Rough Country (20 page)

Nope. That was two years ago, almost. Connie's been gone almost two years, Windrow said.

Bauer jumped in. When I heard why you were coming down here, I looked on the Internet and found the story on this other murder. You know my sister was a lesbian?

Virgil nodded. Yes.

There has been some speculation about this Miss McDill, she said.

She was a lesbian, or bisexual, businesswoman who stayed at the Eagle Nest, like your sister, Virgil said.

Bauer leaned back in her chair: Then that's the connection. I prayed to the Lord for two years to give us something. Anything. Connie's murder couldn't have been a random act. The Lord wouldn't allow it.

That argument might not hold up in court, Sedlacek said.

She waved him off. I don't care about that. I want to know why some animal took Connie's life. If I can find out why, I'll find some peace. The way it is now, I think about it all the time. I have no peace.

Virgil went back to Windrow and pressed him on Wendy, but Windrow insisted that he knew nothing at all about her. So tell me, he said, you got that music shirt on, and you've heard her . . . what do you think?

Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, Have you seen the Rolling Stones film Shine a Light?

' Bout twenty times, Windrow said.

Virgil said, Think Christina Aguilera. But country.

Windrow tipped back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and said, Really.

Really, Virgil said.

That's pretty damn interesting, Windrow said. I'm hunting for a September band. The guy who was coming in hurt himself bad and had to cancel.

She's good, Virgil said. Her band's got a couple of soft spots.

We can fix that, Windrow said. He tipped forward and wrote a note on his calendar, and added, Backup people are like lamp plugs plug them in, pull them out. A good one can play anything.

Bauer said, I believe this will have more to do with sex than with music.

Virgil nodded at her and said, Well, Miz Bauer, Wendy Ashbach is a little bit gay. She's living with a gay drummer, and spent the night with Miss McDill, the night before McDill was shot to death so you may be right.

HE TOLD THEM ABOUT the investigation so far, and about the fistfight between Berni and Wendy, and when he did, Windrow made another note on his calendar, then said, I'm going to run up there and take a look at her.

You like the idea that she fights? Virgil asked.

Yeah, I do, he said. People like that have an authenticity that these crystalline chicks can't fake. The fans can feel it; they're starved for it.

Take it easy when you get up there, Virgil said. We got enough dead people.

AS THEY WERE LEAVING, Bauer said to Virgil, We saved all of my sister's papers; I thought there might be something in them for an investigator, but nobody saw anything. If you want, I could make them available to you.

Virgil looked at his watch. I'd like to get out of here before dark how far are the papers from the Cedar Rapids airport?

Five or six minutes, she said. Swanson is a little way south of the airport.

Good deal, Virgil said. I'll follow you up there.

And I'll probably see you up in Grand Rapids, Windrow said. How far is it?

Nine hours by car, probably. You can fly in, commercial, but there aren't many flights. Bar is called the Wild Goose.

I fly a little Cessna. Love to do it, don't do it enough, Windrow said. If the weather's good, I'll head up there in the morning, maybe.

OUT IN THE PARKING LOT, Sedlacek and Virgil shook hands, and Sedlacek said, Prudence is okay. A little dry, but she's smart, like her sister.

Seems okay, Virgil said.

I was worried that she might seem a little crazy, going on about the Lord this and the Lord that, that he wouldn't allow Constance to be murdered at random.

Who can tell about that, Virgil said, looking over at the woman as she got into a Ford Taurus. She might even be right.

Chapter
11

JANELLE WASHINGTON WENT TO WORK in a candy store to pick up extra cash when her husband, a greenskeeper, hopped down off a tractor and tore his ACL. He was out of work for weeks, and they were living on worker's comp payments, and something had to be done.

The candy store barely paid minimum wage, but that was fine. The work wasn't onerous, and they were only bridging the gap between worker's comp and what they needed, so they didn't need a lot. Then, after he got back on the tractor, she decided she liked the contact with other people during the day, and she stayed on with the candy store.

There was a problem, though. Janelle couldn't stay out of the chocolate. She'd always prided herself on her figure, which wasn't perfect, but her husband, James, seemed to like it a lot, and when she gained two pounds in the first week, and another in the second week, then two more . . . something had to be done.

First, she resolved to eat only two pieces of fudge a day: five hundred calories. Then, during the summer, at least, she'd ride her bike from her house, out in the countryside, all the way into town, eight miles each way, which took her about forty-five minutes each way, and burned, according to an Internet calculator, about five hundred calories. Also, she learned, she'd be building muscles, and more muscles also meant more calories burned.

Now the question was, should she use the extra calories for another piece of fudge? Or really turn herself into a raging piece of super-fit muscle? Staying at two pieces a day was hard, with the owner in the back cooking up all that chocolate. . . .

On this day, she'd finished up, cleaning off the counters, had said good-bye to Dan, the owner, and took off. The first few blocks were stop-and-go, getting out of town, watching the traffic; but once she was on the other side of the river, the traffic disappeared and she started to pump; started to sweat.

She'd never been an athlete, but the bicycle had turned something on, and she was getting addicted to the flow of the thing. . . .

McDILL'S KILLER SAT in a copse of trees that grew on a natural mound at the intersection of the county road and a trail that led back to a canoe-landing on the Mississippi. From a nest at the top of the mound, both the landing and the road were visible. No canoeists had come along in an hour, and none were visible in a half-mile stretch of the river above the landing.

Washington should be coming around the corner at any minute. Shooting her would do two good things. First, it'd confuse the issue. The killer would carefully leave behind a shell, so they'd know that McDill's killer also shot Washington. But since Washington had no connection to lesbians or Wendy's band or the Eagle Nest, maybe they'd go for the idea that the killings were random. Maybe; but if not, it'd at least be confusing.

