Mad River

6

Virgil spent a fruitless Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone-people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.

The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.

Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”

“It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”

At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.

A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.

“I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”

“Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”

“That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”

Virgil drove northeast to Bigham, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.

Still cold.

It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck, though-even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.

He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.

The key thing about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.

They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.

“Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He. . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away. .”

“So. . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are. . you know. . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her-I’m sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”

She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know. . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.

“I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”

As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.

When he’d wrung her out, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.

“They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”

When Virgil went back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.

“We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now-it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and it’s what I would have done.”

“So it’s all coming down to the truck,” Virgil said.

“We got some media on the way,” Duke said. “We need to figure out who’s going to talk.”

“Not me,” Virgil said. “We usually leave that to you elected guys.”

Duke nodded. “Good enough. What are you going to do?”

“Just wait,” Virgil said. “There’s not much more to do. They’ll pop up, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Tomorrow. I just pray to God they don’t kill anyone else.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I think there’s a good chance that they will,” Virgil said. “I think there’s a good chance that they already have-they parked that truck in somebody’s garage, and that somebody is already dead, and they’re on their way to Los Angeles.”

“Now what?”

Virgil said, “Well, I’m here. I think I’ll go talk to a couple of O’Learys. The other guy who got killed. . Emmett Williams? You know where I’d find his people?”

“His sister lives here, he was staying with her. I’ll get her address if you want it, but that looked to us like a killing of opportunity. They were running and he just got in the way and got shot down. I don’t think there’s much in it, for you.”

“Probably not,” Virgil agreed. “But what else am I gonna do?”

Virgil got addresses for the O’Learys and Williams’s sister, and got them spotted on a city map by the sheriff’s secretary. The O’Learys lived out from the center of town, on a ridge overlooking the river; Williams’s sister, whose name was LuAnne Rogers, lived in an apartment building on the edge of the downtown, a few blocks from the courthouse. Virgil drove over, parked in front of a hardware store, and walked back across the street. Rogers’s apartment was over a bridal and prom dress shop. Virgil climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

The door was opened by a small boy, maybe five. “Your mom home?” Virgil asked.

A woman called, “Just a minute,” and Virgil heard dishes clattering, and then a lanky good-looking black woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Can I help you?”

“I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I want to chat with you about your brother, if you’re Miz Rogers.”

“Yeah, I am. Come in.”

Virgil stepped inside, and the woman said to the boy, “You go on and play your game. I’m putting you on the watch, one half hour.”

The boy scuttled away, and the woman said, “He’s got a Wii skateboard game.”

Virgil said he was sorry about her brother, and asked if she knew, or if any of her friends might know, if there was any connection between Williams and Sharp, Welsh, or McCall.

“That’s the first time I ever heard those names,” she said. “You know who did it?”

Virgil said, “Maybe. We’re looking for three young people, two men and a woman. You’ll be hearing about it on TV.”

“I don’t allow much TV in here,” she said. “And if I don’t allow Brad to watch it, I can’t watch myself. But I guess I’ll make an exception.”

She said again that she hadn’t heard of any of the three. “Emmett was here for two weeks, and he was going back home next week. He really didn’t have time to meet anybody up here.”

“Where’s home?”

“Kansas City. He’d been hassled around by his ex-wife down there, and he came up here to get away for a while. Then. .” She teared up a bit, and wiped the tears away. “Emmett and I weren’t real close. He was seven years younger than I am, and. . we just weren’t that close.”

She said her husband, Bradley Senior, was a plant engineer who installed computer-assisted wood-cutting machines and designed production lines, and was doing that at a local furniture factory. They’d been in town for six months and would be there for another three, and then would move on to the next job.

They talked about Emmett, and about growing up in Kansas City. Virgil decided after a few minutes that she had no real information. When he stood up to leave, she said, “I hate to ask you this, because this is all so terrible. . but, our car?”

