Mad River

26

When Virgil got to Bigham, Murphy’s car had been taken to the sheriff’s impound area. Virgil went by Duke’s office and was told that Duke was out. The chill in the office was still deep, and a deputy named Jim Clark only reluctantly showed Virgil the car.

The car was a BMW 328i. The small blood spot was just below the headrest; Virgil could see no sign of a bullet hole. He had the deputy open all four doors, and without touching anything inside, he looked at the back of the headrest and then the backseat. There was no sign of a bullet exit hole on the back of the headrest, or an entrance hole on the backseat.

“What are you doing about the blood?” Virgil asked.

“Our crime-scene specialist is driving samples up to the BCA,” Clark said.

“Is Ross Price around?” Virgil asked. Price was the sheriff’s investigator.

“Somewhere,” the deputy said.

“I need to talk with him,” Virgil said.

The deputy closed the car and locked it, and led Virgil back inside. The dispatcher got ahold of Price, who said that he’d be back in ten minutes or so. Virgil went down in the basement, got a Diet Coke and a Nut Goodie, then waited on the steps outside the law enforcement center.

Price was prompt: just about ten minutes after he talked to the dispatcher, he rolled into the sheriff’s parking lot, and Virgil went over to talk to him.

“So how did all this come up?” Virgil asked. “Who figured out he was gone?”

Price said that late on Monday evening, Murphy had been seen at a local self-serve car wash, detailing his BMW. “We talked to a guy who saw him there, Lance Barber.”

“Friend of Murphy’s?”

“No. Lance is a baker, he works at Bare Bakers. He’s an older guy, must be close to seventy. He went through the fast wash, and saw Murphy down there. As far as we know, he was the last one to see him,” Price said. “He said he saw Murphy shining up his headlights with a rag when he went into the automatic wash, and he was just going through the drier when Murphy drove out the exit lane.”

That was that. Murphy didn’t go to work the next day, and didn’t answer his landline phone or his cell phone, either one. His father went around to his apartment and let himself in, and there was no sign of him.

“Then, we found his car parked down at Riverside Park,” Price said. “It was unlocked, and we found that blood on the seat. Our crime-scene guy, Bob Drake, took a blood sample, just to make sure it was Murphy’s, along with some hair and what looked like semen samples from Murphy’s bed for comparison. Then we locked up the car so your guys could really get into it, if it turns out to be Murphy’s blood, as I expect it’ll be.”

Virgil nodded, and then said, “And nothing since?”

“He hasn’t charged anything on any credit cards, hasn’t used an ATM, left two hundred dollars in cash in the top drawer of his chest of drawers. Hasn’t used his cell phone. Doesn’t have another car that we know of.”

“You think he might have faked it?”

Price hesitated, then said, “I’m not smart enough to figure out what happened. It’s all weird.”

“Just asking what you think,” Virgil said.

“What I think is, there’s some chance he faked his own death, and his old pal Randy White set up a hideout and picked him up. Then I asked myself, ‘Why would he do that?’ As long as Randy is gone, Dick’s not going to go to trial for murder. And then, there’s Ag’s money. He still hasn’t gone to probate with the will. . Everybody’s been waiting for that, because they’re talking about the O’Learys suing for wrongful death. Anyway, he’d be leaving that money behind, at least for now, and that’s not the Dick Murphy we know and love. So, that would make me think he didn’t fake it.”

Virgil nodded. “I could buy that. Unless, maybe, he knew that Randy was coming back.”

“But why would he leave the money in the chest of drawers? Why wouldn’t he have done a better job of getting out of town?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil admitted. “Unless Randy called and said he was coming back the next day, and he had to throw something together.”

“But. . would he be throwing something together, and then go out and wash his car so he could ditch it an hour later?”

Virgil said, “Hmm.”

“But here’s something that’s sort of in favor of it being a fake: I can’t figure out what kind of a killing wound would put that blood on the car seat, where it is. If somebody pointed a gun in the window and shot him, why wouldn’t we find some evidence of a gunshot? If he was stabbed, why would he bleed backward into the seat back? Why wouldn’t there be blood anywhere else? What it looks like, tell the truth, is like he cut his arm, and smeared some blood on the seat. We won’t know for sure until your crime-scene people start taking the seat apart.”

