Mad River

13

Virgil finished up with the sheriff’s department, copied the McCall interview to his laptop, and left the recorder in the LEC evidence room. He had a Diet Coke and a conversation with the sheriff and the Marshall police chief, then called Duke. Nobody had any idea where Sharp and Welsh had gone. Deputies were running all over Bare County, and the adjacent counties, looking for the Townes’ truck, but nobody had seen it.

“I fear for what we’re going to find when we catch up to them,” Duke said.

“So do I,” Virgil said. “I have no idea of whether they’re north, south, east, or west. I wish I knew, because I’d like to be there when we do find them.”

After that, Virgil was at loose ends. Since he was there in Marshall, anyway, and because everybody had his cell phone number and would be in touch if anything broke, he called Sally Long. She answered on the third ring and said, “Virgil Flowers: you did call.”

“If you’re not real busy, we could get dinner,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe go over to the Six and catch a movie.”

“Or maybe just find someplace to talk about our feelings,” she said. And, into the silence, “Just kiddin’, there, cowboy.”

“Jeez, you scared the heck out of me,” Virgil said. “Every time I do that, I get divorced.”

He spent the next three hours at his hotel, much of it on the phone or the computer, keeping up. There was a long story about the murders, out of the Star-Tribune website, with profiles of the suspects; and more stories from Omaha, Kansas City, and Fargo. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis had picked up AP stories, which were rewrites of the Star-Tribune, but Los Angeles had a columnist on the ground. And television from everywhere.

Channel Three out of the Cities had video from a National Guard MP detachment showing soldiers loading up a bunch of Humvees, and the reporter said that most of the MPs had gotten back from Iraq that past fall, and had serious experience running checkpoints and roadblocks.

Virgil was mentioned in the Star-Tribune as a “top BCA agent and troubleshooter,” which meant that Ignace was sucking up to him.

The last part of his motel time he spent making himself pretty and swell-smelling, buffing up his cowboy boots and shaving again. After a last check, he headed out the door, not feeling particularly guilty about it, either.

Sally was living in a small blue house not far from the university. A young blond woman, perhaps twenty years old, came to the door, crunching on a stalk of celery filled with orange pimento cheese spread. She said, “You must be Virgil. Sally’ll be right out.”

“Who’re you?” Virgil asked, as he stepped inside. The house was neatly kept, and sparsely furnished, like a bachelor woman might do it.

“Barbara,” the woman said. “I’m a student. I rent the garage loft from Sally.”

Sally took another five minutes and Virgil sat on the couch and watched Barbara munch through another two stalks of celery-Virgil turned down the offer of one, saying, “We’re going out to dinner”-and found out that Barbara was studying studio arts. “The problem is, I don’t have any talent,” she said.

“That’s a good thing to find out,” Virgil said.

“The other problem is, I’m not interested in anything else. So, what do you think I should do?”

“Why’d you italicize the you?”

“Because I’ve asked everybody else, and they all give me bullshit answers. So see, I’m relying on you to give me a non-bullshit answer.” She crossed her legs, and cocked her head, waiting for an answer.

“Well,” Virgil said, after a minute, “I never wanted to be a cop, but I just kind of got there. I didn’t plan it, but I found out that it’s pretty interesting. So, if I were you, I’d look around for something that seems like it might be an important job, and just pick it. Even if you’re not too interested in the general subject matter right now, if it’s really important, you’ll get interested in it later, when you start learning the details of it.”

She peered at him as she gnawed down the second of the two celery stalks, then said, “That sounded less bullshitty than most answers. Not entirely un-bullshitty, but mostly.”

“Well, good, then,” Virgil said. “I passed.”

“Passed what?” Sally asked, as she came into the room from the back of the house. “Are we talking kidney stones?”

Virgil stood up and thought, Ooo, and pecked her on the cheek. She was wearing a silky black blouse and tight black jeans, tucked into cowboy boots with turquoise cutouts that looked like they were right off the prairies of New York’s Upper East Side.

