some kind of Minnesota thing? An efficiency thing? An egalitarian thing? What is it?"

"Not many people wear lipstick anymore," Zoe said. "It's a pain to keep it looking good. You wind up chewing it off. But… people will put on a touch when they go out."

"Even gay women?"

"Not so much, maybe," she said. "But… some. The girly ones."

He thought about that for a moment, then said, "Ah, man. Well, I've got to get back and talk to Erica McDill's friends from the Cities. I thank you for the tour. Maybe I'll come back tonight, take a look at the band. See if I can figure out your type."

"Wendy… Whatever. She's a slut. But she turns my crank. If I had a crank."

Virgil laughed and asked, "Why don't you pay for the drinks?"

OUTSIDE IN THE PARKING LOT, she walked with him to the Trailblazer and asked, "You really don't care if I tell some friends about this? About… that a woman did it?"

He shrugged. "No, go ahead. Something to talk about. Better than the Internet. But be careful about who you talk to-we are dealing with a nutcase."

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW was eating dinner at the Eagle Nest, and Mapes said, "We think she braced the rifle across a four-inch log. Looks like she moved the log for that reason-to get a rifle rest. There were a couple of other logs she might have braced her hands or her arms on, and we've bagged all that and we'll look for prints and DNA. Haven't found any hair, but we did find some cotton fibers that may have come from her shirt. No more shells, so there might have been only the one shot."

"Any possibility that more might have gotten thrown into the water?" Virgil asked.

"We checked with a metal detector. Never got a flicker," Mapes said.

"So it's basically prints or DNA and the Mephistos," Virgil said.

"I wouldn't count on prints-I took a long look at that cartridge, and it looked clean and a little oily. I should have been able to see a print. But, maybe not. Maybe the lab will bring something up. And I've got to believe that if she came through that swamp, and knew what she was doing, she was wearing gloves. It's not so bad out in the open, but coming over the margins of the marsh, the mosquitoes were so thick they were clogging up our head nets. If she knew what she was doing, she would have covered up. Gloves, maybe even a head net."

He left them to finish eating and went looking for Stanhope. A woman Virgil hadn't met was turning off lights in the office. She said, "She took them up to the library."

"Uh, who…?"

"The people from the Cities. Miss McDill's friends."

LAWRENCE HARCOURT, whose name was on the agency, was a slender man with close-cropped white hair, quick blue eyes behind military-style gunmetal glasses, and a face that seemed oddly unlined for his apparent age-a face-lift? The second and third of McDill's friends, Barney Mann, creative director for the agency, and Ruth Davies, McDill's partner, always called him Lawrence, never Larry, and though neither deferred to him, they always listened carefully when he spoke.

Mann was a fireplug of a man with a liquor-reddened face and blond hair going white; he had an Australian accent. Virgil thought he might be forty-five. He was noisy and argumentative and angry.

Davies was stunned: not weeping, but disoriented, almost not-believing. A short, not-quite-dumpy woman with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, she looked like a church mouse. Her mouth was a thin, tight line: whoever had given McDill the lipstick note, it hadn't been Davies.

All three, Virgil thought, after the introductions had been made and some questions answered, were intensely self-centered. They were not so concerned about the existential aspects of McDill's death, but rather, what it means to me. They had also been concerned with image, Virgil thought, to the point of silliness. They could have driven up from the Twin Cities, individually, in three hours. Instead, they'd rented a floatplane, apparently to demonstrate the urgency of the matter, and after soaking up time in arranging the flight, and getting together, and making the flight, they'd taken six or seven hours.

Harcourt had checked Virgil quickly, eyes narrowing a bit, and he asked, "Have you had any experience with this kind of investigation?"

"Yes," Virgil said.

"He's the one who killed the Vietnamese," Stanhope told them.

They all looked again, and Mann asked, "Do you have any ideas about how it happened? About who did it?"

Virgil opened his mouth to answer, and Davies broke in. "I just want to see her. What if there's been a mistake?"

"She's been identified by people who knew her," Virgil said, as kindly as he could. "The photograph on Erica McDill's driver's license is a picture of the woman who was killed."

"I still…" she began, and she turned in a circle, and Stanhope patted her on the shoulder.

Mann: "You said you have some ideas…"

"It seems to me after some investigation that the killer is a woman who knows how to handle a rifle and knew the territory. Could be local, or could be an outsider, a guest at the lodge. If I knew why, I'd be closer to a complete answer."

Mann rubbed his nose and then looked at Harcourt and said, "That's not what I expected to hear."

Harcourt nodded, and Virgil asked, "What'd you expect?"

