Mad River

4

They cleared the house, then Virgil told Duke, “We need to round up everybody in town who knew Rebecca Welsh and James Sharp, get them in one place so we can brainstorm with them. We need to figure out where Welsh and Sharp are, right now.”

Duke nodded, turned to a deputy, said, “Get those two girls we talked to, get them to name everybody who knows these people. We’ll meet up at the elementary school. . ” He looked at his watch. “At eleven o’clock sharp. Get Don Watson to open the place up.”

The deputy left, and Duke asked Virgil, “What else?”

“The neighbor’s house down the road has a car outside, but I didn’t see anybody there. We ought to check all the neighbors, make sure folks are okay.”

Duke said, “I’ll get that going. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll call the crime-scene people, get them over here, talk to the DMV and find out what James Sharp, the old man, drives, and get people looking at it.” He thought for a second, then said, “Then I’m going to call my boss. . And listen, I need everything you’ve got on those Friday murders in Bigham. Who’s working that?”

“Ross Price, he’s our investigator. I’ll hook you up with him.”

Virgil started with the DMV-James Sharp Senior drove a ten-year-old, extended-cab, silver Chevy pickup-and then called Davenport. “Jimmy Sharp and Rebecca Welsh hung with a bunch of people in the Cities. I’ve got one name you could call to find out exactly who that might be. . who else they know. I already spoke to her this morning, so she’s familiar with the situation.”

“You’re sure it’s Welsh and Sharp?” Davenport asked.

“It’s better than fifty-fifty. Sharp’s got a bad rep here in town as a bully who might sell a little dope. Welsh is his girlfriend. If you actually spot them up there, look to see if they might be driving his old man’s Chevy truck. I think the killers have it, whoever they are. Welsh’s folks’ car is still in their garage.”

“What’s your next move?”

“We’re having a seance over at the elementary school with everyone who knew Welsh and Sharp. If they’re running, I need to know which way they’re going.”

“Good luck with that,” Davenport said. “I’ll get things going here. Stay in touch.”

Virgil downloaded Jimmy Sharp’s and Becky Welsh’s driver’s license photos to his cell phone, and spent a few minutes looking at them. Jimmy was a kid who a lot of people would have said was handsome-he had the cheekbones and the squared-off chin, but there was something about the cast of his features that wasn’t quite right: he looked sneaky. Becky should have been pretty: blond, small nose, big eyes, but there was a disappointment about her face-a disappointment with life-that made her look sad, and a little too hard.

But then, he thought, maybe makeup could fix it.

The gathering at Gerald Ford Elementary School brought in about thirty townspeople, who were sitting on metal folding chairs, talking quietly among themselves, when Virgil arrived. Virgil had told Duke about the silver pickup, and Duke had called back to his office and had an alert broadcast through the local sheriffs’ association, which covered eight counties in the western part of the state.

Virgil was wearing the black sport coat and collared shirt he’d worn to church, which passed for fairly sober wear in a country town. He smiled at the crowd when he came in, with Duke trailing behind, and picked up a folded chair, shook it open, and planted it in front of the group.

He introduced himself, and Duke, and said, “Y’all may have heard what’s going on, here. We’re trying to find Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh. I can tell you that Mr. and Mrs. Welsh and the senior Mr. Sharp were all found shot to death. We haven’t been able to find Jimmy or Becky. We don’t know whether they were involved in the shootings, or if they might be victims, or maybe they don’t even know about them. Anyway, we need to find them, and since you all know one of them, or both of them, we were hoping you could throw out some ideas about where they might be, or might be going, or who we might contact to find that out.”

A square-faced man with straw-colored hair raised a hand and asked, “Isn’t it a little. . abnormal. . to be talking to everybody at once like this?”

Virgil said, “This is an abnormal situation. We were hoping that if you folks listen to each other, and mix it up a little, we’ll spark off some ideas. We’re brainstorming.”

A woman off to one side muttered, “I don’t know nothing about this.”

Virgil said, “Look, what kind of a kid was Jim? When you knew him? Who knew him best?”

Everyone looked around, and eventually most of them focused on a young man who stirred nervously and then said, “We used to hang out, some. Not like we were good friends.”

Virgil: “Was he a good kid, bad kid, middle-of-the-road?”

The young man said, “He was. . okay. . most of the time.”

Somebody snorted, then an older man said, “Oh, horseshit.”

That got them going.

Jimmy Sharp was a thin young man of average height, with long black hair and what one man said was “a joker’s face, like the joker on a playing card.” That seemed mostly to mean Sharp’s smile, which often formed itself into a sneer, usually with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

A man named Ralph, who identified himself as one of Sharp’s teachers through sixth grade, said that he’d begun bullying other children in third or fourth grade, after he’d been held back the first time. “He was one of those kids who just started getting his hormones early, and probably got whacked around by his father, and he never got along with books, and that all turned him into a little punk. His mother, whose name was Jolene, if I’m not mistaken, took off from here about that time, and hasn’t been back, as far as I know.”

