Rough Country

by John Sandford

  “Don’t know,” Virgil said. The question hadn’t occurred to him. “Maybe she was an amateur, and thought the head was the natural place to aim.”

  “She?”

  “We think the shooter might have been a woman,” Virgil said.

  “So you really didn’t think it was me?” Owen asked.

  “Nope. But everybody said you didn’t like her, that she might be planning to fire you, so I had to check,” he said. He glanced at the woman and said, “I mean, maybe your wife shot her.”

  The woman said, “I don’t even kill mice. I take them outside and let them go.”

  “And you were here the night before last?”

  “I was at work until five, at Highland Junior High,” she said. “I’m a teacher. I had after-school volleyball.”

  Virgil smiled: “I thought it was local, myself. . . .”

  To Owen: “If you had to pick out one woman, that you know of, who was most likely to shoot McDill, who’d you say?”

  Owen thought for a couple of seconds, scanning Virgil’s face, and then said, “Jean.”

  “Who’s Jean?”

  “That’s me,” the woman said. “I really didn’t like that bitch.”

  They talked for a few more minutes: Owen didn’t know anybody at the agency, he said, who’d kill McDill.

  “It’s some backwoods redneck antigay thing,” he said. “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that some backwoods guy did it. I was watching a football game once, at Palachek’s up in Milaca, and somebody said something about one of the quarterbacks being gay, and this redneck guy said, ‘I’d kill a queer,’ and he meant it.”

  “Wonder if he’d think the same about a lesbian?” Virgil asked.

  “Why would a lesbian be different?”

  “Lesbian’s not a threat to a straight guy,” Virgil said. “Some straight guys have fantasies about lesbians.”

  Jean checked him: “Sounds like you have personal experience in that area.”

  VIRGIL ASKED, “It’s been suggested that I might check into the whereabouts of a John Yao. Do you know . . . ?”

  “John? John wouldn’t hurt a rabid rat. The Sextons suggested him, right? Those fucks . . .”

  VIRGIL LEFT with a brown paper bag full of sweet corn and cucumbers.

  Why the head shot? Maybe a personal passion, and the killer wanted to mutilate McDill’s face? That happened in male homosexual murders of passion, but he wasn’t sure about females. Owen was right, though. The head shot had made the killing harder, and no more certain. Something to think about.

  Did he have fantasies about lesbians? He considered the proposition and decided that he did not. He had fantasies about women; he’d never considered the lesbian angle. Maybe he’d give it a try, the next time he needed a fantasy.

  VIRGIL LEFT the Owens’s place behind, headed back into the core of the Cities. First to McDill’s house, then to the board meeting, to see what that might produce. He should put more pressure on Davies, he thought, to see if he could squeeze something out of her; and talk to the crime-scene crew working on McDill’s house.

  He’d just gotten back inside the I-694 loop when he took a call from the duty officer at BCA headquarters in St. Paul. “You know a woman named Zoe Tull, up in Grand Rapids?”

  “Yeah—what happened?”

  “I don’t know if anything happened. But she called and said she needs to talk to you, and it’s urgent. Actually, she said, ‘kinda urgent.’ ”

  VIRGIL PUNCHED in Zoe’s number and she answered on the second ring, fast for a cell phone. “Virgil?”

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody was in my house last night, while I was in bed,” she said.

  “Ah, jeez—why?” He had an image in his mind’s eye, a killer at night in a dark house. “Why do you think there was somebody in the house?”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night. I lay awake forever, thinking about everything,” Zoe said. “After that fight, my brain was going around in circles. Then, really late—two o’clock—I thought I heard something. In the kitchen. Or maybe, in the office. So I sat up and I turned on the light, and then I got up, and I couldn’t see anything, because it was so dark in the rest of the house, so I yelled, ‘Hello, I’ve got a gun.’ After a minute, I didn’t hear anything, so I peeked out and I saw the cat in the hallway, and I thought it was the cat, and I walked through the house, and didn’t see anybody. Then this morning, the back door was open, maybe a quarter inch. I didn’t even see that it was open until I went out. I mean, I reached out to open it, and it opened as soon as I touched it. It won’t even close now, because they broke the wood around that hole-thing where the lock goes in.”

