Mad River

by John Sandford

  “We all just want to make sure you understand about the attorney,” Virgil said.

  “Okay.”

  Virgil said to Duke and the deputy, “You’re witnesses to the Miranda. He’s my prisoner. It’d be best for all of us if we put him in jail over in Marshall, because if anything happened to him in Bare County . . . Well, the trouble would be so deep it’s unlikely that any of you would be working in law enforcement again. So I’m taking him.”

  The deputy looked at Duke and said, “Sheriff, you can’t—”

  Duke snapped, “Don’t tell me what I can do.” He nodded at Virgil. “Take him. But I want to know every word that comes out of his mouth.”

  “You’ll get it,” Virgil said. “Let’s get the crime-scene people over here to take this Jeep apart. We don’t want to miss a single thing. And don’t let anybody touch it—we don’t want any confusing DNA or fingerprints.”

  And Virgil asked McCall, “Where’s your pistol? You were seen with one.”

  “I don’t got no gun. They wouldn’t let me have no gun with bullets in it, because they were afraid I’d shoot Jimmy. Becky’s got the gun. She used it to shoot some woman back there, in the farmhouse. Did you find the farmhouse?”

  “We found it,” Virgil said. “Who shot the man?”

  McCall looked confused. “Wasn’t no man when I went running out of there. Becky shot this woman, and then there’s some other stuff, and she went to look for medicine for Jimmy, and when she went up the stairs, I grabbed the woman’s keys off the kitchen counter and ran out to the driveway and jumped in the Jeep. I didn’t see no man anywhere.”

  Duke said, “This Clarence Towne is going to make it. Got word from the medics: he looks bad, but he’s got one good lung and no arteries hit, so we’ll find out if the boy is telling the truth on that. Not that it’ll make a hell of a lot of difference.”

  Virgil said, “It could make some. . . . Tom’s in a lot of trouble, but there are things that could count to his benefit, if we go to trial.”

  As he said it, he swiveled away from McCall so McCall couldn’t see his face, and winked at Duke and the deputy. Duke showed a tiny nod, and said, “So take him. I don’t want to look at him anymore.”

  “Crime Scene’ll be here pretty quick,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody touch that truck.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL GOT MCCALL into the front seat and locked his handcuffed wrists to an eyebolt under the seat, using a chain that let McCall sit upright but not move much.

  “What happens if we roll the truck? I couldn’t get out,” McCall whined.

  “I know. You’d probably burn to death,” Virgil said. McCall blanched, and Virgil added, “Relax, Tom. You’re still alive, and you wouldn’t have been if anybody else had gotten to you first. And I’m not going to roll the truck. Probably.”

  Behind them, Duke had turned around, with the other patrol car behind him, and they headed back toward the farmhouse.

  It was a fifty-mile run into Marshall, and Virgil started by telling McCall that he was in desperate trouble, and almost certainly going to prison forever. “You can only help yourself by cooperating. If you’re convicted, maybe get early parole or something.”

  After ten minutes of bullshit, with McCall breaking down to weep, and to claim his status as a victim, not a killer, Virgil, feeling that he’d primed the pump, held up a small handheld digital recorder and said, “I want to make a record of our talk. You know, your lawyer can use it to prove you cooperated.”

  “I guess it’s okay,” McCall said.

  Virgil turned the recorder on and said, “I just want to make sure that you remember that Miranda warning. Remember when I told you that you’ve got a right to remain silent . . .” He went through it again, and McCall said, “Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

  “Great,” Virgil said. “Listen, tell me about Jim Sharp and Becky Welsh. We gotta find them before they kill anybody else. You know where they’re at?”

  “In a cornfield, I think,” McCall said. He told Virgil about running out of Oxford, with Jimmy bleeding from the leg wound, about hiding in the cornfield, about walking back to the farmhouse to get medicine and a different car.