The other thing the killing would do is get rid of Washington. Nobody would remember it after she was dead, the killer thought, but Washington knew a little too much about Slibe Ashbach Jr. and his father. . . .

WASHINGTON CAME AROUND the corner a mile away, not pedaling hard, but moving right along. The road was smooth blacktop, and she was clear and steady in the four-power scope. She was wearing a scarf, as a babushka, to keep her hair neat. Her face was clear in the glass . . . four hundred yards, three-fifty, three hundred, and closing . . .

A truck came around the corner behind her. Not moving fast, sort of idling along, and the killer took the gun down, forehead beaded with sweat, breathing hard from a sudden shot of adrenaline. Not good. Not good.

TOM MORRIS SAW JANELLE pedaling along and thought about what might have been if he'd moved a little faster after high school. They might have hooked up. The possibility was out there, for a while. He knew it, and she knew it, and that made them like each other all their lives, even if nothing happened, and they both wound up happily married to other people.

He slowed, ran the window down, grinned at her, and called, Still pedaling your ass around town . . .

You shut up! she said.

No, I think it's a good thing, he said. I saw James downtown yesterday. He said you guys were going out to Moitrie's on Friday. We might be out there, we're thinking about seven.

She stopped, straddling the bike, moved it over to the truck, and said, I'll call Patsy. Maybe we can get a table together.

They talked for a minute about a snowmobile club that wanted to take out some unused field crossings, and the culverts that went with them, and if that would put too many snowmobilers on their road, and about the growing flock of crows that were hanging around, and how Morris had hired an exterminator to get the squirrels out of his attic routine neighbor stuff and then he said good-bye: Talk to Patsy. See you out there.

THE PICKUP MOVED ON, slowly, paced by the bike for a hundred yards or so, and then pulled away. By this time, Washington was opposite the killer, then passing, and the truck was still there, moving slow as white paste down the highway, and Washington was farther and farther down, the crosshairs first on her head, but then the head shot became uncertain, and then on her back, on her white blouse . . .

The truck went over a low rise and disappeared. The killer glanced back: nothing from the other direction. But this wasn't as clean as the other killings, there could be somebody . . .

Ah . . .

White blouse in the scope, squeeze . . .

The shot was almost a surprise.

WASHINGTON FELT AS THOUGH she'd been hit by a meteor. She was down, and bleeding, in the ditch, her bicycle on top of her, and looked down and found blood gushing from her rib cage, and she began to crawl up the side of the ditch, not thinking, not knowing what happened, wondering if she'd been hit by a car. She began to grow weak, understood that she was going to die if something didn't happen.

One last push and she was on the shoulder, and she tried to hold herself together, tried to think, still not understanding, rolling up, blood on her hands, blood on her blouse, no car, what happened? She could hear herself making a growling noise, and felt the gravel on her face and under her hands, sticky with blood. . . .

Some time passed, and she was mostly aware of the blue of the sky above her, and then the wheel of a car was right there by her head, and she heard the crunch of gravel. A face appeared in her field of vision, and she heard the man's voice:

Jeez! Janelle! What happened, oh, my God, and she focused on Tom Morris's face and he was on his cell phone screaming, We've got a woman hurt bad . . . bleeding bad . . . Get some help out here, my God, we need an ambulance, we need an ambulance. . . .

Chapter
12

PRUDENCE BAUER HAD FIFTEEN or twenty sealed cardboard moving boxes full of her sister's life, consolidated in a back bedroom, and when Virgil opened the first one, he was hit in the face by a dusty lilac-scented perfume that smelled more like death than death itself. Two of the boxes contained papers taken from Connie's desk within a couple days of her death, including a diary, and an appointment book from the Louvre.

Was she an art enthusiast? Virgil asked Bauer, thinking of the museum membership cards he'd seen in McDill's wallet.

No, not especially she used to get those from the Barnes and Noble store up in Cedar Rapids. There's another one around, but I think it was on the theme of cats.

She left him sitting in a rocking chair, in the bedroom, on a braided rag rug, flipping through the paper and getting nowhere. She came back fifteen minutes later with a Diet Coke: Found anything?

He took the Coke. Not so far. But it all helps: even if I don't see anything now, maybe something relevant will pop up later. It's a matter of getting the most information that you can, into your head.

You know, you should look at the phone receipts, to see who she was talking to at the time. They're in here somewhere. . . .

She started digging through boxes of records, looking for the phone receipts, as he paged through the diary, which was fairly bland: who did what to whom, in Swanson, and none of the things done were dramatic, except that a man named Don left his wife, Marilyn, and moved to Marion, wherever that was, to be around a woman named Doris.

Whatever happened to Don and Doris? Virgil asked Bauer.

She looked up, her eyes distant, for a moment, and then she said, I think they moved to Oklahoma. Lake Eufaula.

So Don never got back with Marilyn?

No. Marilyn's still alone. Sometimes I see her standing in her window, looking out. She lives just down the street and around the corner, she said.

Maybe she's looking for Don coming back, Virgil suggested.

Bauer looked at him and smiled: That's going to be a long wait. Don and Doris are in love.

HE'D FOUND NOTHING at all when Bauer handed him a stack of phone bills: There are four calls to northern Minnesota right before she died. Three to one number, one to another.

He took the bills, checked through them, copied the numbers into his notebook, held up the bills, and said, I'd like to take these. I'll give you a receipt.

I don't really need

Legal niceties, Virgil said.

He was curious about the numbers, though, got on his phone, called the office in St. Paul, read the numbers off to Davenport's secretary, and said, Get somebody to run those down. They're two years old.