Rough country

22

TWO PEOPLE ARRIVED in the next ten minutes. The first came slouching through the police lines, a redheaded man wearing a rumpled black sport coat over jeans and long sharp-toed black city shoes that he called Jersey Pointers. He and his girlfriend had taught Virgil how to jitterbug-Ruffe Ignace, a reporter for the recently bankrupt Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Virgil waited arms akimbo, and Ignace came up, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and said, "That fuckin' Flowers. When I saw your happy face, I went ahead and told the cops that I was here to consult with you."

"I oughta throw your ass out," Virgil said.

"That's right. I'm trying to save a bankrupt newspaper and you're piling on," Ignace said. "Thanks a lot, old pal. Forget everything you owe me."

"How you been?" Virgil asked.

"Tired of driving a hundred and fifty miles at the crack of dawn because some asshole twenty-three-year-old editor thinks I should," Ignace said. "I'm writing a crime novel."

"You and every other reporter in the state," Virgil said.

"Ah, they're writing screenplays. I'm writing a novel. I even got an agent." Ignace looked around, at the cops coming and going. "Catch anybody?"

"Just got a break. We're looking at a kid named Slibe Ashbach Junior, also known as the Deuce, son of Slibe Ashbach Senior, who runs this septic construction company, and brother to Wendy Ashbach, a singer in a local country band. We found some blood: it's on its way to Bemidji."

Ignace asked, "Blood from McDill?"

"No. She was killed at long range… This was from yet another guy. We think there may be three connected murders and one non-fatal shooting…" He took a minute to explain; he'd learned that Ignace had an eidetic memory for conversation, and would be able to write it all down later. The memory, Ignace had told him, was good for two or three hours before starting to fade. "Listen, I'm gonna have to introduce you to the sheriff. I don't know if he'll want you in here. Be nice, okay? We're also looking for the father, Slibe Senior. I'm gonna hang around here until he shows up, or until somebody says they've got him in town."

A truck came firing down the road, throwing up a cloud of dust. "Hell, here he comes now."

"But the son is the suspect?"

"Right now. The father was when we came in. Watch this… if the sheriff doesn't kick you out."

The cop at the end of the driveway had stopped Ashbach, and Virgil led Ignace over to Sanders and said, "Bob, I want to introduce you to Ruffe Ignace, he's a crime reporter from the Star Tribune. I let him in, but told him that it'd be your call to let him stay or go."

Sanders nodded at Ignace, didn't offer to shake hands: "If the local paper shows up, I'll have to kick you out, because I'm not letting those guys in. Otherwise, stand around with your hands in your pockets, and I don't care."

"Thanks, Sheriff. I appreciate it," Ignace said. "I'll stay back."

SLIBE'S TRUCK CAME rolling past the cop and into a slot along the garden fence, where it stopped, and Slibe got out, saw Virgil and the sheriff, and headed over, pushing an attitude. A couple of the deputies picked it up and vectored on him, but he slowed down as he came up, and shouted past a deputy, "What the hell is going on here? You're bustin' up my house?"

"We're searching it," Virgil said. "And Wendy's and your son's. Where's the Deuce? You find him?"

"I don't keep track of him," Slibe said. He looked wildly around, and said to Sanders, with a pleading note in his voice, "Don't fuck with my dogs, Sheriff. Don't fuck with my dogs."

Virgil said, "Come over to the house and sit down. I got a question for you."

The sheriff said, "Just to be on the up-and-up, we oughta read him his rights."

ONE OF THE DEPUTIES did that, and Slibe said to Virgil, "I don't want no fuckin' lawyer. And I don't want to be sittin' in my own house with you. Ask what you're gonna ask."

Virgil said, "You've got a Visa card. Let me see it."

Slibe looked at him for a second, then took his wallet out of his back pocket, thumbed through the card slots, found a Visa card, and handed it over. Virgil took the notebook out of his back pocket, looked at it: different number.

"How long you had this card?" Virgil asked.

"Thirty years? I don't know," Slibe said.

"Does the Deuce have one?"

"He don't," Slibe said. "He don't have a bank account. Wendy does."

"I've got a different card number for a Slibe Ashbach."

"But…" His eyes slid away, then came back and he said, "I got a business card. We keep it in the house, you know, for deliveries and such."

Virgil said, "Let's get it."

Slibe had a neat home office in a second bedroom at the back of the house, with a wooden desk. He pulled the left-hand desk drawer completely out, reached inside the drawer slot, and fumbled out four credit cards-a Visa, a Visa check card, a Target, and a Sears. Virgil checked the Visa number, and it matched.

He held it up. "On the morning of the day that Constance Lifry was killed in Swanson, Iowa, this card was used to charge gas in Clear Lake, Iowa, which is three hundred miles south of here. Early the next morning, it was used to charge gas at the same station, which means the driver probably put three hundred miles on his truck between those two gas-ups. Swanson is about a three-hundred-mile round-trip. The next charge was back here."

