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."