He shrugged: "That it came like a bolt out of the blue and nobody had any idea. If that were the case, I could probably give you the why."

Virgil spread his hands. "I'm all ears."

Mann said, "Lawrence told me on the way up that he and Erica had agreed that she would buy his stock in the agency. That would have given her about three-quarters of the outstanding stock, and total control. Ever since Erica took over, she's been agitating to make the agency more… efficient."

"She wanted to fire people," Harcourt said. "As many as twenty-five or thirty. A lot of them have been with the agency for a long time. They've been protected by the board. Erica had the authority to fire them, as CEO, but then her actions could be reviewed by the board, and there are a number of people on the board who already didn't like her. There would've been a fight-"

"What did you think about the firings?" Virgil asked him.

Harcourt stepped back and sat in one of the library chairs and crossed his legs. Virgil noticed that even though he was wearing jeans and ankle boots, he was also wearing over-the-calf dress socks. He said, "I was generally against them-I could see a couple of them, but no reason for a top-to-bottom housecleaning."

"But you were gonna sell?"

Harcourt sighed, and looked around the room at all the faded old books. "I kept the stock in the first place because the agency pays a nice dividend. But I'm seventy-one and I've got a bad ticker. I need to get my estate in order," he said. "The thing about an ad agency is, its property is mostly intellectual. It's a group of talents, a collection of clients. We don't really own a damn thing, except some tables and chairs. We even lease our computers. So, if I passed the stock down to my children, and Erica got pissed, she might just cherry-pick the talent and start her own agency, and my kids would get screwed. They'd get nothing. But bolting would be a big risk for Erica, too. Big start-up costs, diminished client list. She'd be much better off keeping things as they are. All of that gave me an incentive to sell, and Erica an incentive to buy. We made a deal a couple of weeks ago. We never closed on it."

Mann said, "The point being, there are about thirty scared people down in the Cities who think they might lose their jobs. Some of them have worked at the place for twenty-five or thirty years. They'd have no place to go. Too old. Burned out. Some of them, or one of them, might have… you know… killed her to stop that. That was my first thought, when I heard she'd been killed."

"Would killing McDill actually stop the firings?" Virgil asked.

Mann scratched his head. "I don't know. For a while, probably. I don't know who gets her stock, now. Her parents are still alive, I think…"

"They are," Davies said. "I won't get a thing. Not a thing."

"She didn't leave you anything in her will?" Mann asked her.

"I don't think she had a will," Davies said. "She was pretty sure she'd live forever."

"She had a will somewhere," Harcourt said. "She was too… not calculating, but rational… not to have a will."

"Oh, for Christ's sakes, Lawrence, the woman was calculating," Mann snapped. To Virgil: "They called her the SST at the office. Stainless Steel Twat."

Virgil asked Mann, with a smile, "So… were you on the list? To be fired?"

"Oh, fuck no," Mann said. "She went out of her way to let me know that."

"Barney runs our major accounts and they're pretty happy with him. If he were to leave, he might take some of them with him," Harcourt said. He added, "I had reason to believe that Erica was planning to offer him a partnership. Or a share."

Mann cocked his head. "Really? Well, that's a shot in the ass."

Virgil threw his hands up. "So? What happens now? With the agency?"

Mann and Harcourt looked at each other, then Mann turned back and said, "I don't know."

Harcourt said to Mann, "We need to make arrangements here and get back to the Cities. We need a board meeting. Immediately. We have to have a new management in place by Monday, before the clients start calling."

"What's going to happen to me?" Davies asked. "What's going to happen?"

Again, Harcourt and Mann looked at each other. Neither one said, "I don't know," but Virgil could see it in their faces; and so could Davies.

VIRGIL GOT OUT his notebook and jotted down a few thoughts, then talked to Harcourt, Mann, and Davies individually. Harcourt and Mann both said that they'd been in the Cities the day before, and gave Virgil a list of people they'd seen during the day. Unless one of them was telling a desperate lie, the alibis would eliminate them as the killer, because the Cities were simply too far away to get back and forth easily.

Davies, on the other hand, had no alibi. She'd been sick the morning before, she said, and when she finally got out of bed, it was almost noon. She went grocery shopping at a chain supermarket where they'd be unlikely to remember having seen her. Still feeling logy-"I think I ate something bad"-she'd spent the day cleaning, watching a movie on DVD, and then had gone to bed early, with a book. Neither a DVD nor a book would leave an electronic trace.

She picked up on the direction of the questioning and protested, "I wouldn't ever do anything to hurt Erica-I love Erica. She was the love of my life. We've been together for six years… I don't know anything about guns. I've never been here. I didn't even know exactly where it was…"

"Did you or Erica have outside relationships? Was your relationship, uh, an open relationship?"