Slibe's eyes had widened, and now his Adam's apple bobbed, and he looked around the office, and at the sheriff, and said, "Jesus God. I knew that boy wasn't right."

"You think the Deuce did it?" Virgil asked.

"I don't know-I don't know," Slibe said. "But I didn't… I never stopped in no Clear Lake in my life, far as I know. I don't even know where it is. It's on I-35? I been to Texas down I-35, on my way to New Orleans, but that was after Katrina."

"The Deuce uses this card?"

"We all use it," Slibe said. He started to tremble and shake. "He's… used it for gas before. Without me knowin'."

Virgil said, "You don't know where he is, now?"

"No, but he's on foot, I believe. I saw him packin' up, he took some Shake 'n Bake out of my cupboard, got his gun and fishing pole." He was slack-mouthed. "Jesus God, you think he killed them people?"

Virgil said to the sheriff, "Now we do need to find him."

"We can do that," the sheriff said.

ITASCA COUNTY is a forest broken up by bogs and water and a few towns, twice as big as Rhode Island, three thousand square miles of pine, spruce, cedar, tamarack, birch, aspen, and maple. If all the Deuce did was sit under a bush, Virgil thought-Virgil was a prairie kid-he'd be almost impossible to find. The sheriff thought differently.

"You sit down on a stump, almost anyplace, and after a while, somebody'll come along. Damnedest thing. When somebody gets lost, the thing that keeps them lost is that they go wandering around. If they'd just sit on a stump, somebody would come along."

"That's great, Sheriff, except that he's carrying a rifle and he might've killed a few people already," Virgil said.

"That's a point," Sanders said.

Ignace stuck an oar in: "What're you going to do?"

"Well, if he's going to bump into somebody, that's what he's going to do," Sanders said. "What I'm going to do is, I'm going on the radio."

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW FOUND and bagged several kinds of ammo, a bunch of short cords and ropes that could have been used to strangle someone, and a dozen pieces of jewelry hidden in a box in an army footlocker full of comic books and the remnants of a set of giant plastic Tinker Toys.

The jewelry, including a strand of thin pearls, a small turquoise thunderbird, and several pairs of cheap earrings, went in a bag as possible trophies taken from the dead women. But when Virgil showed the bag to Wendy, her eyebrows went up and she said, "That's Mom's stuff. Where'd you find it? I used to have it and it disappeared."

Virgil checked with Davies and Prudence Bauer and neither knew of missing jewelry, of small pearls or thunderbirds. Bauer asked, "Where's Jud?"

Virgil said, "I don't know."

"You people are like a curse on us," she said, and she broke down and began to cry into the phone.

SANDY CALLED AND SAID that she'd spoken to Jud Windrow's ex-wife, and Windrow's blood type was A-positive, a common type. Slibe said that his was O, but Wendy didn't know hers.

The afternoon dragged into early evening. Ruffe was bored by the search, and finally said good-bye; he gave Virgil his cell number, said he planned to file, and then was off to explore the "erotic potentialities" of Grand Rapids. The cops started packing up and dispersing. Slibe spent the afternoon stomping around the acreage, cursing, worked with the dogs for a few minutes, watched the crime-scene people moving in and out of his house. Wendy huddled with Berni. At six, a tech from Bemidji called and said the blood on the sleeve was A-positive.

Virgil called Sanders: "I guess it's possible that Slibe Two is A-positive, if his mother was, but this makes me really think that Jud Windrow is… gone."

"We're going full bore on Slibe Junior," Sanders said. "If anybody in Bemidji County doesn't know who we're looking for, he's blind and deaf."

THE SUN WAS DOWN behind the trees when Sanders called back and said, "We've got a likely sighting. He's got a canoe, he's off the river in a swampy area down below Deer River. Some kids coming down the river spotted him heading back through the rice, and called it in."

"So what're we doing?" Virgil asked.

"Gonna be real quiet about it, set people up all along the river, put a couple boats up above him, down below him, so he can't sneak past," Sanders said. "Wait for daylight, go in with a helicopter. Run his ass down."

"Anything I can do?"

"Well… you up for a plane ride?"

VIRGIL WENT BACK through town, stopped at a Subway for a BMT and a Coke, ate it on the way to the airport. He was chewing on the sandwich when Sig called. She asked, "What you doing?"

"We're trying to run down Slibe Junior…" He told her about the search, and about the credit card, about the upcoming plane ride.

She whistled and said, "Well, thank God. Be safe in the plane."

AT THE AIRPORT, he took a pair of binoculars out of his equipment bag, hooked up with a deputy named Frank Harris.

