"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.