Mad River

by John Sandford

  • • •

  THEY TALKED ABOUT Barbara on the way out to the Blue Moon, a steak house that wasn’t terrible. And they talked about horses, which Virgil didn’t know much about, except that they sometimes bite people, and that the French sometimes ate them with both red and white sauces. Then they talked about Barbara’s problem.

  “You know, when I was in high school, I was going to be a lawyer and do great things for the Indian people,” Sally said. “When I got to college and started talking to people, I found out that there are more lawyers helping the Indian people than the Indian people can really use. So then I didn’t know what to do, and when I got divorced, I called my dad, and he said, ‘Come back here and run the business.’ I couldn’t think of anything better at the moment—I figured I’d do it for a couple of years and then go back to school—but now, I find out that running the business is pretty interesting. And I have fourteen employees who depend on me to do good, and I kinda like that. The responsibility. It’s the first time I feel like I’m really doing something.”

  “You are doing something,” Virgil said. “One of the problems with these kids I’m chasing is that they never did anything. I’m not sure how much of that is their fault, but if they’d had something to do, other than sit on their asses, or shoot pool . . . none of this would have happened. Maybe.”

  “Everybody needs something,” she said. Then, “You know what? Everybody deserves something.”

  They got to the steak house, were seated in a U-shaped booth, and ate salads and pork chops, and gravitated together until their thighs were touching under the table, and Virgil began to feel really warm.

  When the waiter took away the main-course plates, Virgil asked, “You want some dessert?”

  She put her hand around his wrist and said, “Sure. I’d like a little Flowers.”

  • • •

  HE GOT HER BACK to the motel, and on the bed, and pulled off her boots one at a time and dropped them on the floor, then pulled off the tight jeans, stopped when the waistline got down to her knees, and turned his head up and laughed, and when she asked, “What?” he started pulling again and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since eleventh grade.”

  She surprised him and said, “So have I—been waiting for you to do it.”

  The jeans came off, and so did everything else, and they got busy, and an hour later, she muttered into his shoulder, “Well, that was better than pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, even.”

  “Far better?”

  “Maybe not far better,” she said.

  “Then we just gotta try harder.”

  “I could do that.”

  A while later, he said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”

  She said, “I was too young. You weren’t, but I was. You were like a big goddamn dangerous thing, you had hormones coming out of your ears. You scared the heck out of me. In a good way, kinda—you’d get me so hot—but it just didn’t seem right. Then, of course, you jumped Linda Smith.”

  That sat there for a minute, then Virgil, cornered, said, “True.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  He thought again, and then said, “Yes.”

  That made her laugh, and she asked, “Whatever happened to Linda?”

  “She married a rich farmer guy from over by Chamberlain. I think she works part-time for some kind of social services agency over there.”

  “South Dakota?”

  “Yeah. Jackie Bolt told me they’ve got a place that looks down on the Missouri. Supposed to be really pretty. I guess they spend their winters down in Panama. That’s what I heard. They go big-game fishing. They’ve got a sailfish in their farmhouse living room. In South Dakota.”

  • • •

  THEN, since it was impossible to screw all the time, he told her about chasing Sharp and Welsh and McCall, the details of the various killings, and the problem of finding Sharp and Welsh; at the same time, stroking her nipples and other good parts.

  “See, we know everything—we’ll convict them in one minute, when we get them to court. But we can’t find them. This country is too big.”

  “But there are so many people looking for them.”

  Virgil pushed himself up on an elbow, trailed a finger down to her navel, and said, “I was on another case that involved a guy out in the countryside. The thing is, he sold a bunch of dope to a dealer down in Worthington, and the Worthington cops got there about two minutes late, and this guy took off and the cops were chasing him. They chased him about fifty miles or so, before they caught him, and then he dumped his car and started running through the cornfields. This was at night, and they lost him.

  “He was a Canadian guy, and what we found out later was, he decided to walk back to Canada. He broke into houses and a convenience store along the way, to get food. I got involved when he was somewhere up in Yellow Medicine. So I figured out, sitting in this motel, you could get about five hundred and eighty football fields, between the goal lines, not including the end zones, in a square mile. Yellow Medicine County, I happen to know, is about seven hundred and sixty square miles, because I looked it up. So that means you could have about thirty-five thousand football fields in Yellow Medicine. Could you hide in a football-field-sized patch of land out in farm country? Damn right you could. If the guy lay down in a ditch, you could walk right past him. You can’t even figure out how to find somebody who’s doing that. So we can’t find them. Becky and Jimmy. We don’t think they’re far away, especially with Jimmy being shot. But where?”

  “What happened to the Canadian guy?”

  “He got away,” Virgil said.

  “Completely?”

  “Completely. But he was a dope dealer, so he’s probably gotten to his use-by date.”

  “You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

  “Or rich enough to have quit,” Virgil said. “A few of them manage to do that. You see them sitting on their yachts down in the Caribbean.”

