Rough Country

at a walking pace. Virgil looked down the creek, and as the cop had said, it was choked with dead trees, sweepers, branches. He doubted that you could walk along it, and a boat would be impossible. They moved out, along the edge of the pond, scanning the shoreline until Johnson said, “There you go.”
    “Where?”
    “See that dead birch, the one with the dead crown?” He was pointing across the weed flat at the wall of aspens and birch trees. “Now look about one inch to the left; you see that dark hole in the weeds? I see that all the time, in the backwaters on the river—somebody walked out there . . . over toward that beaver lodge.”
    “Okay.” Virgil looked back at the boats around the body. “Could have set up on the lodge.”
    “Eighty-yard shot. Maybe ninety,” Johnson said. “Looks about like a good sand wedge.”
    “Could be fifty, depending on how she drifted,” Virgil said. “Good shooting, though.”
    Don said, “Not that great. Eighty, ninety yards. That’s nothing, up here.”
    “I’ll tell you what,” Virgil said. “He had one shot, no warm-ups, and he put it dead in her forehead. She was probably moving, at least a little bit. And he was shooting a human being and had to worry about being caught, about being seen, about getting out of there. With all that stress, that’s damn good shooting. He knew what he was doing.”
    Don looked from the shore back to the boats, back to the shore, then nodded, and said, “When you’re right, you’re right.”
    Looking at the beaver lodge, a low hump of bare logs, twigs, and mud just off the shoreline, Johnson said, “About impossible to get there from here. Might push a boat through to the beaver lodge, but even then . . .”
    Virgil shook his head: “Better to come in from the same side the shooter did. Have to do that anyway.” To Don: “Let’s go see the sheriff.”
     
     
     
    THE FUNERAL HOME GUYS had McDill in a body bag and were zipping it up when they got back. The sheriff looked at their faces and asked, “What?”
    Virgil said, “I think we got ourselves a crime scene.”

3
    WITH THE BODY out of the water, the sheriff talked to the two deputies who were looking for bloodstained lily pads, and told them to wait at the pond until he called them, or until the crime-scene crew arrived and sent them back. Then the rest of them pulled out, led by the sheriff in his boat, Virgil, Johnson, and Don in theirs, George Rainy, the guide, by himself, and the boat with the body.
    At the pond, Virgil had only one flickering bar on his cell phone, but he had a solid four when they got back. As soon as Don cut the motor and started cutting a curve into the dock, he called the Bemidji office and talked to the duty officer.
    “You got a crime-scene crew headed my way?”
    “Should be there,” the duty officer said. “Let me give them a call.” He was back a minute later. “They ran into a closed bridge. They should be there in ten or fifteen minutes. They gotta 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