Rough Country, Page 3

  “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 en
d 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.”

  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 co
ming 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.