Rough Country

just cherry-pick the talent and start her own agency, and my kids would get screwed. They’d get nothing. But bolting would be a big risk for Erica, too. Big start-up costs, diminished client list. She’d be much better off keeping things as they are. All of that gave me an incentive to sell, and Erica an incentive to buy. We made a deal a couple of weeks ago. We never closed on it.”
    Mann said, “The point being, there are about thirty scared people down in the Cities who think they might lose their jobs. Some of them have worked at the place for twenty-five or thirty years. They’d have no place to go. Too old. Burned out. Some of them, or one of them, might have . . . you know . . . killed her to stop that. That was my first thought, when I heard she’d been killed.”
    “Would killing McDill actually stop the firings?” Virgil asked.
    Mann scratched his head. “I don’t know. For a while, probably. I don’t know who gets her stock, now. Her parents are still alive, I think. . . .”
    “They are,” Davies said. “I won’t get a thing. Not a thing.”
    “She didn’t leave you anything in her will?” Mann asked her.
    “I don’t think she had a will,” Davies said. “She was pretty sure she’d live forever.”
    “She had a will somewhere,” Harcourt said. “She was too . . . not calculating, but rational . . . not to have a will.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Lawrence, the woman was calculating,” Mann snapped. To Virgil: “They called her the SST at the office. Stainless Steel Twat.”
    Virgil asked Mann, with a smile, “So . . . were you on the list? To be fired?”
    “Oh, fuck no,” Mann said. “She went out of her way to let me know that.”
    “Barney runs our major accounts and they’re pretty happy with him. If he were to leave, he might take some of them with him,” Harcourt said. He added, “I had reason to believe that Erica was planning to offer him a partnership. Or a share.”
    Mann cocked his head. “Really? Well, that’s a shot in the ass.”
    Virgil threw his hands up. “So? What happens now? With the agency?”
    Mann and Harcourt looked at each other, then Mann turned back and said, “I don’t know.”
    Harcourt said to Mann, “We need to make arrangements here and get back to the Cities. We need a board meeting. Immediately. We have to have a new management in place by Monday, before the clients start calling.”
    “What’s going to happen to me?” Davies asked. “What’s going to happen?”
    Again, Harcourt and Mann looked at each other. Neither one said, “I don’t know,” but Virgil could see it in their faces; and so could Davies.
     
     
     
    VIRGIL GOT OUT his notebook and jotted down a few thoughts, then talked to Harcourt, Mann, and Davies individually. Harcourt and Mann both said that they’d been in the Cities the day before, and gave Virgil a list of people they’d seen during the day. Unless one of them was telling a desperate lie, the alibis would eliminate them as the killer, because the Cities were simply too far away to get back and forth easily.
    Davies, on the other hand, had no alibi. She’d been sick the morning before, she said, and when she finally got out of bed, it was almost noon. She went grocery shopping at a chain supermarket where they’d be unlikely to remember having seen her. Still feeling logy—“I think I ate something bad”—she’d spent the day cleaning, watching a movie on DVD, and then had gone to bed early, with a book. Neither a DVD nor a book would leave an electronic trace.
    She picked up on the direction of the questioning and protested, “I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt Erica—I love Erica. She was the love of my life. We’ve been together for six years. . . . I don’t know anything about guns. I’ve never been here. I didn’t even know exactly where it was. . . .”
    “Did you or Erica have outside relationships? Was your relationship, uh, an open relationship?”
    “No. No, it wasn’t open,” she said. “I mean, back at the beginning, we both were dating other people simultaneously, if you see what I mean . . .”
    “I know what you mean,” Virgil said.
    “. . . but once I moved in, we were committed.”
    Virgil nodded. “Okay. I believe you when you say you wouldn’t want to hurt Erica, but I had to ask—you know, if there had been another person, if there was a sexual tension, if she’d started pulling away from the other person, to stay with you.”
    “Why