Rough Country

“Hell no, I’m not messing around with anybody. Why does everybody ask that?”
    “Because when a married woman gets shot under unusual circumstances, the first guy we look at is the husband, and most of the time, he did it. In this case, we don’t think you did—never did—but we have to push a little, we have to let you know that if you were fooling around, you better tell us now, and explain that, because we’d find out sooner or later,” Virgil said.
    “Did all my fooling around before I married Jan. Nothing since,” Washington said.
    He had no more idea of where the shot might have come from. They were talking about that when another man, who looked something like Washington, heavy and balding, stuck his head down the hall and said, “James—how’s she doing?”
    The sheriff said to Virgil, “This is Tom Morris. He’s the one who found her and called the ambulance. He saw her just before she was shot.”
    Morris told his story:
    “I was driving up behind her on that stretch along the river, right outside of town, and I stopped to talk for a minute, and then went on my way. I went over this little hill and couldn’t see her anymore, but then there’s a little bigger hill and when I got to the top, I looked in the mirror and I thought I saw her layin’ on the road. She was wearing this white blouse and she looked like she was on the road, so I stopped and looked out the back window, but I was a long way away, and it did look like she was down, so I turned around and went back. . . .”
    Virgil dug into the story and between the four of them, and knowing where the shot came from, they worked out a sequence: the shooter was waiting for Washington to get close on her bike, and probably planned to shoot her as she came up to his sniper’s nest, or immediately after she’d passed him. But then Morris came along, and he couldn’t shoot until Morris was out of sight. Then Morris went over the hill, and he shot Washington and probably ran down to his vehicle, and took off in the other direction, back toward town.
    Morris said, “I thought about it, and the guy was taking a hell of a risk. He had to be parked down on that canoe-landing, and then walk up on that hump. He could see a long way to the west, but he couldn’t see no more than a half-mile to the east, and if he’d pulled the trigger and then a car had come around the curve to the east, he’d have been screwed. He’d have had to kill that guy, too. If I’d come around the corner one minute later, it’d have been me.”
    “Not a lot of traffic out there, though,” Sanders said.
    “No, but there’s some ,” Morris said.
    “Could he have been in a boat?” Virgil asked.
    The other three men looked at one another, then the sheriff said, “We asked that question, but we don’t have an answer. The thing is, if he was in a canoe, the river bends away from the road about right there, going west. It’s really more like a big creek than a river right there . . . but he could have gotten lost pretty quick, and a mile or so upstream, another road comes along on the other side, where he could have left his car. There are places along there, back in the trees where it’d be completely out of sight. . . . It could be done.”
    “It’d take some serious stones,” Morris said. “The problem is, in a canoe, he’s moving slow. And if he’s seen, he’s got no way to run. It’d be a hard fifteen-minute paddle back to his car.”
    “Or her car,” Virgil said.
    “Doesn’t feel like a woman anymore,” Sanders said. “I could go with a woman on the McDill thing, but this doesn’t feel like a woman to me.”
    “The guys in Iowa think their killer is male,” Virgil said. He filled in Morris and Washington on the Iowa murder, and warned them that it might not have anything to do with McDill and Jan Washington.
     
     
     
    BEFORE LEAVING, Virgil took Sanders off down the hall and asked, “You know a woman named Barbara Carson? Lives here in Grand Rapids?”
    “Sure . . . she’s an older lady, she’s about six blocks from here. Used to work for the county.”
    “The woman who got killed down in Iowa called her before she came up here. I need to talk to her, I guess. Tomorrow.”
    “I’ll get you an address.”
    “How about a kid named Jared Boehm? Works out at the Eagle Nest.”
    Sanders pulled back a bit. “Jared? Sure. His dad’s a manager at the paper plant. Why?”
    “I need to talk to him, too,” Virgil said.
    “About