Mad River

9

Virgil worked into the night: called the crime-scene crew out of Bigham, where they’d checked into a local motel for the night. Virgil listened while the Lyon County sheriff and a social worker talked to the two kids, and then got Duke out of bed and told him about it.

“You think they’re gone from my county?”

“I don’t know where they are, Lewis. They might be running for the West Coast. But they might be coming back to you, since that’s the country they know best. I just got no idea.”

They learned that the Boxes had two cars, and that both were missing. Whether one might be in a shop somewhere, they didn’t know, but the killers now had access to either two or three vehicles, and they put out stop orders on all three.

A bit before three o’clock in the morning, Virgil got back to the motel, beat, and had just taken his boots off when he took a call from the BCA duty officer in St. Paul, who said, “We’ve got an incoming call from somebody who says it’s an emergency, about those guys you’re chasing. He wants your number.”

“Did he say where he’s calling from?”

“He said he’s traveling, but he needs to call you right quick, or he’s got to turn his phone off.”

“Is there an ID on the phone?”

“Yeah, it’s a guy calling, but it’s a woman’s phone. A Nina Box.”

“Give him my number,” Virgil said. “Jesus, give him my number. Then see if you can track the call, get all over the call. . that’s one of the guys we’re chasing.”

The duty officer went away, and fifteen seconds later Virgil’s phone rang. He said, “Yeah. Virgil Flowers.”

“This is Tom McCall.”

“How do I know that?” Virgil asked. He needed to keep McCall talking.

“Jimmy shot the Boxes. He shot Mr. Box in the heart with one gun and then shot Mrs. Box in the head with another gun that he got out of the Boxes’ gun safe in the bedroom. That good enough?”

“Tom, you’ve got to come see me,” Virgil said. “You are in deep, big trouble, but if you’re calling, I can probably help you out.”

“Listen, I got nothing to do with this,” McCall said. “I was hanging with Becky and Jimmy in Bigham-we are friends, I admit that, or anyway, we were friends. Jimmy and Becky said they were going over to a guy’s house in Bigham because the guy owed Jimmy some money for dope, and they’d come back and pick me up. When they came back, they were driving this other car, and, man, I didn’t know what they done until the next day when Jimmy shot his old man.”

“It’s all Jimmy?”

“It’s all Jimmy. . but Becky is his girlfriend, and they’re gonna kill me. I can’t get away from them. I know they’re gonna kill me. I got the Box kids down the basement, I think they’re all right, Jimmy wanted to kill them, too.”

The Box kids remembered Becky pushing them down the stairs, so McCall was probably lying about that.

“Where are you?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know. Becky was driving when we left the Boxes’, and they made me sit in the backseat. Becky’s in a Shell station, we’re getting gas and groceries. I’m sitting low in the seat, but Jimmy’s out walking around, smoking. . They think I’m sleeping, but they don’t know I got this phone. I’m scared to run. You gotta get me out, man. They’re both crazier than bug shit. You gotta get me out.”

“You’re in a Shell station. Are they gonna hold it up?”

“No, no. I don’t think so. We’re in some town, but not Marshall. I don’t know my way around so good. . But listen, I’m innocent. I didn’t do any of this shit. I can tell you something that nobody knows. When we were in Bigham, we had NO money. NO money. So Jimmy went over to this girl’s house in Bigham, and when he came back, he had a thousand dollars in cold cash. He didn’t say so exactly, and I’m afraid to ask, but I think he was paid to kill her. He and Becky talk- I think Jimmy’s coming back. Get me out, man, get me out.”

Virgil shouted, “Call me back.”

Maybe too late: McCall was gone.

Virgil punched up the number of the BCA duty officer and at the same time brought up his computer; the duty officer said, “Sorry, Virgil, he was on AT amp;T and I still don’t have anybody who can help me out. I got the phone number and your number and maybe we’ll get something out of that.”

Virgil told him to call anytime he had anything of substance, and then did a search for Shell stations in Minnesota. There was one at Springfield, probably fifty or sixty miles away, but there was no way that one would be open at four o’clock in the morning; the other one was at Luverne, just off I-90. That one was a possibility.

Another minute of digging on the ’net got him a phone number, and he called it, but there was no answer. Luverne didn’t have a police department, but was covered by the Rock County sheriff. Virgil had that number in his database, called it. The duty officer said, “Tell you what-they aren’t open. If he told you he was calling from the Shell station in Luverne, he was pulling your weenie.”

