Rough Country

by John Sandford

“Well, we got a mass. You think you know what it is; and it’s consistent. That’s all I can tell you at this point.”

  Wendy asked, “What?”

  Virgil sighed and stepped up on the top step and put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her tight. “Ah, God I hate this.”

  “What?”

  “Wendy . . . I believe your mom is down there, under the garden.”

  SHE FROZE, as if all the muscles in her body contracted at once. Then she pushed him off, and Berni, agape, stepped away and said, “You’re crazy.”

  Wendy, horrified, looking from the garden to Virgil, repeated it: “You’re crazy.”

  Virgil said, “These guys are using a top-end metal detector. They say there’s a big buried metal mass out there, under the garden.

  “You told me that when your mother left, she left her car here, and took off with her boyfriend, Hector Avila. I had a BCA researcher look up Avila’s car, which was a 1990 S10 Blazer. It was never rereg istered anywhere in the United States. There was no sign of it in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, California, Nevada, Colorado . . . no place in the Southwest.

  “You told me that when you came back from school, that your father told you that your mother had gone away, and that day he started a garden. . . .”

  She shook her head. “No . . . no, no, no, not right. Mom’s out in Arizona.”

  “Can’t find her,” Virgil said. Can’t find a Hector Avila, either. Can’t find a Maria Ashbach getting a divorce anywhere in Minnesota or Arizona or anywhere else.”

  “Dad told me when they got divorced . . .”

  “And he told you that he got a letter that said your mom didn’t want to see you anymore. Did that sound like your mom?”

  She looked at the garden, a sense of dry-lipped desperation about her. “But that . . . but that . . .”

  “Your brother. I took his picture and showed it to Jan Washington, in the hospital in Duluth. She thought it was a picture of Avila. The Deuce is Avila’s son, and your father knows it. That’s why he’s framing him.”

  “It can’t . . .”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Virgil said. “We know we’ve got a big metal mass down there. We know your father had excavation equipment that he could have used to bury it. You’re out here at the end of the road, with nobody going by. He could have pulled it off. We gotta look.”

  WENDY STARTED TO CRY, and Berni wrapped her up and led her back into the trailer, Berni looking at Virgil with fear on her face, and Virgil said, quietly to the deputies, “Hang around, keep an eye on them.”

  He called Sanders: “You better get out here.”

  Mapes showed him the space in the garden where they were getting the best responses. “You can’t tell exactly how big it is, but it’s probably car-length, and probably car-wide, and not too deep.”

  WENDY CAME OUT of the house, tears streaming down her face: “How’re you going to dig it up?”

  “Get some guys out here.”

  “I can run the Bobcat better than anyone in the county.”

  “Wendy, that’s a really bad idea.”

  She shrieked at him: “I can’t stand this. I can’t stand it. I can’t wait. You understand that? Mom’s in Arizona. Mom’s in Arizona, and she might come back. She can’t be in the garden. . . .”

  Virgil said to Berni, “You better take her—”

  Wendy pushed Berni away. “Bullshit. I’m going for the Bobcat.” She stalked away, and one of the deputies moved to cut her off, but Virgil gave him a shake of the head, and the deputy stepped back. Virgil followed her, and Berni followed Virgil, and the deputy came after them, leaving the second deputy, Mapes, and Huntington standing in the garden.

  THERE WERE TWO BOBCATS in the machine shed, one with a front-end loader, the other with a shovel. The larger Caterpillar shovel was gone. Wendy climbed into the Bobcat with the shovel and fired it up. She said to Virgil, “Out of the way.”

  “Not a good idea, Wendy,” Virgil said.

  “I don’t care. . . .” She idled the machine for a moment, said, “When Mom left, something must have busted in his brain. He told me once that he’d taken her into town, and they bought gravesites together. I mean, they were thirty.”

  “I think that’s why he was holding you so close,” Virgil said.

  She ran the power up a bit and said, “Out of the way.”

  VIRGIL FOLLOWED THE BOBCAT across the yard, and Mapes came up and said, “You think this is a good idea?”

