Rough Country

face that seemed oddly unlined for his apparent age—a face-lift? The second and third of McDill’s friends, Barney Mann, creative director for the agency, and Ruth Davies, McDill’s partner, always called him Lawrence, never Larry, and though neither deferred to him, they always listened carefully when he spoke.
    Mann was a fireplug of a man with a liquor-reddened face and blond hair going white; he had an Australian accent. Virgil thought he might be forty-five. He was noisy and argumentative and angry.
    Davies was stunned: not weeping, but disoriented, almost not-believing. A short, not-quite-dumpy woman with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, she looked like a church mouse. Her mouth was a thin, tight line: whoever had given McDill the lipstick note, it hadn’t been Davies.
    All three, Virgil thought, after the introductions had been made and some questions answered, were intensely self-centered. They were not so concerned about the existential aspects of McDill’s death, but rather, what it means to me. They had also been concerned with image, Virgil thought, to the point of silliness. They could have driven up from the Twin Cities, individually, in three hours. Instead, they’d rented a floatplane, apparently to demonstrate the urgency of the matter, and after soaking up time in arranging the flight, and getting together, and making the flight, they’d taken six or seven hours.
    Harcourt had checked Virgil quickly, eyes narrowing a bit, and he asked, “Have you had any experience with this kind of investigation?”
    “Yes,” Virgil said.
    “He’s the one who killed the Vietnamese,” Stanhope told them.
    They all looked again, and Mann asked, “Do you have any ideas about how it happened? About who did it?”
    Virgil opened his mouth to answer, and Davies broke in. “I just want to see her. What if there’s been a mistake?”
    “She’s been identified by people who knew her,” Virgil said, as kindly as he could. “The photograph on Erica McDill’s driver’s license is a picture of the woman who was killed.”
    “I still . . .” she began, and she turned in a circle, and Stanhope patted her on the shoulder.
    Mann: “You said you have some ideas . . .”
    “It seems to me after some investigation that the killer is a woman who knows how to handle a rifle and knew the territory. Could be local, or could be an outsider, a guest at the lodge. If I knew why , I’d be closer to a complete answer.”
    Mann rubbed his nose and then looked at Harcourt and said, “That’s not what I expected to hear.”
    Harcourt nodded, and Virgil asked, “What’d you expect?”
    He shrugged: “That it came like a bolt out of the blue and nobody had any idea. If that were the case, I could probably give you the why.”
    Virgil spread his hands. “I’m all ears.”
    Mann said, “Lawrence told me on the way up that he and Erica had agreed that she would buy his stock in the agency. That would have given her about three-quarters of the outstanding stock, and total control. Ever since Erica took over, she’s been agitating to make the agency more . . . efficient.”
    “She wanted to fire people,” Harcourt said. “As many as twenty-five or thirty. A lot of them have been with the agency for a long time. They’ve been protected by the board. Erica had the authority to fire them, as CEO, but then her actions could be reviewed by the board, and there are a number of people on the board who already didn’t like her. There would’ve been a fight—”
    “What did you think about the firings?” Virgil asked him.
    Harcourt stepped back and sat in one of the library chairs and crossed his legs. Virgil noticed that even though he was wearing jeans and ankle boots, he was also wearing over-the-calf dress socks. He said, “I was generally against them—I could see a couple of them, but no reason for a top-to-bottom housecleaning.”
    “But you were gonna sell?”
    Harcourt sighed, and looked around the room at all the faded old books. “I kept the stock in the first place because the agency pays a nice dividend. But I’m seventy-one and I’ve got a bad ticker. I need to get my estate in order,” he said. “The thing about an ad agency is, its property is mostly intellectual. It’s a group of talents, a collection of clients. We don’t really own a damn thing, except some tables and chairs. We even lease our computers. So, if I passed the stock down to my children, and Erica got pissed, she might