  “I don’t think of Canadians as being drug dealers,” she said.

  “They are,” Virgil said. “Generally, as a nation, they’re pretty depraved. At least, that’s been my experience.”

  “See, that’s another thing I didn’t know.”

  Now she sat up and asked, “Why don’t you cops have experts on chasing people? I mean, you’ve got experts on everything else.”

  “Never thought of that,” Virgil said, studying her parts in an academic way. They were very good. “I mean, how would they get to be experts? What would you study?”

  “You know—how people think when they’re running. Where they’d run to. How they’d think about it. That kind of thing. You know, psychologists.”

  “Well, maybe somebody should,” he said.

  Then they got involved again, and then they went to sleep—Virgil liked sleeping with women (the sleeping part), and so it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that his eyelids popped open and he said, “Ah, man.”

  She twitched, and he groped around on the nightstand and knocked his wallet on the floor, and she woke up and rolled toward him and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Calling Stillwater penitentiary,” he said. He found his cell phone.

  “At four o’clock in the morning? What for?”

  He told her, and she said, “I’m flattered, but if you’re going to do that, you’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

  “Pretty soon,” he agreed.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said. “You think . . . ?”

  “I don’t have to leave immediately,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  STILLWATER WAS THE biggest penitentiary in Minnesota, and though it wasn’t the only one, or the closest one, it was the one with most of the experts. Virgil talked to a skeptical duty officer who
, in any case, said he’d pass along Virgil’s request.

  “Just get the warden to call me on my cell. He knows me. I’m going to assume that he’ll cooperate, and start that way.”

  “I dunno . . .”

  “Get him to call me,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, feeling fairly light in his boots, he and Sally shared a kiss in the cool morning air on the motel room’s doorstep, and he said, “I’ll try to get back tonight, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.”

  “Catch the kids. When you come back, I want your full attention,” she said.

  • • •

  FROM MARSHALL, which was not all that far from South Dakota, to Stillwater, which was on the river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin, was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, assuming no hang-ups in morning traffic. Virgil left Marshall at five o’clock, took six or seven phone calls from various prison officials, including the warden, over the next three hours, and finally the warden called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re ready to go when you get here.”

  “I’m hung up in traffic on 494 headed toward the airport,” Virgil said. “It could be a while.”

  “You got lights and a siren?”

  “Yeah, but that’d get me there about one minute sooner, and the noise would drive me crazy. I’ll just coast,” Virgil said. “Hey—thanks for this. It’s goofy, but it’s all I got.”

  “I think it’s kinda interesting,” the warden said. “I read about what you did up in Butternut Falls. This is sort of like that.”

  • • •

  STILLWATER PRISON SITS on a hill in Bayport, Minnesota, a few miles south of the town of Stillwater, and why it wasn’t called Bayport prison, Virgil didn’t know; nor was he curious enough to find out. The prison was not a particularly welcoming place, but neither was it particularly grim. Virgil had been inside perhaps a dozen times. He called ahead two minutes before he got there, parked across the street, locked up his guns, and walked over to the administration building.

  An assistant warden named Ron Polgar was waiting for him and escorted him to the warden’s office. The warden was a tall, thin, pink-faced man in his thirties, with steel-rimmed spectacles; a career correctional bureaucrat named James Benson, he could have been an accountant. He was notable for his adamant opposition to capital punishment, which Minnesota did not have, and would never have, if Benson had anything to do with it.

  “Virgil,” he said, standing up as Virgil came into the office. Virgil said, “How you doing, Jim?” and they shook hands.

  “You must be pretty much in a rush . . .”

  “Unless the Guard finds them this morning, which could happen,” Virgil said. “You got my guys together?”

  The warden nodded. “We’re herding them into a classroom right now. We’ve got the projector and screen set up with a laptop. I hope you know Windows.”

  “Yeah, I should be okay,” Virgil said. “How’d you pick the guys?”

  “Talked to everybody,” the warden said. “Your requirements were peculiar—people from out in the rural areas, shitkickers, I think you said, willing to cooperate, fairly bright. And that’s what we got. Bright, but not exactly geniuses. We’ve got what, a dozen of them?”

  “Eighteen now,” Polgar said.

  “I didn’t want them to be really dumb, that’s all,” Virgil said. “I don’t need geniuses for this.”

  “Got you covered,” Benson said. “They’re just run-of-the-mill . . . shitkickers.”

  “Excellent,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let me know what happens,” Benson said.

  • • •

  VIRGIL AND POLGAR processed through several locked gates into the secure area and walked over to a classroom, where the inmates were waiting under the eyes of two guards. They were an odd assemblage for the prison: for one thing, they were all white, which was unusual, even for Minnesota. They were dressed in a variety of street clothes, jeans and sweatshirts for the most part.

  They all wore the same skeptical look on their faces.

