Rough country

SLIBE.

The good old Sliber. The Sliberoni. The Slibe-issimo.

"Slibe did it," Virgil said to the ceiling of the motel room, which didn't answer.

JOHN PHILLIPS was a short, balding, muscular redhead, wearing a blue suit that was, Virgil thought, silently punning to himself, ill-suited to his complexion. The lines in Phillips's face suggested a permanent skepticism, a guy who'd heard the phrase "I didn't mean to do it" a few hundred times too many. He was the Itasca County attorney, and he sat behind his desk, and in front of an American flag, his face growing more skeptical by the moment.

Sanders, the sheriff, sat with his legs crossed, to one side, looking at Virgil, while Virgil finished up: "… and that's about it."

"So you've got one thing-the Visa card and the gas station," Phillips said.

"No, I've got two and probably three dead, and one shot in the back, and a nut running loose. I think Slibe One probably did it, but it could be Slibe Two, and there's even a possibility that, for reasons we don't know, Wendy Ashbach did it. After I ran my strangulation test last night, it occurred to me that while Zoe isn't strong enough to have killed Lifry, Wendy might be. Wendy probably has thirty pounds on Zoe."

"But Wendy wanted to go with this guy Windrow," Sanders said.

"Yeah. And Wendy has an alibi, more or less, for McDill, though the alibi depends on exactly when McDill was killed, and we don't know that. Anyway, that's why I think it was probably Slibe One or Two, and not Wendy. But, if we can get a warrant for the whole property, we might as well take Wendy's place apart, too."

Phillips plucked a yellow pencil out of a Mason jar on his desk and used the eraser end to scratch his head. To Sanders, he said, "I can tell you what Don's going to say. It's a fishing expedition."

"Well, we do have the Visa card," Sanders said.

Virgil said, "That would be a huge coincidence, if Slibe, or Slibe Two, or Wendy, didn't use that to go down there and kill Lifry. That's solid. We've got opportunity on the others, McDill and Washington and Windrow. Neither Slibe One nor Two has a real alibi-and we have the fact that these killings seemed focused on the band."

"Except Washington," Phillips said.

"Well, yeah. But we've also got people killed," Virgil said. "Even if we're fishing, if we can find out which one is doing the killing, we can stop it. And if we can actually prove that one of them did it, I doubt that a court would throw out the evidence, if the search is only questionable. It's not completely unreasonable. Especially if it works out."

"Windrow plagues me," Sanders said. "We can't even find him. Avis has car locators installed on all their vehicles, and they're getting no signal, from anywhere in North America. The guy has gotta be at the bottom of a lake somewhere. The bottom of a bog or something."

"Probably off playing house with Little Linda," Phillips said.

"That's really funny, John, that's hilarious," Sanders said.

"Well, the Windrow thing is gonna be a problem," Phillips said. "We may not be able to get his name in front of a jury if we can't prove he's dead."

"Prove it? We don't even know it," Sanders said.

DISTRICT COURT JUDGE Don Hope was an older white-haired man with rimless glasses, and he said to Phillips, "John, there hasn't been a fishing expedition this big since Teddy Roosevelt went up the Amazon."

Phillips wiggled in his chair and said, "Judge, I hate to hear that phrase, you know? The piscatorial reference? I'm not sure-"

"Yeah, yeah, piscatorial my ass. Well, enough people been killed, and I'm so old, what the hell could they do to me? Get me the paper and I'll sign it. Not that it doesn't violate my principles all to hell and gone."

Virgil smiled and Hope asked, "What're you smiling about?"

"That was a smile of approval," Virgil said.

"You look like a smart-ass," Hope said. "What's that on your shirt?"

"A band," Virgil said. "The Appleseed Cast."

"Never heard of them," the judge said. "They sound like a smart-ass band."

"They are a smart-ass band," Virgil agreed. "Hey, thanks for the warrant, Your Honor. We'll make you proud."

"That Wendy is a buxom lass," the judge said. "Hope she didn't do it."

WITH THE WARRANT IN HAND, there was no huge rush to get out to Ashbach's place, and Sanders wanted to do it right, rather than do it fast. "We're not gonna arrive at the last minute and save Windrow," he said. "If they were gunning for Windrow, he's already dead."

