Then Bob Sanders asked, “What if she’s lying? What if she’s protecting her brother? What if she’s protecting herself? Have you talked to her father since the shooting?”
“No-no-no. I’ll tell you what’s happening. Jesus Christ, it’s so clear,” Phillips said. He got up and did a turn around the office, his hands pressed to his temples. “Wendy tells us her old man did it. We’ve already got a pile of evidence against her brother. Blood on the coveralls, he ran for it . . . So we put him on trial, and Wendy gets up on the witness stand and says she saw her old man at the lake. Not only that, it’s his credit card on the way to Iowa. He could have hung the coveralls up in Junior’s loft. The defense attorney puts Slibe on trial, and the evidence is as strong against him as it is against his son. The Deuce is acquitted, because, shit, let’s face it, there’s more than reasonable doubt. So then what? We arrest Slibe? His daughter gets all shaky on the stand, and we’ve got blood on the Deuce’s coveralls. . . . Slibe’s attorney puts the Deuce on trial, and . . . Wait a minute! Wait for it! They also put Wendy on trial, because Virgil has proof that she was down there. Those shoes. So Slibe gets acquitted. Ah, fuck me. Fuck me!”
Bob Sanders asked, “Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack,” Phillips said. “Dick Raab is going to take that girl and jam her straight up my ass. Ah, Jesus.” He jabbed a finger at Virgil: “You get down to the Cities. You be sitting right next to the bed when the Deuce wakes up, and you suck a statement out of him. If he admits it, we’re good. If he says his old man did it . . . well, we’re not good, but it’s something.”
“And if he’s already lawyered up?”
“Then we’re fucked,” Phillips said. “Wait a minute—you’re not fucked. You caught everybody. It’s me that can’t get the conviction. I’m fucked. You’re okay.”
“That’s a relief,” Bob Sanders said to his father, who cracked a smile.
“Pretty fuckin’ funny, Bob,” Phillips said.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bob Sanders said. “Between the four of us . . . if the Deuce died, that’d settle things. We could let it go.”
Virgil shook his head: “No. The killer is nuts. If it’s Slibe—or even if it’s Wendy—somebody else could get murdered. This is now the way he settles his problems. Because the guy is nuts.”
THEY SAT IN SILENCE for a minute. Ken Sanders said, “Or the gal. Or the gal is nuts. I’ve seen that Wendy. She’s a dead ringer for her mother.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you what, everybody in town was watching that little romance, Maria Ashbach and Hector.”
“You knew about it? I mean, did a lot of people know about it?”
“I don’t know if a lot of people did, but Hector used to do the septic inspections for the county, and Maria Ashbach handled the inspection paperwork for Slibe—and pretty soon, you know, old Hector was inspecting more than the paperwork. Slibe Ashbach’s wife with a Latino. Bound to blow up. And it did: Maria and Hector went and doomed the whole clan. They’re all messed up out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Slibe had gone and diddled his little girl a time or two or three. That’d be why she’s a homosexual.”
“I asked,” Virgil said. “She says no.”
Ken Sanders sat up. “You asked? Must have more sand in you than you look like.”
“He’s the guy who massacred all those Vietnamese up in International Falls,” Sanders said to his father.
Virgil got hot: “Look, I didn’t massacre . . .”
Sanders laughed and waved him off. “Zoe told me that if I wanted to pull your weenie . . .”
Virgil relaxed. “I might have to spank her little ass.”
“Could I watch that?” Ken Sanders asked.
“What is this? The comedy club?” Phillips asked. “Why are we all sitting around laughing? I’m telling you, they’re all gonna walk.”
Ken Sanders shook his head: “They’re not going to walk. For one thing, we’ve probably got Wendy as an accessory, for withholding information. We’ve got those shoes, and if she’s going to mess with you, she’s got to admit that she saw her father out there, that she wore those shoes, and lied to Virgil about it. So we got her: you just have to figure out how to use her as a can opener.”