“Talking about what Barbara should do in life,” Virgil said. And, “Great boots. You got horses?”

“Two,” she said. “The old man’s got a ranch west of town.”

They talked about Barbara on the way out to the Blue Moon, a steak house that wasn’t terrible. And they talked about horses, which Virgil didn’t know much about, except that they sometimes bite people, and that the French sometimes ate them with both red and white sauces. Then they talked about Barbara’s problem.

“You know, when I was in high school, I was going to be a lawyer and do great things for the Indian people,” Sally said. “When I got to college and started talking to people, I found out that there are more lawyers helping the Indian people than the Indian people can really use. So then I didn’t know what to do, and when I got divorced, I called my dad, and he said, ‘Come back here and run the business.’ I couldn’t think of anything better at the moment-I figured I’d do it for a couple of years and then go back to school-but now, I find out that running the business is pretty interesting. And I have fourteen employees who depend on me to do good, and I kinda like that. The responsibility. It’s the first time I feel like I’m really doing something.”

“You are doing something,” Virgil said. “One of the problems with these kids I’m chasing is that they never did anything. I’m not sure how much of that is their fault, but if they’d had something to do, other than sit on their asses, or shoot pool. . none of this would have happened. Maybe.”

“Everybody needs something,” she said. Then, “You know what? Everybody deserves something.”

They got to the steak house, were seated in a U-shaped booth, and ate salads and pork chops, and gravitated together until their thighs were touching under the table, and Virgil began to feel really warm.

When the waiter took away the main-course plates, Virgil asked, “You want some dessert?”

She put her hand around his wrist and said, “Sure. I’d like a little Flowers.”

He got her back to the motel, and on the bed, and pulled off her boots one at a time and dropped them on the floor, then pulled off the tight jeans, stopped when the waistline got down to her knees, and turned his head up and laughed, and when she asked, “What?” he started pulling again and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since eleventh grade.”

She surprised him and said, “So have I-been waiting for you to do it.”

The jeans came off, and so did everything else, and they got busy, and an hour later, she muttered into his shoulder, “Well, that was better than pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, even.”

“Far better?”

“Maybe not far better,” she said.

“Then we just gotta try harder.”

“I could do that.”

A while later, he said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”

She said, “I was too young. You weren’t, but I was. You were like a big goddamn dangerous thing, you had hormones coming out of your ears. You scared the heck out of me. In a good way, kinda-you’d get me so hot-but it just didn’t seem right. Then, of course, you jumped Linda Smith.”

That sat there for a minute, then Virgil, cornered, said, “True.”

“Was it worth it?”

He thought again, and then said, “Yes.”

That made her laugh, and she asked, “Whatever happened to Linda?”

“She married a rich farmer guy from over by Chamberlain. I think she works part-time for some kind of social services agency over there.”

“South Dakota?”

“Yeah. Jackie Bolt told me they’ve got a place that looks down on the Missouri. Supposed to be really pretty. I guess they spend their winters down in Panama. That’s what I heard. They go big-game fishing. They’ve got a sailfish in their farmhouse living room. In South Dakota.”

Then, since it was impossible to screw all the time, he told her about chasing Sharp and Welsh and McCall, the details of the various killings, and the problem of finding Sharp and Welsh; at the same time, stroking her nipples and other good parts.

“See, we know everything-we’ll convict them in one minute, when we get them to court. But we can’t find them. This country is too big.”

“But there are so many people looking for them.”

Virgil pushed himself up on an elbow, trailed a finger down to her navel, and said, “I was on another case that involved a guy out in the countryside. The thing is, he sold a bunch of dope to a dealer down in Worthington, and the Worthington cops got there about two minutes late, and this guy took off and the cops were chasing him. They chased him about fifty miles or so, before they caught him, and then he dumped his car and started running through the cornfields. This was at night, and they lost him.