"Pilot's running late," Harris said. "He called and said his kid might have busted an arm in karate class. He'll be here as soon as he gets out of the emergency room."

"Ah, man…" Virgil didn't feel like waiting. He thought about Sig, sitting home alone, still unfulfilled. Looked at his watch. A half-hour passed, and then forty minutes, and Virgil decided if the pilot hadn't arrived by the end of an hour, he'd bail. He'd feel guilty about it, but he would.

The pilot, whose name was Hank Underwood, walked in five minutes later and said, "Sorry."

"Broken?" Harris asked.

"Yeah. Worse than we thought," Underwood said. He was a short, dark man about Virgil's age. "Not his arm, it's a wrist bone, the navicular. He could be in a cast for five months. He was supposed to start football practice in three weeks."

They were talking about it, walking out to Underwood's single-engine Cessna, and Virgil said the broken arm might be a blessing in disguise. "Maybe he'll turn out to be great at math and become a scientist."

"Rather play football," Underwood said. "All his pals will be… but you could be right." He sounded doubtful.

Underwood put Harris in the back, because he was shorter than Virgil, and as they took off into the darkness, the plane smelling of warm oil and cold air, said, "When we get up there, I'll roll a bit, to give you a view. We'll go up one side and down the other, using Deer River as our guide."

"How're we going to mark him?" Virgil asked.

"GPS," Underwood said. "We'll circle until we can get an azimuth that runs through him and some point in Deer River, and mark ourselves, and then do it again, from another angle. Won't be exact, but it'll be pretty damn close."

"As long as we've only got one fire," Harris said.

Underwood said, "Not many people camping in a swamp. It's usually dark as a coal sack along there. Our biggest problem will be if he's sleeping in his boat, and isn't cooking at all."

"Don't want to spook him," Virgil said.

"We'll be well off. We'll go up one side of the river, fool around for a while, then come back down the other," Underwood said. "If he's close enough to the highway, he might not even hear us."

THEY COULD SEE Deer River within a couple of minutes of taking off. "The place he's supposed to be is right down this way from the lights," Underwood said, gesturing. "See the line of lights? Now, ninety degrees towards us."

The river plain was pitch-black. They flew up the side, past the town, did a wide circle to the west, slowly, scanning the terrain, then came right back down the highway. On the second pass, Harris said, suddenly, "Got a fire."

"Where?" Virgil asked.

"About two-thirty… coming up on three… It flickers… lost it, goddamnit, got it, got it again…"

"Brush between us and it," Underwood said.

Virgil scanned down at the same angle as Harris, at three o'clock. "Got it," Virgil said. "I got it. It's small."

"No point in a barn fire to cook a weenie," Harris said.

UNDERWOOD TOOK THEM around the town, and they put azimuth lines from GPS markers through intersections of the highway, crossing at the fire. "Don't see another damn thing out there," Virgil said, scanning the darkness.

"There isn't anything else out there," Harris said. "You couldn't pay me five hundred dollars to camp out in there. No telling what you'd run into."

"Maybe even a crazy killer," Underwood said. "Friday the 13th, huh?"

"Never saw it," Harris said. "But that's the general idea."

THEY WERE ALL CRANKED when they landed. Virgil and Harris left Underwood to put the plane away, and after warning the pilot to keep his mouth shut, went roaring off to the sheriff 's office. The sheriff and a couple of deputies were waiting for them, with a USGS topo map, and Virgil and Harris used a yardstick to draw out their lines.

"Not bad," the sheriff said, his finger on the map where the lines crossed. "Man, that's not more'n a mile from where the kids thought they saw him. Gotta be him."

"What time are you putting the chopper up?" Virgil asked.

"Sunrise is just about six o'clock-so, about six o'clock." Sanders looked at his watch. "Seven hours. You'll want to be on the ground, up in Deer River, by five at the latest. We'll put you in a boat."

"Who's in the helicopter?" Virgil asked.

"Me and the pilot," the sheriff said. "I'm paying for it, so I get the ride."

"He'll probably shoot you down," Virgil said.

"You just want the ride," Sanders said; and he was right. And he clapped his hands, once, and said, "Hot damn. This is something. I mean, I hate to say it, but I'm having a pretty good time right now. Wasn't having a good time this morning." He turned to one of the deputies. "I'll call you up if we spot him, and you get on to Jim Young, get his ass up to Deer River. I'll put down on the track up there, and I want a picture of me getting out of the helicopter."

And he said to Virgil: "Politics. He's the local newspaper guy."

"Gotcha," Virgil said.

THAT NIGHT VIRGIL THOUGHT about God some more, and about the Deuce, that lonely spark of fire out in the middle of a swamp, a single twisted soul believing itself safely wrapped in nature, with no idea of what was coming in the morning.