“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?”
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.”