Rough country vf-3 Read online

  Unable to get an ecological science job after college, he'd volunteered for the army's Officer Candidate School, figuring they'd put him in intelligence, or one of those black jumping-out-of-airplanes units.

  They gave him all the tests and made him a cop.

  OUT OF THE ARMY, he'd spent ten years with the St. Paul police, running up a clearance record that had never been touched, and then had been recruited by Davenport, the BCA's official bad boy. "We'll give you the hard stuff," Davenport had told him, and so far, he had.

  On the side, Virgil was building a reputation as an outdoor writer, the stories researched on what Virgil referred to as under-time. He'd sold a two-story non-outdoor sequence to The New York Times Magazine, about a case he'd worked. The sale had given him a big head, and caused him briefly to shop for a Rolex.

  Davenport didn't care about the big head or the under-time-Virgil gave him his money's worth-but did worry about Virgil dragging his boat around behind a state-owned truck. And he worried that Virgil sometimes forgot where he put his gun; and that he had in the past slept with witnesses to the crimes he was investigating.

  Still, there was that clearance record, rolling along, solid as ever. Davenport was a pragmatist: if it worked, don't mess with it.

  But he worried.

  "YOU KNOW," JOHNSON SAID, "in some ways, your job resembles slavery. They tell you get your ass out in the cotton field, and that's what you do. My friend, you have traded your freedom for a paycheck, and not that big a paycheck."

  "Good benefits," Virgil said.

  "Yeah. If you get shot, they pay to patch you up," Johnson said. "I mean, you could be a big-time writer, have women hanging on you, wear one of those sport coats with patches on the sleeves, smoke a pipe or something. Your time would be your own-you could go hang out in Hollywood. Write movies if you felt like it. Fuck Madonna."

  "Basically, I like the work," Virgil said. "I just don't like it all the time."

  JOHNSON WAS AN OLD FISHING PAL, going back to Virgil's college days. A lean, scarred-up veteran of too many alcohol-related accidents in vehicles ranging from snowmobiles to trucks to Ever-glades airboats, Johnson had grown up in the timber business. He ran a sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota, cutting hardwood flooring material, with a sideline in custom cutting and curing oversized chunks of maple and cherry for artists. A lifelong fisherman, he knew the Mississippi between Winona and LaCrosse like the back of his hand, and was always good for an outstate musky run.

  Johnson wore jeans and a T-shirt. When it got a little cooler, he pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt. When it got cooler than that, he pulled on a jean jacket. Cooler than that, a Carhartt. Cooler than that, he said fuck it and went to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of T-shirts and a Speedo bathing suit that he called the slingshot.

  NOW HE DIRECTED VIRGIL across the back roads between highways 1 and 79, generally south and west, over flat green wet country with not too much to look at, except tamarack trees and marshy fields and here and there, a marginal farm with a couple of horses. As they got closer to the Eagle Nest, the woods got denser and the terrain started to roll, the roads got narrower and lakes glinted blue or black behind the screens of trees.

  "Wonder how long it took them to think of the name Eagle Nest?" Johnson wondered. "About three seconds?"

  "They could have called it the Porcupine Lodge or the Dun Rovin or Sunset Shores or Musky Point," Virgil said.

  "You're getting grumpier," Johnson said. "Back at the V, I was the one who was pissed."

  "Well, goddamnit, I've been working like a dog all year," Virgil said.

  "Except for the under-time," Johnson said.

  "Doesn't count. I was still working, just not for the state."

  "You oughta model yourself after me," Johnson said. "I'm a resilient type. I roll with the punches, unlike you fragile pretty boys."

  "Fragile. Big word for a guy like you," Virgil said.

  Johnson grinned: "Turnoff coming up."

  ON THE WAY DOWN, Virgil had formed a picture of the Eagle Nest in his mind: a peeled-log lodge with a Rolling Rock sign at one end, at the bar, a fish-cleaning house down by the dock. A dozen little plywood cabins would be scattered through the pines along the shore, a battered aluminum boat for each cabin, a machine shed in the back, the smell of gasoline and oil mixed with dirt and leaf humus; and on calm nights, a hint of septic tank. Exactly how that fit with a rich advertising woman, he didn't know-maybe an old family place that she'd been going to for years.

  When he turned off the highway, into the lodge's driveway, he began to adjust his mental image. He'd been fishing the North Woods for thirty years, ever since he was old enough to hold a fishing pole. He thought he knew most of the great lodges, which generally were found on the bigger lakes.

  He'd never heard of an Eagle Nest on a Stone Lake, but the driveway, which was expensively blacktopped, and which swooped in unnecessary curves through a forest dotted with white pines, hinted at something unusual.

  They came over a small ridge and the forest opened up, and Johnson said, "Whoa: nice-looking place."

  The lodge was set on a grassy hump that looked out over the lake; two stories tall, built of cut stone, logs, and glass, it fit in the landscape like a hand in a glove. The cabins scattered down the shoreline were as carefully built and sited as the lodge, each with a screened porch facing the water, and a sundeck above each porch. An expensive architect had been at work, Virgil thought, but not recently: the lodge had a feeling of well-tended age.

  There were no cars at the cabins. As they rolled down toward the lodge, the road jogged left and dipped into a hollow, where they found a parking lot, screened from the lodge and the cabins by a fifteen-foot-tall evergreen hedge. Four sheriff 's cars were parked in the lot, along with twenty or so civilian vehicles, and a hearse. There were no cops in sight; a lodge employee was loading luggage into a Mercedes-Benz station wagon from a Yamaha Rhino.