“I’ll try to get it back to you quick as we can,” Virgil said. “I just can’t promise when that’ll be. Do you have some other way to get around?”

“The company rented us a car, but we’d like to get our own back. It’s pretty new.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Virgil promised.

Rogers had been straightforward about her distance from her brother, and though she was saddened and depressed by the killing, she was dealing with it. The O’Learys were a different matter.

Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was still in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband, John, was at home when Virgil arrived, taking a break from the hospital vigil, replaced by Marsha’s mother. The surviving daughter, Mary, and four sons, Jack, James, Rob, and Frank, were scattered around a large living room and dining room. Jack was playing light jazz on an upright piano, sounding quite a bit like Harry Connick Jr. Virgil could imagine sitting on the front porch on a moonlit night, spooning with a young neighborhood lady, while Jack’s piano tune trickled through the screen door. .

Virgil had called ahead, and Mary had met him at the door. She was a square-shouldered young woman of medium height, probably not yet twenty, with dark hair and large, dark, direct eyes, wearing two sparkly diamond studs at her ears. She had dark circles at her eyes and her nose was red, from crying. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans.

John was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, and the four boys came in as Mary introduced Virgil to her father. All of them had curly dark hair, conservatively cut, with dark eyes and broad shoulders. They were a bunch of good-looking, athletic Irishmen in sweatshirts and jeans and moccasins, with an easy air of money about them; and an ugly bitter air of tragedy.

“Why did this happen?” John O’Leary asked. “We’re the nicest goddamn people on the face of the earth.”

Virgil shook his head. “I’d tell you that it happens all the time, except that it doesn’t. It’s pretty rare,” Virgil said. “Random killings are just. . incomprehensible. We’ve got an idea now who did it, two or three loser kids from Shinder. They apparently knew your name, knew you were well-off. . they got desperate. That’s what we think.”

He told them what he knew about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, and the oldest three of the boys knew of Sharp and Welsh, and vaguely remembered McCall. “Didn’t really know them,” said Jack. “Jimmy Sharp was a year behind me and a year ahead of Jim, I think.”

Jim nodded and said, “That’s right. Becky was a year younger than me. Everybody said she was kind of a punchboard, but I never knew her well enough to know that. McCall was in there somewhere. He was one of those guys you don’t remember very well. . kind of joked around, but the jokes were always pretty lame. Maybe he was in the same grade as Becky? I don’t know. You think they really did it?”

“It looks that way,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that it’s McCall and two others, and they killed Mr. Sharp and Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because McCall knew them. . but I think it’s probably Sharp. And Becky Welsh.”

The three older O’Leary boys were in college-Jack in medical school, the other two in pre-med, all at the University of Minnesota. Mary was a senior in high school, Frank a sophomore. Ag had been the oldest of them, and, they said, probably had not known any of the suspected killers.

Frank said, “If Ag had gone to med school instead of getting married, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had that temper, if she’d just been quiet. .” And he sobbed once, stuck a knuckle in his mouth and turned away, and his father patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s not Dick’s fault,” John O’Leary said to Frank. Virgil hadn’t known that Ag was married; he assumed that “Dick” was her husband.

Mary: “If he’d taken better care of her, she wouldn’t have been here.”

“And then maybe it would have been you that got killed,” Jim snapped.

Virgil broke in: “Trying to backtrack a trail of what-if’s. . everybody does it, but it doesn’t help. The trail gets too twisted up, and you wind up damaging people who really don’t need it.”

Rob said, “We know that. We’ve even said that.”

Jim said, “But we keep doing it anyway.” He glanced at his father, then said, “Excuse the language, but it’s because Dick is such a. . dick.”

Virgil talked to them a bit more about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, but none of them knew of any direct connection between themselves and the three suspects, except that their mother, Marsha, and Sharp and Welsh all came from Shinder. “But Mom left Shinder before they were even born.”

Virgil nodded, but didn’t mention the diamonds worn to the reunion; it would just be another cause for unwarranted backtracking, and sleepless nights.

