1. McDill’s lover, Ruth Davies, was apparently about to be dumped and disinherited by McDill. By killing McDill, Davies would inherit a hundred thousand dollars and whatever she could loot from the house, which, Virgil thought, might include a few expensive artworks. If McDill had lived, she wouldn’t have gotten a dime.
2. Zoe Tull was apparently trying to scratch together enough money for a bid on the Eagle Nest, and McDill may have been a threat to that plan. Though Virgil liked Zoe, he couldn’t eliminate her as a possibility. She’d complained about the door of her house being forced, but there was no apparent reason that anyone would do that. Had she faked the break-in as a naive tactic to distract him, to suggest another agency working in the murder? Possibly. But, he had to confess to himself, he didn’t think she’d killed anyone. He simply liked her too much to think that.
AND: sex was all over the place.
Zoe and Wendy. Wendy and Berni. Wendy and McDill. McDill and Davies. McDill and Jared Boehm. The Deuce and the dogs? Maybe not. But how about one of the Slibes, and Wendy? Odd things happened on those remote farm sites in the long dark winters. . . .
Berni might fear that she was about to be dumped by both her employer and lover; she must have some idea that if the band was going to make it, she wouldn’t be making it with them . . . or with Wendy. And she had no alibi for the time of the McDill killing; and Constance Lifry had been a threat to move the band, as well.
Virgil had also gotten a bad vibration from the Deuce, when the strange man had talked about the dogs. What had he said? “Them bitches want it all the time, when the heat’s on them.”
Sounded like a line from a rap song. And he’d said it with a little too much relish.
Of course, he was talking about bitches. Virgil had noticed in the past that country people tended to use specific words for the different sexes of specific animals: goose and gander, ram and ewe, boar and sow, dog and bitch, words generally felt to be archaic in the now-urban populace.
Or maybe they just like using the word bitch in public.
FINALLY: he had at least one, and perhaps two, people with uneven mentalities, to be politically correct about it. The Deuce and Wendy, brother and sister. The Deuce wore his problem like a cloak. In Wendy, Virgil had only seen it as a quick flash, but it was there, he thought.
Which meant that Slibe I should be on the list as well, since he was probably the force that bent Slibe II and Wendy.
Slibe.
Slibe had said something that had tickled Virgil’s brain a couple of times. He thought about that, about what he’d been doing when he heard whatever it was, still couldn’t find it, and let it go.
HE LET ALL of it cook through his brain as he worked down the bay, around the corner of it, past the docks of a half-dozen lake cabins. Mind drifting.
A fish of some kind took a slash at the lure, but Virgil missed it, went back to the same spot a minute later, got hit again, but this time, hooked up. Small bass, maybe a foot long. He unhooked it, slipped it back in the lake, leaned over and rinsed his fingers in the cool lake water.
And thought: Davies.
I can eliminate her, if I stop fucking around.
He looked around, trying to figure where he was from the Eagle Nest. Not far . . . He checked his cell phone and got two bars, looked at the time: 7:45. Davenport wouldn’t be at the office yet. He called Davenport’s home, got his daughter, Letty, told her to take the phone back to Davenport’s bedroom.
“This better be something,” Davenport groaned into the phone. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Yeah. Time to get up. Everybody else has been up for hours: so shut up, and call Jenkins or Shrake. I need those guys to lean on somebody for me.”
“Aw, man . . . all right, all right. I’ll get one of them to call you back. You’re on your cell?”
“Yeah. Quick as they can.”
HE HUNG UP and at that instant, he got it—what Slibe had said that tickled him.
Slibe had said that he was thinking of going to Wyoming to shoot prairie dogs. Said it like he’d done it before. But a real dog-shooter wasn’t going out there with a worn-out semiauto .223 with open sights that couldn’t shoot inside four inches at a hundred yards. Nor would he be taking the pump .30-06, or the twelve- or the twenty-gauge shotgun, or the .22 or the old Ruger pistol that had also been in the gun safe. Could possibly take the .308, he supposed, but that wasn’t usually used on prairie dogs. Too big, too expensive.
