Rough Country

good.
     
     
     
    TOM MORRIS SAW JANELLE pedaling along and thought about what might have been if he’d moved a little faster after high school. They might have hooked up. The possibility was out there, for a while. He knew it, and she knew it, and that made them like each other all their lives, even if nothing happened, and they both wound up happily married to other people.
    He slowed, ran the window down, grinned at her, and called, “Still pedaling your ass around town . . .”
    “You shut up!” she said.
    “No, I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “I saw James downtown yesterday. He said you guys were going out to Moitrie’s on Friday. We might be out there, we’re thinking about seven.”
    She stopped, straddling the bike, moved it over to the truck, and said, “I’ll call Patsy. Maybe we can get a table together.”
    They talked for a minute about a snowmobile club that wanted to take out some unused field crossings, and the culverts that went with them, and if that would put too many snowmobilers on their road, and about the growing flock of crows that were hanging around, and how Morris had hired an exterminator to get the squirrels out of his attic—routine neighbor stuff—and then he said good-bye: “Talk to Patsy. See you out there.”
     
     
     
    THE PICKUP MOVED ON, slowly, paced by the bike for a hundred yards or so, and then pulled away. By this time, Washington was opposite the killer, then passing, and the truck was still there, moving slow as white paste down the highway, and Washington was farther and farther down, the crosshairs first on her head, but then the head shot became uncertain, and then on her back, on her white blouse . . .
    The truck went over a low rise and disappeared. The killer glanced back: nothing from the other direction. But this wasn’t as clean as the other killings, there could be somebody . . .
    “Ah . . .”
    White blouse in the scope, squeeze . . .
    The shot was almost a surprise.
     
     
     
    WASHINGTON FELT AS THOUGH she’d been hit by a meteor. She was down, and bleeding, in the ditch, her bicycle on top of her, and looked down and found blood gushing from her rib cage, and she began to crawl up the side of the ditch, not thinking, not knowing what happened, wondering if she’d been hit by a car. She began to grow weak, understood that she was going to die if something didn’t happen.
    One last push and she was on the shoulder, and she tried to hold herself together, tried to think, still not understanding, rolling up, blood on her hands, blood on her blouse, no car, what happened? She could hear herself making a growling noise, and felt the gravel on her face and under her hands, sticky with blood. . . .
    Some time passed, and she was mostly aware of the blue of the sky above her, and then the wheel of a car was right there by her head, and she heard the crunch of gravel. A face appeared in her field of vision, and she heard the man’s voice:
    “Jeez! Janelle! What happened, oh, my God,” and she focused on Tom Morris’s face and he was on his cell phone screaming, “We’ve got a woman hurt bad . . . bleeding bad . . . Get some help out here, my God, we need an ambulance, we need an ambulance. . . .”

12
    PRUDENCE BAUER HAD FIFTEEN or twenty sealed cardboard moving boxes full of her sister’s life, consolidated in a back bedroom, and when Virgil opened the first one, he was hit in the face by a dusty lilac-scented perfume that smelled more like death than death itself. Two of the boxes contained papers taken from Connie’s desk within a couple days of her death, including a diary, and an appointment book from the Louvre.
    “Was she an art enthusiast?” Virgil asked Bauer, thinking of the museum membership cards he’d seen in McDill’s wallet.
    “No, not especially—she used to get those from the Barnes and Noble store up in Cedar Rapids. There’s another one around, but I think it was on the theme of cats .”
    She left him sitting in a rocking chair, in the bedroom, on a braided rag rug, flipping through the paper and getting nowhere. She came back fifteen minutes later with a Diet Coke: “Found anything?”
    He took the Coke. “Not so far. But it all helps: even if I don’t see anything now, maybe something relevant will pop up later. It’s a matter of getting the most information that you can, into your head.”
    “You know, you should look at the phone receipts, to see who she was talking to at the time. They’re in