The crowd agreed that she hadn’t been back, and that she was an O’Hara, and the whole family was gone now since Bernice died. None of them had ever come back, and Jimmy had no other relatives around.

“He used to hang out at the Surprise. Butch thinks he was stealing from there, but never caught him. He wasn’t smart in school, but he could be clever when he wanted to be,” Harvey said.

“What’d he steal?” Duke asked.

“Ask Butch.”

“I hate to accuse somebody,” said an old man in an old blue suit, with a thin, prairie-dried face.

“You Butch?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. Kids would come in, you know, steal candy, try to steal cigarettes or comic books, or get me looking one way, and steal a Penthouse from under the counter. I’d catch them, and call up their parents, and that’d end that. But Jimmy. . I never caught him because I think he was stealing food,” Butch said. “He’d hang around outside until I went to get something for somebody, and then he’d slip into the store and stick something in his pants, then go on over and look at the magazines and comics. I wouldn’t see him until he was right there, and I’d be watching him like a hawk, and he’d never take anything. But I think he was stealing. And I think he was stealing stuff like Dinty Moore stew. It seemed like I’d never sell that stuff, I’d never see it coming across the counter, but at the end of the month, it’d pretty much be gone.”

“But you hired him to work there. .”

“Yeah, against my better judgment. He got out of school and couldn’t catch on with anybody-not even the army wanted him-so finally I gave him a job,” Butch said. “He lasted about a month. He kept bumping heads with the other kids, and I had to let him go. I won’t tell you what he called me when I gave him the news.”

“You afraid of him?” Duke asked.

“No, not exactly. I never felt like he’d come after me, but I did think that there might have been a lot of reasons for him being like he was. . but, when all was said and done, he was sort of a bad kid. Just a mean, bad kid, who liked to see other people get hurt. Like I said, he might have had his reasons.”

“You know his old man?” Virgil asked.

“Of course. I know everybody in town. He was grown-up Jimmy Sharp.”

A woman said, “An asshole.”

Somebody else said, “That’s right.”

The crowd was getting into it now. “How about Becky?” Virgil asked.

“Wild kid,” somebody said. “She was going to New York or somewhere, to be an actress.”

“She was pretty,” somebody else said. “Had a face like an angel, when she was in grade school here.”

“She ever go to New York?”

“Nobody from here goes to New York,” Butch said. “They all come back to the Surprise.”

A woman stood up, jeans and a turquoise-colored blouse, with a piece of silver Indian jewelry at her neck. She’d been sitting next to a man with a long brown ponytail, and Virgil tagged them as the town liberals.

She said, “Jimmy and Becky are like a lot of kids from here-they’ve got no hope. There aren’t any jobs here, they’re not sophisticated enough or well-educated enough to move to the big city and work there, they see all these things on TV that they can never have. They give up. We don’t give them hope. We don’t even give them anything to work with.”

A heavyset man in a jean jacket said, “Come on, Sue. Plenty of good kids come from here. They just aren’t two of them.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Earl. Your boys are gonna get a farm that’s worth, what, right now. . three or four million dollars? All they have to do is drive a tractor long enough, and they’ll be rich. But most people here don’t have a farm to give to their kids. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Virgil jumped in: “That’s all fine, but we really can’t change the culture in the next couple of days. I need to know more about these kids-what they’re like, where they’re probably going.”

“All they ever talked about was going to Los Angeles and working in the movies,” a young girl said. “If I were you, I’d start looking around Sioux Falls or out by Mitchell. They’re probably on their way.”

“Not if they’re driving Jim Sharp’s Chevy,” said a broad-shouldered man with oily blond hair. “The gol-darned tires on that thing won’t get them past Marshall. Jim brought it in for gas last week, and the deepest tread was the tread-wear indicators. Tires are like paper and the transmission sounds like it’s made out of rocks. Won’t get them fifty miles, unless they find new tires.”

“Becky worked for a while over at a McDonald’s in Marshall-maybe they went there. At least she knows the city,” a woman said.

They Talked for a few more minutes, until the people began repeating themselves, and Virgil called it off. Out on the school porch, he said to Duke, “We’ve got a couple dead-enders with a gun. We’ve gotta find that pickup, Lewis. The problem is. . we might find more dead folks when we find the pickup.”

“I’ll get onto Marshall, have them check the place street by street,” Duke said. “And every other town for fifty miles around. We won’t be able to keep it quiet. We’ll start getting the media messing with us.”