“Could you send a car by?”

“I’ll have one there in two minutes.”

“If you see them, don’t try to go one-on-one-for one thing, there are three of them, and they are killers. Get everybody you can find to help out.”

Then Virgil sat on his bed and stared at his telephone. Ten minutes later, Rock County called back and the duty officer said, “Virgil, there’s nobody there. The station’s closed. There’s nothing moving downtown, nothing at all. If they were here, they’re gone-but I got people looking anyway.”

Virgil thanked him and hung up. He called the duty officer at the BCA and told him to get set on Nina Box’s cell phone. “If he calls again, I want to know where he is, and I want to know right now. I want them all over that phone. If they want a warrant, get one. Call when you find out, and call me whatever time it is.”

Then he called Springfield, wound up tracking down a police sergeant, who confirmed that the Shell station was closed and had been for hours. He told the cop why he was calling, and the cop said they’d keep their eyes open, “but they weren’t buying any groceries here.”

Virgil thought about that for a while, and wondered why McCall had specified a Shell station. Was it possible that he’d been at a Shell station earlier? If they were going to Los Angeles, they wouldn’t be going out I-90. On the other hand, I-90 did go west, and everybody said Jimmy Sharp was a little dumb.

He didn’t think he would sleep, but there wasn’t much of an alternative-nothing to do but think-so he finished undressing, lay down, and opened his eyes at seven-thirty with a good solid four hours of sleep behind him; and felt not bad. He rolled out of bed and called Duke, and told him what had happened.

“Ah, jeez, you didn’t have any way to run him down? You had nothin’?”

“I had nothin’,” Virgil said. “I was pulling my hair out, trying to think of something. One thing for sure, we got the right people. And we got the highway patrol and every sheriff’s deputy in four states looking for the pickup and the Boxes’ cars. . but what else is there?”

When Virgil got done with Duke, he called the BCA and found out that while Nina Box had an AT amp;T phone, the call had come in on a non-AT amp;T tower, through some kind of roaming arrangement, and they were still trying to sort out the wheres and whens.

“Let me know,” he said.

Virgil needed to scratch out some kind of plan, and he’d always found a good place to do that was a restaurant booth. He went over to a Perkins diner and got a booth and ordered the barn-buster breakfast, two eggs, hash browns, three buttermilk pancakes, with whole wheat toast, and lots of butter and syrup. He got his iPad and a stylus out and began doodling.

McCall had said that Jimmy Sharp had come back from the O’Leary house with a thousand dollars; that he’d been paid to kill Agatha. The O’Learys had said that if Ag died before the divorce, her husband would get three-quarters of a million dollars, or more. Virgil had known people to kill for three-quarters of a hundred dollars, so it wasn’t hard to believe that somebody would kill for three-quarters of a million.

He’d have to talk to Duke about that, and then make another pass at the O’Learys. He liked seeing his folks, but maybe, he thought, he should find a motel over in Bigham.

“Well, Virgil Flowers, as I live and breathe,” a voice said, and he turned in the booth.

In his own defense, Virgil thought later, her breasts were right there, in a form-fitting sweater, practically in his ear. He did not goggle at them, but even if he had, it would hardly have been insulting, given their quality, and perhaps he did delay a microsecond before lifting his eyes to hers and saying, “Sally! Hey, jeez, I heard you moved to Omaha.”

Sally Long. She was short and dark-complected, with black eyes and black hair, fifty percent Sioux, she’d told him, both of her grandfathers being full-bloods. She had been a high school junior when Virgil, a senior, had taken her to the junior prom. He’d spent the rest of the following summer plotting to get into her shorts, but never had. She said, “I did. With my husband. He’s still there. With his second wife.”

Virgil said, “Uh-oh.” He pointed her to the seat on the other side, and she slid into it and smiled. She’d always been a happy sort.

She said, “Yeah,” and shrugged, and said, “We had a few good years.” There was a beat, and then she said, “Okay, a few good weeks. He was a fuckin’ goat-roper right from the start.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “I heard you’re an important cop, and you’ve been in shoot-outs with spies, and that you’ve been married four times and divorced all four.”

Virgil: “That’s a lie. It’s three.”

They both laughed, and the food arrived, and she ordered a much smaller breakfast, but when it came, she used just as much syrup. The thing was, Virgil was really pleased to see her; happy right to the bottom of his toes. She seemed happy enough to see him, too.