They walked over to Murphy’s car and looked in the window, but nothing really came to Virgil. Would the O’Learys have taken the situation into their own hands? Had Ag O’Leary had some other relationship that Virgil didn’t know about, and Murphy was killed by some unknown actor, in revenge? Could Randy White have been that relationship?

They looked at the spot of blood on the seat, and Virgil did not get the feeling that it was obviously a fake. What it was, was odd.

Virgil asked Price, “Am I still stinking up the place in the Bare County sheriff’s office?”

Price grinned and said, “Barack Obama would run about forty points ahead of you, if there was an election.”

“And Barack is not exactly in deep favor around here.”

“Not exactly,” Price said. “But there are a few guys who’ve been willing to say, privately, when the sheriff wasn’t around, that the thing wasn’t handled right. The Becky Welsh/Jimmy Sharp thing. I think one of them might take the sheriff on, in two years.”

“Does the sheriff know that?”

“Oh, hell no,” Price said. “Maybe it won’t happen at all. We’ll see.”

“Does Duke know you’re talking to me? Or do I have to be careful about mentioning it?”

“Oh, he knows,” Price said. “When you asked the dispatcher to call me, he called Duke first. Duke told him to call me in. . but he doesn’t want to talk to you himself.”

They thought about that for a moment, then Price asked, “Are you gonna take this over? The Murphy thing?”

“What can I do?” Virgil asked. “You’ve done everything I’d do. Maybe Crime Scene will turn up some DNA, and that’ll take us somewhere. Maybe we’ll find a body and that’ll tell us something. Or maybe he’ll show up.”

Price sighed and said, “You know, if Jimmy hadn’t gone up there with that gun. .”

“If Murphy hadn’t paid him to. .”

“Yeah. Well, hell. Stay in touch,” Price said.

Virgil stayed in touch for two weeks, until the DNA came back on the blood: it was almost certainly Murphy’s, because it matched hair, blood, and semen samples from Murphy’s bed. Murphy had taken no money from his bank account, never used his cell phone or credit cards in that time. Then more DNA samples came back, on the car, and they were all Murphy.

A crime-scene tech who’d taken apart the car seat said, “I don’t know how he was killed, if he was killed, but there was more blood there than it looked like. It wasn’t just a spot. He bled through the spot for a while, and it ran down the inside of the fabric. Not a whole lot, but it wasn’t just a wipe, or a smear.”

“So what killed him?” Virgil asked.

“I’m thinking aliens.”

“You mean like, Canadians?”

Then, a day after the second set of DNA samples came back, Davenport called.

“You’re not on the TSA’s no-fly list, are you?”

“I hope not,” Virgil said. “Where am I flying to?”

“Houston. By God, Texas.”

“Why is that?”

“I thought you’d want to talk to Randy White, who was picked up yesterday afternoon after a DUI stop.”

“Sonofagun,” Virgil said.

Virgil flew into George Bush Intercontinental Airport the next morning, and two hours later was interviewing Randy White at the Harris County Jail.

When a guard brought White to the interview room, Virgil asked, “Randy, what the hell happened to you?”

White sat in the chair on the other side of the interview desk and said, “I couldn’t deal with it anymore. You gonna take me back?”

Virgil said, “I don’t know.”

“I got a decent job down here.”

“You know about Dick Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. . I feel bad about it, but I just couldn’t handle it,” White said. “Everybody’s telling me that it’s my information that’ll send him up, but you know what? I really don’t know if he wanted to kill Ag. I’d be the one to send him up, but I don’t know. So I took off.”

Virgil looked at him for a moment, but saw no guile in his eyes. He asked, “You really don’t know about Dick?”

“Well, yeah: he got out,” White said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Virgil said. “What I meant was, he’s disappeared.”

“What?”

