Rough Country

card again later that day in Clear Lake, Iowa, and at three o’clock the next morning, again in Clear Lake, and finally, later that second day, in Grand Rapids.
    “It’s about three hundred miles from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake. It’s something between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and seventy miles from Clear Lake to Swanson, Iowa, depending on which route you take, or three hundred to three hundred and forty miles, round-trip. Then, another three hundred miles back to Grand Rapids. So, if you figure that his truck needs to be refueled every three hundred miles or so, which is reasonable, then it’s quite consistent with the idea that he drove from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake, Clear Lake to Swanson, back to Clear Lake, and then on to Grand Rapids. In fact, it fits perfectly. Even the time fits, if Constance was killed at ten o’clock at night.”
    “You’re a treasure beyond value,” Virgil said. “E-mail that to me.”
    “Treasure beyond value, my ass,” Sandy said. “That’s not what you were saying the last time I talked to you.”
    “I don’t have time for an emotional, ah, encounter, right now,” Virgil began.
    “You’ve never had time for an emotional encounter,” she said. “If you ever find time, give me a ring.”
    She hung up; Virgil winced, sighed, and scratched his nuts.
     
     
     
    SLIBE.
    The good old Sliber. The Sliberoni. The Slibe-issimo.
    “Slibe did it,” Virgil said to the ceiling of the motel room, which didn’t answer.
     
     
     
    JOHN PHILLIPS was a short, balding, muscular redhead, wearing a blue suit that was, Virgil thought, silently punning to himself, ill-suited to his complexion. The lines in Phillips’s face suggested a permanent skepticism, a guy who’d heard the phrase “I didn’t mean to do it” a few hundred times too many. He was the Itasca County attorney, and he sat behind his desk, and in front of an American flag, his face growing more skeptical by the moment.
    Sanders, the sheriff, sat with his legs crossed, to one side, looking at Virgil, while Virgil finished up: “. . . and that’s about it.”
    “So you’ve got one thing—the Visa card and the gas station,” Phillips said.
    “No, I’ve got two and probably three dead, and one shot in the back, and a nut running loose. I think Slibe One probably did it, but it could be Slibe Two, and there’s even a possibility that, for reasons we don’t know, Wendy Ashbach did it. After I ran my strangulation test last night, it occurred to me that while Zoe isn’t strong enough to have killed Lifry, Wendy might be. Wendy probably has thirty pounds on Zoe.”
    “But Wendy wanted to go with this guy Windrow,” Sanders said.
    “Yeah. And Wendy has an alibi, more or less, for McDill, though the alibi depends on exactly when McDill was killed, and we don’t know that. Anyway, that’s why I think it was probably Slibe One or Two, and not Wendy. But, if we can get a warrant for the whole property, we might as well take Wendy’s place apart, too.”
    Phillips plucked a yellow pencil out of a Mason jar on his desk and used the eraser end to scratch his head. To Sanders, he said, “I can tell you what Don’s going to say. It’s a fishing expedition.”
    “Well, we do have the Visa card,” Sanders said.
    Virgil said, “That would be a huge coincidence, if Slibe, or Slibe Two, or Wendy, didn’t use that to go down there and kill Lifry. That’s solid. We’ve got opportunity on the others, McDill and Washington and Windrow. Neither Slibe One nor Two has a real alibi—and we have the fact that these killings seemed focused on the band.”
    “Except Washington,” Phillips said.
    “Well, yeah. But we’ve also got people killed,” Virgil said. “Even if we’re fishing, if we can find out which one is doing the killing, we can stop it. And if we can actually prove that one of them did it, I doubt that a court would throw out the evidence, if the search is only questionable. It’s not completely unreasonable. Especially if it works out.”
    “Windrow plagues me,” Sanders said. “We can’t even find him. Avis has car locators installed on all their vehicles, and they’re getting no signal, from anywhere in North America. The guy has gotta be at the bottom of a lake somewhere. The bottom of a bog or something.”
    “Probably off playing house with Little Linda,” Phillips said.
    “That’s really funny, John, that’s hilarious,” Sanders said.
    “Well, the Windrow thing is gonna