  Polgar nodded at the two guards and went to the front of the room and said, “Okay. Everybody pay attention. You’ve got an idea of why you’re here, and you know that there may be some pretty good benefits for taking part. If you change your mind and don’t want to take part, let us know, and we’ll take you back to your unit. Raise your hand if you’ve changed your mind.”

  He held up his hand as an example, and the group stirred, but nobody else raised a hand. Polgar said, “Good. I’m going to turn you over to Virgil, here, and he’s going to tell you what we need, and then we’ll turn the projector on for a little show.”

  Virgil stepped up and said, “Most of you come from out in the countryside, just like I do, which is where I got the idea to ask for your help. I’m sure you’ve been watching television and know our problem—we’ve got a couple of kids running around killing people, and we need to stop the killing.”

  “You gonna kill them when you catch them?” one of the inmates asked.

  Virgil wanted to be as honest as he could be, since he needed them to work with him. He said, “You know what happens in these situations. We’d like to take them alive, because we’d like to talk to them. But this is not robbery or burglary or car theft—these kids are crazy and they’re killers. This kind of thing usually doesn’t end well. A lot of the time, these people kill themselves rather than give up. Or they decide to go down shooting. I can’t tell you any different. We will do whatever we have to, to stop them.”

  There was another stir through the crowd, a rustle of grunts and two- and three-word exchanges, and a few nods.

  “So what I’m going to do is tell you the story, what happened, and then we’re going to the computer,” Virgil said.

  He told the group everything he knew, from the murder of Ag Murphy to discovery of the Welshes and old man Sharp, and all of the rest of it, right up to the credit union robbery. He described the shoot-out in the street.

  “Jimmy Sharp was hit in the leg. From the description we got, the slug didn’t break any bones, but messed up the outside of his thigh. It won’t kill him, at least not right away. They couldn’t go to a hospital, of course, so they went to an isolated farmhouse to look for medicine. . . .”

  He described the scene at the Towne house, and McCall’s description of sex on the bed, and the murder of Edie Towne.

  “So then McCall took off with the Jeep,” Virgil said. “He called me on a cell phone and gave himself up. I arrested him, and he told us about the cornfield where he thought Sharp and Welsh might be hiding. Like I said, we’d already found that, but it made me think he might be telling the truth about the rest of it. But that’s all we know. What I’d like to do is for you all to think about that, and between us, we’ll try to work out where Sharp and Becky Welsh might have run to.”

  “How would we know that?” one of the inmates asked.

  “You can’t know, for sure,” Virgil said. “But I believe there’s a good possibility that if we all think what we would have done, we might come pretty close to what they’ve done.”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED IT over for a while, and then Polgar fired up the computer and the projector, called up Google Maps, and threw up an aerial photo of Oxford, in which you could clearly see the roof of the bank. Virgil tapped the picture: “Here’s the bank. Here’s where the cop was. They came running out this way, to the waiting Tahoe—Becky Welsh was driving. After the shoot-out, they ran north.”

  Virgil traced the killers’ route out of town, to the cornfield where they hid, and touched the Townes’ farmhouse. “From here, McCall ran further north, then east, and then north again, and then east, and then north.”

  Polgar reduced the scale on the map, to include the enti
re route.

  “I picked McCall up right here,” Virgil said, tapping the map. “Now, Becky Welsh kills Edie Towne and shoots Clarence, and she drives back up the road to the cornfield where Sharp is waiting. They know that McCall has run off. They don’t know why, but they must know that there’s a chance he’ll turn them in, so they can’t go anyplace that he might know about. They’ve got to go to someplace new. They’ve just got to invent this place.”

  The problem had captured them.

  A short thin man in the back row called, “They can’t go back toward town, or any place in a circle around the town, because there’s gonna be cops coming in from all directions. Did you know what kind of truck they stole from this guy?”

  “Yeah, pretty quick,” Virgil said. “It hasn’t been seen since then.”

  Somebody else said, “So they got off the road. They couldn’t go north, toward Bigham, because they’d figure that’s where all the sheriffs would be coming from.”

  They all agreed that Sharp and Welsh would go sideways—east or west—out of the cornfield, probably turning at the first available road.

  Virgil asked, “If it were you, would you go back toward Marshall? Remember, they’ve always been talking about going west, toward Los Angeles, but they killed two people in Marshall.”

  “Didn’t you say that the ambulances and everybody were going to Marshall?”

  “I did say that,” Virgil said.

  “Wouldn’t they hear them?” the same guy asked.

  Virgil looked at the map and considered. “You know, they might. It’s quite a ways, but it was pretty quiet out there.”

  Somebody else said, “Nah. I had some cops coming after me one time, sirens and everything, and I never heard them until I saw the lights behind me.”

  “Yeah, but, they gotta know that Marshall was going to be a hornet’s nest.”

  After some more discussion, the inmates voted unanimously that Sharp and Welsh had gone east, toward the only country where they hadn’t yet done anything, or stirred anybody up. Since McCall might have betrayed them, they would have gotten off the big highway as soon as they could, and would have stayed off them: back roads only.