Instead, he said, “So tell me about Dick.”

Dick Murphy was a couple of years younger than Ag, but they’d both gone up to the University of Minnesota, where they’d dated, had become serious, and eventually, after Ag graduated, had married. Dick’s father ran an independent insurance brokerage in town, and Dick quit school after three years to go to work as a salesman.

“They’re pretty rich, Dick’s whole family,” Rob said. “Dick was a running back on the football team, pretty good, he was always bombing around in those Mini Cooper cars in high school, and then he got a BMW when he went to college. You know, he’s a sales guy-he talks good and he looks good, but he’s sort of a dick.”

“He really loved her, I believe,” John O’Leary said. “I wouldn’t have let them get married if I didn’t believe that.”

“Dad. .” Mary said. She seemed fondly exasperated.

“You don’t think so?” John asked. His tone of voice suggested that he had his own doubts, Virgil thought.

“In his way, maybe,” Mary said. “Ag was hot, and we’re pretty rich, too, and Dick sees himself driving around in a convertible with a hot rich chick. But I think it could have been some other hot rich chick, and he would have been just as happy.”

“I’d like to know more about how she lost the baby,” Jack said.

“He didn’t have anything to do with that,” Mary said. “If you’re thinking. . He didn’t.”

“Didn’t want it,” Jack said. “He almost told me so. He had it all planned out. First they’d get a boat, then they’d get a cabin, then they’d get a time-share at Park City. . then maybe they’d get a kid. Like when they were fifty.”

“Ah, jeez,” Mary said. “So he’s a dick. But he still didn’t have anything to do with the baby.”

They all sat around and looked at each other for a minute or so, then John said to Virgil, “Dick didn’t have anything to do with this. He’s not a bad guy.”

Jim: “Except that he’s a dick.”

“I’m perfectly willing to believe you, that he’s not a bad guy,” Virgil said to John. “But let me ask one last ugly question, and then I’ll leave it alone.”

“What you’re going to ask,” Jack said, “is, ‘Did Dick, the dick, get anything out of her death?’ And the answer is, ‘Uh, yes.’”

John said, “Jack. .”

Jack said, “The cop wants to know, Dad.”

They reminded Virgil of his relationship with his own father: fond, but contentious. Virgil said, “So tell me about it.”

Rob said to Virgil, “The day we’re born, the old man sends a check to Fidelity Investments for the full exempt gift amount, for that year. Then he sends another check every birthday, every year. We were all told from the time we were old enough to understand it, that this money was to pay for our graduate school. It wasn’t for cars, or dope, or women, or any of that. It was for grad school. Dad would pay for undergrad work, but this fund would pay for graduate study. Ag didn’t do any graduate study. How much did she have in there, Dad?”

“She might have spent some of it,” John O’Leary said.

Frank said, “Bull hockey. She probably had more than a half-million dollars-because I’ve got that much, and she’s been collecting for a lot more years.”

Turning directly to Virgil, he said, “Our old man is no dummy. He got our money out of the market before the dot-com crash, then got us back in until things started looking ugly again, a few years ago. He got us back out, and after that crash, got us back in. . I don’t know exactly how much she had, but it was a lot.”

Virgil said, “A number would be nice. Just to give me a solid idea.”

John mumbled, “Last time we talked about it, she had seven-seventy.”

“More than enough for a boat and a cabin and maybe even a time-share,” Frank said. “Unless, of course, she walked out on him.”

“She wasn’t going to buy a boat and a cabin, she was going back to med school,” Jack said. To Virgil: “After she lost her baby, she moved out of Dick’s house and came back here.”

Virgil said, “When I hear about that much money, you know, I get curious, because I can’t help it. But I’ll tell you something: I’m about ninety-five percent, and climbing, that it’s Sharp, Welsh, and McCall.”

John O’Leary nodded, and said, “Okay. Then catch them.”

