Rough Country

unrelated ways.
    1. McDill’s lover, Ruth Davies, was apparently about to be dumped and disinherited by McDill. By killing McDill, Davies would inherit a hundred thousand dollars and whatever she could loot from the house, which, Virgil thought, might include a few expensive artworks. If McDill had lived, she wouldn’t have gotten a dime.
    2. Zoe Tull was apparently trying to scratch together enough money for a bid on the Eagle Nest, and McDill may have been a threat to that plan. Though Virgil liked Zoe, he couldn’t eliminate her as a possibility. She’d complained about the door of her house being forced, but there was no apparent reason that anyone would do that. Had she faked the break-in as a naive tactic to distract him, to suggest another agency working in the murder? Possibly. But, he had to confess to himself, he didn’t think she’d killed anyone. He simply liked her too much to think that.
    AND: sex was all over the place.
    Zoe and Wendy. Wendy and Berni. Wendy and McDill. McDill and Davies. McDill and Jared Boehm. The Deuce and the dogs? Maybe not. But how about one of the Slibes, and Wendy? Odd things happened on those remote farm sites in the long dark winters. . . .
    Berni might fear that she was about to be dumped by both her employer and lover; she must have some idea that if the band was going to make it, she wouldn’t be making it with them . . . or with Wendy. And she had no alibi for the time of the McDill killing; and Constance Lifry had been a threat to move the band, as well.
    Virgil had also gotten a bad vibration from the Deuce, when the strange man had talked about the dogs. What had he said? “Them bitches want it all the time, when the heat’s on them.”
    Sounded like a line from a rap song. And he’d said it with a little too much relish.
    Of course, he was talking about bitches. Virgil had noticed in the past that country people tended to use specific words for the different sexes of specific animals: goose and gander, ram and ewe, boar and sow, dog and bitch, words generally felt to be archaic in the now-urban populace.
    Or maybe they just like using the word bitch in public.
     
     
     
    FINALLY: he had at least one, and perhaps two, people with uneven mentalities, to be politically correct about it. The Deuce and Wendy, brother and sister. The Deuce wore his problem like a cloak. In Wendy, Virgil had only seen it as a quick flash, but it was there, he thought.
    Which meant that Slibe I should be on the list as well, since he was probably the force that bent Slibe II and Wendy.
    Slibe.
    Slibe had said something that had tickled Virgil’s brain a couple of times. He thought about that, about what he’d been doing when he heard whatever it was, still couldn’t find it, and let it go.

    HE LET ALL of it cook through his brain as he worked down the bay, around the corner of it, past the docks of a half-dozen lake cabins. Mind drifting.
    A fish of some kind took a slash at the lure, but Virgil missed it, went back to the same spot a minute later, got hit again, but this time, hooked up. Small bass, maybe a foot long. He unhooked it, slipped it back in the lake, leaned over and rinsed his fingers in the cool lake water.
    And thought: Davies.
    I can eliminate her, if I stop fucking around.
    He looked around, trying to figure where he was from the Eagle Nest. Not far . . . He checked his cell phone and got two bars, looked at the time: 7:45. Davenport wouldn’t be at the office yet. He called Davenport’s home, got his daughter, Letty, told her to take the phone back to Davenport’s bedroom.
    “This better be something,” Davenport groaned into the phone. “Do you know what time it is?”
    “Yeah. Time to get up. Everybody else has been up for hours: so shut up, and call Jenkins or Shrake. I need those guys to lean on somebody for me.”
    “Aw, man . . . all right, all right. I’ll get one of them to call you back. You’re on your cell?”
    “Yeah. Quick as they can.”
     
     
     
    HE HUNG UP and at that instant, he got it—what Slibe had said that tickled him.
    Slibe had said that he was thinking of going to Wyoming to shoot prairie dogs. Said it like he’d done it before. But a real dog-shooter wasn’t going out there with a worn-out semiauto .223 with open sights that couldn’t shoot inside four inches at a hundred yards. Nor would he be taking the pump .30-06, or the twelve- or the twenty-gauge shotgun, or the .22 or the old Ruger pistol that had also been