Rough country vf-3 Read online

  Rough country

  ( Virgil Flowers - 3 )

  John Sandford

  John Sandford

  Rough country

  1

  THE AUGUST HEAT WAS slipping away with the day. A full moon would climb over the horizon at eight o'clock, and the view across Stone Lake should be spectacular.

  All tricks of the light, McDill thought. Her father taught her that.

  A full moon on the horizon was no larger than a full moon overhead, he'd told her, as a small child, as they stood hand in hand in the backyard. The larger apparent size was all an optical illusion. She hadn't believed him, so he'd proven it by taking a Polaroid photograph of a harvest moon on the horizon, the biggest, fattest, yellowest moon of the year, then comparing it to another shot of the moon when it was overhead. And they were the same size.

  He took pride in his correctness. He was a scientist, and he knew what he knew.

  McDill ran an advertising agency, and she knew her father was both right and wrong. Technically he was correct, but you wouldn't make any money proving it. You could sell a big fat gorgeous moon coming over the horizon, shining its ass off, pouring its golden light on whatever product you wanted to sell, and screw the optical illusion…

  MCDILL SLIPPED across the water in near silence. She was paddling a fourteen-foot Native Watercraft, a canoe-kayak hybrid designed for stability. Good for a city woman, with soft hands, who wasn't all that familiar with boats.

  She didn't need the stability this evening, because the lake was glassy-flat, at the tag end of a heat wave. The forecasters were predicting that the wind would pick up overnight, but nothing serious.

  She could hear the double-bladed paddle pulling through the water, first right, then left, and distantly, probably from another lake, either an outboard or a chain saw, but the sound was so distant, so intermittent, so thready, that it was like aural smoke-a noise on the edge of nothingness. Aquatic insects were hatching around her: they'd come to the surface and, from there, take off, leaving a dimple in the water.

  A half-mile out from the lodge, she paddled toward the creek that drained the lake. The outlet was a crinkle in a wall of aspen, across a lily-pad flat, past a downed tree where five painted turtles lined up to take the sun. The turtles plopped off the log when they spotted her, and she smiled at the sight and sound of them. Another few yards and she headed into the creek, which pinched down to hallway-width for twenty yards or so, and around a turn to an open spot, rimmed with cattails.

  The pond, as she called it, was a hundred and fifty yards long, and fifty wide. At the end of it, where the creek narrowed down and got about its real business-running downhill-a white pine stood like a sentinel among the lower trees. A bald eagle's nest was built high in the tree, and on most evenings, she'd see one or both of the eagle pair coming or going from the nest.

  From down the lake, a few minutes earlier, she'd seen one of them leaving, looking for an evening meal. She idled toward the pine, hoping she'd see the bird coming back, then leaned back in the seat, hung the paddle in the side-mounted paddle holder, spread her legs and let her feet dangle over the side of the boat, in the warm summer water.

  Felt the sun on her back. Dug in a polypro bag, found a cigarette and a lighter, lit the cigarette, sucked in a lungful of smoke.

  Perfect. Almost.

  Perfect, if only her mind would stop running.

  MCDILL RAN AN ADVERTISING AGENCY, Ruff-Harcourt-McDill, in Minneapolis. Ruff was dead, Harcourt retired; and Harcourt, two weeks earlier, had agreed to sell his remaining stock to McDill, which would give her seventy-five percent of the outstanding shares.

  Absolute control.

  So excellent.

  She'd toyed with the idea of a name change-Media/McDill, or McDill Group-but had decided that she would, for the time being, leave well enough alone. Advertising buyers knew RHM, and the name projected a certain stability. She would need the sense of stability as she went about weeding out the…

  Might as well say it: weeds.

  THE AGENCY, over the years, had accumulated footdraggers, time-wasters, slow-witted weeds more suited for a job, say, in a newspaper than in a hot advertising agency. Getting rid of them-she had a list of names-would generate an immediate twelve percent increase in the bottom line, with virtually no loss in production. Bodies were expensive. Some of them seemed to think that the purpose of the agency was to provide them with jobs. They were wrong, and were about to find that out. When she got the stock, when she nailed that down, she'd move.

  The question that plagued her was exactly how to do it. The current creative director, Barney Mann, was smart, witty, hardworking, a guy she wanted to keep-but he had all kinds of alliances and friendships among the worker bees. Went out for drinks with them. Played golf with them. Lent some of them money. He was loved, for Christ's sakes. He was the kind of guy who could turn a necessary managerial evolution into a mudslinging match.

  And he'd done an absolutely brilliant job on the Mattocks Motor City campaign, no question about it. Dave Mattocks thought Mann was a genius and the Motor City account brought in nine percent of RHM's billings in the last fiscal year. Nine percent. If you lost an account of that size, you lost more than the account-other buyers would wonder why, and what happened, and might think that RHM was losing its edge.

  McDill wanted to keep Mann, and wondered how much of a saint he really was. Suppose she took him to dinner and simply put it on him: a partnership, options on ten percent of the stock, a million bucks up front, and no fuss when the ax came down.

  In fact, he might usefully soften the blow to the people who were… remaindered. Maybe he could take charge of an amelioration fund, little tax-deductible money gifts to be parceled out as needed, to keep any pathetic tales of woe out of the media. Wouldn't have to be much…

  MCDILL DRIFTED, thinking about it.

  And her thoughts eventually drifted away from the agency, to the upcoming evening, about her sneaky date the night before, and about Ruth. She'd outgrown Ruth. Ruth was settling into middle-aged hausfrau mode, her mind going dull as her ass got wider. She was probably at home right now, baking a pumpkin pie or something.

  In a way, McDill thought, the takeover of the agency changed everything.

  Everything.

  The agency was hot, she was hot.

  Time to shine, by God.

  THE EAGLE CAME BACK.

  She saw it coming a half-mile out, unmistakable in its size, a giant bird floating along on unmoving wings.

  A thousand feet away, it carved a turn in the crystalline air, like a skier on a downhill, and banked away.

  McDill wondered why: the eagles had never been bothered by her presence before. She was farther away now than she had been last night, when she coasted right up to the tree trunk.

  Huh. Had the eagle sensed something else?

  McDill turned and scanned the shoreline, and then, in her last seconds, saw movement, frowned, and sat forward. What was that? A wink of glass…

  The killer shot her in the forehead.

  2

  FIVE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "One of those Pringles," Johnson said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "That's the truth, Johnson."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "You tell him to go fuck himself?"

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

  "Goldarnit, Roy," Johnson said.

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

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

  "You know her?" Johnson asked.

  "No, I don't," Roy said.

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

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

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

  "You on the lake?" Davenport asked.

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

  "Nice day?"

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

  "Virgil, man, I'm sorry."

  "What happened?"

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

  "I've heard of it," Virgil said.

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

  "When did they find her?"

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

  "Where are the Bemidji guys?" Virgil asked.

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

  "Ah, Jesus."

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

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

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

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

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

  "Yeah, somewhere."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  HE AND JOHNSON walked across the parking lot to Johnson's truck, carrying their lunch cooler between them, and Johnson said, looking back at the boat, "That's pretty handy-we gotta do that more often. It's like having a reserved parking space," and then, "What do you want to do about getting around?"
r />   "If you could run me over to the scene, that'd be good," Virgil said. "I'll figure out something after I see it-if it's gonna take a while, I'll go down to Grand Rapids and rent a car."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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