Rough Country

by John Sandford

  Jenkins said, “The first woman who got shot, in the canoe—shooting her like that was pretty unprofessional, you know? If he’s four inches off at eighty or ninety or a hundred yards, on a moving target, he misses clean, and she’s over the side and under water. He could have shot her in the chest, which is twice as big a target. So the thing is, he was either showing off, or . . . well, there isn’t an or. He’s proud of himself. Proud of his ability to do that.”

  “So why’d he shoot the other woman in the back?” Virgil asked. Something was tickling at the back of his brain, a thought, but he couldn’t catch it.

  “We don’t know, but I bet there’s a reason. Bet the shot was longer. You said she was riding a bike. If she was moving fast, and it was a long shot—that might have been one hell of a shot,” Jenkins said. “Not moving, between the eyes, eighty yards, is an easier shot than hitting something that’s moving fast, bouncing maybe, at two hundred yards. We need to know how far away he was. . . .”

  “So you think he’s a shooter. A marksman.”

  “He thinks he is,” Jenkins said. “Or he’s like Lee Harvey Oswald—he’s trying to prove something.”

  VIRGIL HAD BEEN LEANING against a wall, and now he straightened and said, “I’ve got to get my ass back up there.”

  “She out in the car?” Shrake asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your ass,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins faked laughs and bumped knuckles.

  “Listen, boys, if I get to the point where I need to beat the answers out of somebody, I’ll give you a call,” Virgil said.

  “Always happy to protect and serve,” Jenkins said.

  Virgil left, still trying to catch the thought that the two thugs had stirred up; still didn’t catch it, but it was back there, and felt like it did when he went to the supermarket and forgot to buy the radicchio.

  A thought that itched.

  VIRGIL HEADED NORTH, up I-35, stopped more or less halfway at a diner called Tobie’s. Hungry as he was, he didn’t feel like diner meat, so he got a piece of blueberry pie and a cup of coffee, pushed on, north and then west, and pulled into his motel in Grand Rapids at ten minutes after ten. He carried his bag up to his room, and found the phone blinking. A message from Signy: “I talked to Zoe a minute ago and she thought you might have a question for me, about Jan Washington. I’m always up until midnight, so come on over if you want.”

  He thought about it for a minute—he was tired, but not too—and headed out, stopped at a supermarket and got a hot whole-roast chicken and a six-pack, and drove out to Signy’s. He saw her shadow on the window when he pulled in, and then she pushed the door open, a wry smile on her face, saw the supermarket bag, and said, “Oh, you brought me roses. You shouldn’t have.”

  “Bought you something better than roses—I bought you a roast chicken,” Virgil said.

  He went through the door, and she said, “You must think I’m sitting out here starving.”

  “No, but I have the feeling that you’re not much interested in cooking,” he said. “Maybe that’s why Joe left; he wanted a pork chop.”

  “You could be onto something,” she admitted. She opened the chicken bag and the scent filled the room, and she said, “You cut up the chicken, I’ll open the beer.”

  They ate at the little table, facing each other, and he asked her about her day, and she told him about the quilt group that couldn’t talk about anything but the McDill murder, and how, halfway through the quilting bee, Zoe had called her to tell her about Jan Washington, and how the group had freaked out.

  “They really, really couldn’t figure that out. We all decided that there’s a crazy man loose. You’re going to start getting some pressure, I think. People want this guy caught right away. They don’t want to hear how it’s hard. And if you can’t, then bring in more cops until everybody’s got their own cop.”

  Virgil told her about his day, and asked about the woman Barbara Carson, whom Constance Lifry had called before she was murdered. “Barbara,” she said. “Hmm. I know her, she used to work for the county in human services or something like that—welfare, I think. But she’s an older lady . . . if you wanted me to swear that she’s not gay, I couldn’t. I couldn’t swear that she was, either. Zoe might know.”

