A male voice in the background mumbled something, and Virgil asked, "Who was that?"

"I have friends," she said.

"Sandy…"

"Virgil, shut up."

ZOE SAID, "Was that a special friend?"

Virgil said, "She's a researcher at the office."

"She ever done any research into Virgil Flowers?"

"Maybe," he said.

THEY SAT for a minute, and she asked, "Well, what's the verdict?"

"I never thought you did it. You're too stable. Though you have some stability problems when it comes to Wendy. If you were gonna kill somebody, you'd probably kill Berni. Or Wendy. Or yourself," Virgil said. He pinched his lower lip, thinking about it. "But it's complicated. If you figured that she was going to dump Berni anyway, eventually, like everybody does, maybe you wouldn't kill Berni. Maybe McDill was more of a threat, both to take Wendy away and to take the lodge away from you."

"Oh, for Christ's sakes, I'm going to bed," Zoe said, pushing up off the floor. "If you decide to arrest me, call ahead so I'll have time to wash my hair."

"That's what they all say," Virgil said.

Outside, sitting in the truck, he drew a line through Zoe: he'd make a few checks, so he wouldn't get bitten on the ass again, but she didn't do it.

21

VIRGIL SPENT SOME TIME with God that night, thinking about the way things were-about how somebody like Jud Windrow might now be lying dead somewhere, for no discernible reason-and why they were like that, and why a believer like himself would be going around cursing as he did: goddamnit.

Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, but not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible. God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless. God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God's own intelligence…

Far out, dude; pass the joint.

Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny. And he stranded people like Virgil, who wonder about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren't God's own, if, indeed, he had one.

Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too-his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.

He got to "godless commie" and went to sleep.

And worried in his sleep.

FIVE HOURS LATER, his cell phone went off, and he sat bolt upright, fumbled around for it, found it in his jeans pocket, on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"Hello?"

Sandy said, "Slibe Ashbach has a Visa card and a check card. He used the Visa card at an independent gas station in Grand Rapids early in the morning of the day Constance Lifry was murdered. He used the 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 be a problem," Phillips said. "We may not be able to get his name in front of a jury if we can't prove he's dead."

"Prove it? We don't even know it," Sanders said.

DISTRICT COURT JUDGE Don Hope was an older white-haired man with rimless glasses, and he said to Phillips, "John, there hasn't been a fishing expedition this big since Teddy Roosevelt went up the Amazon."