“Your old man still got that tire place on 59?” he asked, as he worked through the pancakes.

“Yep. I’m the manager, now,” she said. “You need your tire changed?”

Virgil’s mind went blank for a moment, then he said, “Maybe,” and the idea of a motel in Bigham slipped away.

The next time Virgil looked at his cell phone, he realized that they’d been talking for more than an hour. He’d told her about chasing the three killers, and the possibility that they were headed west. Now, he said, “Ah, man, I’ve got to go. I’m staying at the Ramada. There’s a good chance I’ll be back tonight, unless we run these kids down. You wanna go out for a salad and a beer?”

She would. He got her phone number and took off.

He tried to plan-he really did need one-but his mind kept skipping back to memories of Sally and that summer before he went to college. He’d been juggling three simultaneous romances, which was not easy to do in a small town; impossible, actually-he’d been caught out by all three of the women. Or girls. Or whatever they are when they’re still in high school.

Crazy days. First time he’d ever smoked dope; remembered sitting up behind the Olson brothers’ barn, by the old abandoned cattle pen, smoking ditch weed and fooling around with Carol Altenbrunner. .

The crime-scene crew had shifted to the Box house in Marshall, working with the Marshall cops. Virgil stopped there first, wending through a line of TV trucks to get there. All the major Twin Cities stations were there, and local stations from all over western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. A Twin Cities newspaper reporter named Ruffe Ignace saw him go through the line and put a hand to his cheek in a “call me” sign. Virgil nodded, held up a finger, meaning “It’ll be a while,” and went on through.

At the Box house, he learned from the crime-scene crew that the couple had been killed with two different guns, one an old-fashioned.38 revolver that shot one-hundred percent solid lead bullets, the other a 9mm shooting modern copper-jacketed hollow-points. They’d picked up the 9mm shell and could see a partial print on it, but hadn’t determined who the print belonged to.

“Right now, I’m ninety-nine percent that the.38 was the same one used to kill the first several victims,” said Sawyer, the crew leader. “I’m just eyeballing it, but it’s the same kind of mungy old lead. I suspect he changed to the nine-millimeter because he’d run out of bullets for the.38. It’s a six-shooter.”

“I’ll tell you what, Bea, you’re right. We got it from another source,” Virgil said, and he told her about talking with McCall.

Duke had come over to Marshall from Bigham, and Virgil took him aside and said, “What do you know about the Murphys there in Bigham? Ag O’Leary’s husband-or Ag Murphy’s?”

“Ag Murphy,” Duke said. “What’s up?”

Virgil told him about the conversation with McCall, and McCall’s claim about the thousand dollars. Duke pinched his bottom lip as he listened, then said, “First time I ran for office, Stan Murphy-he’s the old man-gave five hundred dollars to my opponent because my opponent was favored to win. The next time I ran, he gave five hundred dollars to me. We had an old-timey Episcopal church there in town, and Stan was a member. They had a big hoorah about women being priests and homosexuals and all that, and the congregation split in half. Stan didn’t do anything until he saw which way a couple of the richest guys in town were going, and then he went with them.”

“You’re saying. .”

“The old man’s all about money. Nothing else. Just money,” Duke said. “In fact, somebody told me that back in Butternut Falls, where he was originally from, he was a Catholic, and didn’t join up with the Episcopals until he got here and saw which way the wind was blowing. Where the money was.”

“Okay. But what about Dick?”

“I don’t know the boy that well,” Duke said. “He was a pretty good running back in high school, not good enough for college ball, but okay-he was honorable-mention all-conference, or something. But given his old man’s attitude, I’d say some of that must’ve rubbed off.”

“So if Ag’s getting a divorce, and she dies before it gets done, the kid gets seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Virgil said. “Does that engage your interest?”

“It does,” Duke said. “But if there’s anything there, you’ll have to find it. You’ve met my investigator. He’s all right on some things, but this is out of his league.”

“I may go over and talk to folks in Bigham,” Virgil said. “I wanted you to know.”

After talking to the Marshall chief of police, and the sheriff, Virgil got back in his truck and called Davenport, and filled him in.

“You made all the national talk shows,” Davenport said, when Virgil had finished. “They’re saying Bonnie and Clyde. They’re saying Natural Born Killers. You could probably sell an option on a movie, if you move fast. Everybody in the world is headed your way, and they’re all hoping for a big bloody shoot-out.”