  “How about Jan Washington?” Virgil asked. “We think it’s the same woman who shot McDill . . . or the same person anyway. The same gun. What’s the connection?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “We all live in the same town. But Barbara . . . Everybody else involved in this, like Margery and McDill and this Constance woman and Wendy and even Zoe, are worker-types, and they’re gay. Jan is a housewife who never wanted to work, but she had to, because her husband got hurt. I can’t think of anything she really has in common with the others. She goes to the First Baptist Church, and she helps organize food-shelf drives, and I don’t think any of the other ones go to any church. Not one of them.”

  “Huh.” He looked at her, and she brushed hair out of her eyes.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “You think I shot them?” She was incredulous.

  “No, no, of course not. I was thinking, you’re out here alone, your sister is seen hanging around with a cop, and her house gets broken into,” Virgil said. “Now the cop investigating the murders is hanging around you. . . . I don’t want you to be a target. If you already are, I’d hope you’d be able to defend yourself.”

  “How do you defend yourself? He shoots you in the back when you’re riding your bike, or when you’re sitting in a canoe, bird-watching. He’s a sneak.”

  Virgil got up, rinsed his hands and face in the kitchen sink, and dried himself with a paper towel, and said, “The Washington shooting could be the critical one that breaks this, because it’ll bring light from an entirely different direction. Unless he’s a nut . . .”

  He went out and dropped on the couch, and she brought her beer along and dropped next to him, and he put his arm around her shoulders and she said, “It’s a little scary, all right.”

  “It’s a little scary when you think that somebody broke into Zoe’s place.”

  “Well, I do have a gun, a shotgun, a twenty-gauge that Joe bought me,” she said. “It’s under my bed. My windows are pretty good—I was thinking I could stack some beer cans behind the doors, and if they fall over . . .”

  “Lock yourself in the bedroom with your cell phone and scream for help,” Virgil said.

  “Mmm,” she said.

  Virgil stroked her hair and she leaned closer, and he kissed her; and events moved along, as they do, and at some point down the line, he popped the catch on her brassiere and slipped his hands around her breasts. They were, in the whole world of breasts, on the smaller side, but that was fine with Virgil. He’d seen more than one of his mother’s friends go from 38C to 38-Long, and that was not a problem with the slender ones. . . .

  “Mmmm.”

  They were both breathing hard, and he was in the precise process of squeezing her left nipple between his thumb and forefinger, like picking a blueberry, and she had a hand on his belt buckle, when his cell phone went off.

  She jumped and said, “Virgil . . . For God’s sakes, you left your phone on?”

  The curse of being a cop, and not the first time this had happened to him. He groaned and thought about letting it go, but curiosity got the better of him and he slipped it out. The sheriff. He groaned again.

  “Who is it?”

  “The sheriff,” he said.

  “Well . . . answer it. Better than wondering what he wants,” Sig said.

  Virgil clicked up the phone and Sanders asked, “Where are you?”

  “Just got some gas, I’m gonna turn in,” Virgil lied.

  “Head over to the hospital,” Sanders said. “One of my guys called two minutes ago and said Jan Washington woke up, and she’s talking. You need to talk to her—just in case.”

  “In case . . .”

  “She dies,�
�� Sanders said.

  “Of course,” Virgil said.

  He hung up and looked at Signy for a minute, and said, “I can’t help it.”

  He told her what happened and she stood up and said, “Then you really do have to go. Come on. Get up.”

  They went to the door, and she was tangled up in her shirt and brassiere, and Virgil stopped to kiss her good-bye and she said, “I’m a mess,” and she stopped fighting the tangle of clothing and simply took it off, and Virgil asked, “Aw, man, did you have to do that?” and he crowded her into the corner between the door and the wall, and they were in there for a minute or so and then she pushed away, laughing, and said, “Take a good look, buster, and get out of here.”

  He got out.

  Preceded by what he believed to be the most substantial erection he’d had since junior high.