"If Windrow isn't dead, if he's facedown drunk in some resort bar, I'll kill him myself," Virgil said. "You round up your guys, I'll get the crime-scene crew headed back this way. They'll be a couple hours getting here."

SANDERS GOT THREE COPS from Grand Rapids, plus five deputies. The crime-scene crew would make twelve, plus Virgil, and the sheriff decided to go along-Little Linda was dead in the water. Fourteen people should nail the place down pretty well, Virgil thought. They gathered in a courtroom, and Virgil ran them through what he expected-but he didn't expect much trouble.

"The main thing we're looking for is the gun, or any.223 ammo, or anything that suggests they own a.223 bolt action, like a hunting photo. Especially look for a prairie-dog-shooting photograph. Then, of course, blood. Take a long look at Slibe Junior, if he's back, for any signs of injury. Windrow was driving a Jeep Commander… check car keys. We're gonna be out there for a while, so if you want to get a sandwich, or a couple of Cokes to take along, do it now…"

THEY WENT OUT in a long rolling caravan, as soon as the crime-scene people showed up, the sheriff leading the way, Virgil bringing up the rear. By the time he pulled in, cops were spilling all over the acreage, and Wendy came out on the steps of the double-wide and shouted, "What the hell is this?"

The sheriff ignored her, knocked on Slibe's door, got no response, and Wendy came along, trailing Berni, and said, "Dad's gone into town."

"Then I'll give it to you, and you can pass it on," the sheriff said. "This is a search warrant for the premises of Slibe Ashbach and Slibe Ashbach LLC, doing business as Slibe Ashbach Septic amp; Grading. If you've got a key to the house, we won't have to kick down the door."

"I got a key…" Then Wendy spotted Virgil: "What the fuck are you doing? Virgil? What're you doing?"

"Something came up. I can't talk to you about it. I need to talk to your father," Virgil said. "Is the Deuce back?"

"I don't know. You'll have to look," she said.

"In the house?"

"No, he's got the loft in the kennel." They all turned and looked at the kennel building, and Virgil remembered that there'd been a light on last night.

"There was a light on there last night," Virgil said. "I thought you guys said he'd gone walkabout."

"There's a light on there all the time," Wendy said. "It comes on at dark."

"What for?"

"I don't know-something to do with the dogs."

ONE OF THE COPS went with Wendy to get the key to the house, and Berni said to Virgil, "There's gonna be trouble about this. You guys are going to get sued all over the place."

"Do you know when Mr. Ashbach is expected to return?" the sheriff asked.

"I don't even know why he's gone," she said. "He took off a half-hour ago."

"All right." Wendy came back with the key, and the sheriff said, "Well, let's get to it."

THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE DID the basic search of Slibe's house, Wendy's trailer, and the Deuce's loft, while one cop kept an eye on Wendy and Berni. Three others walked the property and checked the outbuildings.

Virgil idled along with everybody, at one time or another, waiting for something to catch his eye.

The first thing he noticed about Ashbach's house was the neatness: a place for everything, and everything in its place, right down to a tall glass bowl, placed like a spittoon on the floor next to Ashbach's full-sized bed, to hold change-nickels, dimes, and pennies, but no quarters. He pulled out a couple of drawers in the bedroom and found the socks had been rolled; T-shirts were folded, dirty clothes were in a woven-willow hamper under a window; shaving gear, toothpaste, a couple of pill bottles, and a bottle of sunblock lotion were lined up like soldiers on the bathroom counter.

The pill bottles were prescription, and one of the crime-scene people told him they were two different kinds of statin.

VIRGIL REMEMBERED where Slibe kept the key to the gun safe, and they went through it, checked all the guns. They took all of the.223 ammo, which Slibe had said was for the Colt semiauto. The lab could check it all, to see if any might match traces found in McDill's skull; but the ammo was new, so there were no extraction marks to check, and there was no empty brass, no reloads.

"He told me once that they were thinking about going out west for prairie dogs-most of those guys are reloaders," Virgil said.

"Couldn't afford it otherwise," a crime-scene guy agreed.

