Rough Country

“I think she knew. I think she knew the terms. Did you ask her?”
    “I did, but maybe I wasn’t clear,” Virgil said.
    “It’s been in the will for three years,” McDill said. “Erica had a new will made when she took over as CEO, and got a kick in salary. Hard to believe that they didn’t talk about it at all.”
     
     
     
    THE CRIME-SCENE CREW , led by Stacy Lowe, had almost finished processing the house—looking at phone records, calendars, computers, and anything unexpected that might point to a killer.
    Virgil took Lowe aside and asked, “Have you finished with Ruth Davies’s room?” He’d learned that the two women had separate bedrooms.
    “Yes. Looking for something in particular?”
    “I’d like to look at her shoes. . . .”
    Lowe cornered Davies, to confer, and while they were doing that, Virgil slipped into Davies’s room and checked the closet. Davies had a shoe rack, with nine different pairs of shoes mounted on it. He looked through the shoes and found no Mephistos. Went into McDill’s room, found perhaps twenty pairs of shoes, including a pair of Mephistos. He found Lowe. “Process the shoes. The guys up north say the killer might have been wearing Mephistos. Look for dirt. Swamp muck.”
    “Okay. Cool.” She bent close to them, then said, “They look clean.”
    “Do your best.” He checked sizes: eight and a half. Back in Davies’s room, he checked sizes: eight. Davies could have worn a pair of McDill’s Mephistos. Even if those in the closet had never been in the swamp, he knew that McDill owned Mephistos. . . .
    Lowe told him, “There were no guns of any kind. No rifles.”
    Virgil held up a finger, to quiet her, as he tried to catch a thought: Ah. Yes. McDill wore Mephistos. Wendy was in McDill’s room the night before the killing, where she might have had access to McDill’s shoes. . . .
    Something to check.
    “What?” Lowe asked.
    “No guns, huh? Interesting.”
     
     
     
    DAVIES HAD NO ALIBI —she’d been sick, she said—had a monetary and maybe even an emotional reason to kill McDill, had access to Mephisto shoes. May have lied about McDill’s will. She might well have an idea of what McDill did at the resort; might have heard about the solitary visit to the eagle’s nest, might even have had it pointed out on a chart or on Google . . .
    On the other hand, her behavior was simply too . . . unparsed. Davies hadn’t thought of answers in advance. She hadn’t calculated her behavior. Everything about her was raw and unrehearsed.
    Unless , he thought, she was crazy.
    He had, in the past, encountered a crazy serial burglar who seemed the soul of innocence because after the burglaries, he somehow forgot that he’d done them. Virgil didn’t think that he was lying—because of his peculiar psychological problem, he really forgot. Of course, that hadn’t prevented him from selling the stolen stuff on eBay, America’s fence.
     
     
     
    WHEN HE WAS DONE with the talk, Virgil cruised one last time through the house, had a thought—the walls weren’t bare, but they didn’t seem quite right, either. He walked through again, trying to be casual about it, and saw a couple of empty nail holes at picture-hanger height. He asked Lowe, “Did you find anything in her paper about art that she owned?”
    “There’s a file of receipts somewhere. I could find it,” Lowe said.
    “Do that, and check it off against the paintings here.” He gestured around the room. Each wall was hung with either an oil painting or a print, and they didn’t look like they came from a decorator’s back room—they looked like stuff he’d seen in galleries: col orful, idiosyncratic, even harsh. “See if there’s anything missing. I don’t know how much it’s worth, but . . . that’s what I want to know. What it’s worth, and where it is. If it’s missing, I want to know what it could be sold for.”
    When Virgil left, Davies and Oren McDill were stacking Erica McDill’s clothing in the hallway, preparatory to packing it; a dismal task, Virgil thought, and both of them stopped occasionally to cry. He left them like that, in a house of misery, and headed downtown to the agency board meeting.

    THE AGENCY WAS HOUSED on the fifth floor of the Laughton building in Minneapolis, a fashionably international lump of blue glass and steel. Mann introduced him to the board, a group of well-dressed men and women who were snarling at one another around a maple table.
    Virgil made a