“He was a Canadian guy, and what we found out later was, he decided to walk back to Canada. He broke into houses and a convenience store along the way, to get food. I got involved when he was somewhere up in Yellow Medicine. So I figured out, sitting in this motel, you could get about five hundred and eighty football fields, between the goal lines, not including the end zones, in a square mile. Yellow Medicine County, I happen to know, is about seven hundred and sixty square miles, because I looked it up. So that means you could have about thirty-five thousand football fields in Yellow Medicine. Could you hide in a football-field-sized patch of land out in farm country? Damn right you could. If the guy lay down in a ditch, you could walk right past him. You can’t even figure out how to find somebody who’s doing that. So we can’t find them. Becky and Jimmy. We don’t think they’re far away, especially with Jimmy being shot. But where?”

“What happened to the Canadian guy?”

“He got away,” Virgil said.

“Completely?”

“Completely. But he was a dope dealer, so he’s probably gotten to his use-by date.”

“You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

“Or rich enough to have quit,” Virgil said. “A few of them manage to do that. You see them sitting on their yachts down in the Caribbean.”

“I don’t think of Canadians as being drug dealers,” she said.

“They are,” Virgil said. “Generally, as a nation, they’re pretty depraved. At least, that’s been my experience.”

“See, that’s another thing I didn’t know.”

Now she sat up and asked, “Why don’t you cops have experts on chasing people? I mean, you’ve got experts on everything else.”

“Never thought of that,” Virgil said, studying her parts in an academic way. They were very good. “I mean, how would they get to be experts? What would you study?”

“You know-how people think when they’re running. Where they’d run to. How they’d think about it. That kind of thing. You know, psychologists.”

“Well, maybe somebody should,” he said.

Then they got involved again, and then they went to sleep-Virgil liked sleeping with women (the sleeping part), and so it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that his eyelids popped open and he said, “Ah, man.”

She twitched, and he groped around on the nightstand and knocked his wallet on the floor, and she woke up and rolled toward him and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Calling Stillwater penitentiary,” he said. He found his cell phone.

“At four o’clock in the morning? What for?”

He told her, and she said, “I’m flattered, but if you’re going to do that, you’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

“Pretty soon,” he agreed.

“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said. “You think. .?”

“I don’t have to leave immediately,” Virgil said.

Stillwater was the biggest penitentiary in Minnesota, and though it wasn’t the only one, or the closest one, it was the one with most of the experts. Virgil talked to a skeptical duty officer who, in any case, said he’d pass along Virgil’s request.

“Just get the warden to call me on my cell. He knows me. I’m going to assume that he’ll cooperate, and start that way.”

“I dunno. .”

“Get him to call me,” Virgil said.

At five o’clock in the morning, feeling fairly light in his boots, he and Sally shared a kiss in the cool morning air on the motel room’s doorstep, and he said, “I’ll try to get back tonight, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.”

“Catch the kids. When you come back, I want your full attention,” she said.

From Marshall, which was not all that far from South Dakota, to Stillwater, which was on the river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin, was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, assuming no hang-ups in morning traffic. Virgil left Marshall at five o’clock, took six or seven phone calls from various prison officials, including the warden, over the next three hours, and finally the warden called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re ready to go when you get here.”

“I’m hung up in traffic on 494 headed toward the airport,” Virgil said. “It could be a while.”

“You got lights and a siren?”

“Yeah, but that’d get me there about one minute sooner, and the noise would drive me crazy. I’ll just coast,” Virgil said. “Hey-thanks for this. It’s goofy, but it’s all I got.”

“I think it’s kinda interesting,” the warden said. “I read about what you did up in Butternut Falls. This is sort of like that.”

Stillwater prison sits on a hill in Bayport, Minnesota, a few miles south of the town of Stillwater, and why it wasn’t called Bayport prison, Virgil didn’t know; nor was he curious enough to find out. The prison was not a particularly welcoming place, but neither was it particularly grim. Virgil had been inside perhaps a dozen times. He called ahead two minutes before he got there, parked across the street, locked up his guns, and walked over to the administration building.

