They rode in silence, and not a particularly companionable one, back into town. On the way, Virgil called the sheriff's department, talked to the duty guy: no Windrow.
"You think he's dead?" Zoe asked in a small voice.
"I don't know. But I'm not sure he's alive," Virgil said. He pounded on the steering wheel. "I need to do something. I need to do something. I'm not doing anything."
IN TOWN, at her office, Zoe brought up her computer calendar, found two names, recalled both of them, and said, "That would have taken me up past five o'clock, for sure."
"But that's not far enough, Zoe," Virgil said. "You could make it out there with no trouble, leaving here at five o'clock. Think! What'd you do afterwards?"
"I walked over to Donaldson's and ate-I don't cook very much, neither does Sig-uh, then, let me see." She sat back and closed her eyes. "I ate… but first I went over to Gables and bought a magazine and looked in some windows, because I like to read while I eat. Then, I got gas."
"Did you pay for it with a credit card?"
"Yeah."
"And that would have been around… six?"
She thought about it. "Just about six. Maybe a little later, because I might not have gotten out of here right at five o'clock. I usually don't. Let me think…"
Back to the closed eyes. After a minute, she said, "You know, I remember saying good-bye to Mabel that night. She came in to tell me something… mmm… I can't remember what, it was casual, but she would remember seeing me. Then I did work for a little bit. Mabel leaves at five o'clock-she acts as a receptionist as well as an accountant, so she's in charge of closing up at five. You know, I bet I didn't get out of here until five-twenty or so. So it might have been six-fifteen or even six-thirty when I bought gas."
She shook a finger at him. "Credit cards. I pay for everything with credit cards, because then I have a record. Most accountants do that. C'mon, let's go back to my place."
They got back at three o'clock, and she took Virgil inside, past a little niche office with a filing cabinet, to a closet. Opening the closet, she revealed a stack of plastic file boxes with the years noted on them, going back to 2005.
She said, "Constance Lifry was killed two years ago… you have the date and time?"
"Yeah. Let me get it from the truck."
He came back with his notebook, and they found the relevant box. She found her American Express and Visa bills, and they ticked off the charges.
"Here," she said. "I went to Nordstrom's that day, too. They don't open until eleven o'clock. They know me-they wouldn't take my credit card from somebody else. Look, I went to Target, too, and I bought a bunch of stuff… And the next day, I'm back…"
"You could have driven back by the next day," Virgil said. "But… these don't have exact time stamps on them."
"But they will have," Zoe said. "You can get them from Amex and Visa."
"I'm going to do that, Zoe," Virgil said. "Don't be bullshittin' me about this."
"Do it," she said. "Let's get it over with." And, she said, "You know I didn't do it."
THEY'D GOTTEN DOWN on their knees to search through the boxes, and now Virgil sat back on his heels and asked, "What gas card do you use?"
"I don't have one. I use my Visa," she said. "You can check that with a credit agency."
He thumbed through the Visa again, found charges for gas three days before Lifry was killed, and four days after. Nothing between. Of course, you could pay for gas with cash, though it never occurred to most people.
Huh.
He took his phone out of his pocket, looked up a number, and punched it up. It rang six times, and then Sandy, the hippie, said, "Virgil. Do you know what time it is?"
"Hang on a minute, I'll check," he said.
"Are you out on the town? I thought you were-"
"I'm up north, working a case," Virgil said. "Get a pencil. I need some information by the time I get up tomorrow, which will probably be about ten o'clock."
"I've got human osteology class at ten o'clock."
"So I'll call at nine-fifty," Virgil said. "We need to check the credit agencies for credit cards held by a guy named Slibe Ashbach. You got a pencil?" She did-he spelled the name. "And we need to see when and where he bought gas…"
He gave her the dates.
"Virgil, you know, you are a real treat," Sandy said.
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."