  13

  THE HOSPITAL was a sprawling flat red building south of town; Virgil found a parking space near the emergency room, and jogged across the tarmac and through the door. A nurse spotted him as he came through and he blurted, “Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—I’m here to see Mrs. Washington.”

  “Have to hurry. She’s sort of in and out,” the nurse said.

  JAN WASHINGTON’S HUSBAND was an overweight balding guy who wore Wal-Mart glasses and a pathetic mask of fear, choked by the violence to his wife. He was sitting in the hospital hallway outside the intensive care unit, in a metal-and-plastic chair, while Sanders squatted beside him, one hand on Washington’s shoulder. When Virgil walked up, Sanders stood and said, “Virgil: James Washington, Jan’s husband.”

  Virgil shook Washington’s hand and said, “We’re sorry about your wife, Mr. Washington. How is she?”

  “She’s hurt bad; hurt bad,” Washington said.

  Sanders said, “We’ve got one of our investigators in there talking with her; she’s pretty drowsy.”

  Virgil said, “I’ll step in and listen. . . .” He turned to the door, then stopped and said, “Mapes told me about that .223 shell. How far was the shooter from where Mrs. Washington went down?”

  “Two hundred and forty-four yards,” Sanders said.

  “And she was riding her bike at the time?”

  “Yes . . .”

  Jenkins and Shrake had been right, Virgil thought. The shooter was showing off, or proving something . . . or maybe was just really, really good with a rifle.

  INSIDE THE ICU, Washington looked like everybody looked in an ICU: on her back, head propped a little forward, eyes closed, electric monitoring lines running under her hospital gown, drip lines running into her arms, a catheter draining her bladder, the urine collected in a bag visible under the sheet on one side of her bed.

  A cop sitting near her head looked up at Virgil, who said, “BCA—Virgil Flowers,” and the cop nodded and said, “She comes and goes.”

  “She have any ideas?”

  The cop shook his head. “None. No ideas at all . . .”

  Without opening her eyes, Washington said, in a rusty-sounding voice, “I’m here.”

  The cop said to Virgil, “I don’t have a lot more to ask . . . if you want to talk to her.”

  Virgil said, “Mrs. Washington, I’m from the state police. Did the deputy tell you that we think the man who shot you also shot Erica McDill, the woman who was killed at the Eagle Nest?”

  No response for a second, then a slight nod, and the slow words, “Yes . . . I don’t know . . . why.”

  As far as she knew, she had no connection with Erica McDill—had never even heard the name, she said—and not much with the Eagle Nest, though she did know Margery Stanhope somewhat, through a gardening club. She knew Wendy and other band members by sight, but not really to chat with, and had known Slibe Ashbach and his wife twenty years earlier.

  “Were they close—did you have a falling-out, or something?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I worked for the county for a while, in permits, and Maria Ashbach would come in for permits. We weren’t friends or anything, we’d just chat when she came in. Then, she ran away, and that’s the last I know.”

  “Mrs. Washington, when you were shot, were you riding fast, or slow?”

  “I think . . . I can’t remember right when I was shot, but I think I was riding regular . . . about twelve miles an hour is my regular.”

  “Twelve miles an hour. You know that?”

  “That’s my regular. I have a speedometer on my handlebars.”

  Twelve miles an hour, two hundred and forty-four yards: heck of a shot. The shooter, Virgil thought, knew his capabilities, went for the bigger target at the longer distance, and pulled it off. There was something here, Virgil knew, but he couldn’t pin it down. Something that he knew . . .

  “Mrs. Washington, I have one more question, and you being in your condition, I hate to ask, but I have to . . .”

  She said, “I’m not having an affair. Neither is James.”

  The cop grinned at Virgil and said, “We covered that territory.”

  “Okay. I had to ask. Listen, I deal with wounded people, and you’re gonna be all right. You’ll hurt for a while, but they’ll fix you up good as new.”

  She nodded again, and a few seconds later, drifted off.