Virgil peered at him. White’s reaction was a little too dramatic. Off-key. “Goddamnit, Randy, if you’re lying to me, I’ll put you in Stillwater as an accessory to murder.”

“Virgil-when I took off, Dick was in jail, and I never been back,” White said. “I don’t know what happened up there. I don’t read the newspapers, I don’t have a TV yet. I just don’t know.”

“Did Murphy pay you to leave?” Virgil asked.

“No, no. I just couldn’t deal with it.”

“I’m gonna want to look at your bank account.”

Randy laughed: “And you’ll see that the most I’ve had in it is about a hundred dollars.”

“Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp in cash. He paid some guys to beat me up, in cash. So he’d give you cash.”

“But he didn’t,” White said. He brushed hair out of his eyes and said, “I’ll tell you, Virgil-I liked Ag. More than I should have, since she was my buddy’s wife. I never would have lifted a finger to hurt her, for no amount of money. If I really thought that Dick done it, I’d hang him myself.”

Virgil looked at him, and then asked, quietly, “You didn’t do that, did you?”

White said, “No! No. I been here since I ran away. Virgil, I been here every day. You can ask. I’m working on a roof-tile crew.”

But again, a little flat, a little off-key.

Virgil stared at him, and White stared back; they were locked up, and White never flinched. Something going on here, Virgil thought. He denies everything, but he’s defiant. Had he arranged for Murphy to disappear? But White wasn’t smart enough to engineer that. He wasn’t smart enough to get Murphy out of jail, and then kill him. Not nearly smart enough.

Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’m gonna call my boss and see what he wants to do. So, I’m going to ask the folks down here to hold on to you for a while. Give you some time to think about it. We’re talking murder here, and you’re involved in this somehow. If you’re hiding Murphy. .”

White shook his head and looked at the guard and said, “Let’s go. I’m tired of talking to him.”

He stood up and Virgil said, “You gotta think about it hard, Randy. This is a life-altering decision. If you really liked Ag that much. .”

Virgil trailed off, and turned his head to face the concrete-block wall. A thought prowling there.

The guard touched White on the shoulder, and they stepped toward the door that would take him back to a cell. As the guard opened the door, Virgil turned and called, “Randy!”

White turned to look at him, and Virgil said, “It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who paid you, didn’t they? It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who shipped you out of town so Murphy’d get out of jail. And then they killed him.”

White opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out for a moment, and there was panic in his eyes. Then he said, “No,” and “Fuck you,” and to the guard, “Let’s go. This guy is a crazy man.”

Virgil called Davenport and told him what he thought. Davenport said, “You don’t have one inch of proof, Virgil. You saw it in his eyes? Give me a break: You don’t even know that Murphy is dead. If he is, and an O’Leary did it, it could have been any one of. . How many? Four or five? Who are you going to hang it on?”

“Goddamnit, Lucas, I know.”

“Yeah. Well, both you and I know the biggest organized crime guy in Minnesota. We’ve both had long chats with him, and we’ve never touched him. Why is that?”

“No proof,” Virgil said.

“Exactly. Tell you what: get back up here. It’ll take a couple days to process the paper on White, and then I’ll send a couple guys down there to get him, if you still want him. You go talk to the O’Learys, see if you can shake anything loose.”

Virgil got a late flight out to Minneapolis and was home in Mankato by midnight. The next morning, he called John O’Leary and said that he wanted to talk with him and his children. O’Leary asked, “About what?” and Virgil said, “Dick Murphy.”

O’Leary said he, Marsha, Mary, and Frank could be there, but that the older three boys were all in the Cities. Virgil said he’d talk to the boys later.

“What’s going on?” John O’Leary asked. “Talk to them later? You think we had something to do with Murphy. . disappearing?”

“I found Randy White,” Virgil said.

“Yeah? So what? Does he know where Murphy is?” He asked the question with a hard edge in his voice. A real question, Virgil thought. If Murphy had been murdered, John O’Leary didn’t know about it.

“I’ll talk to you about that when I see you,” Virgil said. “Anyway, what’s a good time?”

