Rough Country

sighed, turned around, dug a Budweiser out of the cooler, popped it open. “Think you better find yourself a ride, Virgil. I’m going back up to the V. This murder shit—I’m done with it. I thought it would be interesting, but it’s just nasty.”
     
     
     
    AT THE CLOSEST APPROACH to the pond, they pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, and the sheriff and Virgil walked one way, and Johnson the other, because Virgil knew that he’d spot the trail, and so would Johnson, but he wasn’t sure about the sheriff. He and the sheriff had walked thirty yards along the gravel road when he saw it: “There.” He turned and shouted, “Johnson!”
    Johnson jogged over and Virgil said, “Stay back from it—we’ll want the crime-scene guys to walk it.”
    There’d been no way the killer could have gotten in without leaving a trail: the soil was firm enough underfoot, but damp, and the plants were the soft, leafy, easily broken kind that you saw in the shade, on the edges of wetlands.
    “The question is, where’d he leave his car?” Virgil asked. The road was narrow, and there were no obvious turnoffs. “Couldn’t park it here; too many people would have seen it.”
    The sheriff said, “There’s some empty cabins up the way. He could park back there, and not get seen. But what if he dropped off a gun, then parked up at the lodge? You could walk down here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Gravel road like this, you could hear a car coming. A little care, you could just step into the woods before it went by.”
    “A guy would be noticed at the lodge, a stranger,” Virgil said. “Maybe a woman?”
    Johnson said, “If it was a woman, especially if it was one who was staying at the lodge, she’d see McDill going out in the boat. She might even have asked her where she was going . . . run down here, boom.”
    Virgil looked into the woods. “If that’s right, the gun might still be in there. Unless she came down last night and picked it up, but that’d really be taking a chance. If they saw her, people would remember.”
    “We’ll check everybody on this road,” the sheriff said. “Every swinging dick.”
    Car coming; they heard it before they could see it, and when they saw it, it was an oversized white van. “Crime scene,” Virgil said.
     
     
     
    THERE WERE FOUR GUYS with the crime-scene crew, led by Ron Mapes, who’d last run into Virgil while they were looking at the murder of an Indian cop from the Red Lake Chippewa reservation.
    Virgil ran them through what had been done, including the marker buoy out on the lake, and all four of them looked down the track toward the lake. “We’re gonna need head nets, metal detectors . . .” Mapes began.
    Virgil said to Mapes, “Could you guys go in there right now, take a quick look at the track? See if anything pops up? At Red Lake, you told me the killer was a small guy, and that got me started in the right direction.”
    “We can look,” Mapes said.
    The crew all had fifteen-inch rubber boots and head nets and cotton gloves to protect against the mosquitoes, and they took it slow, pushing down the track, looking for anything along the way, checking for metal. While they were doing that, Virgil, the sheriff, and Johnson walked farther down the road, looking at the driveways branching off to the sides. The driveways were gravel-and-dirt tracks leading uphill, away from the lake: hunting cabins, the sheriff said, usually empty until the fall.

    THE CRIME-SCENE CREW had been in for ten minutes, out of sight, when they got back, and the sheriff called the Grand Rapids airport Avis and reserved an SUV for Virgil. He’d just rung off when they heard somebody coming in, and then Mapes pushed delicately through the brush beside the killer’s track, still searching it with his eyes. When he got out on the road, he pulled off his head net and said, “The mosquitoes are thick in there . . . gets wet about a hundred yards in.”
    “So . . .”
    “I can’t promise you that she’s the killer, but I can tell you that whoever walked back there is a woman,” Mapes said. “She maybe went in more than once, or maybe there were a couple of them, because it’s tracked up.”
    “Scouting tracks,” Virgil said.
    “Anyway, we got three partial footprints so far, the instep of a woman’s boot or shoe. Maybe a shoe, because there’s a low heel,” Mapes said. “We won’t be able to give you an exact size because we’re mostly seeing that instep, but it also