THEY LOOKED through the firewood shed and found nothing but firewood, neatly stacked for the winter. The machine shed held two Bobcats, a front-end loader and a small shovel, and a larger shovel from Caterpillar. All three machines were older, but well tended. Behind the machine shed was a stack of white plastic pipe, of the kind used to build septic fields, and a concrete tank with a crack in it.

Nothing in the tank but long grass.

THEY FOUND a reloading station in Slibe II's loft.

The loft was just that: a wooden-floored second story in the metal kennel building; the dogs were quiet and friendly, looked well kept and well fed, but the place inevitably smelled of dog shit, and that was true up the stairs in the loft. The loft was heated with two 220-volt overhead electric heaters, and a potbellied woodstove at the far end. There was a sink, a bathtub, and a toilet in a walled-off area at the end of the loft, but there was no door.

Like the house, the loft was organized with military precision; everything neatly kept and clean, on the surface; but the insides of the drawers were a jumble of clothes and electrical and mechanical parts, hunting and fishing gear. When a cop opened the cardboard stand-alone closet, he found a tangle of hangers with winter clothes stuck this way and that, half of it hanging, half of it on the floor. Superficially like Slibe's place, but once you dug in, nothing like Slibe at all.

Four metal army-surplus ammo boxes sat on the floor next to the reloading station. Two contained shotgun shells, twelve- and twenty-gauge, and two contained empty brass. The crime-scene tech dumped the brass, and he and Virgil picked through it, found forty.223 cartridges, which they bagged.

Mapes, the head of the crime-scene crew, came up and took a look, and said, "We need the lab to check it, but I don't see any bolt-action extraction nicks. We need a closer look."

"All we need is one," Virgil said. He shook out the shotgun shells, hoping a stray.223 might be hiding in them, but there wasn't.

Virgil looked under the narrow bed and found a stack of old Hustler magazines, a plastic bag with five fading color photographs of a woman with eighties hair, and another plastic bag with perhaps a quarter ounce of marijuana.

He had the crime-scene guy bag the marijuana, then sat on the bed and looked at the photos. In one, the woman leaned on the front of a seventies or eighties Chevy with a much younger Slibe. They were in the driveway, with the road behind them. No garden, just an empty space. Wendy and the Deuce's mother?

Virgil took them to the end window, for the better light: she was a square-built dishwater blonde, busty, like Wendy, attractive in a country way. Slibe was blond. Virgil had noticed that he was blond ish, behind the bald dome, but his hair was cut so short that it hadn't registered. In this old photo, blond hair covered his ears, as long as Virgil's was. Really blond. Rocker blond…

THE CRIME-SCENE GUY SAID, "Might have something here."

Virgil turned and saw him sitting on the floor next to the hamper, looking at a pair of denim coveralls, looking at the end of one sleeve.

"What?"

"Can't swear to it, but it looks like blood. Significant blood."

"Wouldn't he have seen it?" Virgil asked. He went over and peered at the stain, which was about the size of a half-dollar. The stain didn't appear to soak through; it was superficial.

"He picked it up from the outside, so it's probably not his." The guy held up the coveralls, and the sleeves fell to the side. "See, it's on the bottom of the sleeve… you know, like when you stick your sleeve in jelly, or something."

"Get it back to the lab, right now," Virgil said. This was something. This was good. "We'll eventually need DNA, but what I really need is to get a blood type, like, this afternoon. Gotta try to get Windrow's blood type. Like now…"

"Let's show it to Ron first. He knows blood."

THE CRIME-SCENE GUY bagged the coveralls and they carried them down the stairs and back to the house. Sanders saw them coming, asked, "What?" and Virgil said, "We might have some blood."

Mapes came out to take a look, said, "It's blood," and the word blood stuttered through the group of deputies.

Virgil got Sanders to send the coveralls to Bemidji with one of the deputies, and Virgil told the deputy, "Don't kill anybody, but use your lights and get your ass up there, quick as you can. They'll be expecting you."

"Abso-fucking-lutely," the deputy said.

Virgil called Bemidji on Slibe's landline phone, and told them what he needed, then called Sandy, the researcher, who was still a little stiff, but agreed to find out what Windrow's blood type was.

Wendy came over, attracted by the buzz. "What?" she asked.

Virgil: "Where's your brother?"