So Slibe had a prairie-dog shooter. Very likely a .223, but a bolt action with a big scope on it. Nothing like it had been in the gun safe.
Slibe, Virgil thought, had another gun. And since he should not have known what kind of gun was used to kill McDill, he shouldn’t have had any reason to hide it.
And he was hiding it.
Virgil started to whistle. The ice was going out. . . .
What else?
HE FISHED HIS WAY past the Eagle Nest dock and was coming up on the pond where McDill got shot, when his phone jingled. Shrake. “Whatcha need, big guy?”
“I need you and Jenkins to lean on an emotionally fragile lesbian.”
“We can do that,” Shrake said. “What do you want from the miserable bitch?”
Virgil told him, and Shrake said, “Okay. Now, let me ask you something, since you’re the resident cop-genius. I’m thinking if I got some fake stainless-steel braces for my teeth, you know, that I could put on and take off, they’d make me look way crazy. I saw a guy my age yesterday, walking through the skyway, talking on a cell phone, with braces. He looked like a complete fruitcake. If I got some and grinned at people, showing these things off . . .”
“Two thoughts,” Virgil said. “One: people already think you’re nuts, so it’d be a waste of effort. Two, if you put braces on, and somebody busted you in the mouth, they’d break off all your teeth, instead of maybe one.”
A moment of silence. Then Shrake said, “Maybe I should recon ceptualize my attack persona.”
“Whatever,” Virgil said. “You wanna break down this woman for me?”
OKAY.
Suppose that Jenkins and Shrake eliminated Davies as a murder suspect, by pinning down where she’d been when Washington was shot. There remained the possibility that the murders were coming out of the advertising agency, but the Washington shooting—for which nobody had been able to find any connection to anybody—could hardly have been coming out of Minneapolis . . . unless it was simply done at random, as a diversion. So: set that slim possibility aside, simply on the grounds that he didn’t know how he’d approach a solution.
He scratched his chin, and thought, Although . . .
Mark and Abby Sexton were definitely off center. Mark might have been facing dismissal, and Abby might have harbored some unknown sexual grudge against her former lover; there might be a murder somewhere in that snarled-up psychology, with Washington done as a diversion, at random. If they were both involved, and alibied each other, and were clever about it . . . he’d never catch them.
So: set it aside.
THAT LEFT THE GRAND RAPIDS/Eagle Nest complex. Wendy, Zoe, Berni, Slibe, the Deuce, maybe another band member, maybe another unknown lover from the Eagle Nest.
The unknown lover seemed least likely, especially with the thread leading from Constance Lifry, down in Iowa, through McDill, from Minneapolis, to Jan Washington, in Grand Rapids.
And the Iowa cops thought Lifry’s killer was male, and Virgil tended to think they were correct. So where did the women’s Mephisto shoes come from?
Stray thought: Was it even barely possible that McDill had landed her boat at the beaver lodge, had walked out to the road, and then back? To meet somebody in secret? And that somebody had followed her back in and killed her?
Hadn’t thought of that—and that would definitely put the Cities back in play. Who would she be meeting secretly, outside a swamp in northern Minnesota?
Drifted a little farther, line slack in the water, ignored . . .
Thought, That’s
fuckin’ ridiculous. She could have gotten in her nice comfortable car and driven to any one of a thousand places, within five miles of here, for a secret meeting. She didn’t have to wade through a swamp.
And he made a mental bet with himself: Slibe. Slibe and the unknown rifle.
One way or another, Slibe was involved. He was willing to bet that Jenkins and Shrake would clear Davies, and that he could draw a line through the possibility of involvement from the Cities. The killer was here. . . .
He started whistling again, reeled the lure in, flipped it back out.
Virgil fished on, hard at work.
