Rough Country

by John Sandford

  “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?”

  “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).

  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 be
tween 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 sai
d, 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.