Rough Country

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 knew who it was. Some guy from Lake City who fell out of his boat—”
    “Yeah, yeah, you told me.” He spit a piece of pimento out the window.
    “What I didn’t tell you was, this cop wanted to anchor the body until we could get a bigger boat out there to do the recovery,” Johnson said. “So he tied a line around it, so he could pull it over closer to the shore and tie it off to a tree. But the thing is, it’d been in the river for a week, and was all bloated and full of gas, and when he pulled on the line, the body came apart and the gas came out and rolled right over me.”
    “Ah, jeez,” Virgil said. “You know what you do in a situation like that? Course, I don’t suppose you had any Vicks . . .”
    “Hang on a minute,” Johnson said. “Anyway, I started barfing. I barfed up everything I had and then I kept barfing. Nothing was coming up but some spit, but I couldn’t stop. The cop was barfing, too, and I got out of there and went back to the cabin, and I kept . . . trying to barf. I couldn’t get the smell off me. I took a shower and washed my hair and I even burned the clothes, and I could still smell it and I’d start barfing again. That went on for a week, and then, like three weeks later, it started again, and went on for another couple of days. So, you know, this morning, I thought a murder scene might be interesting, but when I saw her in the water . . . I smelled that gas again.”
    “I didn’t smell much of anything, except lake water,” Virgil said.
    “It’s not real,” Johnson said. “It’s stuck in my brain. That smell.”
    “I’ve heard of that,” Virgil said. “People getting stuck with a smell or a mental image.”
    “The image doesn’t bother me—never saw that much of the guy’s body,” Johnson said. “But when I saw you get your face right down on top of her, and her hair floating out like that, I about blew my cookies. I don’t see how you do it.”
    “Job,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, well . . .” Johnson