  Virgil said, “We’re going with the flow. Give her an outline to work with.”

  MAPES MARKED OUT a perimeter, and Wendy went to work. She was good with the shovel, cutting down a foot at a time, over the whole perimeter, dumped the dirt to the side, out of the garden, the black-and-tan soil piling up as she went deeper and deeper. At two feet, Virgil could see her crying, and stepped up next to the Bobcat and called, over the engine beat, “You okay?”

  “Somebody’s been digging here, deep. The soil’s all cut up. Get back . . .”

  Sanders showed up with another deputy, and Virgil walked over. The sheriff got out of the car, gawked at Wendy in the Bobcat, and asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I think Hector Avila and Maria Ashbach are down there.”

  “What?”

  VIRGIL EXPLAINED and Sanders said, “You can’t be having her dig them up. Get her out of there. What the hell . . .”

  But they were down three feet, and as Sanders was speaking, there was a shriek of metal. Wendy lifted the shovel and backed off, and one of the deputies jumped down into the hole, dug around with a spade, then stood up and looked at Virgil and asked, “What color was the Blazer?”

  “Blue,” Virgil said.

  “We got blue,” the deputy said.

  WENDY WAS IN CONTROL now, her face tight, cold. After a short argument with Sanders, she moved back up to the hole and removed two inches of dirt, and then another inch, and then began to hit metal along the whole length of the hole.

  She backed off, and the deputies climbed down into the hole with a long-handled shovel and a spade.

  Wendy wandered away, through the picket fence around her father’s house, and sat on the porch, her feet on the porch step. Virgil and Berni sat on either side of her.

  “Dad used to whip her ass. I remember it. I remember her fighting him and crying. He used to cry after he did it—but he said he had to, because she’d screwed something up. I thought that was . . . the way men acted. Most of the time, everything seemed all right. . . .”

  “We got a letter from Mom. Dad showed it to me, he read it to me. All about she was going to have a new life, and it was better if we didn’t get involved. She said good-bye. I remember Dad telling the Deuce that she wasn’t coming back, and the Deuce starting to cry because he didn’t understand where Mom went. It was like she was dead or something. . . . And then Dad told me a couple of years later that they were getting a divorce, and then they had gotten one, and I told all my friends. . . .”

  “And I told my mom,” Berni said. “And the way things are here . . . everybody knew they’d gotten a divorce, and what happened.”

  “He was building a story,” Virgil said.

  They sat and watched the deputies dig, and then Virgil asked Wendy, “Why’d you lie to me about that lipstick card? The kiss mark you made for McDill?”

  She said nothing for a moment, then turned her face toward him: “I don’t know. I was scared of you. I was going to deny everything. . . . I don’t know. It was stupid.”

  Across the drive, in the hole, one of the deputies knelt, and started working with his hands. Virgil got up and said, “Wait here.”

  “Bullshit,” Wendy said.

  THE DEPUTIES HAD CLEARED off a roof, and in another few minutes, had cleaned off a foot-long patch of windshield. Sanders got a flashlight from his car and handed it down, and the deputy, on his knees, shined it through the glass, pressed his face closer, moved the light, then stood up and looked at Wendy and then
at Virgil.

  “Got some clothing.”

  “Some clothing,” Sanders said.

  “Got some clothing and . . . some bones and hair.”

  WENDY SAT DOWN, suddenly, in the raw dirt, then flopped backward, her irises rolling out of sight.

  “She’s fainted, or something,” Virgil said, holding her head up. “We better get, uh, what do . . .” He’d never dealt with a woman who’d fainted.

  Berni came to hold her head and shouted at Sanders, “Get her to a hospital, get—”

  Then Wendy stirred and Virgil said, “Don’t move. You fainted, is all, just stay like that.”

  But Wendy rolled to her hands and knees and looked in the hole. “All these years,” she said. “All these years, I thought she’d come back someday. Or I thought I’d be famous, and I’d have a show in Arizona, and she’d come up and talk to me. . . . I still have that dream. All these years . . .”