Phillips considered the old man for a while, then said, “I knew there was a reason you got elected eight times.”
“Damn right,” Ken Sanders said. Then, to Virgil, “I read about that thing up in International Falls. You taking it hard?”
So they talked about it for a while, the old man listening attentively, asking a few intelligent questions. He said, finally, “I don’t see that you had any better options, Virgil.”
“I can’t think of any,” Virgil said. “I could have let it go, but . . . people get trials, you know? You don’t make a deal with a bunch of foreign killers to come here and execute people.”
Ken Sanders said, “I worry about cops with machine guns, though. We’re turning ourselves into the military. Got machine guns, got squad cars that are like tanks, full of munitions and guys with armor. You get a situation like this morning, it’s going to come to a bad end, all those guys running around with heavy-duty weapons. Hell, you get an ordinary car chase, and half the time somebody winds up dead. And half the time it’s somebody who’s completely innocent. Trying to cross the street . . .”
“I hear you,” Virgil said.
“You know, old home week is fine, and all that—but we’ve got some shit to do,” Phillips said.
Virgil stood up, stretched. “You’re right. I need to break this thing down. I need to know who killed those people. Not so you can convict them; so I know.”
“Then get your ass down to the Cities,” Phillips said.
Virgil thought about Sig, and thought about going out there, and thought about the Deuce waking up in a hospital without an attorney right there.
He needed to go to Sig’s.
He had to go to St. Paul.
25
VIRGIL CALLED SIGNY and told her that he had to go away for one more night, and though there might have been a thread of skepticism in her voice, she said, “You’ve got to get this done, Virgil.”
He said, “Sig, honest to God, there’s no place I’d rather be than up here.”
“I believe that. . . .”
A CRAPPY, mindless drive down I-35 to the Cities; not much to look at in the afternoon, without even the romance of the nighttime stars.
He caught Jimmie Dale Gilmore, with “Dallas,” one of his favor ites, and Lucinda Williams’s cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” and the music smoothed the flow, but when he drove into the parking lot at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, he hadn’t thought of a single thing that could help.
BUT HE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING when he stepped into the room and saw the Deuce. The boy’s slack face was a dark island in the middle of a lot of white sheets and white pillows and white bedcovers and electronic equipment that showed red and green numbers, and bags of clear stuff that flowed into his arms through plastic tubes, and flowed out of him through more plastic tubes. His eyes were closed, his breathing light and thready.
Virgil asked the nurse, “Has he been awake?”
“Yes. He was awake an hour ago, but he’s in bad shape,” she said. “He hasn’t said anything coherent. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s got painkillers running, I don’t think he’ll be back tonight.”
“Is he going to make it?”
“Eighty-twenty,” she said. “They had to repair his rectum, there were some bone fragments that went through. His legs and pelvis are gonna be held together with metal plates. His spine didn’t get involved, but he’s got a lot of damage in his legs. One of the surgeons said they might have to go back in a half-dozen times to get it all fixed. As well as it’s gonna get fixed. And then there’s infection. If that turns bad, it’s all up for grabs.”
Virgil said, “Thanks,” and went down to the cafeteria and got a Coke and sat down to think
about what he’d just seen. After a while, he looked at his watch and called Sandy, the researcher. She was getting ready to go home. “I need a bunch of information. I need to get it in the next few hours. I can get you the overtime. You up for it?”
“Nice of you to ask, instead of ordering me around like your personal slave,” she said.
“Sandy—”
“Shut up, Virgil. What do you want?”
“Okay, in order. There’s a woman named Janelle Washington in a hospital in Duluth. I need to know which one. Her husband’s name is James, they live in Grand Rapids. . . . I need to get a car registration. . . .” He gave her the rest of the list, which she said shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’m heading up to Duluth. Goddamnit, I was up there two hours ago, down here for fifteen minutes, now I gotta go back.”
“A little rain has gotta fall in every life,” she said.