  “The strike plate.”

  “Whatever. I looked at it, and somebody had pried it. They broke some of the wood around the lock.”

  “Did you call the cops?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes. I told them the whole thing, about how I’d been talking to you, and they said the door definitely had been pried, but they couldn’t tell when,” she said. “They didn’t do anything, though. They said I should get better locks. They said I should tell you.”

  “Okay. Get better locks. Is there anyplace else you can stay overnight? A motel . . .”

  “I could stay with my sister if I had to,” Zoe said. “Her husband is out of town.”

  “Go to your sister’s,” Virgil said. “The crime-scene crew is probably still there, so I’ll have them look at your back door. Did the cops screw around with it, looking at it?”

  “No, no. I don’t think they touched it,” she said. “They looked at it pretty close, though.”

  “All right. I’m going to give the crime-scene guys your number, and they’ll call you, and talk to you about it,” Virgil said. “Don’t touch the door again. Go to your sister’s until you get the locks changed.”

  “Okay.”

  “What kind of gun do you have?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t have a gun. I’ve got a baseball bat. Also, I’ve got one of those Wave radios and a CD of a Doberman barking,” she said. “But I forgot about the bat and the CD last night. I’m such a twit.”

  “Get the locks. Go to your sister’s. I’m coming back up this afternoon. I’ll call you when I get there,” Virgil said.

  HE CALLED MAPES, with the crime-scene crew, and had them send a guy to Zoe’s. Called Zoe back and told him the guy was coming. Next he checked with the medical examiner: “We got all the usual stuff, Virgil, and I can tell you she wasn’t drunk or doped up, to any significant extent. There’s a messy entry wound in her forehead, which I guess you saw . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “I’m calling that a .223. Won’t know for sure unless you find a slug, but we can see the rim of the impact hole, and judging from the damage it did, it sure looks like a high-powered .22 of some kind—.223 would be the best bet, could be an old .222. I don’t think it’s one of the small hyperspeed ones. . . . I’m going with .223.”

  “Thank you.”

  Independent confirmation. The .223 was one of the more popular shooter’s guns in the state, the same caliber used in current military assault rifles, low recoil, relatively cheap ammo, very accurate in the right gun. All he had to do was find the gun; preferably with attached fingerprints and a map of the murder scene.

  And he thought: If the killer had broken into Zoe’s house, then the killer was local, from Grand Rapids; she would have to have been hooked into a local gossip network to know that Zoe had been talking to Virgil.

  ERICA MCDILL HAD LIVED in an area of million-dollar homes with quiet suburban streets, big yards, tall trees, and swimming pool fences in the backyards, where the backyards were visible. McDill’s home was a low, flat-roofed midcentury place, showing steel beams and glass, ugly, but probably architecturally significant, Virgil thought. The driveway wound around back and ended at a four-car garage. A guy named Lane, from the crime-scene crew, let him in: the house had been professionally decorated, from the carpets to th
e ceiling paint.

  Ruth Davies was there with McDill’s father, sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by twenty square feet of paper.

  He took Davies first, and got nothing. She simply dithered, until it began to drive him crazy, and eventually she went into the kitchen and began baking something with peanut butter.

  McDill’s father, Oren McDill, looking down at all the paper that summed his daughter’s life, was distraught, depressed, shaken. He was a tall, thin man with a gray buzz cut, simple gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He said that McDill did have a will, and that he was the executor. “I’ll get you a copy as soon as I can get to my safe-deposit box,” he said. He gestured at all the paper. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She was supposed to do this for me.”

  McDill’s mother lived in Arizona with a second husband, and she and her daughter were not close, McDill said. “It goes back to the divorce. We got divorced when Erica was in high school, and she couldn’t believe that her mother would dump both of us. Mae wanted her freedom. Didn’t want a husband—at the time, anyway—didn’t want a kid. She told us that. Erica never got over it.”