  26

  SANDERS WALKED OVER, a radio in his hand, and said, “They’re there—and he’s gone. The Caterpillar is still there and the lowboy, but he’s gone. The people at the site said he was going to lunch.”

  “Probably back in town,” Virgil said.

  “We’ll sweep through there. . . .”

  An intermittent drizzle had begun, coming with the occasional ragged black cloud, going with brighter gray ones. They all stood hunched in it, watching the work.

  There were four cop cars on the road outside the fence, a couple more trucks down the driveway, and three civilian cars, as well as Virgil’s truck and the crime-scene van parked in front of the house. Mapes and Huntington were directing the excavation, and half the truck was now clear, sitting in the bottom of the widening hole. One of the civilians was a Bobcat operator from Grand Rapids, and he was carefully digging down the sides of the vehicle, while deputies with shovels did the close work.

  Full circus mode, Virgil thought.

  PHILLIPS, THE COUNTY ATTORNEY, wearing a yellow rain jacket, climbed out of the hole, scraped mud off the bottom of his shoes on the lawn, and brushed off his hands and came over and said, “Goddamnedest thing. The woman’s in the backseat, the guy’s across the front. It looks to me like he shot them in the head. The skulls are right there, faceup, grinning out at you. . . .” He shivered and said, “I won’t be trying to sleep tonight. Or maybe the rest of the month.”

  “How did this happen?” Sanders asked. “Why didn’t anybody know?”

  “A lot of people did know. They knew it before it happened—knew that Hector and Maria were going to run off,” Virgil said. “And then they were gone . . . and they’d gone to Arizona. Everybody knew that. Slibe apparently didn’t make any secret of it. Now that I think about the way it worked, he must’ve started a few rumors himself. About the letter from Maria, and all that. People knew she’d written back . . . because Slibe told people.”

  “Her family . . . her parents?”

  “Don’t know,” Virgil said. “I’ll ask Wendy when I have a chance.”

  THE SHERIFF WATCHED the excavation, then sidled over and asked quietly, “How in the hell did you figure this out?”

  Virgil said, “People kept talking in the background, about Hector Avila and Maria, and I never concentrated on the Hector part. But when we were searching the Deuce’s loft, I found some pictures of Slibe and Maria when they were young. They were blond. And Wendy is flat, pure blond: she’s so white she’s transparent. I got down to the hospital, and the Deuce was propped up on these white sheets, and he was so dark . . . and it all tripped off. Hector Avila, a Latino name. An affair; a dark kid; a father who seemed willing to frame his own son. It occurred to me, the Deuce wasn’t his son. . . .

  “I thought about that, and then I thought about the fact that we can’t find Windrow’s car. Not even with a LoJack on it. Maybe somebody found and disconnected the LoJack, but there was another explanation. You said it yourself—that it must be in a lake somewhere. Or something. Like, buried.”

  “And you thought about those goldarned Bobcats. . . .”

  Virgil nodded. “And that Slibe started a big garden the day his wife disappeared forever.”

  THEY WERE TALKING when Virgil saw Slibe’s truck coming, burning up the road, and he said, “Oh, shit. Slibe.”

  The cops turned and looked, and a couple of them ran for their cars. Slibe’s truck slowed, stopped, and Virgil could see a figure in the driver’s seat, taking them all in—taking in the hole in the garden. The truck started to back up, to turn around, and a cop yelled, “He’s running,” but then it straightened again, came on, accelerating, moving too fast to make a good turn at the driveway, took out the mailbox and then came on, straight at the deputies in the drive, who scattered, the truck accelerating, throwing wet gravel, coming straight at Virgil and Sanders and Phillips.

  Virgil yelled, “Get out of the way,” and Phillips ran for the garden hole and Virgil and Sanders ran for the concrete steps, got on the steps as the truck brushed by, Slibe’s face framed in the side window of the truck, and then he was past them, continuing past the house and the crime-scene van, past the kennel. The truck crashed through a board fence and into the back pasture.

  Wendy’d heard the commotion and came to the door, and saw the truck disappear. The cops were pulling vests from their cars, and Sanders was pointing the deputies after the truck, and Virgil asked Wendy, “What’s back there?”