  OUT IN THE HALL, Virgil spoke to her husband, again with the apology for having to ask. James Washington said, “Hell no, I’m not messing around with anybody. Why does everybody ask that?”

  “Because when a married woman gets shot under unusual circumstances, the first guy we look at is the husband, and most of the time, he did it. In this case, we don’t think you did—never did—but we have to push a little, we have to let you know that if you were fooling around, you better tell us now, and explain that, because we’d find out sooner or later,” Virgil said.

  “Did all my fooling around before I married Jan. Nothing since,” Washington said.

  He had no more idea of where the shot might have come from. They were talking about that when another man, who looked something like Washington, heavy and balding, stuck his head down the hall and said, “James—how’s she doing?”

  The sheriff said to Virgil, “This is Tom Morris. He’s the one who found her and called the ambulance. He saw her just before she was shot.”

  Morris told his story:

  “I was driving up behind her on that stretch along the river, right outside of town, and I stopped to talk for a minute, and then went on my way. I went over this little hill and couldn’t see her anymore, but then there’s a little bigger hill and when I got to the top, I looked in the mirror and I thought I saw her layin’ on the road. She was wearing this white blouse and she looked like she was on the road, so I stopped and looked out the back window, but I was a long way away, and it did look like she was down, so I turned around and went back. . . .”

  Virgil dug into the story and between the four of them, and knowing where the shot came from, they worked out a sequence: the shooter was waiting for Washington to get close on her bike, and probably planned to shoot her as she came up to his sniper’s nest, or immediately after she’d passed him. But then Morris came along, and he couldn’t shoot until Morris was out of sight. Then Morris went over the hill, and he shot Washington and probably ran down to his vehicle, and took off in the other direction, back toward town.

  Morris said, “I thought about it, and the guy was taking a hell of a risk. He had to be parked down on that canoe-landing, and then walk up on that hump. He could see a long way to the west, but he couldn’t see no more than a half-mile to the east, and if he’d pulled the trigger and then a car had come around the curve to the east, he’d have been screwed. He’d have had to kill that guy, too. If I’d come around the corner one minute later, it’d have been me.”

  “Not a lot of traffic out there, though,” Sanders said.

  “No, but there’s some,” Morris said.

  “Could he have been in a boat?” Virgil asked.

  The other three men looked at one another, then the sher
iff said, “We asked that question, but we don’t have an answer. The thing is, if he was in a canoe, the river bends away from the road about right there, going west. It’s really more like a big creek than a river right there . . . but he could have gotten lost pretty quick, and a mile or so upstream, another road comes along on the other side, where he could have left his car. There are places along there, back in the trees where it’d be completely out of sight. . . . It could be done.”

  “It’d take some serious stones,” Morris said. “The problem is, in a canoe, he’s moving slow. And if he’s seen, he’s got no way to run. It’d be a hard fifteen-minute paddle back to his car.”

  “Or her car,” Virgil said.

  “Doesn’t feel like a woman anymore,” Sanders said. “I could go with a woman on the McDill thing, but this doesn’t feel like a woman to me.”

  “The guys in Iowa think their killer is male,” Virgil said. He filled in Morris and Washington on the Iowa murder, and warned them that it might not have anything to do with McDill and Jan Washington.

  BEFORE LEAVING, Virgil took Sanders off down the hall and asked, “You know a woman named Barbara Carson? Lives here in Grand Rapids?”

  “Sure . . . she’s an older lady, she’s about six blocks from here. Used to work for the county.”

  “The woman who got killed down in Iowa called her before she came up here. I need to talk to her, I guess. Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get you an address.”

  “How about a kid named Jared Boehm? Works out at the Eagle Nest.”

  Sanders pulled back a bit. “Jared? Sure. His dad’s a manager at the paper plant. Why?”

  “I need to talk to him, too,” Virgil said.

  “About this stuff ?”

  “Some people think that Erica McDill might have been fond of him,” Virgil said.