14

BARBARA CARSON was a bust. An elderly widow who got around with a walker, she lived in a tiny rambler with a yard full of nasty-looking rosebushes.

"I did know her quite well," she said. She looked like Santa Claus's wife, with curly white hair and pink cheeks. "We corresponded regularly about our heritage roses."

Virgil learned that heritage roses were old varieties no longer grown, but often found around abandoned farmsteads. A few thousand people scattered around the country were dedicated to saving them-Lifry had been one, and so was Carson.

"Everybody was shocked when she was murdered. She was the nicest lady, that's all we talked about for weeks, her murder," Carson said.

"Who's we?" Virgil asked, one foot out the door.

"Well, the rose people, on the Internet. That's how I heard: I got an alert. Another one of our people down in Cedar Rapids put out all the information."

She knew Lifry came to Grand Rapids to "be with her gay friends at that resort."

"So she made no secret about being gay?"

"Why should she?" the little old lady asked. "Nobody would care but a bunch of stuffy old men."

VIRGIL DROVE BACK to the sheriff 's department, tracked down Sanders, filled him in on Boehm without mentioning the whole prostitution snarl, and on Carson, and asked, "You ever heard of Slibe Ashbach Junior? Call him the Deuce? About sixteen, has a reputation for being a little flaky?"

Sanders shook his head: "Can't say that I have. We've got forty-five thousand people in the county, and I only know about thirty-eight thousand of them."

"So he's not big on your felony list?"

"Not that I've noticed," Sanders said. "He live up there with Slibe?"

"I guess. I'd like to check your records."

"We can do that-let me call the deputy who runs that area. He might know him."

ITASCA COUNTY-the Grand Rapids police department, actually-had run into Slibe II on two occasions, after fights at the junior high school. There'd been no charges out of either fight, and nobody had been seriously injured. The police had been called because both of the fights had been on the school grounds, and the cops had written reports mentioning Slibe as one of the combatants.

Sanders said a dozen or so similar reports came in every year, either through the sheriff's department or the Grand Rapids Police-"Everybody's screaming at us to stay on top of the schools, ever since the school shootings at Red Lake. We don't let anything go anymore."

When Virgil finished reading the reports, the deputy who might know Slibe II hadn't shown up, so he walked kitty-corner over to a coffee shop, and was sitting there, looking at a cup of coffee, and listening to an orchestrated, Muzak version of "Hells Bells," when the deputy came in and offered a hand and said, "Roy Service."

Service got a cup of coffee, and the waitress behind the counter said, "Pretty fast service, huh, Service?" and cackled and went off with her coffeepot.

"Honest to God, she's said that to me three hundred times," Service muttered to Virgil. "One of these times, I'm gonna take out my gun and shoot her. Or myself."

"Don't think I would have lasted this long," Virgil said. "Don't tell her my name is Flowers… So, you know a Slibe Ashbach Junior? They call him the Deuce?"

Service nodded. "I've met him. You think he might be involved in these shootings?"

"I don't know. I've only seen him once… He seemed a little odd," Virgil said.

Service chuckled. "Yeah, you got that right. He's a little odd." He stirred some nondairy creamer into his coffee, then said, "You like movies?"

"Sure."

"You know Jeremiah Johnson? Robert Redford as a mountain man?"

"Sure. One of my favorite movies, aside from The Big Lebowski."

"Well, the Deuce is like Jeremiah Johnson. A mentally impaired Jeremiah Johnson. He goes sliding around the woods and the lakes up here, popping up here and there… don't know what he eats, if he always does… fish, I guess, squirrels, eats at home sometimes, I suppose. But he walks all over the place. I've seen him out twenty or thirty miles from home, on foot. Carries a gun. He sleeps out there, in the woods."

"You know what kind of gun he carries?"

"Depends. Sometimes, a single-shot shotgun, when he's shooting grouse. Sometimes an old pump.22. A DNR guy told me once that he shoots deer with his.22-slides right up next to them and shoots them execution-style, ten feet, one shot to the brain."

"A.223?"

Service shook his head. "I've never seen him with anything like that, with a centerfire. He may have one. Probably could get one. But I don't think he really needs one-getting really close is part of his game."

Virgil took a sip of coffee and thought about it, about the way the shooter found his way into the back-bay, the pond, off Stone Lake. "Does he drive? Does he work?"

Service said, "He did. He's got a Chevy pickup, and he used to work out at a junkyard on Highway 2, tearing down cars for salvage parts. He was the yardman for a few months, but then he quit. I don't know why. I guess he works for his old man now, at the kennels. His old man does septic-system excavation, and he helps with that."

"You think he could hurt somebody?" Virgil asked.

Service said, "Going back to movies. Have you ever seen Of Mice and Men?"

"Yeah."

"Lennie, you know, who kills the guy's wife. The Deuce is like that," Service said. "He could get excited and kill somebody by accident, but I don't see him planning it out."

"How about if he popped a couple of people because he got the urge?"

"Maybe," Service said. "He's had enough shit shoveled on him, all his life. He could be pretty angry under all of it. Kids gave him a hard time in school, old man gives him a hard time at home, doesn't have the brains to deal with it. He just heads for the trees."

Interesting, Virgil thought, when he said good-bye to Service. A good suspect whom he had no good reason to suspect.

FROM HIS CAR, he called Mapes and asked him about Slibe's AR-15, and was told that they'd done test shots with it, and whatever it might be, it wasn't the weapon that had produced the shells at Stone Lake or the Washington shooting.

"Could you get that back to me? Is there some way I could get it back this afternoon?"

"Let me check around. We'll figure out something."

The gun, Virgil thought, was an excellent reason to go back out to Slibe's place.

HE WAS ON HIS way to the hospital, to check on Washington, to see if she was awake and had anything else to say, to ask if she or her husband knew anything about Jared Boehm or the Deuce, when Sanders called. "I got a woman who wants to talk to you. She says she might have some information."

"Yeah? Who?"

"Iris Garner. She's Margery Stanhope's daughter."

IRIS GARNER was a tall redheaded woman in her mid-thirties who lived not far from the Boehms, in another sprawling ranch house, but on the precise edge of town, off the water, with an actual ranch in the back. Not exactly a ranch, but a training ring for horses, with a small horse barn behind it, and a pasture that extended out to a tree line that marked the edge of the real countryside.

She smiled in a tired way when she answered the door, said, "Come in," and as they walked through to the living room, she said, "I wasn't sure I should call you. I had to think about it. But after Jan Washington… I'm not even sure that this amounts to anything…"

"I take everything," he assured her.

"Mother doesn't know that I called you," she said. "Please don't tell her, unless it's necessary. She'd be really upset."

She sat down in a red armchair next to a flagstone fireplace, and Virgil settled onto a couch. "That's not a problem. The only time the specifics of an investigation get out is when they get into court. At that point, of course, things are pretty serious."