Rough Country (4 page)

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.

Chapter
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.