Rough Country

silhouette, circling toward the light, and she said something and he said, “I hope so. Look, get some sleep,” and whatever she’d said, his response was apparently okay, because she said, “Thanks . . .”
    A flash of green. A goddamn luna moth: he hadn’t seen a live one in years. Late in the year for a luna. Were they producing two generations now, in Minnesota? He had a friend at the University of Minnesota who’d know. . . .
    “. . . tonight?”
    “Yeah,” Virgil said. “Call me anytime . . . let’s get a cheeseburger or something.”
    She looked at him oddly, and he wondered what she’d said— there’d been a little chime in his head, when she said whatever it was—and she headed off to her car, turning to wave.
    The luna flapped around the light, beating against it. Virgil tried to edge up close, but the bug must’ve spotted him, because it flapped wildly off into the night, toward the third-quarter moon hanging overhead.
     
     
     
    HE WENT BACK INSIDE, told Windrow he had to run, and Windrow nodded and the band started playing and Windrow lifted his voice and said, “Thanks for reminding me about these girls. I owe you one.”
    Virgil left. He had a plan; he’d go fishing in the morning, and while he was out in the boat, he’d solve the crime.
    In his head, anyway.
    But he might get a late start. Tonight, he was gonna drop by Sig’s place. There was, he thought, an excellent chance that he might not be in any shape to get up at five A.M.
    An excellent chance.
     
     
     
    HE GOT TO SIG’S PLACE at eight-thirty. Zoe’s Pilot was parked outside, with a couple of other cars, and he could see lights down at the gazebo.
    He groaned, and heard the chime again, the one that’d gone off when Zoe was talking.
    Quilting bee, she’d said. Sig’s having a quilting bee. . . .

15
    ROBERT PLANT AND ALISON KRAUSS were working their way through “Please Read the Letter” as Virgil backed his boat down the ramp into Stone Lake. The music suited the morning and his mood, and he sat and listened to the last bit of the song before he cut the engine.
    Another day with flat water, but the sky had turned, showing a flat gray screen of cloud that could make some rain before the day was gone. He climbed down from the truck, into the smell of fish scales and backwater, clambered up on the trailer tongue and walked out to the bow of the boat, grabbed the bow line and pushed it off. The boat slipped off the trailer and he pulled it around to the side of the ramp and tied it off to a bush.
    After parking the truck and trailer, he locked up, unlocked again, got his raincoat, peed on a shrub, climbed in the boat, pulled it out with the engine, then swung around and headed for the south shoreline.
    There were muskies in the lake, but he wasn’t going to worry about that. Instead, he went looking for a weedy bay, something with lily pads and snags, found one and started flipping out a weed-less bass lure, looking for either northern pike or bass. He wouldn’t keep anything, so he didn’t much care what he caught, or, indeed, whether he caught anything at all.
     
     
     
    FISHING CALMED HIS MIND, slowed him down: the sheer, unimportant repetitive quality of it, flip and reel, flip and reel, worked as a tranquilizer, but the possibility of a strike kept him alert. The combination of alertness and quietude was good for thinking in general. Sometimes, when he was buried in facts, he couldn’t see the forest.
    And he knew how to work that state of mind.
    Instead of attacking the facts, he let them float across his consciousness as he worked the bait around the flat purple-and-green lily pads. Halfway down the bay, a white heron watched him with its yellow-rimmed snake eye, until it decided that Virgil wasn’t a threat and stalked on after a breakfast frog.
    A wise man—a cop named Capslock—once observed that he’d never seen a murder with a large amount of money attached to it, in which the money wasn’t important. On the other hand, Virgil hadn’t ever seen a murder that involved an intense sexuality in which the sexuality wasn’t involved.
    The same was not true with the mentally challenged: he’d seen lots of cases that involved obviously crazy people, the first suspects in everyone’s minds, in which the crazy people weren’t involved at all. But that was no guarantee—sometimes obviously crazy people did do it.

    SO: he had a murder case in which there was large money involved in at least two