An assistant warden named Ron Polgar was waiting for him and escorted him to the warden’s office. The warden was a tall, thin, pink-faced man in his thirties, with steel-rimmed spectacles; a career correctional bureaucrat named James Benson, he could have been an accountant. He was notable for his adamant opposition to capital punishment, which Minnesota did not have, and would never have, if Benson had anything to do with it.

“Virgil,” he said, standing up as Virgil came into the office. Virgil said, “How you doing, Jim?” and they shook hands.

“You must be pretty much in a rush. .”

“Unless the Guard finds them this morning, which could happen,” Virgil said. “You got my guys together?”

The warden nodded. “We’re herding them into a classroom right now. We’ve got the projector and screen set up with a laptop. I hope you know Windows.”

“Yeah, I should be okay,” Virgil said. “How’d you pick the guys?”

“Talked to everybody,” the warden said. “Your requirements were peculiar-people from out in the rural areas, shitkickers, I think you said, willing to cooperate, fairly bright. And that’s what we got. Bright, but not exactly geniuses. We’ve got what, a dozen of them?”

“Eighteen now,” Polgar said.

“I didn’t want them to be really dumb, that’s all,” Virgil said. “I don’t need geniuses for this.”

“Got you covered,” Benson said. “They’re just run-of-the-mill. . shitkickers.”

“Excellent,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”

“Let me know what happens,” Benson said.

Virgil and Polgar processed through several locked gates into the secure area and walked over to a classroom, where the inmates were waiting under the eyes of two guards. They were an odd assemblage for the prison: for one thing, they were all white, which was unusual, even for Minnesota. They were dressed in a variety of street clothes, jeans and sweatshirts for the most part.

They all wore the same skeptical look on their faces.

Polgar nodded at the two guards and went to the front of the room and said, “Okay. Everybody pay attention. You’ve got an idea of why you’re here, and you know that there may be some pretty good benefits for taking part. If you change your mind and don’t want to take part, let us know, and we’ll take you back to your unit. Raise your hand if you’ve changed your mind.”

He held up his hand as an example, and the group stirred, but nobody else raised a hand. Polgar said, “Good. I’m going to turn you over to Virgil, here, and he’s going to tell you what we need, and then we’ll turn the projector on for a little show.”

Virgil stepped up and said, “Most of you come from out in the countryside, just like I do, which is where I got the idea to ask for your help. I’m sure you’ve been watching television and know our problem-we’ve got a couple of kids running around killing people, and we need to stop the killing.”

“You gonna kill them when you catch them?” one of the inmates asked.

Virgil wanted to be as honest as he could be, since he needed them to work with him. He said, “You know what happens in these situations. We’d like to take them alive, because we’d like to talk to them. But this is not robbery or burglary or car theft-these kids are crazy and they’re killers. This kind of thing usually doesn’t end well. A lot of the time, these people kill themselves rather than give up. Or they decide to go down shooting. I can’t tell you any different. We will do whatever we have to, to stop them.”

There was another stir through the crowd, a rustle of grunts and two- and three-word exchanges, and a few nods.

“So what I’m going to do is tell you the story, what happened, and then we’re going to the computer,” Virgil said.

He told the group everything he knew, from the murder of Ag Murphy to discovery of the Welshes and old man Sharp, and all of the rest of it, right up to the credit union robbery. He described the shoot-out in the street.

“Jimmy Sharp was hit in the leg. From the description we got, the slug didn’t break any bones, but messed up the outside of his thigh. It won’t kill him, at least not right away. They couldn’t go to a hospital, of course, so they went to an isolated farmhouse to look for medicine. . ”

He described the scene at the Towne house, and McCall’s description of sex on the bed, and the murder of Edie Towne.

