John Sandford - Rough country

"Any particular reason he's doing that?" Virgil asked.

"Not as far as I know. I think he's tired of being here," Sanders said.

THEY FOUND RAINY and interviewed him in a room called "the library," a cube with three soft chairs and a few hundred hard-backs with sun-faded covers, and six geraniums in the window, in terra-cotta pots. Rainy lived fifteen minutes away, toward Grand Rapids, but outside of town. He worked a half-dozen lakes in the area, guiding fishermen in the summer, deer and bear hunters in the fall. He got a hundred dollars a day plus tips, had worked on another lake the day before the killing, and had been scheduled to take out a couple of women in the morning and teach them how to fish for walleye.

"Got down to the dock, and they was runnin' around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. They thought Miz McDill might of gone down toward that pond. So I says, 'Well, why don't I go take a look?' So I jumps in a boat and runs down there, and there she was. Wasn't like I investigated-I come out the pipe and there she was. I spotted her as soon as I come out, the boat and her shirt."

"You touch her?" Virgil asked.

"Shit no. I watch TV," the guide said.

Virgil nodded. "Okay. No ideas?"

Rainy shook his head: "Nope. Well… one. Don't mention it to Miz Stanhope; I need to work here."

"I can keep my mouth shut," Virgil said, and the sheriff nodded.

"The women here, you know, a lot of them are singing on our side of the choir," Rainy said.

Virgil looked at the sheriff, who did a little head bob that suggested that he agreed, but hadn't mentioned it out of politeness.

"You think…"

Rainy nodded. "Rug munchers," he said. "The thing is, you know, they'd go on down to the bars-the Goose in particular-and you'd hear that there were some fights when they got the liquor in them. I don't mean like, out in the parking lot, but you know, screaming at each other. Fighting over who was munchin' who. So… it could be a sex thing."

Virgil asked the sheriff, "Miss McDill…?"

"Don't know. I do know that a lot of the women who come up here aren't gay," Sanders said. "Margery told me once that a lot of them want to come up here without having to put up with macho North Woods bullshit. Don't mind men, they just want to get away for a while, get back to nature on their own."

"How'd that come up?" Virgil asked. "About who was gay?"

"Somebody made a comment at the Chamber of Commerce, and she was steamed about it," the sheriff said. "I bumped into her, purely by accident, and she let it out. We've known each other since grade school."

"Huh."

The sheriff chuckled. "You just said, 'Huh,' like a cop."

"No, no… but you wonder, if this was done by an outsider, somebody who was staying here at the lodge, how'd they know exactly how to walk in there? To the pond?" Virgil asked.

"Could have looked on Google Earth, like we did," Sanders suggested.

"One possibility," Virgil admitted.

"Could have scouted it," Sanders added.

"Or it could be a local," Virgil said.

"Look, if you'd asked me how to get in there, to the pond, off the road, I'd have to take a long look at a map and maybe get a compass, and I've lived here all my life," Sanders said. "The killer either knows this exact area a lot better than I do, or she looked at Google Earth. Or a map. Maybe used a GPS. And probably scouted it. So it's just as likely to be an outsider as a local. Either way, they'd have to scout it."

"Or was a deer hunter," Rainy chipped in. Virgil and the sheriff turned back to him. "After it freezes up, it's not so bad back there. No bugs, no mud. You go a couple hundred yards back, and you can see the pond. John Mack has a couple of tree stands maybe a five-minute walk west of there. Guys around here'll push that piece of woods, from the road over to the lake, up toward Mack's place."

"Must take a lot of guys to push it," Virgil said.

"Naw, it's not so bad. Like I said, you can see better. You get six, eight guys across that neck, about noon on opening day, and push 'em west, the deer'll funnel between two little ponds," Rainy said. "The kids on the stands will usually take one or two. The guys put their kids up on the stands, to give them a crack at a good one."

"I'll keep that in mind," Virgil said. "Thank you."

As they were leaving the library, the sheriff leaned close to the guide and said, "Long as you're working here, I'd go easy on that 'rug muncher' business."

Rainy's Adam's apple bobbed a couple of times. "I'll do that. I will."

OUT IN THE MAIN LODGE, Sanders said to Virgil, "I don't want you to get the idea that people up here are antigay. Some of the women at the lodge might be gay, but it doesn't bother anyone. We want them to come into town, shop, go to the restaurants-these women have money. This resort's gonna cost them two thousand dollars a week, and some of them come up for a month. It's not like they buy a bucket of minnows and sleep in the back of the truck."

Virgil smiled. "You mean like me and Johnson?"

"Well-you know, they hang out at the Wild Goose, like George said. Tom Mortensen, he's the owner, if you told him he was going to lose his gay business, he'd have a heart attack," Sanders said. "They keep him going. He likes having them, and they like being there. Hell of a lot less trouble than a bunch of cowboys."

THEY WENT by the office to find Stanhope. Zoe, the woman who thought Virgil had perpetrated a massacre, was sitting at a computer, wearing a pair of black librarian glasses, which meant that Virgil would almost certainly fall in love with her; the near-sighted intellectual look did him in every time. If she'd had an over-bite, he would have proposed.

Stanhope was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder and at a piece of paper in her own hand, and said, "I'm sure we paid him off before July first. The Fourth of July fell on a Friday, payday, and I remember that he wasn't here for the fireworks, because he usually helps set them up-"

"You see the problem, though," Zoe said, tapping the computer screen. "If he slopped over into July, then he has to go on the third-quarter numbers, too."

Stanhope sensed them at the doorway, turned, and said, "Hi. We're trying to figure out an accounting problem."

"When you got a minute," Virgil said, "I'd like you to walk me over to Miss McDill's cabin, talk a bit about her."

"Go right now," Stanhope said.

The sheriff said, "I'll leave you to it, Virgil. I gotta go talk to the TV people."

Virgil nodded: "Go. I would like to fix a ride down to the Avis dealer, though."

Zoe said, "My office is in town-I could ride you down there. I'll be another half-hour here."

"That'd be great," Virgil said.

ALL THE CABINS had names: McDill had been in the Common Loon, one bedroom, with extra sleeping space up a ladder in a second-story loft. The loft also had a doorway out to the sundeck.

In addition to the bedroom, the cabin had a segregated space, like a den, with a computer desk complete with an Ethernet cable and a wall notice about wireless connections, a Xerox laser printer, a high-end business chair, and a two-line phone; a small, efficient kitchen; and a living/sitting room with a fieldstone fireplace. McDill's Macintosh laptop was hooked to an Ethernet cable.

"No television," Virgil said.

"We've got a thing about that. If you want to watch television, you've got to come up to the theater at the lodge. But the basic idea here is you get away from TV and all that," Stanhope said.

"But you've got-"

"We found out that most of the people who come here want to get away from the absolute crap-TV-but a lot of them can't afford to completely isolate themselves. They're businesswomen and they need to stay in touch. You'll notice that your cell phone works here."