After a moment of silence, O’Leary said, “Make it seven o’clock. I’m going to get the boys down from school. If you want to talk to us, you can talk to us all at once.”

Bigham Was a little more than two hours away, straight up the Minnesota River Valley, so Virgil had the best part of a day to kill. He caught up with his bills, filed expense reports, did some laundry, and caught up with a muskie forum on the ’net. When he was current with the world, he got the power washer out of the garage and power-washed the boat. It had last been in the Mississippi, and the Mississippi was now full of all kinds of weird flora and fauna, some of which hitched rides to other lakes and rivers in the scuppers of boats.

He’d just finished doing that, and was coiling the hose, when Davenport nosed into the driveway in his 911. “Out for a ride,” he said. A lame excuse. He looked at the boat and said, “You ought to call that The Governator, because of the way you got it.”

“Easy,” Virgil said. “I’m a little sensitive about that. So, you down here to give me a talking-to?”

“No, but I thought we might have lunch somewhere,” Davenport said. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue-checkered tie, the blue not coincidentally matching the color of his eyes. Virgil suspected the clocks on his socks would also match. “You can drive the Porsche, if you want,” Davenport said. “There may be women watching.”

“Mankato women don’t fall over for something as crass as a Porsche,” Virgil said.

Davenport shrugged. “That’s not my experience. Anyway. . you want to drive, or you want me to?”

Virgil took the keys: “On the off-chance you’re right.”

“What about your little sweetie in Marshall?”

“My little sweetie was too busy with work to go out last weekend. I have a feeling that we may be cooling off,” Virgil said.

“But you’ll still be friends.”

“Sure.”

“Good work,” Davenport said. “Keep them as friends, and there’s always a chance you’ll pick up a piece of charity ass sometime in the future when you need it.”

“If Weather heard you talking like that, she’d slap the shit out of you,” Virgil said.

“True, but Weather isn’t here,” Davenport said. “Listen, are we going to stand here and bullshit, or are we gonna get lunch?”

They went to a diner, and got the usual, for Minnesota, which was the New England equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner, both of them going with Diet Cokes. “The thing about Diet Coke,” Davenport said, “is that nice chemical edge to it. It’s like drinking plastic.”

“And it’s non-fattening,” Virgil said.

Davenport: “You’re not going to get the O’Learys, Virgil. They’re probably as smart as you are, or nearly so. If they took out Murphy, they did it right. They’re the kind of people who know all about DNA, and fingerprints, and all of that. They took their time to plan it. If what you’re telling me about them is true, you can bet your life they won’t turn on each other.”

“Maybe I can turn White. .”

“If you turn White, and he says they paid him to disappear, you’d have to prove they knew that would end the case against Murphy, and that Murphy would make bail, and they did that explicitly to give themselves an opportunity to murder Murphy. Their side of the story would be, they realized that Murphy was probably innocent, and they thought they might as well end the agony for the husband of their late, much-loved daughter.”

“They couldn’t say that with straight faces.”

“But a lawyer could,” Davenport said. “The other thing is, you’re about to take on a clan of doctors. You know how hard it is to get doctors to practice in a place like Bigham? I bet that if you got a jury down there, even if they thought some O’Leary did it, they wouldn’t convict. They just wouldn’t do it.”

“Lucas. . you’re saying they’re going to get away with murder.”

“They will, if they did it. I’m not sure that they did it, and neither are you. You know your case against Murphy? That was ten times stronger than anything you’re likely to get against the O’Learys. You don’t even have a body. A jury won’t be sure, not given all the circumstances. You have one chance: that somebody confesses. What do you think the chance of that is?”

Virgil rubbed his forehead and admitted, “Slim and none.”

“And Slim is out of town,” Davenport said.

They ate for a while, and then Virgil said, “So you came down here to tell me to ditch the whole thing.”

“Nope. You have the best clearance record that anybody ever heard of, and I’d never tell you to stop,” Davenport said. “I just came down to tell you how it is. You won’t get them.”

