Rough Country

by Slibe. Slibe really loved Maria, and that got transferred over to Wendy. . . .”
    “How do you know all this stuff? How old were you when it happened? Ten?”
    “I got it from Wendy. We were together for a while. It was the big thing in her life.”
    “Slibe never . . .”
    “No, no, no . . . they didn’t. At least Wendy said they didn’t,” Zoe said. “I asked, too. But: I don’t think he wants her to leave him. I think he wants to keep her. I think Slibe believes he owns her. Like he owned Maria. She’s his.”
    “He seems to be pretty cool about the fact that she’s a lesbian,” Virgil said.
    “Well—he’s got the man attitude. If she was hooked up with a guy, that guy would own her. The ownership would go from Slibe to the guy. He doesn’t want that. Lesbians, in his eyes, it’s just chicks being chicks. But a guy . . .”
    Virgil said, “Huh.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    His phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket and looked at it—the sheriff’s department—said, “Virgil,” and Sanders said, “They got her, and she’s madder’n a hornet.”
    “You don’t sound too worried.”
    “Naw, if anything goes wrong, I plan to blame it on you,” Sanders said.
    “Good plan,” Virgil said. “I’ll go on over there.”
    He stood up, and Zoe asked, “Is there any possibility you’ll be seeing my sister tonight?”
    Sig must have talked, Virgil thought: “I might drop by, have a beer.”
    “Yeah, have a beer. She went to shave her legs,” Zoe said.
    “Well, shoot. I was gonna offer to do it for her,” Virgil said.
    Zoe laughed and then said, “Slibe.”
     
     
     
    BERNI KELLY WAS EXACTLY as mad as a hornet. She was sitting in an orange plastic chair looking at a guy behind a desk reading a newspaper. Virgil came up from slightly behind her and thought he could hear her buzzing; and she was—she was doing an angry hum, like his first ex-wife used to do.
    He put an offensive smile on his face and said, “Berni! Thanks for dropping by.”
    She turned in the plastic chair and said, “You motherfucker,” and came up out of the chair and Virgil thought she might be going for his eyes. The cop behind the desk felt it, too, and stood up, but Virgil put his hands up and said, “Whoa, whoa. Just want to talk.”
    She started to cry, and he saw that she’d already been crying, and that her eyeliner had started to run. “I think Wendy’s gonna kick me out of the band.”
    “Really?”
    “Aw, that guy who came up here with you, Jud, he’s telling her that she needs a better drummer.”
    “You talked to Jud about it?”
    “No, he told her, and she’s telling me. They say they haven’t made a decision, but they’ve made a decision . . . and then you go and get that fuckin’ deputy to drag me outa there.”
    “Still got a mouth on you,” the cop said.
    She turned around and said, “Shut up, Carl,” and to Virgil, “Carl’s wanted to fuck me since he was in the ninth grade and I was in the fifth. Isn’t that right, Carl?”
    Carl said to Virgil, “You want to take her in the interview room? I don’t want to put up with her anymore.” And to Berni, “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things, are worthy of death.”
    “Oh, yeah, I heard you got born again,” she said. “Which you needed, since they fucked up the first time.”
    Virgil edged her toward the interview room. “C’mon, let’s go talk,” he said, and to Carl, who’d pissed him off, “The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”
    “That didn’t mean they were queer,” Carl called after them, as they went into the interview room. He sounded anxious about it.
    Berni asked, “What was that all about?”
    “I’m a preacher’s kid,” Virgil said. “I know all that stuff, for and against.”
    “Was David queer?”
    Virgil said, “Who knows? Donatello apparently thought so.”
    “Don who?”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL SAT HER DOWN on the opposite side of the conference table and said, “Berni, we’ve been through all the evidence, the sheriff and I, and it’s pretty obvious that you’re involved in these killings somehow.”
    She started to protest but he held up his hands. “Hear me out. First of all, we’ve had two band-related killings, plus a third shooting, which was done with the same rifle that killed McDill. You have no real alibis. So we started putting together a case, including the tracks back into