“Most of them are already here,” Virgil said. “I just saw Ruffe.”

“That figures. He’s still trying to get to the Times,” Davenport said. “You want me to send you any help? Jenkins and Shrake are available.”

“Lucas, it’s mostly a hunt and everybody for a hundred miles around is hunting for them. Jenkins and Shrake wouldn’t add much to that. I’m just hoping McCall gets back to me.”

“All right. Well, anything I can do,” Davenport said.

“I wish you could do something,” Virgil said. “It’s the most frustrating thing. We know who’s doing the killing, but how do you find them? You gotta wait until they fuck up, and they could kill any number of people before they do that.”

Virgil called Ruffe Ignace. He’d worked with the reporter a few times, in an “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine” arrangement that had usually worked out well for both of them. Virgil regarded him as almost trustworthy. Ignace answered on the first ring and asked, without preamble, “You working on anything else for the Times?”

“No, but just between you and me, I’ve almost got a story locked up with Vanity Fair. Just a matter of signing the contract.”

There was a long silence, then Ignace said, “If you aren’t lying, I’m going to kill myself.”

“Use a lot of pills and alcohol, that’s the best way,” Virgil said. “Guns and ropes, you can get it wrong and wind up a vegetable.”

“Aw. . Jesus.”

“So you wanted me to call?”

“Aw, Jesus.” More silence, then, “I went to the press conference this morning. I need some details that nobody else got. I’ll be just about exactly twenty-four hours behind the TV people.”

“What do I get?” Virgil asked.

“I can’t promise favorable mentions, because that would be unethical. But I can’t help it if I feel favorably toward you.”

“All right.” Virgil gave him a few crime-scene details about the bodies, the murder scenes, about how he’d linked the car in James Sharp Senior’s garage to the murders of Ag O’Leary Murphy and Emmett Williams.

“That’s good, that’s good stuff,” Ignace said. “So-off the record, just between you and me. . what are you doing for Vanity Fair?”

After talking to Ignace, Virgil left Marshall and drove to Bigham, thinking about the O’Learys and the Murphys, and a little about Sally Long. Like this: Gonna have to be careful with the Murphys and the O’Learys, I don’t want to spark off a feud that’ll get the kid lawyered up. . talk to them, get the details, swear them to silence. . What do I say to Dick? How do I get started. .? Boy, she really kept her figure over the years. . She looks better now than she did in high school. .

He teased at the Murphy puzzle; if it was true that Dick Murphy paid for the killing of his wife, Virgil had three potential witnesses, all of them mass murderers. In Virgil’s experience with mass murder, which was mostly through TV news, Sharp and his friends were likely to wind up dead before they ever got to a court.

As he was going past Shinder, he got the phone out again and called Davenport: “You said, and I quote, ‘Anything I can do.’”

Davenport temporized: “Well, that was maybe a little hyperbole.”

“I need to get into your database for Bigham,” Virgil said.

After a few seconds’ silence, Davenport said, “Okay. What are you looking for?”

“The baddest people in town. Not stupid, though,” Virgil said. “I want somebody you might go to if you were thinking about hiring a killer.”

“I won’t have anybody like that,” Davenport said. “The best I can do is, I might have somebody who could point you in the right direction.”

“That’ll work,” Virgil said.

“Give me a couple hours,” Davenport said.

Davenport had spent the best part of two years building a database of people in Minnesota who would talk to the cops, and who also knew a lot of bad people. He had a theory that every town of any size would have bars, restaurants, biker shops, what he called “nodes” that would attract the local assholes.

He was trying to get two informants in every node, and did that by selling what he called “Cop Karma.”

“Karma’s just another word for payback,” he told the more sophisticated of his recruits. “You stack up some good karma points with me, and the next time you drive into the ditch, if it’s not too serious, you could get yourself some payback.”

The network was paying dividends, but Davenport kept the whole thing close to his chest. “If you got some highway patrolman calling you up every ten minutes, trying to solve the local speeding crisis, it won’t work,” he said. “You only call on the heavy stuff.”

Getting Davenport involved gave Virgil even more time to think about Sally, and as he turned the crest of a hill and dropped down the valley that led into Bigham and to the Minnesota River, he decided that he really had to put Sally aside.

A romance, hasty or otherwise, would divert his attention from the investigation, and Sharp, Welsh, and McCall had to be stopped; and Murphy, if he was involved, had to be tagged.