“You’ve got such a soft heart,” he said.
“Lucas is just leaving. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Naw. He’d probably piss me off. Call me as soon as you get the information on Washington.”
When he got off the phone, he went out to the truck, dug out his Nikon D3, carried it back up to the Deuce’s room. The nurse wasn’t happy about it, but Virgil got harsh, and she backed off. He stood on a chair and took several pictures of the Deuce, checking them on the LCD screen for sharpness, was satisfied and stepped down.
The nurse showed up with the nursing supervisor, and Virgil told them, “All done—and some things gotta be done. Screw the rules, and you can quote me.”
HALFWAY TO DULUTH, as it was getting dark, he pulled into a roadside diner, parked in the side lot, and went to sleep for half an hour. Sandy woke him with the phone call, and told him where Washington was, and that she was awake and waiting, and then said, “You’re right about the car. It was never registered, anywhere.”
“Thanks, Sandy. See you in a couple of days.”
He went into the diner and got a sticky bun, and headed north again.
JAN WASHINGTON WAS SITTING up in the hospital bed. He hadn’t known her before she’d gotten shot, but she had the look of a woman who’d lost a lot of weight in the past few days.
“James is here someplace,” she said.
“How are you?” Virgil asked.
“I hurt—all the time. They give me painkillers, but they’re not working very well. Either that, or they knock me out. They can’t seem to find a middle ground.”
“I need to show you a photograph,” he said. He took his laptop out of his bag, turned it on, loaded the Adobe Lightroom program, and brought up the best of the Deuce photos, the one that focused on the boy’s face, and cut out the hospital gear. It looked almost like a driver’s license photograph.
“Do you know this man?”
She looked at the photo for several seconds, then her forehead wrinkled and she said, “Oh—from a long time ago. That’s Hector. What’s his last name? He only worked there for a couple of years before they went off. . . . Hector Avila. That’s it. He went off to Arizona with Maria Ashbach. They ran away together.”
THEY SAT AND TALKED about it.
Hector Avila worked for the county as a civil engineer in the public works department, while Washington worked there as a clerk, before she quit to have kids. They were friendly, and she’d been around when Avila met Ashbach.
“Hector used to do the inspections on the septic installations out in the county. Maria handled the paperwork for Slibe’s business. She was the office manager while Slibe did the excavation. I knew something was going on. I warned Hector about it. . . .”
“You warned him?”
“Well, you know . . . Slibe is a country guy, and this was his wife. You go messing around . . . there are a lot of dark country roads out there. You could get . . . shot. Like me.”
“How long was the affair going on?” Virgil asked.
“Quite a while. A couple of years, at least,” Washington said. “They were sneaky about it—after it got going good, they’d never talk to each other. I knew, because I knew Hector . . . He’d get a motel room somewhere, usually up at Hibbing, and she’d sneak up there. I don’t know . . . it started out as pure sex, and then I think they fell in love. I hope they’re happy, wherever they are.”
VIRGIL CALLED RON MAPES, the crime-scene chief, at home, and told him what he needed. Called Sanders: “That search warrant out at Ashbach’s was good for what, three days?”
“Yup. After that, we’ve got to go back. But we weren’t required to finish the search the first day. What’s going on?”
“If I tell you, you’re gonna make fun of me when I fall on my ass,” Virgil said.
“No, I won’t—”
“See you tomorrow,” Virgil said.
“Wait, wait—what about the Deuce?” Sanders asked.
“He was asleep. I never talked to him.”
“John Phillips is going to be pissed. He needed that statement.”
“Ah, the Deuce didn’t do it,” Virgil said. “You can tell John that for me.”
“Virgil—”
“I’m going to need a couple more of your deputies. About nine o’clock,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL GOT BACK to the motel at two in the morning and dropped facedown on the bed, and was gone.
Mapes called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re down in the lobby.”
“Go get a cup of coffee somewhere,” Virgil moaned. “I’ll get up in a minute.”