  As he told the story, he slowed, and his eyes caught Virgil’s, and Virgil realized that he was editing the story as he told it. Some of it, at least, was a lie. “We got down to this farmhouse, and there wasn’t anybody home. The back door was locked, but Becky knew how to get it open with a driver’s license. We, uh, we got inside . . . uh, we were going to look for medicine, but, uh . . .”

  “Yeah? What about Becky?”

  “She always wanted to fuck me. That’s the God’s truth. She’d play footsie with me under the dinner table, like she was daring Jimmy to catch us. Jimmy’d kill her if she did. But then, Jimmy was hurt so we got to this empty house and she said she wanted to fuck me and we went back into this bedroom and did it. She had this big gun—”

  “She had a big gun and made you take her back into the bedroom and f—” He remembered the recorder, and covered himself. “—have sex with her?” Virgil’s skepticism shone through.

  “No, no, not exactly that way. . . . I could take it or leave it, you know. She makes me nervous. She wants to be smacked around a little, which is weird. Anyhow, we were back there, just finished up and getting dressed, when we heard this Jeep come into the driveway. We didn’t know it was a Jeep, but it was. Anyway, she gets up with this gun, and this woman walks in through the kitchen and Becky goes around through the dining room and gets in behind her, and I hear the woman saying, like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and Boom. Becky shoots her. I go running through the dining room, and I say, ‘What’d you do? Oh, no, not another one,’ and Becky said, ‘Don’t tell Jimmy what we done, about fuckin’ me,’ just like the dead woman didn’t count for nothing. Then she said she was going to go upstairs and look for medicine, and I said I’d watch the road. Soon as I heard her upstairs, I grabbed the keys off the counter and ran out to the Jeep and took off.”

  “And you never saw a man . . .”

  “No. Never did. I just took off and I didn’t stop running until I got you on the phone and you told me to stop. I was cooperating.”

  • • •

  THERE WAS SOMETHING screwed up about the story, Virgil thought, but he called Duke and told him about it. “Have somebody check that back bedroom, see if there might have been some sex going on there.”

  “I’m right outside. Just hang on,” Duke said. Virgil heard a screen door slam, and Duke saying something to somebody else, then Duke came up and said, “Well, something happened here. There’s some blood on a pillow. Not much. Like a cut or something. Looks like it’s been used, the blankets are all over the place.”

  “Get Crime Scene on it,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody else in there.”

  When he got off the phone, McCall said, “You believe me now?”

  Virgil said, “Maybe.”

  And after a minute, Virgil asked, “Tell me what happened at the O’Leary house.”

  “Okay. Okay. Jimmy didn’t have any money. Never did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it out of. I had an apartment, up in the Cities, but lost my job, and was running out of rent, and Jimmy said if we could get to Bigham, he knew a guy who’d get us jobs. I had like eighteen dollars, for gas and some food. So we went there, in Jimmy’s old car—we actually spent a night living in the car, and it was colder ’n shit. The car was a piece of shit, and kept breaking down, the starter didn’t work, and the guy who was supposed to get us jobs didn’t know where we could get one. So then Jimmy said he knew this O’Leary guy, and me and Becky should come along with him . . . and maybe get a loan. We started out late, and we didn’t know exactly where it was, and the car was giving us trouble, so we left it in this parking lot and walked. It was pitch-dark when we
got there. We went down the side of the house, and I sez, ‘What the hell is this?’ and Jimmy pulls out this gun and puts it up against my chest, and he sez, ‘You’re gonna open a window, big guy, or I’m gonna shoot you in the heart.’ He’s a short guy, and I’m not, so we went to this window, and I lifted it up, and he pointed the gun and said, ‘Get in there,’ so I went in there.”

  McCall said the three of them crept through the house, McCall quaking in his shoes. Jimmy forced him to climb the stairs, then pointed him to the front of the house, where they woke up two girls in a bed. “One of the girls started screaming, and Jimmy shot her. And somebody started yelling from another part of the house, and I ran, and they all come behind me.”