  “I don’t want to . . .” Virgil looked around; they were sitting in a four-seasons porch, alone, but he could hear Davies babbling on somewhere. “Look, I don’t want to be an asshole, is what I don’t want to be. But I have to ask: If you’ve looked at the will . . . would Erica’s mother be in line to inherit anything?”

  McDill shook his head. “Not a penny.”

  “Huh. How about Ruth?”

  “Ruth will get a hundred thousand,” McDill said.

  “That’s not bad . . . she thought she’d get nothing,” Virgil said.

  McDill frowned at that: “I think she knew. I think she knew the terms. Did you ask her?”

  “I did, but maybe I wasn’t clear,” Virgil said.

  “It’s been in the will for three years,” McDill said. “Erica had a new will made when she took over as CEO, and got a kick in salary. Hard to believe that they didn’t talk about it at all.”

  THE CRIME-SCENE CREW, led by Stacy Lowe, had almost finished processing the house—looking at phone records, calendars, computers, and anything unexpected that might point to a killer.

  Virgil took Lowe aside and asked, “Have you finished with Ruth Davies’s room?” He’d learned that the two women had separate bedrooms.

  “Yes. Looking for something in particular?”

  “I’d like to look at her shoes. . . .”

  Lowe cornered Davies, to confer, and while they were doing that, Virgil slipped into Davies’s room and checked the closet. Davies had a shoe rack, with nine different pairs of shoes mounted on it. He looked through the shoes and found no Mephistos. Went into McDill’s room, found perhaps twenty pairs of shoes, including a pair of Mephistos. He found Lowe. “Process the shoes. The guys up north say the killer might have been wearing Mephistos. Look for dirt. Swamp muck.”

  “Okay. Cool.” She bent close to them, then said, “They look clean.”

  “Do your best.” He checked sizes: eight and a half. Back in Davies’s room, he checked sizes: eight. Davies could have worn a pair of McDill’s Mephistos. Even if those in the closet had never been in the swamp, he knew that McDill owned Mephistos. . . .

  Lowe told him, “There were no guns of any kind. No rifles.”

  Virgil held up a finger, to quiet her, as he tried to catch a thought: Ah. Yes. McDill wore Mephistos. Wendy was in McDill’s room the night before the killing, where she might have had access to McDill’s shoes. . . .

  Something to check.

  “What?” Lowe asked.

  “No guns, huh? Interesting.”

  DAVIES HAD NO ALIBI—she’d been sick, she said—had a monetary and maybe even an emotional reason to kill McDill, had access to Mephisto shoes. May have lied about McDill’s will. She might well have an idea of what McDill did at the resort; might have heard about the solitary visit to the eagle’s nest, might even have had it pointed out on a chart or on Google . . .

  On the other hand, her behavior was simply too . . . unparsed. Davies hadn’t thought of answers in advance. She hadn’t calculated her behavior. Everything about her was raw and unrehearsed.

  Unless, he thought, she was crazy.

  He had, in the past, encountered a crazy serial burglar who seemed the soul of innocence because after the burglaries, he somehow forgot that he’d done them. Virgil didn’t think that he was lying—because of his peculiar psychological problem, he really forgot. Of course, that hadn’t prevented him from selling the stolen stuff on eBay, America’s fence.

  WHEN HE WAS DONE with the talk, Virgil cruised one last time through the house, had a thought—the walls weren’t bare, but they didn’t seem quite right, either. He walked through again, trying to be casual about it, and saw a couple of empty nail holes at picture-hanger height. He asked Lowe, “Did you find anything in her paper about art that she owned?”

  “There’s a file of receipts somewhere. I could find it,” Lowe said.