As he came up to the first stoplight in town, he took out the cell phone again and punched in Nina Box’s number. As it had earlier in the day, it switched immediately to a recorded answering message. McCall had turned the phone off, but when he turned it on, the first thing he’d see would be five calls from Virgil.

He’d planned to go to the O’Learys’ place and have a long talk with them about Dick Murphy. Instead, he went to the Pumpkin Cafe, got a BLT and fries, and a Diet Coke, and read the local newspaper, and waited.

He was on his third Diet Coke when Davenport called back. “I’ve got two names and phone numbers for you. You’ll have to meet them somewhere private, because they don’t want to be seen with you.”

“Not a problem. Are they on their phones right now?”

“They are. Waiting for you to call,” Davenport said. “Don’t give them too much shit, and call me and tell me where you’re gonna meet, in case something goes wrong.”

“Are they gonna be a problem?”

“Shouldn’t be. But. . I don’t know some of them as well as I should.”

“Can they keep their mouths shut?” Virgil asked.

“If you use the right threats.”

The first guy was named Honor Roberts, and he said he’d meet Virgil at the Parker Bird Sanctuary where Bare County Road 6 crossed the Minnesota River. “There’s a chain across the entrance, but if you look close you’ll see that the lock is broke. You can lift it right off and come in. Be sure you put it back up when you come through.”

The second source was a woman named Roseanne Bush, who’d meet him in the town’s only tattoo parlor, which was called The Bush.

“We gonna be okay there?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, we’re not open till six. You can park in the back of the Goodwill store and walk down the alley. The door’ll be unlocked, just come on through.”

The bird sanctuary was ten miles northwest of town, a piece of damp land with a lot of bare-branched cottonwoods in the loop of an oxbow of the Minnesota River. There was nobody else on the road when Virgil lifted the chain off the steel post, went through, and replaced the chain. A gravel road wandered back into the woods, and Virgil, though an outdoorsman, had to wonder what kind of birds were being preserved. Crows? Blackbirds? Starlings? He didn’t know of any rare species going through there. Sandhill cranes, maybe? But didn’t they usually hang out in cornfields?

Roberts was sitting on the tailgate of a Chevy pickup truck, smoking a brown cigarillo down to the end. He was a tall, thin man, with ragged hair and bright blue eyes, dressed quite a bit like Virgil, in jeans and barn coat. He was wearing brown cowboy boots, and stood with the boots crossed at the ankle. He said, “Well, you look like Flowers, from what Davenport told me.”

“I am,” Virgil said. “We wouldn’t have called you up if it weren’t pretty important.”

“If it’s about these people going around shooting everybody, I don’t know much. I know Jimmy Sharp, but I never met either of the other two, far’s I know.”

“I’m not so concerned about Jimmy, unless you know where he is,” Virgil said.

“If I knew that, I’d call somebody up. That boy is nuts,” Roberts said.

“Okay. What I’m looking for is somebody you’d hire to do a killing for you. Who’d do it for money.”

Roberts said, “Huh.”

Virgil added: “Not a complete dumbass, who’d get caught and roll over on you.”

Roberts uncrossed his boots and snapped the cigarillo butt down the road. “That’s a tough one. Who do you think did the hiring?”

Virgil said, “What do you do for a living?”

“I buy and sell,” Roberts said.

“A fence?”

“That’d be a goddamn uncharitable way to look at it,” Roberts said.

“Okay, well, this is the way it is,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you who I’m looking at, but if the word gets around town, and it goes back to you, I’ll bust you, and I’ll fix it so Davenport can’t save your ass.”

Roberts tipped his head and said, “I can keep quiet.”

Virgil: “I’ve been told that Jimmy Sharp was hired to kill Ag O’Leary Murphy by Dick Murphy. Murphy stands to inherit three-quarters of a million.”

Roberts whistled and said, distractedly, “No wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“I saw Dick shooting nine-ball down to Roseanne’s Billiards last night, and he seemed pretty goddamned cheerful for somebody whose old lady just got killed.”

“That right?”

“Pretty goddamned cheerful,” Roberts said.

“This is not owned by Roseanne Bush, is it?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, she owns pretty much every low-life place in town,” Roberts said. “You know her?”

“No, but I heard about her. That a lot of bad people hook up around her.”

“She might find a killer for you,” Roberts said. His eyes narrowed in thought, and he asked, “If you think Dick hired Jimmy Sharp. . why are you looking for another killer?”