“I will,” Virgil said. “I just hope to God I catch them before they do any more damage.”

“You think you will?” Jack asked.

Virgil looked at them: tough and bright, the whole bunch. He said, “No.”

They talked a little more about the circumstances of the night of the murder-James and Rob had been at the university, but Jack had come home for the weekend. He and Frank were sleeping in separate rooms down the hall from the room where Mary and Ag were.

They were both awakened by shouting, then a gunshot, and then people running, and they ran into the hallway where they encountered their father and mother, heard people running down below. . but then they heard Mary screaming that Ag had been shot. Jack had started after the killers, but his father wrestled him back into the hallway, fearing that he’d also be shot.

Then John and Jack had gone to treat Ag, but knew immediately that she was dead. “Never any doubt,” John said. “She was just. . gone. I’m sure she never knew what happened. No pain, nothing.”

Virgil asked about the kitchen window. “That’s a mystery. I never looked at it. The lock. I talked to Marsha, she never looked at it, I talked to the housekeeper, she never looked at it. . It should have been locked. I guess it wasn’t.”

“Wonder when the last time. . Dick. . was in the kitchen,” Frank asked.

John shook a finger at him: “That’s enough. Shut up.”

Mary took Virgil to the door, while the males sat slumped in the living room, all looking as tired as men can look. Mary looked back at them and said, “Ag was the oldest. Because there were so many of us, she really wound up being a babysitter for most of us. She took care of us growing up.”

“I’m so sorry,” Virgil said, and he was. Then he asked, “When Ag lost her baby, you’re sure Dick didn’t have anything to do with it?”

She shook her head and said, “I’m sure as can be. She and a friend went shopping up in the Cities that day, and Dick was here. I saw him myself, and Ag was fine when she left. She called us from the hospital, told us that she’d lost the baby. She was only six weeks along, so it wasn’t like a big awful thing. She just started bleeding, and they went to the emergency room, but the baby was gone. She was back here the next day.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “Like I said, I’m ninety-five percent that I know who did it, I just have to find them.”

He took another step and said, “Just to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. . what was the name of the friend who went to the Cities with Ag?”

Mary touched her neck, just at the collarbone, and said, “Why, Laura Deren. She’s an old friend of ours. Ag’s, especially. She lives here in town-she’s an accountant.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said. He looked out at the town-the O’Leary house was just at the crest of a hill, looking out over it-and he said, “You’ve got a great view up here.”

“It looks awful to me, right now,” Mary said. “It looks cold and lonesome forever.”

Virgil called Duke. “Heard anything?”

“Silent as a tomb. Can’t figure out where that silver truck went. We’ve stopped every silver truck for five states around.”

“Well. Keep looking,” Virgil said. “The media on you yet?”

“Yes. They’re setting up on the courthouse lawn. We’ll have a press conference in a couple hours.”

“I’m gonna stay clear,” Virgil said. “If you need any information from me, give me a ring.”

“I’ll do that,” Duke said. “I should be okay. I did a few of these during the hassle over the so-called concentration camp.”

“I suppose you did,” Virgil said. “I’m going back to Shinder, and then probably on to Marshall for the night. Nothing much to do except monitor the phones. Not until they pop up again.”

The crime-scene crew was still working on the two sites in Shinder, but had nothing that was either new or relevant. Virgil made some calls about getting the stolen car back to the Rogers family, and was told that it would be a few more days. He called LuAnne Rogers and told her that.

If Sharp, Welsh, or McCall had had more friends, there would have been more talking to do; as it was, Virgil sat outside the Surprise, eating an ice cream sandwich, and tried to think of something that he needed to do, that would help, but he couldn’t think of anything.

Eventually, he drove over to Marshall, called his parents and invited himself to dinner, then took a shower and a nap.

Thought, as he drifted away, that everything had gone too quiet, and smiled at the thought, remembering the old black-and-white films on late-night TV:

The drums. . the drums have gone quiet. They always go quiet just before they attack.