Mad River

by John Sandford

  He sat on the bed for a minute, getting oriented, then picked up his cell phone and punched the menu item for “home.” His mother never slept past six o’clock on any one day in her life, and at that moment, he thought, would be looking into the kitchen cupboard and calculating how many pancakes to make that morning.

  She answered immediately, an edge of horror in her voice. “Virgil: What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, Ma, except some people got killed over in Shinder and I’m looking at them. Right now, I’m here in town, at the Ramada, and I thought I’d run over and get some pancakes if it’s not too much goddamn trouble to expect that from your mother.”

  She was delighted: “Get over here, Virgil. Your father’s already up and raving in the study.”

  “I gotta take a shower. I’ll see you in a half hour.”

  • • •

  RAVING IN THE STUDY—the old man was practicing his sermon. Feeling more awake, Virgil cleaned up and got dressed, and headed into a sunshiny morning that felt like it might even get warm later in the day. It didn’t, but it felt that way.

  Virgil’s father was the lead pastor of the largest Lutheran congregation in Marshall, a town with several species of Lutheran. Virgil had grown up in a redbrick house across the street from the church, and had gone to church services every Sunday and Wednesday of his life, until he went to the University of Minnesota. He’d since given up churchgoing, but not some fundamental belief in the Great Architect.

  When Virgil pulled into the driveway, he was ambushed by his father, who’d been waiting by the back door, and who said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. . . .”

  His father was a tall man, also slender, like Virgil, with graying hair and round steel-rimmed spectacles. He’d played basketball at Luther College, down in Iowa, before going to the seminary. He clutched in one hand the printout of his sermon; he’d been a popular man all of his life, and a kind of sneaky kingmaker in local politics.

  Virgil said, “Uh-oh.”

  “I immediately thought of Genesis 16:11 and 12, ‘You shall name him Ishmael . . .’”

  Virgil continued it: “‘. . . for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. And he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.’”

  His father blinked and said, “I knew if I beat it into your head long enough, it’d stick.”

  Virgil said, “Where’s Mom? . . . And yeah, some of it did stick.”

  His father said, “In the kitchen. You know Ishmael is considered the father of the Arabs.”

  “I know that you’ll be up to your holy ass in alligators if you go telling people that the Arabs deserve what they’re getting because the Bible says so,” Virgil said.

  His father followed him into the kitchen, saying, “That wouldn’t be the point, not at all. I’d never say that.”

  • • •

  THEY SAT IN THE KITCHEN and ate pancakes and his father raved and his mother chipped in with news of various high school friends, and they both behaved as though they hadn’t seen him for years, when, in fact, he’d been there only a month earlier.

  His mother inquired about any new wives, a friendly jab, and he denied any new close acquaintances, and his father said, “But you have to admit, it is passing strange that something that was written three thousand years ago seems to have such a relevance for today’s world.”

  Watching them bustle around each other in the tight little kitchen, sixtyish and very comfortable, Virgil remembered the time when he was seventeen and the folks had a little dinner party, three other couples plus Virgil. One of the couples was Darrin and Marcia Wanger. Darrin was president of a local bank, a tall, broad-shouldered man with an engaging smile. Virgil remembered how he had caught his mother and Darrin Wanger touching each other with their eyes, and how he thought then, My God, they’re sleeping together.

  Old times in the rectory . . . And who knows, maybe he was wrong.

  But even thinking about it now, he thought not. His mother said, “You put so little syrup on those pancakes that it got sucked right down inside. Take some more syrup.”

  • • •

  THEN IT WAS the best part of an hour in church, Virgil sitting in the back; but twenty people, mostly older, stopped to say hello to him, and touch him on the shoulder. Good folks. His father did his rave, and it all seemed well-reasoned and kind.

  At nine o’clock, he was on his way back to Shinder. Duke was just coming into town and Virgil turned in behind him and followed him down to the Welsh house. They got out of their trucks at the same time, and Duke nodded at Virgil and asked, “How was church?”

  “Fine. My old man did his sermon from Genesis 11 and 12, and moved on to the Palestinians and the Israelis. . . .” Virgil gave him a one-minute version, and Duke, though an asshole, proved a good listener, and when Virgil finished, he said, “Sounds like your father is a smart man.”

  “He is,” Virgil said. The crime-scene van was parked in the swale in front of the Welsh house, and Virgil asked, “You know what time they got here?”

  “About three hours ago . . . around six o’clock,” Duke said.

  He and Virgil went inside, where Beatrice Sawyer was working over George Welsh’s body. Sawyer was a middle-aged woman, more cheerful than she should be, given her job, and a little too heavy. She had bureaucrat-cut blond hair, went without makeup, and was wearing a lime-colored sweatshirt and blue jeans and boots. She saw Virgil and said, “Well, this one’s dead.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said. “He was dead last night, too. Are you going to get anything off them?”

  “Too early to tell, but I doubt that it’ll be anything conclusive if it’s a domestic. He was shot from eight to ten feet away, judging from the powder traces—there is some, but not much. The shooter was standing where you are, these two were standing where they fell. We’ll recover both slugs, and they should be in reasonable shape—not hollow points, they look to be solids. We’ll be able to identify the gun, if you come up with it. There were no shells around, and I won’t know for sure until we pull the slugs, but it was probably a revolver.”

  “If you get DNA, why won’t it be conclusive?” Duke asked.

  “Because if it’s a domestic, there’s a lot of reasons for the shooter’s DNA to be all over the place,” Sawyer explained. “There doesn’t appear to have been a struggle—no defensive or offensive marks on George’s hands or arms, which means that the killer didn’t close with him. Shot him from a distance.”

