"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."
"I didn't smell much of anything, except lake water," Virgil said.
"It's not real," Johnson said. "It's stuck in my brain. That smell."
"I've heard of that," Virgil said. "People getting stuck with a smell or a mental image."
"The image doesn't bother me-never saw that much of the guy's body," Johnson said. "But when I saw you get your face right down on top of her, and her hair floating out like that, I about blew my cookies. I don't see how you do it."
"Job," Virgil said.
"Yeah, well…" Johnson sighed, turned around, dug a Budweiser out of the cooler, popped it open. "Think you better find yourself a ride, Virgil. I'm going back up to the V. This murder shit-I'm done with it. I thought it would be interesting, but it's just nasty."
AT THE CLOSEST APPROACH to the pond, they pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, and the sheriff and Virgil walked one way, and Johnson the other, because Virgil knew that he'd spot the trail, and so would Johnson, but he wasn't sure about the sheriff. He and the sheriff had walked thirty yards along the gravel road when he saw it: "There." He turned and shouted, "Johnson!"
Johnson jogged over and Virgil said, "Stay back from it-we'll want the crime-scene guys to walk it."
There'd been no way the killer could have gotten in without leaving a traiclass="underline" the soil was firm enough underfoot, but damp, and the plants were the soft, leafy, easily broken kind that you saw in the shade, on the edges of wetlands.
"The question is, where'd he leave his car?" Virgil asked. The road was narrow, and there were no obvious turnoffs. "Couldn't park it here; too many people would have seen it."
The sheriff said, "There's some empty cabins up the way. He could park back there, and not get seen. But what if he dropped off a gun, then parked up at the lodge? You could walk down here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Gravel road like this, you could hear a car coming. A little care, you could just step into the woods before it went by."
"A guy would be noticed at the lodge, a stranger," Virgil said. "Maybe a woman?"
Johnson said, "If it was a woman, especially if it was one who was staying at the lodge, she'd see McDill going out in the boat. She might even have asked her where she was going… run down here, boom."
Virgil looked into the woods. "If that's right, the gun might still be in there. Unless she came down last night and picked it up, but that'd really be taking a chance. If they saw her, people would remember."
"We'll check everybody on this road," the sheriff said. "Every swinging dick."
Car coming; they heard it before they could see it, and when they saw it, it was an oversized white van. "Crime scene," Virgil said.
THERE WERE FOUR GUYS with the crime-scene crew, led by Ron Mapes, who'd last run into Virgil while they were looking at the murder of an Indian cop from the Red Lake Chippewa reservation.
Virgil ran them through what had been done, including the marker buoy out on the lake, and all four of them looked down the track toward the lake. "We're gonna need head nets, metal detectors…" Mapes began.
Virgil said to Mapes, "Could you guys go in there right now, take a quick look at the track? See if anything pops up? At Red Lake, you told me the killer was a small guy, and that got me started in the right direction."
"We can look," Mapes said.
The crew all had fifteen-inch rubber boots and head nets and cotton gloves to protect against the mosquitoes, and they took it slow, pushing down the track, looking for anything along the way, checking for metal. While they were doing that, Virgil, the sheriff, and Johnson walked farther down the road, looking at the driveways branching off to the sides. The driveways were gravel-and-dirt tracks leading uphill, away from the lake: hunting cabins, the sheriff said, usually empty until the fall.
THE CRIME-SCENE CREW had been in for ten minutes, out of sight, when they got back, and the sheriff called the Grand Rapids airport Avis and reserved an SUV for Virgil. He'd just rung off when they heard somebody coming in, and then Mapes pushed delicately through the brush beside the killer's track, still searching it with his eyes. When he got out on the road, he pulled off his head net and said, "The mosquitoes are thick in there… gets wet about a hundred yards in."
"So…"
"I can't promise you that she's the killer, but I can tell you that whoever walked back there is a woman," Mapes said. "She maybe went in more than once, or maybe there were a couple of them, because it's tracked up."
"Scouting tracks," Virgil said.
"Anyway, we got three partial footprints so far, the instep of a woman's boot or shoe. Maybe a shoe, because there's a low heel," Mapes said. "We won't be able to give you an exact size because we're mostly seeing that instep, but it also looks to me like there's a capital M in the instep, a logo. One of the guys thinks it's for Mephisto shoes. He said Mephisto shoes run about three hundred bucks a pair."
"Not something you'd see every day," Virgil said.
"Heck, I don't even know if you could buy any locally, I mean, closer than the Cities," Mapes said. "Though you could order them on the Internet."
"What else?" Virgil asked.
"Well… nothing. But I thought that was quite a bit," Mapes said.
"Nothing on the beaver lodge?"
"Not there yet. I'm going back in."
"Done good, Ron," Virgil said.
The sheriff looked at Virgil and said, "Gotta be somebody at the lodge. A woman, shoes from the Cities." Sanders had relaxed a notch: this was more of a Cities problem than a local deal, and he was happy to have it that way.
"Let's go back and talk to Stanhope," Virgil said. "Then if you could have one of your guys give me a lift down to Grand Rapids, we could let Johnson go."
"I can do that," the sheriff said.
ON THE WAY BACK to the lodge, Johnson said, "I feel like I'm ditching you."
"You're not. This isn't your job. Catch a fish for me, up there," Virgil said.
"Not gonna catch any fish," Johnson said gloomily. He ducked his head over the steering wheel, looking up at the bright sky. "This trip is cursed."
At the lodge, Virgil hopped out, got his duffel bag, walked around to the driver's side, and said, "You stay off that Budweiser when you're driving."