Virgil: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Davenport looked around the cafe with its red leatherette counter stools, big men in coveralls, waitresses with beehive hairdos, then down at his plate of sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, and cranberry sauce, all covered with cream of mushroom gravy, and said, “No. It’s sure as shit not Chinatown, Virgil. It’s just life.”

They thought about that for a bit, then Davenport asked, “What’s going on with the guys who beat you up?”

Virgil shrugged. “Nobody’s wanted to go to trial. The state guys don’t want to resolve anything until we figure out what happened to Murphy, and McGuire and Atkins apparently think that the more confused things get, the more likely they are to get a better deal. So. . it’s still out there.”

“So everything’s settled except the O’Learys. . as much as it’s going to be, anyway,” Davenport said.

“Yeah.”

They ate some more, then Virgil said, “I’m going to Bigham tonight. I’m going to take a shot at them. Just see if anything falls out.”

“God bless you, man,” Davenport said.

Davenport dropped Virgil at his house and said, “Watch the weather service. There’s some bad shit coming in from Nebraska.” Then he was gone, moving fast in the 911.

Davenport was right. Bad shit coming down.

Virgil saw it on his computer, the weather radars all across the northern plains. A line of thunderstorms showed up in a crimson streak from western Kansas to eastern North Dakota, and the fattest part of the bowed-out line of supercells was aimed right at southwest Minnesota.

He called his father to tell him to keep an eye on it. “We’ve been watching it coming since yesterday,” his father said. “This is a nasty one.”

Virgil packed his Musto sailing suit in the back of the truck, just in case, and at three o’clock took off. Fifty miles east of Bigham, the sky turned cloudy, with the downward bumps of mammatus clouds; never a good sign. The wind picked up, and the clouds overhead were churning like whipped cream in a blender, but there was no rain. That would come, Virgil thought, but not yet.

He was dry all the way to Bigham. Beyond Bigham, though, the sky was a dark wall of cloud, and the cottonwood trees in City Park were whipping and twisting in the wind.

Virgil was early. He checked into the same hotel where he’d spent his time during the hunt for Sharp and Welsh, went up to his room, and turned on the television. The Sioux Falls weather radar showed the storm plowing toward Bigham: the leading edge of the heaviest band was ten miles to the west and the weatherman was screaming about wall clouds and the hook signature.

There’d been two confirmed tornadoes out of the system, and a third one was suspected. Virgil called his father: “What’s happening there?”

“It’s something else,” his father shouted into the phone. “It’s a hurricane out there, and a light show. No damage, though. We’ll be out of it in twenty minutes. There’s supposedly a tornado down south of us.”

“Call me if you have a problem. I’m in Bigham.”

“Bigham? Virgil, this baby is coming right at you.”

Virgil got off the phone and went and looked out the window. He couldn’t see much, but the window was rattling in its frame from the wind; then the rain came, a violent, pounding downpour that would last less than an hour, but might dump two or three inches of rain.

Virgil looked at his watch: six o’clock. He’d meet the O’Learys in an hour, but if there was a tornado out there. .

There was.

With the weatherman focusing on the hook at the southern trailing edge of the supercell, he watched it as it skimmed a few miles south of Bigham and continued to the northeast.

A tornado’s hard to track; an exact track usually can’t be done until the next day, when the tornado guys look down at the track from the air. But looking at the weather radar, the small oval area of the supposed tornado appeared to run right over the town of Victoria Plains, which was eight miles south of Bigham.

Virgil watched the radar, listened to the rain, heard an ambulance scream by, and then another, and then a couple of cop cars. The weatherman had no specific information, so Virgil called the Bare County sheriff’s office, identified himself, and asked the dispatcher if there was a problem.

“There is,” she said. “VP took a direct hit, and it’s a big storm. They’re saying the whole town is torn apart.”

“I’ve got lights, siren, and a 4Runner. You think I should get up there?”

“You probably should,” she said. “We’re calling everybody for help. There’s some farms got hit, too, but we don’t have any direct reports yet. Throw everything out of the truck except the first aid kit. You might be needed to transport people back to the hospital.”