“So then McCall took off with the Jeep,” Virgil said. “He called me on a cell phone and gave himself up. I arrested him, and he told us about the cornfield where he thought Sharp and Welsh might be hiding. Like I said, we’d already found that, but it made me think he might be telling the truth about the rest of it. But that’s all we know. What I’d like to do is for you all to think about that, and between us, we’ll try to work out where Sharp and Becky Welsh might have run to.”

“How would we know that?” one of the inmates asked.

“You can’t know, for sure,” Virgil said. “But I believe there’s a good possibility that if we all think what we would have done, we might come pretty close to what they’ve done.”

They talked it over for a while, and then Polgar fired up the computer and the projector, called up Google Maps, and threw up an aerial photo of Oxford, in which you could clearly see the roof of the bank. Virgil tapped the picture: “Here’s the bank. Here’s where the cop was. They came running out this way, to the waiting Tahoe-Becky Welsh was driving. After the shoot-out, they ran north.”

Virgil traced the killers’ route out of town, to the cornfield where they hid, and touched the Townes’ farmhouse. “From here, McCall ran further north, then east, and then north again, and then east, and then north.”

Polgar reduced the scale on the map, to include the entire route.

“I picked McCall up right here,” Virgil said, tapping the map. “Now, Becky Welsh kills Edie Towne and shoots Clarence, and she drives back up the road to the cornfield where Sharp is waiting. They know that McCall has run off. They don’t know why, but they must know that there’s a chance he’ll turn them in, so they can’t go anyplace that he might know about. They’ve got to go to someplace new. They’ve just got to invent this place.”

The problem had captured them.

A short thin man in the back row called, “They can’t go back toward town, or any place in a circle around the town, because there’s gonna be cops coming in from all directions. Did you know what kind of truck they stole from this guy?”

“Yeah, pretty quick,” Virgil said. “It hasn’t been seen since then.”

Somebody else said, “So they got off the road. They couldn’t go north, toward Bigham, because they’d figure that’s where all the sheriffs would be coming from.”

They all agreed that Sharp and Welsh would go sideways-east or west-out of the cornfield, probably turning at the first available road.

Virgil asked, “If it were you, would you go back toward Marshall? Remember, they’ve always been talking about going west, toward Los Angeles, but they killed two people in Marshall.”

“Didn’t you say that the ambulances and everybody were going to Marshall?”

“I did say that,” Virgil said.

“Wouldn’t they hear them?” the same guy asked.

Virgil looked at the map and considered. “You know, they might. It’s quite a ways, but it was pretty quiet out there.”

Somebody else said, “Nah. I had some cops coming after me one time, sirens and everything, and I never heard them until I saw the lights behind me.”

“Yeah, but, they gotta know that Marshall was going to be a hornet’s nest.”

After some more discussion, the inmates voted unanimously that Sharp and Welsh had gone east, toward the only country where they hadn’t yet done anything, or stirred anybody up. Since McCall might have betrayed them, they would have gotten off the big highway as soon as they could, and would have stayed off them: back roads only.

“Remember, the cops know what car they’re driving and it’s on television everywhere. They can’t go through any towns where people might see them. . Jimmy’s in pain and maybe bleeding still. He might not be able to go too far. They come from around there, and they do know the countryside.”

“So they go east, and never would jog north,” said a hulking blond in the front row. “They jog south.”

“Why is that?” Virgil asked.

“Look at the map. The Minnesota River comes slanting down across there, and they’d get pinned against the river. You can only cross it on main highways, and you said that they needed to stay away from where people could see them. Back roads only.”

They all looked at the map, and then somebody said, “Bob’s right.”

Somebody else said, “But they could be thinking of hiding out in the woods. Lots of woods around the river, all the rest is farmland.”

“They need to eat, they need maybe to see some TV, see what the cops are doing,” said the blond man. “No. I believe they’d jog south, and keep jogging south to get past those little towns around there.”

A very tall man with overgrown eyebrows said, “They gotta get off the road. I can feel that in my gut. Gotta get off the roads. Cops got helicopters, they’re looking everywhere. You could run for a while, but the longer you run, the more scared you’d get. Could you guys run for an hour? I don’t think I would.”

