“Right,” Stanhope said.
“Do you know the road that goes past the creek out of the lake?”
“Sure, I go up there in the fall,” she said. “We try to be good neighbors with the people up there.”
“Where would a killer hide a car?”
Stanhope had to think for a minute, and then said, “There are three houses that face out on the lake, but there are two more that are hunting cabins, not on the water. You could go through one of their gates, park behind a cabin. Or up the driveway. They’re pretty overgrown, so you wouldn’t see a car from the road.”
“We looked up there, but didn’t see much,” Virgil said. “But the shooter would be taking a big risk. What if somebody was up there when he pulled in . . . ?”
Stanhope was shaking her head. “It’s easy to tell. There’s nothing much in the cabins—some beds, electric stoves, a pump, tables and chairs. Not much worth stealing. So the gates are closed at the road, but they’re not locked up. You drive down there, and if the gate is closed, nobody’s home. If somebody’s up there for a couple days, getting ready for hunting season or something, they leave the gates open.”
“So you could drive down there, open a gate, drive up the driveway, close the gate, and you’d be out of sight.”
“Yes.”
Virgil asked Zoe, “Do you do taxes for anybody up there?”
She shook her head: “They’re out-of-towners. From the Cities, I think. Maybe one from Alex . . .”
BACK OUT TO THE CAR. “Now where?” she asked.
“Down to your office. You must have a calendar.”
“I do,” she said.
They rode in silence, and not a particularly companionable one, back into town. On the way, Virgil called the sheriff’s department, talked to the duty guy: no Windrow.
“You think he’s dead?” Zoe asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know. But I’m not sure he’s alive,” Virgil said. He pounded on the steering wheel. “I need to do something. I need to do something. I’m not doing anything.”
IN TOWN, at her office, Zoe brought up her computer calendar, found two names, recalled both of them, and said, “That would have taken me up past five o’clock, for sure.”
“But that’s not far enough, Zoe,” Virgil said. “You could make it out there with no trouble, leaving here at five o’clock. Think! What’d you do afterwards?”
“I walked over to Donaldson’s and ate—I don’t cook very much, neither does Sig—uh, then, let me see.” She sat back and closed her eyes. “I ate . . . but first I went over to Gables and bought a magazine and looked in some windows, because I like to read while I eat. Then, I got gas.”
“Did you pay for it with a credit card?”
“Yeah.”
“And that would have been around . . . six?”
She thought about it. “Just about six. Maybe a little later, because I might not have gotten out of here right at five o’clock. I usually don’t. Let me think. . . .”
Back to the closed eyes. After a minute, she said, “You know, I remember saying good-bye to Mabel that night. She came in to tell me something . . . mmm . . . I can’t remember what, it was casual, but she would remember seeing me. Then I did work for a little bit. Mabel leaves at five o’clock—she acts as a receptionist as well as an accountant, so she’s in charge of closing up at five. You know, I bet I didn’t get out of here until five-twenty or so. So it might have been six-fifteen or even six-thirty when I bought gas.”
She shook a finger at him. “Credit cards. I pay for everything with credit cards, because then I have a record. Most accountants do that. C’mon, let’s go back to my place.”
They got back at three o’clock, and she took Virgil inside, past a little niche office with a filing cabinet, to a closet. Opening the closet, she revealed a stack of plastic file boxes with the years noted on them, going back to 2005.
She said, “Constance Lifry was killed two years ago . . . you have the date and time?”
“Yeah. Let me get it from the truck.”
He came back with his notebook, and they found the relevant box. She found her American Express and Visa bills, and they ticked off the charges.
“Here,” she said. “I went to Nordstrom’s that day, too. They don’t open until eleven o’clock. They know me—they wouldn’t take my credit card from somebody else. Look, I went to Target, too, and I bought a bunch of stuff. . . . And the next day, I’m back . . .”
“You could have driven back by the next day,” Virgil said. “But . . . these don’t have exact time stamps on them.”
“But they will have,” Zoe said. “You can get them from Amex and Visa.”
“I’m going to do that, Zoe,” Virgil said. “Don’t be bullshittin’ me about this.”
“Do it,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.” And, she said, “You know I didn’t do it.”
THEY’D GOTTEN DOWN on their knees to search through the boxes, and now Virgil sat back on his heels and asked, “What gas card do you use?”