  Out in the street, they ran down the hill to the car, but couldn’t get it started. Jimmy completely freaked out, McCall said, but then they saw a man come out of the apartment house and walk over to his car. Jimmy jumped out of the car and ran over and shot him. “Just like that. Not even a howdy-do.” A minute later, they were on the way to Shinder.

  “They kept telling me, ‘Tom, we’re gonna kill you, you motherfucker, if you make one noise or try to get away.’”

  “But where did the money come in?” Virgil asked. “This money he had?”

  “Well, we got to Shinder, and we were going to hide in Jimmy’s house until things quieted down, but Jimmy, man, he was like, crazy, and he got in an argument with his old man and shot the old fucker down.

  “Jimmy said we’d have to run, sooner or later, and the old man’s truck was no good, we needed some money to get a better one, and I said, ‘Shit, where’ll we get any money?’ and Jimmy said, right out of the blue, ‘Well, I got a grand.’ And Becky and I both said, ‘What?’ and he pulled this roll of brand-new twenties out of his pocket. He said he took it off that girl he shot, but that’s bullshit. It was pitch-dark in there, and she was in bed. She had the money between her legs or something? I don’t think so.”

  “So where do you think he got it?”

  “That’s the thing. Becky kept giving him shit about it, so he whips out this old pistol and blows across the barrel, and sez, ‘Never thought you’d be fuckin’ a hit man, huh?’”

  “A hit man?”

  “That’s what he said. But that’s all I know about it. That he called himself a hit man,” McCall said.

  “If somebody paid him to kill the girl, who would that have been?” Virgil asked.

  McCall shrugged. “I got no idea.”

  “How long were you in Bigham?”

  “Three days . . . well, we got there late one day, then overnight, then another day, then overnight, then another day, and that night was the, you know, thing at O’Leary’s.”

  “Okay. When you lifted the window, did you have to force a lock?”

  “Nope. Went right up. Zip. Like it was greased,” McCall said.

  “Did Jimmy pick it?”

  “Yeah. He went right to it. It was pretty high up, it was over a kitchen counter, so it was a little too high for him. That’s why he needed me. And I wasn’t going to say no, with a pistol pointed at my heart.”

  Virgil thought it over, and then said, “Those nights when you were in Bigham . . . what’d you do?”

  “Hung out, mostly. Didn’t have the money to do much. Shot some pool. Jimmy thought he was a pool shark. But he’s not. He looks like a pool shark, but he’s really bad at it.”

  “Was Jimmy hanging with anybody in particular? Did he seem tight with anyone?”

  McCall looked at Virgil for a long moment, then said, “You know, I got an answer to that, but I think I need to talk to a lawyer. Like you said, you’d get me a lawyer.”

  Virgil thought, Ah, shit. He’d been so close, but with the tape running, he had no choice. “All right. We’ll stop right here, get you to Marshall, and hook you up with an attorney.”

  He turned off the tape and said, “You motherfucker, you killed that cop. I hope you rot in hell.”

  That put a further dent in the conversation. McCall cowered against the passenger-side door until they got to the law enforcement center in Marshall, and Virgil turned him over to the sheriff.

  After spending a half hour on paperwork, he called Davenport and said, “One down. But somebody else is probably dead, unless Jim and Becky are out in another cornfield.”

  “They can’t hide for long,” Virgil said. “The governor just put the National Guard on the roads—they’re deploying at every intersection out there. As soon as they’re in, they’ll organize teams of troops and cops and hit every house on the prairie.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Probably be in place by tomorrow morning, and the search’ll start by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That means that they’ll probably kill them,” Virgil said. “I need Jimmy alive long enough to get the guy who paid him to kill Ag Murphy.”

  “Who’d that be?” Davenport asked.

  “Ag Murphy’s husband.”

  “Really? Well—good luck with that.”

  13

  VIRGIL FINISHED UP with the sheriff’s department, copied the McCall interview to his laptop, and left the recorder in the LEC evidence room. He had a Diet Coke and a conversation with the sheriff and the Marshall police chief, then called Duke. Nobody had any idea where Sharp and Welsh had gone. Deputies were running all over Bare County, and the adjacent counties, looking for the Townes’ truck, but nobody had seen it.