"No. No, it wasn't open," she said. "I mean, back at the beginning, we both were dating other people simultaneously, if you see what I mean…"

"I know what you mean," Virgil said.

"… but once I moved in, we were committed."

Virgil nodded. "Okay. I believe you when you say you wouldn't want to hurt Erica, but I had to ask-you know, if there had been another person, if there was a sexual tension, if she'd started pulling away from the other person, to stay with you."

"Why wouldn't the other person have shot me?" Davies said. "Why would you shoot the one you want?"

"Because you shoot the one who rejects you," Virgil said. "Hell hath no fury…"

Davies slumped. "Oh, God. You know, there might have been one fling. She might have had one relationship, but she broke it off a year ago."

"With who?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I was afraid to ask. I was afraid if I asked, it would precipitate something. Instead, I just went out of my way to… attach myself more firmly."

"You must at least suspect a person, a name…"

She said, "Look. I only suspect a relationship. I'm not even sure there was one. It could have been a bad time at work. We didn't talk about her work. She didn't want to. Our relationship was her way of getting away from work. So it's possible that what I thought was a distracting relationship was actually something else. So, no. I don't have a name. Or a suspect."

SHE LOOKED SO TIRED and beat-up that Virgil let her go. Mann and Harcourt had gone with Margery Stanhope to call the funeral home, to see if the body had already been shipped to the medical examiner at Ramsey County, or if further arrangements had to be made. Virgil lingered down the hall from Stanhope's office until he saw Mann emerge, turn away, and head toward the front of the lodge. He caught him just as Mann stepped into the bar.

"Mr. Mann…"

Mann looked back over his shoulder, then nodded to the bar. "I need a drink."

At the bar, the bartender looked at him and said, "Sir, this bar is basically ladies only-"

"Just give me a goddamn drink, honey," Mann said.

"Sir-" Still apologetic.

Mann cut her off: "I came up here to take care of Erica McDill. If you don't give me a drink, I'll sue you for discrimination in so many different directions that you'll be an old woman before you get out of court. A martini, a double, two olives, and I want to see you make it and I don't want to see you spit in it, because then I'd have to throw you out the fuckin' window."

"Relax," Virgil said. The bartender, anger on her face, stepped away, picked up a shaker, and scooped up some ice.

"Relax, my ass. As soon as I get a couple drinks under my belt, I'm gonna go rent a car, and me and Harcourt are headed back to the Cities," Mann said. "What a waste of time. What are we doing up here? We need to be down there."

"You'll take Miss Davies with you?"

"Yeah, I guess, if she wants to go," Mann said. He watched as the bartender finished making the drink. "But she's sort of a prune."

The bartender pushed the martini across the bar and said, "Choke on it, motherfucker."

Mann grinned at her, then at Virgil, said, "They got a tough brand of bartender up here." He sipped the drink. "Make a pretty good martini, though." He'd put a ten on the bar, and the bartender slapped five dollars back in change. He pushed it into the bar gutter as a tip.

The bartender, a bottle-redhead with dark-penciled eyebrows, with a name tag that said Kara, looked at the money, then at Virgil, and said, "You're the police officer. People said it was the surfer-looking guy."

"Yes," Virgil said.

Mann looked him over and said, "You are sort of surfer-looking."

"Cute, for a cop," the bartender said, softening a bit on Mann.

"He is cute," Mann said. "I'd fuck him myself, if I were gay."

"Guys," Virgil said. "Shut up."

The bartender looked at him for a beat, then another, then made a tiny dip of her head toward the back of the bar, and wandered away. Mann had been concentrating on his drink, said, "What a day."

"When you're on the way back, and I expect either Miss Davies or Mr. Harcourt will be driving, because you'll have done this drinking…"

Mann grinned again and said, "You're an optimist, son."

"… so when you're on the way back, make up a list of the people who would have been fired. Especially the ones who'd be most bitter, and the women."

"You really think a woman did it?"

"At this point, it's the best bet," Virgil said. "Though I take you seriously about those people down at the agency. I've been thinking about it, and looking at Google Earth, and the maps, and the fact that people down at the agency knew where Erica was going, and when, and she probably talked about what she did up here. I've recalculated. It might be fifty-fifty on whether the killer was from up here or down there."

"You think?" Mann sucked the life out of an olive, then popped it into his mouth.

"Which brings me to ask, who did McDill have that affair with, last year? Ended about a year ago. Somebody at the agency?"

There was about one long suck of alcohol left in the martini glass, and Mann paused with the rim of the glass an inch from his lip, stared straight ahead for a minute, thinking, then turned to Virgil and said, "So… Ruth knew about it, huh?"