Virgil was on his way in five minutes; he’d taken thirty seconds to pull on the Musto pants and jacket, and another two minutes to haul his gear out of the truck and up to the hotel room.

He couldn’t see it, but the sun was low in the sky, and it should have still been broad daylight. As it was, it looked like three o’clock on a cloudy winter day, not quite dark, but not quite light, either; the rain was coming so hard that in places, the water ran over the curbs of the street and down the sidewalks. The truck shuddered with the impact. There were trees down in City Park, and a power company truck headed fast to somewhere-no lights on the north side of town-and then Virgil cleared the town and headed south, following the nav system through the pounding rain.

Victoria Plains-VP-was an ordinary farm town of a thousand people or so, implement dealers and grain silos on the outskirts, with a compact little business district, now half emptied by the two big-box stores in Bigham. There were rows of small prairie houses spreading in uneven blocks out from the central district, with an orange-brick elementary school just off Main Street.

Quite ordinary an hour earlier; now it looked as though a giant had stepped on it.

Virgil passed an ambulance coming out of town, running with lights and siren. A few minutes later, another went by.

The first houses Virgil saw were half-wrecked, and he realized, looking out in the dimming light, that all around them were foundations from houses that simply were no longer there. A man was running down the street through the rain, waving his arms. When Virgil stopped, the man looked at Virgil and said, “You’re not an ambulance.”

“You need one?”

“Yeah-if you can get. . You gotta go around. .”

“Get in,” Virgil said.

The man wasn’t wearing rain gear; he was wearing an athletic jacket and jeans and running shoes, and sputtering with the rain he’d absorbed. He said, “Go that way,” and Virgil went that way. The man said, “There’s a house down. They think a kid is still inside. I don’t know, he’s probably dead.”

Virgil didn’t have anything to say to that, and the man said, “We saw it coming. Thank God, we saw it coming. I think most people made it down the basement.”

They traveled in a jigsaw route along back streets and down an alley, ran over electric wires a couple of times, dodged downed trees, and then the man pointed at a crowd of people working around what must have been an old Victorian house. The man got out in the rain and said, “Let’s go,” and he darted off toward the downed house.

Virgil zipped up the rain jacket and got out, pulled the hood up against the rain, and ran over to the house. A line of men were prying away pieces of siding and structural lumber and beams, and throwing them aside. When Virgil asked what they were doing, the man ahead of him said, “We can hear the kid. Four-year-old.”

They threw lumber for ten minutes, then a big fat man suddenly disappeared into the hole they were making, and a couple of people yelled, “Take it easy, Bill, take it easy. .”

Another man near the hole said, “He’s got him. He’s got him. He’s alive.”

A minute later, the fat man popped out of the hole, holding a kid like a rag doll. Then he bundled the kid in his arms and said, “Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the fuckin’ ambulance.”

Virgil yelled, “We’ll take my truck. We’ll take my truck.”

The men carried the kid down to Virgil’s truck and laid him in the back, and another man crawled inside with him, and the fat man yelled, “Down to Ericksons, everybody who can make it. Down to Ericksons.”

Virgil turned the truck, hit the lights and siren, and took off.

VP was eight miles south of Bigham and the Bigham Medical Center, which Virgil knew well. He made it in seven minutes, the truck rocking in the wind and the rain, while the man in back shouted, “You gotta hurry, you gotta hurry.”

At the medical center, two people ran out into the rain with a gurney and lifted the kid aboard. One of the two was Frank O’Leary, the youngest of the boys. He apparently didn’t recognize Virgil, wrapped in the Musto suit, and the two of them pushed the boy off into the emergency room.

The guy who rode with Virgil shouted, “We gotta go back.”

Virgil made three trips, the two ambulances seven or eight more. On his last trip, Virgil took a woman who might have had a broken hip, in the back, while an elderly man, who’d ripped his hand on a nail, rode in the passenger seat.

VP was still a mess, and people still roamed the town looking for dead, injured, and missing, but mutual-aid cops and ambulances were flooding in, and a disaster headquarters was operating, and Virgil wouldn’t be needed again.

