Rough Country

seem like somebody who would have perpetrated a massacre,” she said.
    “I didn’t.”
     
     
     
    THEY’D GOTTEN TO THE END of the driveway, and when Virgil looked left, he saw the crime-scene van rolling toward them. He said, “Hold on for a second, will you? I want to see if these guys got anything else.”
    He hopped out of the car, and when the van driver saw him, he pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Mapes climbed out of the passenger seat carrying a small plastic bag, which he handed to Virgil. Virgil held it up to the sky, to get some light on it.
    “A .223,” he said. The shell’s brass was still bright.
    “Hasn’t been there long—I could still smell the powder burn,” Mapes said. “It was caught in some logs, a couple inches above the water. The shooter couldn’t have looked for it long—it was right there.”
    “Off to the right? Like it was thrown out by an autoloader?”
    “Ah, yes—off to the right, but the extraction marks look like they came from a bolt action. I’m sending Jim”—he jabbed his thumb back toward the truck—“back to Bemidji with it, see what we can see. The other guys are still working the beaver lodge.”
    “Good going, man.”
    “Well, it was right there—even you could have found it,” Mapes said. Pause. “Maybe.”
    Virgil handed him McDill’s car keys and said, “I knew you were going to insult me, so I carefully contaminated the car. See if you can find something anyway.”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL GOT BACK in the Pilot and told Zoe about the shell. “Now all I have to do is find a rifle and some Mephistos, and we’ve got it.”
    “You’ll be able to tell the rifle from just one shell?”
    “Not me, the lab. But, yup. Extraction marks. And if we’re lucky, she pushed the cartridge down in a magazine with her thumb, and there’ll be a big ol’ thumbprint. Brass takes good prints.”
    “Mmm. Well, I for one have no Mephistos,” she said. “Why’d you ask?”
    “Because the woman who killed Erica McDill may be local—she knew exactly when and how to get into the pond to catch McDill alone. And she may wear Mephistos.”
    “You thought I did it?”
    “You’ve been sort of hanging around. A psychopath might do that,” Virgil said.
    “I’ve been hanging around because I’m curious,” she said. “Also, I’m not a psychopath. I’m an obsessive-compulsive.”
    “That’s what a psychopath would say,” Virgil said. “The case of the curious accountant—a woman for whom blood was just another cocktail.”
    She brushed the chatter away, as though it were a fly. “You know for sure it’s a woman?”
    “Pretty sure,” he said.
    “And local.”
    “Possibly. You could make a good argument that it comes from the lodge, too,” Virgil said. “Would you like to suggest a name or two?”
    “No, no. But it makes you think,” Zoe said.
    “It does make you think,” Virgil agreed.
    After a moment, she asked, “Should you be telling me all of this?”
    “Why not?” Virgil asked. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
    “Well, God. What if I blabbed to everybody?”
    Virgil yawned, tipped his seat back a couple of inches, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “Go ahead,” he said. “I don’t care.”
     
     
     
    AT THE AIRPORT, Zoe pointed him at a metal building; inside, he found a guy with a pilot’s hat half asleep on a couch, who got grog gily to his feet and asked, “You the state trooper?”
    “Close enough,” Virgil said. He rented a Chevy Trailblazer, got his duffel from Zoe’s car, and threw it in the back of the SUV.
    “How come you don’t have a gun?” she asked, through her open car door. “Aren’t cops required to carry guns? I read that somewhere.”
    “In my experience, bad things can happen if you carry a handgun,” Virgil said. “For one thing, it causes your shoulder to slope in the direction of the pocket you carry it in. Over the years, that could cause spinal problems.”
    “I can’t tell whether this is some hopeless attempt to be charming, or if you’re just being weird,” she said.
    “Can you tell me where the Wild Goose is? I want to take a quick look.”
    “Well, follow me. I’ll take you over,” Zoe said. “It’s mostly a women’s bar. You might feel a little odd being there by yourself. Lonely.”
     
     
     
    THE WILD GOOSE was a mile or so north of the Grand Rapids city limits, a standard North Woods country bar—orange-stained peeled-pine logs set on a rectangular