They all thought about it, and Virgil said, “I want to hear everybody on that. Think about what this guy just said. How long could you stand to run?” He pointed at a road, and traced it going east. “From here to here is one minute. From here to here is four or five minutes. These are sections, so each one is about a mile.”

The argument started and flowed around the group, and they started voting with shows of hands, at each intersection. But at each intersection, the possibilities multiplied, and it became apparent that there was no one solution-but there were other solutions that seemed, to the inmates, impossible. “You just can’t go there,” one of them said about a particular route. “You just run into too many people.”

They asked questions about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, to get an idea of what kind of people they were, and one man said, “I was kind of like them, up to the time I got caught. I’ll tell you what, they won’t go too far from home. They won’t get down into no strange country, where they don’t know how things work. They might try to go up to the Cities, since they been there, but too many people would see them. . I’d say, they might go over into the next county, but not too much farther.”

“I bet they go someplace down around I-90, thinking that maybe if things quiet down, they could make a break for it some night. Get a long way down the road, east or west.”

A couple of other inmates, who’d been silent up to that point, chipped in to disagree: people like Sharp and Welsh, they thought, might talk about LA, but they’d never go there, not when push came to shove. They might go to Worthington, or Windom, but it’d be unlikely that they’d go much farther than that, especially since Sharp had been wounded.

Eventually, after two hours, Virgil had three relatively small circles on the map of south-central Minnesota. Most of the inmates-there were always a few holdouts-thought they’d be in one or the other, and most thought that the middle one, one that bent to the southeast, would be the most likely.

The circle took in the southeastern corner of Bare County.

“I think we’re done,” Virgil said, looking at the map. “I appreciate the help, and I’ll tell the warden that, and anybody else who’ll listen.”

They all seemed pleased with that, and then the hulking blond man raised his hand and Virgil nodded at him.

“I’ll tell you something. Jimmy and Becky were partners, and Jimmy got shot. Tom McCall said they went to this house to get medicine, and she fucked him on the bed there. He’s lying. She wouldn’t fuck him like that. A woman wouldn’t do that. They’ll put out almost anytime, but they wouldn’t if somebody got shot in a bank robbery. That kind of thing don’t get women hot. It pushes some other button.”

“There is some evidence that they had a sexual encounter on the bed in the back,” Virgil said.

“I didn’t say they didn’t fuck, I said she didn’t fuck him,” the blond man said. “What happened was, he raped her. The thing is, a bank robbery, and a bunch of shooting, could get a guy all hot. Wouldn’t get a woman hot, not if somebody was hurt. Not if it was a friend.”

Half the crowd looked skeptical, and half looked like they might agree. The blond said, “Think it over. You’re McCall, you’re hot for this chick, but you’ve never been able to get to her. Here’s your last chance, ’cause you’re going to turn them in. What have you got to lose? They’re already gonna get you for a bunch of murders, what’s a little rape, even if they believe her? So, you fuck her. But she’s still trying to get away-get medicine, get back to Jimmy. She’s gonna take out fifteen minutes to fuck somebody after they just killed this farm lady, and somebody else might come at any minute? I don’t believe it. I believe McCall fucked her, but I think it was a straight-out rape.”

Again, the crowd was divided, but Virgil said to the man, “I know Tom McCall just a little bit, from having talked to him. I believe you might be right. He’s a fuckin’ weasel.”

“I am right,” he said.

“And I’ll follow it up,” Virgil said. To the rest of the group: “I want to thank everybody for your help. I’ll do whatever I can to see you get credit for it. And keep an eye on the TV. You’ll see how the story comes out, and whether or not you were right.”

Virgil, back on the street, called Davenport and told him that he was coming through St. Paul before heading back west. “Meet you at Cecil’s,” Davenport said. “I’ll buy you lunch and you can tell me about it.”