The old man told Virgil he’d gotten hurt dragging broken lumber off a downed house, where they were looking for another old man who lived alone. They hadn’t found him. The old man with the ripped hand said, “That sonofabitch is trying to get out of our golf game,” and then he started to cry.

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come, and the wind was gone; Virgil could see stars down toward the horizon.

When they got to town, Frank O’Leary came out with the gurney to get the woman with the hip, and Virgil realized that the woman helping him was his sister, Mary. Virgil led the old man inside, attracted the attention of a nurse, who looked at the old man’s hand and took him away.

Before she went, she said, “There’s coffee and cookies just down the hall.”

Virgil went that way, and got a cup of coffee, and because there were plenty of cookies, took six. Then he went back in the hallway, toward the entrance, then stopped to watch the emergency reception area.

There were several gurneys and beds with people on them, and he saw Jack O’Leary, the med student, taking notes from a woman who lay propped up on a wheeled bed. He was nodding as he took notes, and then he stood up, said something to her, patted her on the arm, and moved on to another bed.

A moment later, John O’Leary came out of the back part of the ER, what must’ve been an operating room. He was wearing an operating gown with a spot of blood on the belly of it. He stepped over to Jack and asked him something, and Jack pointed to one of the beds, and John O’Leary went over to look at the patient.

Another of the O’Leary boys showed up, dressed like his father; what he’d been doing, Virgil had no idea, but he was wearing an operating gown and booties.

Wu, the doc who’d treated Virgil, came out of the back and called something to John O’Leary, who turned and went after him.

Virgil watched it all for another five minutes, and then when they were all occupied, slipped out the door.

Ten minutes later, he had his gear out of the hotel and back in his truck: they needed all the rooms they could get, and he wasn’t that far from home; or, he could go into Marshall, which was pretty convenient. If he went to Marshall, he could be back in Bigham early the next day.

He drove out to the highway, to the stop sign, looked both ways.

He could be back the next day, to interview the O’Learys. The emergency would be over by then.

Or he could say, “Fuck it,” and go home.

Let it go.

If the whole crew of O’Learys had resurrected one person, one kid, from the calamity of Victoria Plains, that would make up for any number of Murphys, wouldn’t it?

Well, no, Virgil thought, it wouldn’t. The O’Learys, he was convinced, had violated one of God’s own natural laws: Thou shalt not kill.

On the other hand. .

Virgil sat at the stop sign for five minutes, staring blank-eyed into the night. Remembering all those O’Learys, dark-eyed, bright, hardworking kids, hovering over the mass of injured and dying, doing what they’d been so well programmed to do. Would the knowledge of their crime be enough punishment? Would it haunt them down through the years?

What to do?

Five minutes.

Then Virgil sighed, said aloud, “Fuck it,” and turned toward home.

The next day, the weather guys flew over what would be known as the Victoria Plains F4, the biggest tornado of the year in Minnesota. It had been on the ground for almost forty miles, knocking over a few farmhouses and outbuildings here and there. The storm killed twelve people in VP, and injured forty-odd more.

The track itself looked a little like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a pig. The southwestern tip showed a few downed trees, some messed-up fields; then the path got wider, and the damage more extensive. Then the trail got really fat, and in its fattest part, whacked Victoria Plains. After VP, it went off to the northeast, slimming down, and then, twenty miles farther along, lifting off the ground altogether.

The weather guys would have needed God’s Own Camera to see it, but just where the trail had started to get fat, right at the head of the pig, the tornado had crossed a cornfield owned by a man named Alex Brown, and then barreled into an old woodlot, long neglected and overgrown with trees, brush, and not a little wild hemp; ditch-weed; marijuana.

If they’d had God’s Own Camera, and had been able to see through the tangled mess of downed timber and layers of shredded brush, they might have seen the outline of a carefully dug grave, unexpectedly disturbed by the tree roots wrenched from the wet earth. And now, sticking up from between the roots of a dying marijuana plant, a few fingers.

One with a heavy gold wedding ring.

Dick Murphy.

Pushing up weed.