Wasn't a guess: he'd figured out where Virgil had gotten the information. Smart guy. "She did," Virgil said. "But she doesn't know who it was."

"Abby Sexton, editor at a specialty home-furnishings magazine down in the Cities," Mann said. "She never worked at the agency, but her husband does."

"Her husband. Okay. Was he gonna get fired?"

"That's possible. The word was, Erica would have left Ruth for Abby, but Abby sort of blew her off. Had her little fling, went back to Mark, and promptly got pregnant. Erica was really hosed about the pregnancy. That was one thing that Erica couldn't have given Abby. Anyway, Mark's an account guy. He's okay, not great. Firing him would have been a nice little piece of revenge, what with them having the new kid. Magazines don't pay enough to feed a canary."

Kara the bartender was at the far end of the bar, and Mann held up another finger. She rolled her eyes and started putting together another drink.

Virgil took out his notebook, wrote Abby Sexton in it, asked, "What magazine was that?"

Mann said, "Craftsman Ceramics, something like that. They specialize in Arts and Crafts tile and pottery and so on."

"You're a smart guy," Virgil said. "What else should I know?"

"I don't know. The Abby thing hadn't occurred to me, because I don't think like a cop. But I do take this hard, this murder. If I think of anything, I'll call you."

Virgil nodded and said, "Thanks-and I'll give you a call tomorrow morning about that list. If you could get me a phone number for Abby Sexton, that'd be a bonus." He caught the eye of the bartender, drifted out of the bar, turned left, and walked down toward the restrooms.

THE BARTENDER pushed through the back door a moment later, stepped close, and said, "You could lose me this job, and there aren't any more jobs like it. Not around here. So, I'd appreciate it if… you know."

Virgil nodded. He was like the Associated Press-lots of sources, all anonymous.

"I saw you with Zoe, getting in her car," Kara said. "You know she's gay?"

"Yeah."

"Well, the thing is, I like her fine-I'm straight, by the way-but I thought you should know that Zoe has had two short, mmm, involvements, with a girl named Wendy Ashbach, who's a country singer down in Grand Rapids."

"Sings at the Wild Goose," Virgil said.

She nodded. "Zoe told you? Anyway, Wendy has this longtime girlfriend named Berni Kelly…"

"The drummer?"

"Yes. You know, you're smarter than you look, picking up all this stuff."

"Thanks, I guess," Virgil said. "So there's a love triangle with Zoe and Berni and Wendy."

"Up until night before last," Kara said. "Then it became a rectangle. Or a pentagon."

"Yeah?"

"There were some women in here late, getting loaded. My deal is, I stay until they leave. So I got out of here late and walked down to my car when I saw Miz McDill's car pull into the parking lot. They didn't see me, I was down at the far end of the lot, where the employees park. Miz McDill and Wendy Ashbach get out of the car and walk around to the end of it, and Miz McDill throws a lip-lock on Wendy and Wendy gives it right back to her. So they're fooling around for a minute, which made me kinda hot, I gotta admit, and then they go sneaking off through the dark, toward Miz McDill's cabin. I don't know what happened the next morning, or if they snuck out early, or what."

"You didn't mention this to anyone?" Virgil asked.

"No, but if somebody saw them the next morning, the word would have gotten around," Kara said. "A lot of the lesbos know Wendy, and they know she's hot and likes girls, and if McDill got her in the sack, everybody would have been interested."

"Huh."

"That's exactly what I thought. Huh." She glanced down the hall. "I gotta go…"

"Listen, Kara… don't tell anybody about this. There's a crazy woman around here and you don't want to attract her attention."

"No shit, Sherlock," she said. "My last name's Larsen. I'm in the Grand Rapids phone book. If you need to ask me any more questions, call me. Don't talk to me here."

VIRGIL FOUND MARGERY STANHOPE in the main office, alone, staring out the window at the darkening lake. She turned in the chair when Virgil stepped in and asked, "Figured it out?"

"Not yet. Margery: if you knew anything at all that might put some light on this thing-or even if something unusual happened with Miss McDill in the last day or two, behavior-wise, you'd be sure and tell me, right?"

She said, "Something happened. What happened? Why did you ask that?"

"I'm wondering who spent the night in McDill's cabin, night before last, and why nobody's telling me about it," Virgil said.

Stanhope sat up straight: "Night before last? I know nothing about that. I don't spy on people-but I should have heard. I would have heard, if it were true."

"You don't think it's true? I've got it on pretty good authority."

She said, "Let me go talk to people. I'll find out."

"Do that," Virgil said. "Let me give you my cell phone number. Call me anytime."