  Deeper in the woods, on the other side of the parking lot, Virgil saw the corner of a green metalwork building, probably the shop. Neither the parking lot nor the shop would be visible from the lodge or the cabins. Nice.

  "Where're the boats?" Johnson asked, as Virgil pulled into a parking space.

  "I don't know. Must be on the other side of the lodge," Virgil said.

  AS THEY CLIMBED out of the truck, the lodge worker, a middle-aged woman in a red-and-blue uniform, stepped over and asked, "Can I help you, gentlemen?"

  "Where's the lodge?" Virgil asked.

  "Up the path," she said, and, "Do you know this is ladies only?"

  "We're cops," Johnson said.

  "Ah. Okay. There are more deputies up there now." To Virgil: "Are you a policeman, too?"

  Johnson laughed and said, "Yeah. He is," and they walked over to stairs that led to a flagstone path through the woods, out of the parking lot to the lodge.

  THE LODGE and its grassy knoll sat at the apex of a natural shoreline notch. The notch was filled with docks and a variety of boats, mostly metal outboards, but also a few canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats. A hundred yards down to the right, two women walked hand in hand down a narrow sand beach that looked out at a floating swimming dock.

  Twenty women in outdoor shirts and jeans were scattered at tables around the deck, with cups of coffee and the remnants of crois sants and apple salads, and looked them over as they went to the railing. Down below them, two uniformed sheriff's deputies were standing on the dock, chatting with each other.

  A waiter hurried over: a thin, pale boy with dark hair, he had a side-biased haircut that he thought made him look like Johnny Depp. "Can I help you?"

  Virgil said, "I'm with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. How do we get down to the dock?"

  The waiter said, "Ah. Come along."

  He took them inside, down an interior stairway, through double doors under the deck, and pointed at a flagstone walkway. "Follow that."

  The flagstone path curled around the stone ledge,
right at the waterside, and emerged at the dock. Two women, who'd been out of sight from the deck, were standing at the end of the path, arms crossed, talking and watching the deputies. Johnson muttered, "I've only been detecting for ten minutes, but check out the short one. And she's wearing a fishing shirt."

  Virgil said, quietly as he could, "Johnson, try to stay out of the way for a few minutes, okay?"

  "You didn't talk that way when you needed my truck, you bitch."

  "Johnson…"

  THE WOMEN TURNED and looked at them as they came along, and Virgil nodded and said, "Hi. I'm Virgil Flowers, with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I'm looking for Sheriff Sanders."

  "He's out at the pond," said the older of the two. A bluff, no-nonsense, heavyset woman with tired eyes, she stuck out a hand and said, "I'm Margery Stanhope. I own the lodge."

  "I need to talk to you when I get back," Virgil said. "I noticed that somebody was checking out when we were coming-a lady was loading luggage. I'll have to know who has left since the… incident."

  "Not a problem," she said. "Anything we can do."

  The younger woman was a small, auburn-haired thirty-something, pretty, with a sprinkling of freckles on her tidy nose; the kind of woman that might cause Johnson to get drunk and recite poetry, including the complete "Cremation of Sam McGee." Virgil had seen it happen.

  And she was pretty enough to cause Virgil's heart to hum, if not yet actually sing, until she asked, "Are you the Virgil Flowers who was involved in that massacre up in International Falls?"

  His heart stopped humming. "Wasn't exactly a massacre," Virgil said.

  "Sounded like a massacre," she said.

  Stanhope said, "Zoe, shut up."

  "I feel that we have to take a stance," Zoe said to her.

  "Take it someplace else," Stanhope said. She looked past Virgil at Johnson: "You're also a police officer?"

  Virgil jumped in: "Actually, he's my friend, Johnson. We were in the fishing tournament up at Vermilion and I got pulled to look at this case. The guys who'd normally do it are on that Little Linda thing. Johnson's not a police officer."

  "Pleased to meet you," Stanhope said, and shook with Johnson. "What's your first name, again?"

  "Johnson," Johnson said.

  She said, "Oh." Not sure if her leg was being pulled. "What's your last name?"

  "Johnson," Virgil said. When Stanhope looked skeptical, he said, "Really. Johnson Johnson. His old man named him after an outboard. Everybody calls him Johnson."

  Zoe was pleased, either with the double name, or the concept of a name based on an outboard motor. "You get teased when you were a kid?" she asked.

  "Not as much as my brother, Mercury," Johnson said.

  Stanhope said, "Now I know you're lying."

  "Believe it," Virgil said. "Mercury Johnson. He suffers from clinical depression."

  "Thank God Mom decided to quit after two," Johnson said. "Dad wanted to go for a daughter and he'd just bought a twenty-five-horse Evinrude."

  "I don't know," Zoe said. "Evvie's kind of a nice name."

  That made Johnson laugh, and, since she was pretty, laugh too hard; Virgil said, "I'll talk to you ladies later. I gotta go see the deputies."

  Stanhope said, blank-faced, to Johnson, "This isn't a laughing matter. This is a terrible tragedy."

  Virgil nodded and said, "Of course it is."

  Virgil and Johnson turned toward the dock, and Zoe asked, "She's dead, isn't she? Little Linda?"

  "I don't know," Virgil said, over his shoulder, still miffed about the massacre question. "I don't know anything about it."

  "I wonder if it's connected to this death?"

  Virgil paused. "Do you have any reason to think so?"

  "Nope. Except that they happened only two days apart," Zoe said.

  "And about forty miles," Virgil said.

  "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 s
heriff 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."