Rough country

He thought about that for a moment, then said, "Ah, man. Well, I've got to get back and talk to Erica McDill's friends from the Cities. I thank you for the tour. Maybe I'll come back tonight, take a look at the band. See if I can figure out your type."

"Wendy… Whatever. She's a slut. But she turns my crank. If I had a crank."

Virgil laughed and asked, "Why don't you pay for the drinks?"

OUTSIDE IN THE PARKING LOT, she walked with him to the Trailblazer and asked, "You really don't care if I tell some friends about this? About… that a woman did it?"

He shrugged. "No, go ahead. Something to talk about. Better than the Internet. But be careful about who you talk to-we are dealing with a nutcase."

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW was eating di

"Any possibility that more might have gotten thrown into the water?" Virgil asked.

"We checked with a metal detector. Never got a flicker," Mapes said.

"So it's basically prints or DNA and the Mephistos," Virgil said.

"I wouldn't count on prints-I took a long look at that cartridge, and it looked clean and a little oily. I should have been able to see a print. But, maybe not. Maybe the lab will bring something up. And I've got to believe that if she came through that swamp, and knew what she was doing, she was wearing gloves. It's not so bad out in the open, but coming over the margins of the marsh, the mosquitoes were so thick they were clogging up our head nets. If she knew what she was doing, she would have covered up. Gloves, maybe even a head net."

He left them to finish eating and went looking for Stanhope. A woman Virgil hadn't met was turning off lights in the office. She said, "She took them up to the library."

"Uh, who…?"

"The people from the Cities. Miss McDill's friends."

LAWRENCE HARCOURT, whose name was on the agency, was a slender man with close-cropped white hair, quick blue eyes behind military-style gunmetal glasses, and a face that seemed oddly unlined for his apparent age-a face-lift? The second and third of McDill's friends, Barney Ma

Ma

Davies was stu

All three, Virgil thought, after the introductions had been made and some questions answered, were intensely self-centered. They were not so concerned about the existential aspects of McDill's death, but rather, what it means to me. They had also been concerned with image, Virgil thought, to the point of silliness. They could have driven up from the Twin Cities, individually, in three hours. Instead, they'd rented a floatplane, apparently to demonstrate the urgency of the matter, and after soaking up time in arranging the flight, and getting together, and making the flight, they'd taken six or seven hours.

Harcourt had checked Virgil quickly, eyes narrowing a bit, and he asked, "Have you had any experience with this kind of investigation?"

"Yes," Virgil said.

"He's the one who killed the Vietnamese," Stanhope told them.

They all looked again, and Ma

Virgil opened his mouth to answer, and Davies broke in. "I just want to see her. What if there's been a mistake?"

"She's been identified by people who knew her," Virgil said, as kindly as he could. "The photograph on Erica McDill's driver's license is a picture of the woman who was killed."

"I still…" she began, and she turned in a circle, and Stanhope patted her on the shoulder.

Ma

"It seems to me after some investigation that the killer is a woman who knows how to handle a rifle and knew the territory. Could be local, or could be an outsider, a guest at the lodge. If I knew why, I'd be closer to a complete answer."

Ma

Harcourt nodded, and Virgil asked, "What'd you expect?"

He shrugged: "That it came like a bolt out of the blue and nobody had any idea. If that were the case, I could probably give you the why."

Virgil spread his hands. "I'm all ears."

Ma

"She wanted to fire people," Harcourt said. "As many as twenty-five or thirty. A lot of them have been with the agency for a long time. They've been protected by the board. Erica had the authority to fire them, as CEO, but then her actions could be reviewed by the board, and there are a number of people on the board who already didn't like her. There would've been a fight-"

"What did you think about the firings?" Virgil asked him.

Harcourt stepped back and sat in one of the library chairs and crossed his legs. Virgil noticed that even though he was wearing jeans and ankle boots, he was also wearing over-the-calf dress socks. He said, "I was generally against them-I could see a couple of them, but no reason for a top-to-bottom housecleaning."

"But you were go

Harcourt sighed, and looked around the room at all the faded old books. "I kept the stock in the first place because the agency pays a nice dividend. But I'm seventy-one and I've got a bad ticker. I need to get my estate in order," he said. "The thing about an ad agency is, its property is mostly intellectual. It's a group of talents, a collection of clients. We don't really own a damn thing, except some tables and chairs. We even lease our computers. So, if I passed the stock down to my children, and Erica got pissed, she might just cherry-pick the talent and start her own agency, and my kids would get screwed. They'd get nothing. But bolting would be a big risk for Erica, too. Big start-up costs, diminished client list. She'd be much better off keeping things as they are. All of that gave me an incentive to sell, and Erica an incentive to buy. We made a deal a couple of weeks ago. We never closed on it."

Ma

"Would killing McDill actually stop the firings?" Virgil asked.

Ma

"They are," Davies said. "I won't get a thing. Not a thing."

"She didn't leave you anything in her will?" Ma