“You don’t sound like you’ll be up in a minute,” Mapes said.
“Ah . . . all right. I’m getting up.”
THE MORNING was cool and quiet, with a sniff of rain in the air, and when Virgil got out to the parking lot, he found it wet: it had rained overnight, but not much—there were dry rain shadows under the cars. He walked across to the lobby, past the crime-scene van, and found Mapes and an assistant, Herb Huntington, looking at travel brochures.
“Lot to do around here,” Mapes said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Your wife’ll be happy to hear that,” Huntington told his boss. “ ‘ Honey, we’re getting out of Bemidji this year. Yes sir, we’re going to Grand Rapids. Fishing, hunting, golf, whatever you want.’ ”
“You guys got your stuff ?” Virgil asked.
“Virgil, I’m not saying you’re crazy,” Mapes said. “But I’m gonna hide in the back of the truck while Herb does the work.” Virgil shook his head, a sad smile crossing his face, and Mapes asked, “What?”
“I’m not really guessing,” Virgil said. “Let’s go get some breakfast—we might be out there for a while.”
“What do you got that I don’t know about?” Mapes asked.
“We can’t find Jud Windrow,” Virgil said. “Not even with a LoJack on his car.”
Mapes hitched up his pants. “Huh. Well, there is that. So—Log Cabin? Pancakes?”
THEY ATE AND PICKED up the two deputies, made a three-truck caravan out to the Ashbach place. They parked in front of it, which, for a moment, seemed abandoned, a cloud hanging over it. Virgil banged on Slibe’s door, got no answer, and one of the deputies walked around to the garage, looked inside, and called back, “His truck’s gone.”
“Check the loft.” To Mapes: “Might as well get going.”
Virgil started toward Wendy’s double-wide, and halfway there, the door opened and Wendy, barefoot, in jeans, came out on the concrete steps. “What’re you doing?”
“Where’s your father?” Virgil asked.
“He’s . . . our attorney said we weren’t supposed to talk to you, no matter what you said,” Wendy said. Berni came up behind her, put her hand on Wendy’s shoulder.
“You gotta do what your attorney says,” Virgil said. “But I’ll tell you, Wendy, if your father is here, and he pops up and he shoots somebody, I’ll send you to prison for murder.”
“Let me . . . what are you doing out there?”
Across the yard, Mapes and Huntington were pacing across the garden. “Continuing the search,” Virgil said. He looked at Berni: “Berni, the attorney hasn’t told you anything because you don’t have an attorney. So I’m asking you, do you know where Slibe is?”
“That’s not fair,” Wendy protested.
“Fuck fair,” Virgil said. “Berni, if you know, you better say, or you’re gonna be in as deep as Wendy.”
Wendy said, “I’ll tell you—don’t pick on her. He’s working a job south of town, on the Wendigo farm.”
“When did he leave?”
“Usual time, I guess—six-thirty or so. I heard him go,” Wendy said.
“Didn’t you think it was a little odd, him not going to see the Deuce?”
“I think he was too freaked out, and then they took the Deuce away,” Wendy said. “Berni and I are going down to St. Paul today, maybe he’ll come. What’re you doing out there, Virgil?”
HUNTINGTON WAS AT THE BOTTOM of the garden with a metal box slung around his shoulders, holding what looked like a basketball hoop at the end of an eight-foot pole. As they watched, he pushed the hoop out in front of him, so it hovered over the top of the potatoes, and started walking up the length of the garden, Mapes pacing along with him.
“Wendy, you oughta go see your brother,” Virgil said. “I was down there last night. He could use some support.”
She turned back to him: “Is he bad?”
“Bad enough. They can fix him, but it’s going to take time. The biggest threat is infection.” He told her about the visit, turned back, and saw Mapes walking toward them. Huntington was wandering in a circle, stepping on tomato plants and cucumber vines, heedless of the damage, killing them.
Mapes said, “We got a mass, Virgil. And it’s big.”
“No question?”