Rough Country

would probably know that. Maybe you should call somebody.”
    She looked at him for another moment, then said, “In here.”
     
     
     
    JARED BOEHM WAS A TALL , thin boy—young man—with a fashionably gelled upright haircut that gave him a permanent look of surprise and irony. He was sitting on the living room couch, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said, “Make tender and awkward sexual advances, not war.” He was nervous; over his shoulder, through the window, a Hobie Cat had been dragged onto the lawn, and a run-about was hanging off a wooden dock.
    His mother said, “This is Officer Flowers.”
    Virgil shook hands with him, sat down, said, “Like the shirt,” and Boehm nodded and asked, “Want to trade?” and Virgil said, “I’ll stick with the Stones, I guess.” He opened his notebook and explained about rights, and read the Miranda card to the kid. Boehm nodded that he understood, and Virgil made a note of the time and circumstances, and then asked, “Could you tell me where you were when Miss McDill was killed?”
    “He was in Duluth,” Susan Boehm said.
    Virgil waved her down: “I really have to get this from Jared, okay? Your answers don’t work for me.”
    Jared said, “I was in Duluth. I worked until three, and Erica—Miss McDill—was up at her cabin when I left, and I said good-bye and went home, and got my bag, and started off to Duluth. Driving. I got to the campus about five and checked into the dorm—there was an orientation, and I ate with some other guys in the cafeteria. There was a guy named Rusty Jones who took us around.”
    “How many people in the group?” Virgil asked.
    “Maybe . . . ten. Or eleven. Something like that.”
    “Okay. And if I talk to Rusty Jones, he’ll tell me that you were there around five o’clock?”
    “He should. I was,” Jared said.
    Virgil doodled, and then asked, “Did you see anybody hanging out with Miss McDill, or did you ever see any kind of conflict, any trouble?”
    He said, “No, not really.”
    “Was she popular in the camp?”
    “I guess. She had friends . . . I never really saw any hassles. I’ve been thinking about who might have something against her, but all I can think of is that sometimes people disagreed about stuff, you know? One wants to do this, the other wants to do that. . . . But not something that would get anybody shot. I’ve seen people pissed off, but never like I thought there’d be a fight.”
    “Okay.” Virgil shut his notebook, turned to Susan Boehm, and said, “I’m going to call this fellow Rusty Jones and confirm that Jared was there—but I really don’t think Jared would be dumb enough to lie about it . . .”
    “He isn’t,” she said, still cold, but relaxing.
    “. . . and since we believe it’s the work of one person, that would rule Jared out. At this point.”
    “So are we done?” Jared asked.
    “Not quite,” Virgil said. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute, privately.”
    Susan Boehm snapped, “No way.”
    Virgil said to Jared, “If you’re eighteen, you can ask your mom to step away.”
    “Okay,” Susan Boehm said, standing up. “That’s enough. Out of the house.”
    Virgil shook his head. “This is why you should have had a criminal attorney,” Virgil told her. “I need to finish my interview with Jared. The law says I can do that. You invited me in. Time is of the essence. I would like to talk to Jared privately. If you both refuse, I’ll talk to him with you in the room. It’s up to you two.”
    “About what?” Jared asked.
    “I think you might know,” Virgil said.
    Jared looked at him for a moment, then turned to his mother and said, “I think you better leave.”
    “No fucking way,” she said.
    Mother and son dueled for a minute, and Jared caved: “I can’t do anything without you getting all over me.”
    She said, “It’s for your own good.”
    “No, it isn’t,” he said. “It’s because you’re a fucking control freak.”
    She recoiled: “You can’t speak to me that way!”
    Jared ran his hands through his hair: “Ah, God.” Then, to Virgil: “Go ahead.”
    “You had a sexual relationship with Miss McDill?”
    Susan Boehm looked as though Virgil had slapped her. She stared at her son: “What?”
    With perhaps a glimmer of satisfaction, Jared said, “Yes.”
    “Did you . . . see her often?”
    “Twice. She came in on Saturday, and I went over there on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.”
    “Was anybody else there when you