Washington should be coming around the corner at any minute. Shooting her would do two good things. First, it'd confuse the issue. The killer would carefully leave behind a shell, so they'd know that McDill's killer also shot Washington. But since Washington had no connection to lesbians or Wendy's band or the Eagle Nest, maybe they'd go for the idea that the killings were random. Maybe; but if not, it'd at least be confusing.
The other thing the killing would do is get rid of Washington. Nobody would remember it after she was dead, the killer thought, but Washington knew a little too much about Slibe Ashbach Jr. and his father…
WASHINGTON CAME AROUND the corner a mile away, not pedaling hard, but moving right along. The road was smooth blacktop, and she was clear and steady in the four-power scope. She was wearing a scarf, as a babushka, to keep her hair neat. Her face was clear in the glass… four hundred yards, three-fifty, three hundred, and closing…
A truck came around the corner behind her. Not moving fast, sort of idling along, and the killer took the gun down, forehead beaded with sweat, breathing hard from a sudden shot of adrenaline. Not good. Not good.
TOM MORRIS SAW JANELLE pedaling along and thought about what might have been if he'd moved a little faster after high school. They might have hooked up. The possibility was out there, for a while. He knew it, and she knew it, and that made them like each other all their lives, even if nothing happened, and they both wound up happily married to other people.
He slowed, ran the window down, grinned at her, and called, "Still pedaling your ass around town…"
"You shut up!" she said.
"No, I think it's a good thing," he said. "I saw James downtown yesterday. He said you guys were going out to Moitrie's on Friday. We might be out there, we're thinking about seven."
She stopped, straddling the bike, moved it over to the truck, and said, "I'll call Patsy. Maybe we can get a table together."
They talked for a minute about a snowmobile club that wanted to take out some unused field crossings, and the culverts that went with them, and if that would put too many snowmobilers on their road, and about the growing flock of crows that were hanging around, and how Morris had hired an exterminator to get the squirrels out of his attic-routine neighbor stuff-and then he said good-bye: "Talk to Patsy. See you out there."
THE PICKUP MOVED ON, slowly, paced by the bike for a hundred yards or so, and then pulled away. By this time, Washington was opposite the killer, then passing, and the truck was still there, moving slow as white paste down the highway, and Washington was farther and farther down, the crosshairs first on her head, but then the head shot became uncertain, and then on her back, on her white blouse…
The truck went over a low rise and disappeared. The killer glanced back: nothing from the other direction. But this wasn't as clean as the other killings, there could be somebody…
"Ah…"
White blouse in the scope, squeeze…
The shot was almost a surprise.
WASHINGTON FELT AS THOUGH she'd been hit by a meteor. She was down, and bleeding, in the ditch, her bicycle on top of her, and looked down and found blood gushing from her rib cage, and she began to crawl up the side of the ditch, not thinking, not knowing what happened, wondering if she'd been hit by a car. She began to grow weak, understood that she was going to die if something didn't happen.
One last push and she was on the shoulder, and she tried to hold herself together, tried to think, still not understanding, rolling up, blood on her hands, blood on her blouse, no car, what happened? She could hear herself making a growling noise, and felt the gravel on her face and under her hands, sticky with blood…
Some time passed, and she was mostly aware of the blue of the sky above her, and then the wheel of a car was right there by her head, and she heard the crunch of gravel. A face appeared in her field of vision, and she heard the man's voice:
"Jeez! Janelle! What happened, oh, my God," and she focused on Tom Morris's face and he was on his cell phone screaming, "We've got a woman hurt bad… bleeding bad… Get some help out here, my God, we need an ambulance, we need an ambulance…"
12
PRUDENCE BAUER HAD FIFTEEN or twenty sealed cardboard moving boxes full of her sister's life, consolidated in a back bedroom, and when Virgil opened the first one, he was hit in the face by a dusty lilac-scented perfume that smelled more like death than death itself. Two of the boxes contained papers taken from Connie's desk within a couple days of her death, including a diary, and an appointment book from the Louvre.
"Was she an art enthusiast?" Virgil asked Bauer, thinking of the museum membership cards he'd seen in McDill's wallet.
"No, not especially-she used to get those from the Barnes and Noble store up in Cedar Rapids. There's another one around, but I think it was on the theme of cats."
She left him sitting in a rocking chair, in the bedroom, on a braided rag rug, flipping through the paper and getting nowhere. She came back fifteen minutes later with a Diet Coke: "Found anything?"
He took the Coke. "Not so far. But it all helps: even if I don't see anything now, maybe something relevant will pop up later. It's a matter of getting the most information that you can, into your head."
"You know, you should look at the phone receipts, to see who she was talking to at the time. They're in here somewhere…"
She started digging through boxes of records, looking for the phone receipts, as he paged through the diary, which was fairly bland: who did what to whom, in Swanson, and none of the things done were dramatic, except that a man named Don left his wife, Marilyn, and moved to Marion, wherever that was, to be around a woman named Doris.
"Whatever happened to Don and Doris?" Virgil asked Bauer.
She looked up, her eyes distant, for a moment, and then she said, "I think they moved to Oklahoma. Lake Eufaula."
"So Don never got back with Marilyn?"
"No. Marilyn's still alone. Sometimes I see her standing in her window, looking out. She lives just down the street and around the corner," she said.
"Maybe she's looking for Don coming back," Virgil suggested.
Bauer looked at him and smiled: "That's going to be a long wait. Don and Doris are in love."
HE'D FOUND NOTHING at all when Bauer handed him a stack of phone bills: "There are four calls to northern Minnesota right before she died. Three to one number, one to another."
He took the bills, checked through them, copied the numbers into his notebook, held up the bills, and said, "I'd like to take these. I'll give you a receipt."
"I don't really need-"
"Legal niceties," Virgil said.
He was curious about the numbers, though, got on his phone, called the office in St. Paul, read the numbers off to Davenport's secretary, and said, "Get somebody to run those down. They're two years old."
"How soon do you need them?"
"I'll be back tonight. You could leave them on your desk, if you get them."
When he'd finished with the paper, he called Doug Wayne, the pilot, arranged to meet him at the airport. Bauer walked him out to the rental car, touched his elbow, and said, "I think you'll find him, whoever he is. When you asked about Don and Doris, that gave me confidence that you're interested in things."
Virgil nodded. "I will find him. I will run him down."
"And if you kill the sonofabitch, I would shed no tears at all."
"Why, Prudie," Virgil began, intending to shine the light of his third-best smile on her, but his phone rang and he fumbled it out, looked at the phone number, unknown, but from northern Minnesota. Like a cool breeze down his shirt: he punched up the phone and said, "Yeah?"
"Hey, this is Mapes…"
"I was gonna call you, man, but I'm down in Iowa. What happened with that shell?"