“Because Sharp’s kind of a dumbass, I’m told, and I’m not sure he’d be the first person you’d go to, if you were looking for somebody to do a good job on it.”

Roberts said, “Huh. You’re smarter than you look.”

“Thanks.”

“You know, if Dick was gonna sneak up on somebody and ask that question, ‘Would you do a killing for me?’ I bet the first person he’d ask would be Randy White. They played football together, and they hang out some. Randy was a linebacker and a mean little jerk. He’d try to hurt people. Everybody knew it, but the coach is just as mean as he was. A fuckin’ rattlesnake. There was rumors he’d slip Randy ten bucks for every starter he’d take out of a game. I’m not sure I’d believe that-it’s just too goddamned wrong.”

“And White is still around town?”

“Oh, yeah. He works for the county road department,” Roberts said. “Digging holes, filling them in. Runs a snowplow in the winter. He runs with a crowd that’s too fast for him. Out to the Indian casinos and such. Needs money all the time.”

“You ever done any business with him?”

Roberts showed a thin smile. “Maybe. County’s always got some surplus equipment floating around.”

White was the only name that Roberts really had. “I keep thinking of all your qualifications,” he said. “There are two or three people around town who might kill for money, but every one of them’s a bigger fool than Jimmy. I can’t see Dick Murphy talking to them about it.”

“What are the chances that Dick Murphy would do it himself?” Virgil asked

Roberts laughed, almost a bark, sharply cut off. “Zero,” he said. “Dick’s one of those smarmy little assholes who goes greasing around town, spreading trouble. If you want somebody to goad a couple drunks into fighting each other, Dick’s your boy. He’s a real friendly sort, when you first meet him, but the longer you know him, the less you like him. Just like his old man.”

“Maybe I oughta be looking at his old man.”

Roberts shook his head: “Naw. His old man wouldn’t give five seconds to Jimmy Sharp. Or to Ag O’Leary’s money, either. He doesn’t need her money, and he sure as hell is too smart to try to kill her for it. Nope. It’s Dicky you want.”

Virgil left him in the bird sanctuary, peering up into the trees with a pair of binoculars. He wasn’t, he said, looking for anything in particular, which seemed odd, but then Virgil didn’t know much about watching birds. Instead of educating himself, he went back to town, to talk to Roseanne Bush.

Bush was a rugged-looking young woman; dark-eyed and dark-haired, her hair streaked with silver and red like tinsel; she’d never be called pretty, but might be called magnetic. Virgil found her sitting in her tattoo parlor throwing darts at a target face on the men’s room door. Her shop smelled like patchouli oil and leather, and a smoker’s haze stuck on the windows.

Virgil told her the same story he’d told Roberts, and she said, “I’m the same age as Ag was, two years older than Dick, and let me tell you something about little Dicky.” She pulled at her bottom lip for a moment, as if pulling her head together, and then she said, “He didn’t exactly rape me.”

Virgil said, “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly. We were a year out of high school, and we were drinking in my old man’s bar after hours, and Dicky kept pouring it down me. . hell, it was free. . and he is a good-looking thing. . and, he just did it to me,” she said. “I kind of think I resisted, but I was no virgin, and I kind of think I led him on. . but I think I tried to say no, and he did it anyway. The problem is, I’m not sure of any of that ’cause I was too damn drunk. But I’ll tell you what: I haven’t gotten drunk since then.”

“So it might have been a rape, and even if it wasn’t, he’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, that’d be fair,” she said. “So’s his old man. Anyway, he’s got this friend, Randy White. .”

White was the only name she had, though, like Roberts, she said there were a few more dumbasses who’d probably agree to do a killing, but nobody that anyone would trust.

“You think Murphy would have trusted Jimmy Sharp?”

“Oh. . yeah. They knew each other. I saw them shooting pool a couple of times, but what passed between them, I don’t know. Jimmy wasn’t book-learning smart, but when he decided to do something, he’d get it done, somehow. You ever know a guy like that? He’d come up with one bad idea after another, and then he’d execute them?”

Virgil thought of a couple cops he knew, and said, “Yeah, unfortunately.” Then, “But Dick would trust Jimmy.”

“Jimmy would not squeal on Dick, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s too proud to do that.”

“So Jimmy would have been a possibility. Along with this White,” Virgil said.

“I think Randy would have been the first choice, but yeah, Jimmy would have been a possibility.”

