Slibe's eyes had widened, and now his Adam's apple bobbed, and he looked around the office, and at the sheriff, and said, "Jesus God. I knew that boy wasn't right."
"You think the Deuce did it?" Virgil asked.
"I don't know-I don't know," Slibe said. "But I didn't… I never stopped in no Clear Lake in my life, far as I know. I don't even know where it is. It's on I-35? I been to Texas down I-35, on my way to New Orleans, but that was after Katrina."
"The Deuce uses this card?"
"We all use it," Slibe said. He started to tremble and shake. "He's… used it for gas before. Without me knowin'."
Virgil said, "You don't know where he is, now?"
"No, but he's on foot, I believe. I saw him packin' up, he took some Shake 'n Bake out of my cupboard, got his gun and fishing pole." He was slack-mouthed. "Jesus God, you think he killed them people?"
Virgil said to the sheriff, "Now we do need to find him."
"We can do that," the sheriff 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 watch. A half-hour passed, and then forty minutes, and Virgil decided if the pilot hadn't arrived by the end of an hour, he'd bail. He'd feel guilty about it, but he would.
The pilot, whose name was Hank Underwood, walked in five minutes later and said, "Sorry."
"Broken?" Harris asked.
"Yeah. Worse than we thought," Underwood said. He was a short, dark man about Virgil's age. "Not his arm, it's a wrist bone, the navicular. He could be in a cast for five months. He was supposed to start football practice in three weeks."
They were talking about it, walking out to Underwood's single-engine Cessna, and Virgil said the broken arm might be a blessing in disguise. "Maybe he'll turn out to be great at math and become a scientist."
"Rather play football," Underwood said. "All his pals will be… but you could be right." He sounded doubtful.
Underwood put Harris in the back, because he was shorter than Virgil, and as they took off into the darkness, the plane smelling of warm oil and cold air, said, "When we get up there, I'll roll a bit, to give you a view. We'll go up one side and down the other, using Deer River as our guide."
"How're we going to mark him?" Virgil asked.
"GPS," Underwood said. "We'll circle until we can get an azimuth that runs through him and some point in Deer River, and mark ourselves, and then do it again, from another angle. Won't be exact, but it'll be pretty damn close."
"As long as we've only got one fire," Harris said.
Underwood said, "Not many people camping in a swamp. It's usually dark as a coal sack along there. Our biggest problem will be if he's sleeping in his boat, and isn't cooking at all."
"Don't want to spook him," Virgil said.
"We'll be well off. We'll go up one side of the river, fool around for a while, then come back down the other," Underwood said. "If he's close enough to the highway, he might not even hear us."
THEY COULD SEE Deer River within a couple of minutes of taking off. "The place he's supposed to be is right down this way from the lights," Underwood said, gesturing. "See the line of lights? Now, ninety degrees towards us."
The river plain was pitch-black. They flew up the side, past the town, did a wide circle to the west, slowly, scanning the terrain, then came right back down the highway. On the second pass, Harris said, suddenly, "Got a fire."
"Where?" Virgil asked.
"About two-thirty… coming up on three… It flickers… lost it, goddamnit, got it, got it again…"
"Brush between us and it," Underwood said.
Virgil scanned down at the same angle as Harris, at three o'clock. "Got it," Virgil said. "I got it. It's small."