“I don’t have one. I use my Visa,” she said. “You can check that with a credit agency.”
He thumbed through the Visa again, found charges for gas three days before Lifry was killed, and four days after. Nothing between. Of course, you could pay for gas with cash, though it never occurred to most people.
Huh.
He took his phone out of his pocket, looked up a number, and punched it up. It rang six times, and then Sandy, the hippie, said, “Virgil. Do you know what time it is?”
“Hang on a minute, I’ll check,” he said.
“Are you out on the town? I thought you were—”
“I’m up north, working a case,” Virgil said. “Get a pencil. I need some information by the time I get up tomorrow, which will probably be about ten o’clock.”
“I’ve got human osteology class at ten o’clock.”
“So I’ll call at nine-fifty,” Virgil said. “We need to check the credit agencies for credit cards held by a guy named Slibe Ashbach. You got a pencil?” She did—he spelled the name. “And we need to see when and where he bought gas. . . .”
He gave her the dates.
“Virgil, you know, you are a real treat,” Sandy said.
A male voice in the background mumbled something, and Virgil asked, “Who was that?”
“I have friends,” she said.
“Sandy . . .”
“Virgil, shut up.”
ZOE SAID, “Was that a special friend?”
Virgil said, “She’s a researcher at the office.”
“She ever done any research into Virgil Flowers?”
“Maybe,” he said.
THEY SAT for a minute, and she asked, “Well, what’s the verdict?”
“I never thought you did it. You’re too stable. Though you have some stability problems when it comes to Wendy. If you were gonna kill somebody, you’d probably kill Berni. Or Wendy. Or yourself,” Virgil said. He pinched his lower lip, thinking about it. “But it’s complicated. If you figured that she was going to dump Berni anyway, eventually, like everybody does, maybe you wouldn’t kill Berni. Maybe McDill was more of a threat, both to take Wendy away and to take the lodge away from you.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, I’m going to bed,” Zoe said, pushing up off the floor. “If you decide to arrest me, call ahead so I’ll have time to wash my hair.”
“That’s what they all say,” Virgil said.
Outside, sitting in the truck, he drew a line through Zoe: he’d make a few checks, so he wouldn’t get bitten on the ass again, but she didn’t do it.
21
VIRGIL SPENT SOME TIME with God that night, thinking about the way things were—about how somebody like Jud Windrow might now be lying dead somewhere, for no discernible reason—and why they were like that, and why a believer like himself would be going around cursing as he did: goddamnit.
Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, b
ut not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible. God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless. God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God’s own intelligence. . . .
Far out, dude; pass the joint.
Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny. And he stranded people like Virgil, who wonder about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren’t God’s own, if, indeed, he had one.
Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too—his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.
He got to “godless commie” and went to sleep.
And worried in his sleep.
FIVE HOURS LATER, his cell phone went off, and he sat bolt upright, fumbled around for it, found it in his jeans pocket, on the floor at the foot of the bed.
“Hello?”
Sandy said, “Slibe Ashbach has a Visa card and a check card. He used the Visa card at an independent gas station in Grand Rapids early in the morning of the day Constance Lifry was murdered. He used the card again later that day in Clear Lake, Iowa, and at three o’clock the next morning, again in Clear Lake, and finally, later that second day, in Grand Rapids.
“It’s about three hundred miles from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake. It’s something between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and seventy miles from Clear Lake to Swanson, Iowa, depending on which route you take, or three hundred to three hundred and forty miles, round-trip. Then, another three hundred miles back to Grand Rapids. So, if you figure that his truck needs to be refueled every three hundred miles or so, which is reasonable, then it’s quite consistent with the idea that he drove from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake, Clear Lake to Swanson, back to Clear Lake, and then on to Grand Rapids. In fact, it fits perfectly. Even the time fits, if Constance was killed at ten o’clock at night.”
“You’re a treasure beyond value,” Virgil said. “E-mail that to me.”
“Treasure beyond value, my ass,” Sandy said. “That’s not what you were saying the last time I talked to you.”
“I don’t have time for an emotional, ah, encounter, right now,” Virgil began.
“You’ve never had time for an emotional encounter,” she said. “If you ever find time, give me a ring.”
She hung up; Virgil winced, sighed, and scratched his nuts.
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 troubl
e.
“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 & 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.”