16
THERE WAS A LOT to think about, and Virgil worked at it hard, all morning; and in the early afternoon, found a place with a SANDWICHES sign in the window, facing the water, and an ancient Pabst sign hanging below it, and a dock. He’d put in for forty-five minutes or so, got a Coke and a hamburger, read a two-day-old Herald-Review at the bar, and talked to the bartender, who thought the killings were the work of a nut from the Twin Cities.
“Take my word for it—I’m very rarely wrong about these things,” the bartender said.
His name was Bob, and Bob had no reason to think what he did, except that, in his opinion, the Twin Cities were chock-full o’ nuts. He also had, Virgil thought, a variety of bad opinions on sports, women, beer, fishing, and Sebring convertibles.
“The thing is,” Bob said, laying his fat forearms on the bar, “that place is known for having lesbians going through there. I bet it’s all tied up with a Twin Cities lesbian thing, whachacallum—covens?”
“I believe that’s an assemblage of thirteen witches,” Virgil said.
“Same difference,” Bob said. He pulled a toothpick out of his mouth and closely examined the chewed end. “Maybe it’s some kind of sacrifice thing.”
VIRGIL WAS BACK on the water before two, working down the waterline opposite the Eagle Nest. At three, he took a call from Shrake: “We shook her up and I can tell you two things: she had an alibi for the Washington shooting—she was at the funeral home, making funeral arrangements. And, she took three paintings away for safekeeping, and she will now be bringing them back. She claims that McDill gave them to her as gifts, but she’s got no proof of that.”
Virgil was no longer interested, but he asked, “How much were they worth?”
“Hard to tell, but McDill paid around ninety thousand for one of them, and thirteen thousand or so for the other two,” Shrake said.
“So they were worth stealing.”
“Hard to tell. I asked a pal who runs an art gallery, and he says they’re worth what somebody will pay you for them. The big painting, which is like a lot of color splotches, was done by a woman from Washington, D.C., who hung out with some abstract big shots in the fifties, but wasn’t a big shot herself. Maybe she will be someday, and the picture will be worth a lot more. Maybe everybody will forget her, and then it’ll be worth nothing.”
“Wait, wait, wait, back up there,” Virgil said. “You’ve got a pal who runs an art gallery?”
“Fuck you. Anyway, that’s what we got,” Shrake said. “If Davies is involved, she’s pulling strings, but she’s not pulling the trigger. She was down here when Washington was shot.”
“Thank you. That helps,” Virgil said.
And he thought, Slibe.
AND HE ALSO THOUGHT, I’ve got nothing to take to trial.
HE HAD SOME PIECES of forensic evidence: two rifle shells, and a shoe impression. The shoe impression was worse than useless, since it pointed at a female killer. If the shooter had an accomplice, then it might work into something. . . . The rifle shells were better: if he could find the rifle, he’d have something. And the rifle could have DNA, fingerprints, a history.
But if Slibe was the shooter, the best thing he could have done, at this point, was to have thrown the rifle in a lake somewhere. If he’d done that, and lain low, and kept his mouth shut, Virgil couldn’t get at him.
HE FISHED FOR ANOTHER ten minutes, coming up to the launch ramp, put the rod down, kicked back in the captain’s chair, and called Sig. “You want to get something to eat?”
“I’d do anything to avoid my cooking,” she said. “Was that you that turned around in my driveway last night?”
“Yeah. Quilting bee. I forgot,” he said.
“I’m not quilting anything tonight,” she said. “A steak and a bottle of wine could get you somewhere.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“See you then.”
AND HE CALLED SANDERS, who was back in Bigfork. “Could you have one of your deputies go around and pick up Berni Kelly? She’s the drummer with Wendy Ashbach’s band. I want to talk to her, but I want her treated like a suspect. No handcuffs, but put her in the back of a squad car. Make it feel bad. Sit her down in a hallway outside an interview room and let her stew. She’s probably down at that Schoolhouse place, the music studio. If she’s not there, try out at Slibe Ashbach’s place.”
“You think she did it?”
“I don’t think anything in particular, except that the scope of suspects seems to be narrowing,” Virgil said. “The one that bothers me, though, is Washington. Have you guys got even a hint of anything?”