When they finished talking, he asked her about her businesses, and she said she currently ran the tattoo parlor, a billiards parlor and bar, a motel, and a tavern. “My business plan calls for me to take the supermarket in three years-it’s in trouble, but I think I could make a go of it. Then the bank. Once I got the bank. .” She lifted a hand, then closed it into a fist. “I’ll have the whole town right here.”

“Jesus Christ, remind me not to move here,” Virgil said.

She laughed and asked, “You want a tattoo? I could give you a nice little BCA, with a dagger through it, and some drips of blood running down your arm.”

“But it’d hurt,” Virgil said.

“Just a little bit.”

“I try to avoid pain, in all its forms,” Virgil said.

Randy White.

He asked Bush where White might be found, and she said, “Probably down at the county garage, out on County Road 2. He doesn’t work real hard.”

Virgil went down to the county garage, which turned out to be a Korean War-era Quonset hut, where he found a supervisor named Stan. Stan said that White was probably out on County 4, down past Stillsville, throwing roadkill into the ditch. “He’s supposed to bury anything smaller than a deer, but it’d be a cold day in hell before you’d find him doing that. Just throw it in the weeds is good enough for him. That is, if he’s not sitting in a beer joint somewhere, sneaking a beer. . Uh, you’re not related, are you?”

“No, no, just want to talk to him.”

“About Jim Sharp?”

“You know Jim?”

“Know who he is,” Stan said. “Know he used to hang with Randy. Randy says this morning, when I asked him if he heard from his old friend Jimmy, he’d hit me upside the head with a shovel if I told anybody they was friends, which they were.”

“You don’t sound too worried about getting whacked,” Virgil said.

Stan hitched up his Fire Hose work pants: “I’d kick the sonofabitch’s ass, if he tried.”

“You don’t sound that close,” Virgil ventured.

“I’m just ired of doing all my job and half of his,” Stan said.

Virgil headed down to Stillsville, most of which could have been built under an apple tree. There was a combination gas station and grocery store, with a pale-eyed Weimaraner guarding the place. Virgil went in and bought two cold Schlitz longnecks, since they didn’t have any Leinies, put them in his truck cooler with a couple cold bottles of Diet Coke, got in the driver’s seat, gave the dog the finger, and took off. He found White leaning on his shovel a couple miles south of town, his head on his hands, staring across a vacant field.

Virgil pulled up behind the orange county truck. White roused himself to look at Virgil, and asked, “Who’re you?”

“Cop,” Virgil said. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you about your friend Jimmy Sharp.”

“Stan tell you we were friends?” White asked. You could see the linebacker in him: the wide shoulders, the heavy hips. Virgil had some trouble with linebackers in high school, and wouldn’t have wanted to run into White. But now White had the beginning of a beer belly hanging over his belt, and his nose was already going red with alcohol.

“I never talked to a Stan, but just about everybody else in town told me,” Virgil said. “They said you were asshole buddies, you and Jimmy and Dick Murphy.”

White’s eyelids flickered, almost as if somebody had thrown a punch at him, and Virgil thought, Uh-huh. And he said, “So I brought along a couple of beers, and thought we could find a place to sit and talk.”

A place called Shepard Creek was a few hundred yards down the road, and they went there, Virgil trailing along behind the orange truck. They parked on the gravel shoulder just north of the bridge, and Virgil got the cooler out of the truck and followed White down the bank.

The creek had decades earlier been dammed by local farmers to make a swimming hole. The swimming hole never quite worked out-it silted up over the years-but the remnant of the dam was still there, a pile of small gray granite boulders dug out of local farm fields. A few extra rocks had been left on the bank, to make seats around a fire hole.

Virgil handed White a beer and took a Coke for himself. They sat on a couple of the flatter rocks, and Virgil asked, “Any fish in here?”

“Bullheads, maybe,” White said. “Snakes. It’s about half mud.”

“Smells like bullheads,” Virgil said. They tipped up their bottles, and Virgil said, “So I’ve been told, on pretty good authority, that Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Dick’s wife. That there was no robbery up at the O’Leary place: Jimmy went up there to kill.”

White shook his head. “I honest to God don’t know anything about that. I don’t want to go to prison, but I just don’t know anything about it.”

“I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’ve sent a lot of people up to Stillwater, but I never sent anybody that I didn’t think deserved it,” Virgil said. “And I did send up a lot of people who deserved it, but never thought I’d get them. Now: a number of people have told me that if Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Ag Murphy, he probably would have asked you first.”

“He didn’t,” White said, and Virgil watched him take a long pull at the bottle, drinking about half of it down, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a yo-yo.

“But you know something,” Virgil said. “I can see it in your face. There are lots of people dead right now, and it all started with Ag Murphy. If you cover up even the slightest little thing, and I find out about it, you’ll go down as an accomplice to multiple murders. You’ll do thirty years.”

“Well, shit, man, I had nothing to do with Ag Murphy,” White said.

“But you know something.”

White tipped the bottle up and finished the beer, and threw the bottle into the creek. The bottle floated gently back past them, under the bridge and out of sight. Virgil said nothing at all, and after a minute, White asked, hoarsely, “You got another one of those?”

Virgil went up to the truck and got the second bottle of Schlitz, handed it to him. White said, “I was shooting pool with Dick, probably two weeks ago, and he says, ‘You know what that bitch did?’ He was talking about Ag. He said, ‘Bitch went up to the Cities and killed my baby boy. She and her lesbo girlfriend went up there and got an abortion.’”

Another minute of silence, then Virgil asked, “Was that true?”

“I think it was,” White said.

“But there was something else he asked,” Virgil said.

White took a sip of the beer, then held the bottle between his knees, looking down at the dirt of the fire hole. “He said Ag had a bunch of money. A whole lot, and if something happened to her, he’d get it. He said she deserved whatever she got. ’Cause of the abortion.”

“And what’d you say?”

White looked sideways at Virgil. “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ And I didn’t. After a while, we were shooting pool, and Dick said, ‘I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.’ I said, ‘Good,’ and let it go. When I heard she’d been shot. . I couldn’t believe it.”

“You should have gone to the sheriff,” Virgil said.

“Duke?” White made a half-choking sound, something like a laugh. “If I’d gone to Duke, he’d of slapped my ass in jail so fast. . and I’d still be there. The likes of me, I’d never get a break from the likes of him. The thing is. . Dick never asked me. Never came up again.”

“But you think he had Ag murdered. That’s what you really think,” Virgil said.

Another pull at the bottle. “Yeah. That’s what I think. But he never said anything direct.”

They sat looking at the creek for a minute, then Virgil stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You take care,” he said.

“That’s it?” White asked. “Take care?”

“I might need you as a witness someday. If that happens, I’ll expect you to tell the same story you told here. But maybe it won’t happen. In that case. .”

“He’ll get away with it.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Yeah, it does,” White said. “A lot. I don’t know why. I’ve always. . kicked a little ass myself. Never ran from a fight. But Ag, she was a nice girl. She never needed no little cocksucker like Jimmy Sharp shooting her.”

Virgil squatted down, said, “I do have another question for you. I was talking to a guy who said that when you were linebacking, the coach would give you ten dollars every time you took out a starter for the other team.”

“Not true,” White said, but he smiled into his beer bottle.

“Then what was it?”

He looked up at Virgil, and the smile might have been pained. “It was five dollars, and only for running backs, quarterbacks, and receivers.”

“That’s one of the evilest goddamn things I ever heard of,” Virgil said. “In high school ball? It’s a fuckin’ game, man.”

“Not in our conference, and not for our coach. If that sonofabitch ever loses a game to Redwood Falls, he’s toast. He’s outa there. He’s gone. But you’re right. It’s evil, and I shouldn’t never have done it. But, you know. .”

“What?”

“I needed the money.”

Virgil sighed and gave up on football. He said, “Listen, Randy. You’re the only witness against Dick Murphy. Murphy may still be in touch with Jimmy. So you’ve got to take care. I’m serious. You stay away from Murphy, and might want to lock your doors at night-or maybe head out for a few days. We know Jimmy’s got himself some hunting rifles.”

White nodded, and said, “I got this supervisor. Stan. If you could fix it for me to get a couple days off, I could drive up to the Cities. I got a cousin there I can stay with.”

Virgil said, “I can fix that. It’ll be fixed when you get back.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“You have a little thing about Ag Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“No. Hardly even knew her. Didn’t really know her until she married Dick. That’s when I really got to know her,” he said. He stopped, and Virgil waited, because he wasn’t done. He said, “She was a nice girl. Friendly with everyone. I knew her in high school, and she was always nice to me, and then when, you know, she came back here with Dick, I’d see her around, and she’d always stop to talk. . ”

“But there was really nothing there. .”

White said, “Ah, Jesus,” and it came out like a sob.