Rough Country

here somewhere. . . .”
    She started digging through boxes of records, looking for the phone receipts, as he paged through the diary, which was fairly bland: who did what to whom, in Swanson, and none of the things done were dramatic, except that a man named Don left his wife, Marilyn, and moved to Marion, wherever that was, to be around a woman named Doris.
    “Whatever happened to Don and Doris?” Virgil asked Bauer.
    She looked up, her eyes distant, for a moment, and then she said, “I think they moved to Oklahoma. Lake Eufaula.”
    “So Don never got back with Marilyn?”
    “No. Marilyn’s still alone. Sometimes I see her standing in her window, looking out. She lives just down the street and around the corner,” she said.
    “Maybe she’s looking for Don coming back,” Virgil suggested.
    Bauer looked at him and smiled: “That’s going to be a long wait. Don and Doris are in love.”
     
     
     
    HE’D FOUND NOTHING at all when Bauer handed him a stack of phone bills: “There are four calls to northern Minnesota right before she died. Three to one number, one to another.”
    He took the bills, checked through them, copied the numbers into his notebook, held up the bills, and said, “I’d like to take these. I’ll give you a receipt.”
    “I don’t really need—”
    “Legal niceties,” Virgil said.
    He was curious about the numbers, though, got on his phone, called the office in St. Paul, read the numbers off to Davenport’s secretary, and said, “Get somebody to run those down. They’re two years old.”
    “How soon do you need them?”
    “I’ll be back tonight. You could leave them on your desk, if you get them.”
    When he’d finished with the paper, he called Doug Wayne, the pilot, arranged to meet him at the airport. Bauer walked him out to the rental car, touched his elbow, and said, “I think you’ll find him, whoever he is. When you asked about Don and Doris, that gave me confidence that you’re interested in things.”
    Virgil nodded. “I will find him. I will run him down.”
    “And if you kill the sonofabitch, I would shed no tears at all.”
    “Why, Prudie,” Virgil began, intending to shine the light of his third-best smile on her, but his phone rang and he fumbled it out, looked at the phone number, unknown, but from northern Minnesota. Like a cool breeze down his shirt: he punched up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
    “Hey, this is Mapes . . .”
    “I was gonna call you, man, but I’m down in Iowa. What happened with that shell?”
    “The shell came from a .223 bolt action, but hey, Virgil, shut up for a minute. Listen: a woman got shot, an hour and a half ago. Named Jan Washington. Was she part of your investigation?”
    “No, never heard of her,” Virgil said. “Where was she shot?”
    “In the back, the bullet exited outa her—”
    “No, no, where in Minnesota?”
    “Oh—right outside town. Outside Grand Rapids. The thing is, since we were still working here, the sheriff asked us to go out and take a look. We came up with one, single .223 shell, fired from a sniper’s nest. And I’ll tell you what, Virgil—it’s going to take the lab to tell us for sure, but I will kiss your ass in Macy’s front window if it didn’t come out of the same gun as killed McDill.”
    Virgil didn’t react immediately; let it percolate down through the lobes of his prefrontal cortex. Then he said, “Shit.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Is the woman dead?” Virgil asked.
    “No, she isn’t. She’s hanging on,” Mapes said. “Not talking, but hanging on, and they say that she’s got a good possibility of making it, though she’s lost most of one kidney and her spleen.”
    “I gotta get up there.”
    “See ya,” Mapes said.
     
     
     
    HE TOLD BAUER ABOUT IT , and she asked, “What does this mean?”
    “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you and tell you, when I find out.”
     
     
     
    HE GOT TO THE AIRPORT before Wayne, and called Sanders, the sheriff, who was driving back toward Grand Rapids from Bigfork, where he’d been looking for Little Linda, and asked, “How is Washington connected to the Eagle Nest?”
    “As far as I can tell, she’s not,” Sanders said. “Her husband said neither one of them has ever been there.”
    “Her husband—so she’s not gay?” Virgil asked.
    “Not gay or bi, either one,” Sanders said. “At least, that’s what I believe, from knowing each other all our lives.”
    “Does she know Wendy?”
    “Probably.