“That’s not all bad,” Virgil said. “The more people spotting for us, the better. We’ll just have to put up with the bullshit that comes with it. Or really, you will-you’ll be the face on this thing, until we get them or there’s more shooting.”

“So maybe instead of sneaking around until they find out, we oughta just go ahead and bring the media in right away. Make an appeal.”

Virgil nodded. “Think about how you want to do that. We’re not even sure that these kids are involved. . but we do need to find them.”

“Let me think about it,” Duke said. “What’re you going to do?”

“Call people up on the telephone,” Virgil said.

Davenport, working the phones with a couple of other BCA agents, had tracked down Jimmy Sharp’s last known address, a room in a postwar house on St. Paul’s East Side. The owner, whose name was Ronald Deutch, had originally rented the room to another man from Shinder, named Tom McCall. McCall had let Jimmy and Becky sleep in his room for the week before Deutch kicked all three of them out for non-payment of rent.

“As far as we could tell, all three of them were effectively homeless,” Davenport said. “Deutch was renting them the room for fifty dollars a week, and they were two weeks overdue and couldn’t come up with even a night’s rent. They left there two weeks ago, and the landlord hasn’t seen them since.”

“So there might be three of them, instead of two,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. You gotta see what you can find on this McCall guy.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

Virgil had been working the telephone from his truck, where he could keep the phone plugged into the charger. He’d just hung up from the Davenport call when a man stepped up beside the truck and knocked on the passenger-side window. He was a thin man who wore a cowboy hat, a tan, western-style canvas sport coat, and rimless eyeglasses. Virgil ran the window down and the man said, “I’m Ross Price. I’m the-”

“Investigator,” Virgil said. “Hop in. We need to talk.”

Price got in and said, “Five dead. These kids have gone crazy.”

“If it’s them,” Virgil agreed. “I’ve talked to Duke about the murders Friday night, but I’d like to get the details.”

“I’ve been writing up everything. I’ve got files on my computer I could send you.”

“Do that. But just tell me what you’ve seen so far.”

Price looked out the window, scratched his forehead, then said, “It seems simple, but it feels complicated. I’ve never been the lead investigator on a murder where we really needed investigation. I’ve done two murders, but we knew who did both of them the minute we walked in the door. One was a bar fight, the other one was a domestic. But this one. .”

Virgil nodded: “I know what you mean. My first murder investigation, you know, a real investigation, I was so confused that I didn’t know if I was coming or going. But, after a while, it smooths out. So just tell me what you saw, and what people told you.”

The murder victim was named Agatha Murphy, shot in the head during what looked like a burglary gone bad. Or a robbery gone bad-Price wasn’t sure which it was.

“They came in like burglars. We think three of them, but it could have been two-the surviving witness wasn’t sure about that. At least one was a woman. But two men and a woman, that fits with what you’ve got going here.”

“Yes, it does,” Virgil said. “What kind of neighborhood was it? Was the house picked by chance?”

“I can’t say,” Price said. “They passed a lot of houses that looked as good as the O’Leary house. That had me confused. But now that it seems like these kids are from here in Shinder, it makes more sense. Mrs. O’Leary was from here in Shinder, and I guess she was flashing some expensive diamonds. . ”

Price repeated the story about O’Leary and her jewelry. He said one of the intruders apparently came in through a back window that had been left unlocked, and then opened a back door for the others. They’d crept through a sleeping house, eventually entering the front bedroom where two women, sisters, were sleeping. One of them, Agatha Murphy, was staying at her parents’ house after separating from her husband some months earlier. The other, Mary O’Leary, was a senior in high school, six years younger than Agatha.

“They came in the bedroom, said they were there to do some robbing,” Price said. “Ag Murphy-they call her Ag-got up in their face, and one of them knocked her down. That spooked them, and they ran for it. But before they went, the leader shot Agatha in the forehead and killed her. Medical examiner said death was instantaneous. Mary O’Leary says that Agatha was kneeling on the floor when she got shot, and was no threat to the killer. He shot her down in cold blood. Just. . nuts.”

Virgil: “Did they ask for money or jewelry?”

“Didn’t ask for anything. The leader said he was there to do some robbing, but then, the girl got on him, and he hit her and then shot her. Then they ran.”

“Can Mary identify them? Any way at all?”

Price shook his head. “The leader had a flashlight in their faces. Your crime-scene people couldn’t come up with prints, and we haven’t heard back about DNA but they weren’t too confident about that, either. They did find some denim threads on the windowsill, and some brown cotton threads that might have come from gloves. . so they were ready to do it.”

“The back window. . Did the O’Learys say why it was open?”