  “Do that, and check it off against the paintings here.” He gestured around the room. Each wall was hung with either an oil painting or a print, and they didn’t look like they came from a decorator’s back room—they looked like stuff he’d seen in galleries: col orful, idiosyncratic, even harsh. “See if there’s anything missing. I don’t know how much it’s worth, but . . . that’s what I want to know. What it’s worth, and where it is. If it’s missing, I want to know what it could be sold for.”

  When Virgil left, Davies and Oren McDill were stacking Erica McDill’s clothing in the hallway, preparatory to packing it; a dismal task, Virgil thought, and both of them stopped occasionally to cry. He left them like that, in a house of misery, and headed downtown to the agency board meeting.

  THE AGENCY WAS HOUSED on the fifth floor of the Laughton building in Minneapolis, a fashionably international lump of blue glass and steel. Mann introduced him to the board, a group of well-dressed men and women who were snarling at one another around a maple table.

  Virgil made a brief presentation of what he’d found, and one of the men blurted out, “I was at a Twins game,” and, one by one, without being asked, the other members provided alibis, most of which would be easy to confirm. One guy didn’t have one, but he was six-five and his shoes must have been thirteens, Virgil thought. He made a note anyway. If any of them had done it, it was going to take a break from somewhere else, from somebody else, to prove it.

  By four o’clock, he was on his way north again.

  Kept thinking about what Owen had said: a backwoods gay basher making a point.

  Could be, but he doubted it. It usually took something more specific to trigger a murder; not always, but usually. Money, sex, obsession, competition, alcohol . . . something. Something he was missing.

  8

  ZOE TULL’S SISTER’S HOUSE was more like a cabin than a real house, and sat on a shallow bay down a dark dirt road on Fifty-Dollar Lake. Zoe’d talked Virgil back to the place by cell phone, and was standing in the yard when he pulled in.

  “The crime-scene guy who came to my house couldn’t find any fingerprints but he said the door had definitely been forced,” she said. And, “Hello.”

  “Hi. Yeah. I talked to him,” Virgil said. “He said your locks wouldn’t have kept a small child out.”

  “That situation will be fixed tomorrow.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “I don’t like this. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, or if it’s because I’m talking to you, or if it’s some goof who kills women.”

  An older woman pushed out of the house: Zoe’s sister. She looked a lot like Zoe, slender but more weathered, with cool, distant green eyes and a nose that was a bit too long. She was wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over her elbows, and jeans. She looked at Virgil for a moment, nothing shy about it, then looked past him for a minute, and said, “Nice rig.”

  “Works for me,” Virgil sai
d.

  “You all best come in before the bugs eat you alive,” the sister said.

  “My sister, Sig. Signy,” Zoe said. And to Signy, “This is Virgil.”

  SIGNY’S HOUSE SMELLED like pine wood and maybe a hint of bacon and pancakes; had a tiny kitchen, a small living room with a couch and a couple of easy chairs on an oval hooked rug, a woodstove in one corner, and a hallway that apparently led back to a couple of bedrooms. Virgil took one of the chairs and Zoe asked, “So what’d you find out?”

  “Not much. Talked to a couple of people who didn’t like McDill, but they didn’t do it. Found out that Ruth Davies will inherit a hundred thousand dollars, and that she knew that McDill had had at least one affair, so I guess it’s possible that she thought that their time was ending. Oh. She has no alibi.”

  Signy had gone to the kitchen and came back with three bottles, handed one to Virgil. Negra Modelo. Virgil took a swallow and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t drink when I’m on duty.”

  “That’s a goddamn shame,” Signy said. She handed another bottle to Zoe, and had one for herself. “You don’t think this Davies woman did it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Virgil said.

  “You sound like it,” she said.

  “Okay. I don’t think she did it.”

  “Who do you think did?” Signy asked.

  “I don’t know enough of the players,” Virgil said. “I’ll be up for a few days, figure that out.”

  Signy smiled at him and showed a chipped front tooth. “Got an ego on you, I’ll say that.”

  SIGNY’S HUSBAND was in Alaska. “One time he went out for a loaf of bread and wound up in Churchill, on Hudson Bay. This time, it’s Alaska.”