Rough Country

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