“They didn’t think it was. Everything else was locked. And I’ll tell you something-this is about the only bit of real detecting I’ve done: I saw that whoever opened that window pried it up with a knife, or maybe a screwdriver. A knife, I think. But I looked at all the other windows down that side of the house, and you know what? There’s not another knife-dent to be found. They went right straight to the open window and pried it up. It’s like they knew.”

“Nice piece of work there,” Virgil said. “Like the window had been spotted in advance.”

“The thing is, the windows have locking levers on both sides. They fold down to lock, up to unlock, but you can’t see what position they’re in from outside. You either knew the window was open, or you had to try them all. Or, you got a giant coincidence.”

“We got a saying about coincidences in the BCA,” Virgil said.

Price bit. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Nothing’s ever a coincidence, except when it is.”

“Jeez, I’ll write that down. That really helps,” Price said.

They talked for a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, “What I’d like is for you to do two things for me-hunt around Bigham and find out if Jimmy Sharp, Becky Welsh, and Tom McCall were staying there for the last week or so. They couldn’t make the rent in the Cities, so they had to be staying somewhere cheap, or free. Maybe with some friends? I don’t know. . But if you find them, have some backup.”

“I’ll put the word out. If they were there, we should know today,” Price said. “What’s the other thing?”

“Find out where Jimmy’s car is. It’s an old black Firebird, the DMV has the tags. They apparently drove here in the Charger and left here in the truck. So, where’s the Firebird? We can’t find his old man’s truck, either, so they might have a new set of wheels. . but maybe, maybe they went back to the Firebird. We really need to know how they’re traveling.”

“But if they had the Firebird when they hit the O’Learys’ house, why did they have to hijack a car?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder. .” Price scratched his forehead again.

“Yeah?”

“They go into the O’Leary house, planning to rob it. . I wonder how they thought they were going to get away? They couldn’t plan on finding a guy standing next to his car.”

Virgil said, “Huh.” They thought about that for a minute, then Virgil said, “Maybe they were planning to kill everybody in the house, and take a car. And panicked, instead.”

“Jeez. . you think? There were five people there.”

“But then, they’re nuts,” Virgil said.

Price left, and Virgil went back to the phones. He called the O’Leary house, now curious about the victims of the first crime, and found that Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband was with her. He talked to Marsha’s mother, Mary Hogan, who said that Marsha had been particularly friendly with two women from Shinder, classmates, Bernice Sawyer and Harriet Washburn, whom Marsha had known since before kindergarten.

“For Shinder things, they’d be the best ones to talk to,” Hogan said. Her voice had an elderly scratch to it, but tough and dry, like a woman who’d seen some death.

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

Virgil talked to Sawyer first. She was a thin, friendly woman with a big country kitchen. Her parents owned the local grain elevator, and her husband worked there. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about Ag being murdered. I thought, my God, what are they doing up there?”

Sawyer had gone to the class reunion, and the dance, and remembered that Becky Welsh had been working the food service, serving desserts.

“Marsha was wearing her diamonds. I don’t know how Becky could have missed them-the most diamonds anybody around here ever saw. Marsha did it on purpose. She had a couple of old rivals here, who wound up leading pretty modest lives, and she was. .” Sawyer smiled. “Sticking it to them, I guess you’d say.”

She’d never heard of a Tom McCall. “He doesn’t live in Shinder, and I don’t believe he’s ever lived here, because I know everybody who lives here,” she said.

When he was done with Sawyer, Virgil touched bases with Washburn, because he couldn’t think of what else to do, and Washburn confirmed what Sawyer had said. Becky Welsh had almost certainly seen the diamonds. Washburn, who also claimed to know everybody who lived in Shinder, agreed that there was no Tom McCall, either in the present or in the immediate past.

Virgil left Washburn, went out and sat in his truck; then called Duke, learned that Duke had been in touch with the local media, and had been called by both KSTP and Channel Three television in the Cities.

“You ever heard of a kid named Tom McCall?” Virgil asked. “About the same age as Sharp and Welsh?”

“There are some McCalls in the county,” Duke said. “I haven’t specifically heard of a Tom.”

“Get somebody to call around to the McCalls you know,” Virgil said. “There may be a Tom McCall running with Sharp and Welsh.” He told him what he’d gotten from Davenport.

“Got any more ideas?” Duke asked.

“I’m sitting here in my truck thinking some up,” Virgil said. “I’ll let you know as they come along.”

“Do that.”

Virgil called him back one minute later. “I just had an idea, though it’s slightly disturbing.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think you should call up all the rich people in town, and make sure they’re alive.”

There was a moment of silence, then Duke said, “Mother of God.”

“Yeah. These kids are flat broke, they don’t even have gas money, probably. They need money. They gotta be looking for it.”