“Nope. One of my investigators drove over to Duluth to talk to her again, and she says she’s mystified. She just can’t think of anything . She’s no help.”
“That happened when I was down in Iowa. I’d told some people where I was going—I’m wondering if she was shot at random, to take the attention away from Iowa, from Lifry. From the band and the Eagle Nest?”
“Hate to think that. Hate to think that we got somebody that crazy. But I guess we do,” Sanders said.
“Know how you feel. Listen, get Berni Kelly, call me when you got her. I’m heading back to town now.”
“Where you at?”
“Been out investigating,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL PUT THE BOAT back on the trailer and hauled it to Zoe’s driveway, unhooked it, and dropped the tongue on the ground. Knocked on the door, but Zoe was still at work. Drove over to her office, was told that she’d be with a client for another fifteen minutes or so. Went down the street to an ice cream parlor, with a pistachio cone in mind, checked his gut to see if he was picking up any flab, decided he hadn’t, and ordered a hot fudge sundae instead.
A couple had come in the door behind him, had gotten cones after trying three different samples, and had left, and the wide-eyed girl behind the counter asked, “Are you that state policeman?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You think you’ll catch him, whoever did it?” she asked. She was self-consciously wiping down the countertop, working to keep the questions casual.
“Count on it,” Virgil said. “We made a lot of progress today. I figure we ought to have him in another day or two. Three at the outside.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She looked at him, doubtfully, he thought, and then asked, as Zoe had, “Why are you telling me this?”
Virgil shrugged. “Why not? You’re a taxpaying citizen. Your money is paying for this investigation, and I’m keeping you up-to-date.”
“Can I tell my mom? She’s pretty worried, and if she knows you’re going to catch him, she won’t worry so much.”
“Sure, go ahead,” Virgil said.
She looked at his shirt: “Why does your shirt say Gourds? Do you grow gourds?”
VIRGIL, REELING FROM HIS EXPOSURE to the ignorance of the young people of Grand Rapids—she didn’t know the Gourds? The world’s best (and only) country cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice”? What kind of education were they getting, anyway?—walked back to Zoe’s and was sent down to her office.
Zoe said, “I’m going out to Wendy’s in a couple minutes. She wants me to look at the contract with the guy from Iowa.”
“I’ve seen his place—it looks pretty substantial to me,” Virgil said, pulling a chair out. “He had pictures of the bands in his office.
Big-time stuff.”
She said, snippy, “So what’ve you been up to? Harassing innocent females?”
Virgil thought about Davies and said, “Well—yes.” He told her about eliminating Davies, and that he hadn’t really thought that the mousy stay-at-home would have done it anyway.
“But you still suspect me. At least, one percent, you do,” Zoe said.
“Nope. I decided I like you too much to consider you a suspect,” Virgil said.
She shook her head. “You know, if you were an accountant . . . never mind.”
“Say it.”
“People would run all over you,” she said. “You can’t do somebody’s books, and tell them that they’re okay, because you like them. Things have to be right. They have to be logical.”
“Maybe. Now, tell me who you think did it,” Virgil said. “It’s got to be somebody no more than two degrees from Wendy.”
She looked at him, then at a wall calendar, then at a picture of a herd of white horses running across a pasture, then back to him, and said, “Slibe.”
“I don’t have a single damn thing that points at him.” Not quite true: he had the prairie dog comment.
“Let me tell you about Slibe,” Zoe said. “He had this wife, whose name was Maria Osterhus, and they had Wendy and the Deuce, and he had this business that was doing okay, S&M Septic & Grading, and then . . . she fell in love with this other guy. She took off. Didn’t want the business, didn’t want the kids, she wanted Hector what’s-his-name. He quit his job and they took off, one night, and went to Arizona, and haven’t been back since. She ditched them, and Wendy and the Deuce were brought up by Slibe. Slibe really loved Maria, and that got transferred over to Wendy. . . .”