Rough Country

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.”
    “Ah, man . . .” Virgil didn’t feel like waiting. He thought about Sig, sitting home alone, still unfulfilled. Looked at his