MCDILL DRIFTED, thinking about it.
And her thoughts eventually drifted away from the agency, to the upcoming evening, about her sneaky date the night before, and about Ruth. She'd outgrown Ruth. Ruth was settling into middle-aged hausfrau mode, her mind going dull as her ass got wider. She was probably at home right now, baking a pumpkin pie or something.
In a way, McDill thought, the takeover of the agency changed everything.
Everything.
The agency was hot, she was hot.
Time to shine, by God.
THE EAGLE CAME BACK.
She saw it coming a half-mile out, unmistakable in its size, a giant bird floating along on unmoving wings.
A thousand feet away, it carved a turn in the crystalline air, like a skier on a downhill, and banked away.
McDill wondered why: the eagles had never been bothered by her presence before. She was farther away now than she had been last night, when she coasted right up to the tree trunk.
Huh. Had the eagle sensed something else?
McDill turned and scanned the shoreline, and then, in her last seconds, saw movement, frowned, and sat forward. What was that? A wink of glass…
The killer shot her in the forehead.
2
FIVE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING.The moon was dropping down toward the horizon, the bottom edge touching the wisps of fog that rose off the early-morning water. Virgil Flowers was standing in the stern of a seventeen-foot Tuffy, a Thorne Brothers custom musky rod in his hand, looking over the side. Johnson, in the bow of the boat, did a wide figure-eight with an orange-bladed Double Cowgirl, his rod stuck in the lake up to the reel.
"See her?" Virgil asked, doubt in his voice.