Rough Country

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Copyright © 2009 by John Sandford
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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandford, John, date.
Rough country / John Sandford.
p. cm.
    eISBN : 978-1-101-14053-6
    1. Police—Minnesota—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Stillwater (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A516R
813’.54—dc22
     

     

     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Daniel, on his birthday

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I wrote this book with my longtime fishing partner and fellow journalist Bill Gardner, author of the musky-fishing classic Time on the Water . We have been fishing for muskies together for nearly thirty years, and it was through his intercession that, in this novel, I make musky fishing out to be a much less stupid activity than it actually is.

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