  “Nothing. He can’t get out of the pasture. . . . There’s a shortcut down to Hourglass Lake. A trail . . .”

  “There’s a boat?”

  “No, there’s a place you can fish, but it’s not our property. There’s swamp on both sides of it, there’s a creek that goes in there. . . . I don’t know. He can’t swim that good, so . . . There’s a cabin that way.” She pointed. “Left when you get to the lake. If he got to that road I guess he could get out. It’d be a long walk.”

  Phillips had heard the last part of it, and he said, “It’s wet country back there. I don’t see where he’s going. There’s hardly any way out.”

  Cop cars were going in on Slibe’s trail, and Sanders hurried up: “I called for the state patrol chopper. It’s gonna be a while.” A cop car headed out of the driveway, and he added, “I got guys going over to Hourglass; they can seal off the landing, and the roads.”

  Virgil said, “Why didn’t he run? He seemed to know what he was doing.”

  Berni, who’d come up behind Wendy, said, “We’d go swimming down on Hourglass sometimes. Slibe’s got an old plastic toolbox, you know, like a truck toolbox, hidden back in the woods. It’s got fire-starter and a minnie net and some fishing poles.”

  “But how’s he . . .” Sanders began.

  Berni said, “It’s big enough for a gun. I never thought of it when you were here looking for the gun, but it’s big enough for one, easy.”

  VIRGIL TO SANDERS: “Get your guys. If he’s out there with a .223 with a scope, they gotta back off. Those vests won’t work. Gonna get some guys shot up if they push him.”

  Sanders was already jogging toward his car.

  “You know what we need?” Berni asked.

  Virgil: “What?”

  “We need the Deuce to track him down.”

  THE COPS WERE ALL gunning up, and Wendy asked, “They’ll kill him, won’t they?” and Virgil thought that was probably the case, but didn’t say so.

  “Where’s the lake?” he asked. “Exactly?”

  Wendy pointed to a low spot in the skyline. “Right down there. But it’s more than half a mile.”

  Virgil said, “I gotta go out,” and, “I’ll try not to hurt him, if I see him.”

  He went to his truck and got his vest and his shotgun, slapped the Velcro tabs in place, walked over to Sanders, who was directing traffic. “I’m going up on that high spot.” He pointed to a place thirty degrees to the right of the tree line dip that marked the lake.

  “You think that shotgun’s gonna work? I can get you an AR-15 if you’d rather,” Sanders offered.<
br />
  “I’m okay—but tell your guys where I’m at. I don’t want to get shot up by a friendly.”

  “Take a radio.” He yelled at one of the cops: “Bill—give me your radio.”

  VIRGIL TOOK THE HANDSET, hung it on his belt, climbed into the truck and followed the rest of the crowd through the broken fence, and bounced over the pasture. At the far end of the field, he could see where Slibe’s truck had crashed through another fence, this one barbed wire, and had gone into the trees. The cop cars were stopped short of that, and most of the cops were standing behind their cars, while two more did an end run to the left, into the woods.

  Virgil didn’t like it: there’d be some dead people for sure, if they pushed Slibe. He drove as far as he could, but well to the right of the others, got out of the truck and on the radio.

  “Your people are crashing into the woods. If he decides to fight, he’ll kill some of them,” Virgil said. “They gotta let him move before they do. They gotta calm down, or he’s going to hunker down somewhere and ambush them.”

  “Gotcha. I think they’ve got a good idea where he went, they’re just keeping him moving.”

  “They’re moving too fast, way too fast,” Virgil said. “If he’s got that rifle—”

  “Gotcha.”

  VIRGIL THOUGHT, Dumbass.

  The sheriff hadn’t struck him as a dumbass, but the chase was hot and he was caught up in it. Cops watch movies like everybody else, and sometimes, it gets them killed.

  Virgil pumped three shells into the shotgun, put the rest in his pocket, and jogged over to the fence, did a leg lift over it, careful not to get snagged, and headed through the woods. He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he’d know it when he saw it.