Rough Country

crime-scene crew is probably still there, so I’ll have them look at your back door. Did the cops screw around with it, looking at it?”
    “No, no. I don’t think they touched it,” she said. “They looked at it pretty close, though.”
    “All right. I’m going to give the crime-scene guys your number, and they’ll call you, and talk to you about it,” Virgil said. “Don’t touch the door again. Go to your sister’s until you get the locks changed.”
    “Okay.”
    “What kind of gun do you have?” Virgil asked.
    “I don’t have a gun. I’ve got a baseball bat. Also, I’ve got one of those Wave radios and a CD of a Doberman barking,” she said. “But I forgot about the bat and the CD last night. I’m such a twit.”
    “Get the locks. Go to your sister’s. I’m coming back up this afternoon. I’ll call you when I get there,” Virgil said.

    HE CALLED MAPES, with the crime-scene crew, and had them send a guy to Zoe’s. Called Zoe back and told him the guy was coming. Next he checked with the medical examiner: “We got all the usual stuff, Virgil, and I can tell you she wasn’t drunk or doped up, to any significant extent. There’s a messy entry wound in her forehead, which I guess you saw . . .”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “I’m calling that a .223. Won’t know for sure unless you find a slug, but we can see the rim of the impact hole, and judging from the damage it did, it sure looks like a high-powered .22 of some kind—.223 would be the best bet, could be an old .222. I don’t think it’s one of the small hyperspeed ones. . . . I’m going with .223.”
    “Thank you.”
    Independent confirmation. The .223 was one of the more popular shooter’s guns in the state, the same caliber used in current military assault rifles, low recoil, relatively cheap ammo, very accurate in the right gun. All he had to do was find the gun; preferably with attached fingerprints and a map of the murder scene.
    And he thought: If the killer had broken into Zoe’s house, then the killer was local, from Grand Rapids; she would have to have been hooked into a local gossip network to know that Zoe had been talking to Virgil.
     
     
     
    ERICA MCDILL HAD LIVED in an area of million-dollar homes with quiet suburban streets, big yards, tall trees, and swimming pool fences in the backyards, where the backyards were visible. McDill’s home was a low, flat-roofed midcentury place, showing steel beams and glass, ugly, but probably architecturally significant, Virgil thought. The driveway wound around back and ended at a four-car garage. A guy named Lane, from the crime-scene crew, let him in: the house had been professionally decorated, from the carpets to the ceiling paint.
    Ruth Davies was there with McDill’s father, sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by twenty square feet of paper.
    He took Davies first, and got nothing. She simply dithered, until it began to drive him crazy, and eventually she went into the kitchen and began baking something with peanut butter.
    McDill’s father, Oren McDill, looking down at all the paper that summed his daughter’s life, was distraught, depressed, shaken. He was a tall, thin man with a gray buzz cut, simple gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He said that McDill did have a will, and that he was the executor. “I’ll get you a copy as soon as I can get to my safe-deposit box,” he said. He gestured at all the paper. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She was supposed to do this for me .”
    McDill’s mother lived in Arizona with a second husband, and she and her daughter were not close, McDill said. “It goes back to the divorce. We got divorced when Erica was in high school, and she couldn’t believe that her mother would dump both of us. Mae wanted her freedom. Didn’t want a husband—at the time, anyway—didn’t want a kid. She told us that. Erica never got over it.”
    “I don’t want to . . .” Virgil looked around; they were sitting in a four-seasons porch, alone, but he could hear Davies babbling on somewhere. “Look, I don’t want to be an asshole, is what I don’t want to be. But I have to ask: If you’ve looked at the will . . . would Erica’s mother be in line to inherit anything?”
    McDill shook his head. “Not a penny.”
    “Huh. How about Ruth?”
    “Ruth will get a hundred thousand,” McDill said.
    “That’s not bad . . . she thought she’d get nothing,” Virgil said.
    McDill frowned at that: