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 coppe
r-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 Sha
rp, 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.”
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