BACK DOWN THE POND, the funeral home guys were hoisting the body into the boat, with some trouble. The sheriff said to the cop on the tiller, "Get me back there."
Virgil said, "I want to take a look at that other shore-where somebody might walk in. Cruise the shoreline."
"I'll be here," the sheriff said.
THEY STARTED where the creek drained out of the pond, moving at a walking pace. Virgil looked down the creek, and as the cop had said, it was choked with dead trees, sweepers, branches. He doubted that you could walk along it, and a boat would be impossible. They moved out, along the edge of the pond, scanning the shoreline until Johnson said, "There you go."
"Where?"
"See that dead birch, the one with the dead crown?" He was pointing across the weed flat at the wall of aspens and birch trees. "Now look about one inch to the left; you see that dark hole in the weeds? I see that all the time, in the backwaters on the river-somebody walked out there… over toward that beaver lodge."
"Okay." Virgil looked back at the boats around the body. "Could have set up on the lodge."
"Eighty-yard shot. Maybe ninety," Johnson said. "Looks about like a good sand wedge."
"Could be fifty, depending on how she drifted," Virgil said. "Good shooting, though."
Don said, "Not that great. Eighty, ninety yards. That's nothing, up here."
"I'll tell you what," Virgil said. "He had one shot, no warm-ups, and he put it dead in her forehead. She was probably moving, at least a little bit. And he was shooting a human being and had to worry about being caught, about being seen, about getting out of there. With all that stress, that's damn good shooting. He knew what he was doing."
Don looked from the shore back to the boats, back to the shore, then nodded, and said, "When you're right, you're right."
Looking at the beaver lodge, a low hump of bare logs, twigs, and mud just off the shoreline, Johnson said, "About impossible to get there from here. Might push a boat through to the beaver lodge, but even then…"
Virgil shook his head: "Better to come in from the same side the shooter did. Have to do that anyway." To Don: "Let's go see the sheriff."
THE FUNERAL HOME GUYS had McDill in a body bag and were zipping it up when they got back. The sheriff looked at their faces and asked, "What?"
Virgil said, "I think we got ourselves a crime scene."
3
WITH THE BODY out of the water, the sheriff talked to the two deputies who were looking for bloodstained lily pads, and told them to wait at the pond until he called them, or until the crime-scene crew arrived and sent them back. Then the rest of them pulled out, led by the sheriff in his boat, Virgil, Johnson, and Don in theirs, George Rainy, the guide, by himself, and the boat with the body.
At the pond, Virgil had only one flickering bar on his cell phone, but he had a solid four when they got back. As soon as Don cut the motor and started cutting a curve into the dock, he called the Bemidji office and talked to the duty officer.
"You got a crime-scene crew headed my way?"
"Should be there," the duty officer said. "Let me give them a call." He was back a minute later. "They ran into a closed bridge. They should be there in ten or fifteen minutes. They gotta go around."
"You still got guys up in Bigfork?"
"Oh, yeah. It's getting worse. You heard about Fox…"
A DOZEN WOMEN were standing on the dock, watching with the combination of curiosity and dread that you got at murders. Virgil tossed a line around a cleat and snugged the boat up to the dock and climbed out, holding it for Johnson and Don. When the sheriff had clambered out of his boat, Virgil relayed the news about the crime-scene crew and said, "Let's go see if we can spot the trail in-where the killer left the road."
"Sounds good."
To Johnson: "Why don't you go up to the lodge and see if you can get us some sandwiches; I'm starving to death."
"What're you doing?"
"I'm going to take a look at the body," Virgil said.
Johnson nodded and headed up the dock. Virgil walked over to Rainy, who was tying up his boat, and asked him to stick around until they could talk. The guide nodded and said, "Yessir," and followed Johnson into the lodge.
The funeral home guys hoisted the body bag out of the boat and Virgil had them unzip it. McDill was lying faceup, the front of her face stained red by hypostasis, the settling of blood in a dead body, under the influence of gravity. She'd gone into the water facedown, and apparently had stayed that way overnight.
The entry wound in her forehead was the size of Virgil's little fingernail, but the bone was pulped, as though the slug had exploded. The exit wound had knocked out the back left part of her skull, exposing some brain matter, which, washed overnight by the lake water, resembled gray cheese. To Virgil, it looked like she'd been shot with a small-caliber rifle, maybe a.223, or possibly a.243, with hollow-point bullets. She was wearing jeans, and he reached around to feel her back pockets, where she might be carrying a wallet, but she wasn't.
"You see any other wounds?" Virgil asked.
The funeral home guys shook their heads. "Not a thing," one of them said. "We'll check at the office, before we pack her up for the medical examiner. Let you know."
The body would be sent to Ramsey County, in the Twin Cities, for the autopsy.
"Zip it up," Virgil said. He duckwalked over to the edge of the dock, reached down, and washed his hands in the lake water.
STANHOPE HAD SEEN THEM coming in and now edged out onto the dock, and when Virgil stood up, she cringed away, unable to look, and asked, "Is that her?"
Virgil nodded and said, "You really don't have to be here. Why don't we go inside?"
She stepped away, still looking at the bag, and shuddered, and led the way along the path to the lodge door and up the interior stairs. Virgil asked, "You got the Internet here?"
"Oh, sure. Every cabin, and wireless all over the lodge."
The Eagle Nest office was a quiet suite of three rooms with two clerks at wooden desks with modern flat-screen computers and a bunch of file cabinets. Two fish replicas, framed photos of well-known guests, and a set of moose antlers hung on the knotty-pine walls. A Scots-plaid woman's beret dangled from one of the antlers. Virgil used Stanhope's computer to download and then call up Google Earth, focus on the lake, and then spot exactly where the body had been, and the shortest land-route into the pond from the loop road.
"Pretty good tool," the sheriff said, looking over his shoulder.
"Not only that, it's free," Virgil said. He grabbed the screen and printed it out.
THE SHERIFF LED THE WAY in his Tahoe, Johnson driving his truck while Virgil ate a cheese-and-bologna sandwich. Between bites, Virgil said to Johnson, "You looked a little green out there. At the body."
Johnson bobbed his head and looked out the window into the forest. "I told you about that body I found on the river."
"About a hundred thousand times," Virgil said.
"So after I found it, I called the cops. This Wisconsin river cop came over, and he knew who it was. Some guy from Lake City who fell out of his boat-"
"Yeah, yeah, you told me." He spit a piece of pimento out the window.
"What I didn't tell you was, this cop wanted to anchor the body until we could get a bigger boat out there to do the recovery," Johnson said. "So he tied a line around it, so he could pull it over closer to the shore and tie it off to a tree. But the thing is, it'd been in the river for a week, and was all bloated and full of gas, and when he pulled on the line, the body came apart and the gas came out and rolled right over me."
"Ah, jeez," Virgil said. "You know what you do in a situation like that? Course, I don't suppose you had any Vicks…"
"Hang on a minute," Johnson said. "Anyway, I started barfing. I barfed up everything I had and then I kept barfing. Nothing was coming up but some spit, but I couldn't stop. The cop was barfing, too, and I got out of there and went back to the cabin, and I kept… trying to barf. I couldn't get the smell off me. I took a shower and washed my hair and I even burned the clothes, and I could still smell it and I'd start barfing again. That went on for a week, and then, like three weeks later, it started again, and went on for another couple of days. So, you know, this morning, I thought a murder scene might be interesting, but when I saw her in the water… I smelled that gas again."