  “I fear for what we’re going to find when we catch up to them,” Duke said.

  “So do I,” Virgil said. “I have no idea of whether they’re north, south, east, or west. I wish I knew, because I’d like to be there when we do find them.”

  • • •

  AFTER THAT, Virgil was at loose ends. Since he was there in Marshall, anyway, and because everybody had his cell phone number and would be in touch if anything broke, he called Sally Long. She answered on the third ring and said, “Virgil Flowers: you did call.”

  “If you’re not real busy, we could get dinner,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe go over to the Six and catch a movie.”

  “Or maybe just find someplace to talk about our feelings,” she said. And, into the silence, “Just kiddin’, there, cowboy.”

  “Jeez, you scared the heck out of me,” Virgil said. “Every time I do that, I get divorced.”

  • • •

  HE SPENT the next three hours at his hotel, much of it on the phone or the computer, keeping up. There was a long story about the murders, out of the Star-Tribune website, with profiles of the suspects; and more stories from Omaha, Kansas City, and Fargo. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis had picked up AP stories, which were rewrites of the Star-Tribune, but Los Angeles had a columnist on the ground. And television from everywhere.

  Channel Three out of the Cities had video from a National Guard MP detachment showing soldiers loading up a bunch of Humvees, and the reporter said that most of the MPs had gotten back from Iraq that past fall, and had serious experience running checkpoints and roadblocks.

  Virgil was mentioned in the Star-Tribune as a “top BCA agent and troubleshooter,” which meant that Ignace was sucking up to him.

  The last part of his motel time he spent making himself pretty and swell-smelling, buffing up his cowboy boots and shaving again. After a last check, he headed out the door, not feeling particularly guilty about it, either.

  Sally was living in a small blue house not far from the university. A young blond woman, perhaps twenty years old, came to the door, crunching on a stalk of celery filled with orange pimento cheese spread. She said, “You must be Virgil. Sally’ll be right out.”

  “Who’re you?” Virgil asked, as he stepped inside. The house was neatly kept, and sparsely furnished, like a bachelor woman might do it.

  “Barbara,” the woman said.
“I’m a student. I rent the garage loft from Sally.”

  • • •

  SALLY TOOK ANOTHER five minutes and Virgil sat on the couch and watched Barbara munch through another two stalks of celery—Virgil turned down the offer of one, saying, “We’re going out to dinner”—and found out that Barbara was studying studio arts. “The problem is, I don’t have any talent,” she said.

  “That’s a good thing to find out,” Virgil said.

  “The other problem is, I’m not interested in anything else. So, what do you think I should do?”

  “Why’d you italicize the you?”

  “Because I’ve asked everybody else, and they all give me bullshit answers. So see, I’m relying on you to give me a non-bullshit answer.” She crossed her legs, and cocked her head, waiting for an answer.

  “Well,” Virgil said, after a minute, “I never wanted to be a cop, but I just kind of got there. I didn’t plan it, but I found out that it’s pretty interesting. So, if I were you, I’d look around for something that seems like it might be an important job, and just pick it. Even if you’re not too interested in the general subject matter right now, if it’s really important, you’ll get interested in it later, when you start learning the details of it.”

  She peered at him as she gnawed down the second of the two celery stalks, then said, “That sounded less bullshitty than most answers. Not entirely un-bullshitty, but mostly.”

  “Well, good, then,” Virgil said. “I passed.”

  • • •

  “PASSED WHAT?” Sally asked, as she came into the room from the back of the house. “Are we talking kidney stones?”

  Virgil stood up and thought, Ooo, and pecked her on the cheek. She was wearing a silky black blouse and tight black jeans, tucked into cowboy boots with turquoise cutouts that looked like they were right off the prairies of New York’s Upper East Side.

  “Talking about what Barbara should do in life,” Virgil said. And, “Great boots. You got horses?”

  “Two,” she said. “The old man’s got a ranch west of town.”