Rough Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

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