  “But you might get some DNA that would narrow it down,” Duke said.

  “Possibly,” Sawyer said. “But juries don’t usually convict on the outside chance that somebody committed a murder.”

  “They do if I tell them to,” Duke said. He didn’t smile.

  Another man, wearing a surgeon’s mask and yellow gloves, came in from the back and said, “Hey-ya, Virgie.”

  “Hey, Don.” Don Baldwin was a tall, thin man with a sharp nose who wore heavy black-plastic fashion glasses because he played in a punk-revival band on his nights off. Like Sawyer, he was wearing a sweatshirt and blue jeans. “What’re you doing back there?”

  “Looked like somebody might have slept in the back bedroom. We’re working it,” he said.

  Virgil said, “Um,” and then, “You look at their car?”

  “Yeah, we’ll process it. . . . I won’t say that I expect much from it.”

  “All right,” Virgil said. He turned to Duke and said, “Let’s run down the daughter. I need to talk to her friends.”

  “Darrell’s got the names.”

  • • •

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Rebecca Welsh didn’t have many friends. The Bare County deputies had come up with
three names from high school, and only two still lived in the county. Nobody, including her parents, knew exactly where the third one was, but one of the deputies said he’d been told she was hooking out in Williston, North Dakota, among the oil crews.

  Of the other two, Virgil spoke first to Carly Redecke, a short, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl whom he found working at the same store where George Welsh had bought his last beer. Though she wasn’t exactly working when he found her: she was in the back room, sitting on a couple of beer cases, smoking a cigarette.

  “I haven’t heard from her since last summer,” Redecke said of Welsh. “She had a place somewhere up in the Cities and was doing night restocking at a Home Depot.”

  “Do you have a phone number for her?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t have that number anymore,” Redecke said. “I called it at Christmas, and I got one of those messages that the phone had been disconnected. But I still got it, if you want it.”

  Virgil made a note of the number, asked her if she knew anyone who might know better where Welsh would be.

  “There’s a bunch of old Shinder people up in the Cities—I was up there myself for a while, but it scared me, so I came back. I’m thinking of trying over in Sioux Falls. There’s nothing here.”

  “Of the old Shinder people, was she hanging with anyone in particular?”

  “Wooo . . . you might try calling Mickey Berenson. She keeps track of everybody. I got her number, I think it’s still good.”

  Redecke didn’t have much more, other than to say that Welsh was “the hottest girl ever to come out of this place. She could be like a movie star.”

  On his way over to see the second woman, he called Mickey Berenson, who was sleeping when he called. He explained the situation, and said, “. . . so we’re trying to get in touch with her.”

  “Oh, jeez, I haven’t seen her in a long time. You know, she was hanging out with Jimmy Sharp. He’s from Shinder, too, he was two grades ahead of us. I think they were getting serious.”

  She didn’t have Sharp’s number, either, but said Sharp’s father lived in Shinder, and might know where his son was, and maybe Becky, too. Virgil thanked her, and went on to Caroline O’Meara’s house, and found her loading sacks of used clothing into the bed of a Toyota Tacoma. She and her mother, O’Meara said, were on their way to a flea market, and were already running late. “I talked to Becky, mmm, last fall, I think, about Halloween. She was back with Jimmy Sharp, they were cruising around town in Jimmy’s dorkmobile.”

  “And that would be . . .”

  “A black Pontiac Firebird, about a hundred years old. Like he was king shit, or something. My boyfriend said he’d be lucky to get it back to the Cities before the tranny fell on the ground.”

  “You sound like you don’t care for him,” Virgil suggested.

  “Well, he’s an asshole. Ask anyone. He was the biggest bully the whole time I was in school,” she said.

  “You know where he works?”

  “No. I doubt that he works. Might sell a little pot or something. He had a job down at the Surprise for a while.”

  “I was just there.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You come to Shinder, you wind up at the Surprise. If you live here, you wind up working there, sooner or later. Jimmy got fired after he got in a fight with Larry Panero. Larry wouldn’t hurt a fly, but Jimmy got on him and never quit.”

  “Huh. Where could I find Jimmy’s father?”

  • • •

  SHARP’S FATHER LIVED in an old wind-burned farmhouse at the far northwest corner of town. O’Meara had told him to look for the only red-painted place at the end of January Street, with a dirt track leading up to the side of the house: “Mean old redneck, is what he is.” A broken-down garage sat at the end of the track.

  Virgil pulled into the dooryard and got out. There’d been a little breeze, early, but that had gone, and the place was dead silent—so silent that he paused, just to listen, and heard nothing at all. The nearest neighboring house was probably two hundred yards away, with an old car parked in front of it, but there was no movement there, either.

  Virgil paid attention to the general vibe, then stepped back to the car, climbed inside, got his gun, and slipped it into his back waistband, under his jacket. Bad feeling. He went to the back stoop, knocked, got no response, knocked louder. Still no response. He backed off and looked toward the garage, with its antique side-folding doors. The doors were partly open, and after another look around, he went that way.

  The car inside the garage was a newer Dodge Charger, with current Missouri plates. There was nobody around the garage, and he turned to walk away when he noticed the bumper stickers. One side featured an oval Thizz Hands sticker, and the other a sticker that said, “Free Li’l Boosie.” Li’l Boosie, Virgil believed, was currently spending his days in the Louisiana State Pen for issues involving guns and drugs; and, judging from the house, he thought it exceedingly unlikely that Old Man Sharp—he didn’t know the old man’s first name—was a big gangsta rap fan.

  Which made the car, in the eyes of a perceptive law enforcement official, something of an anomaly. Virgil noted the car’s tag number, went back to his truck, called the number into the BCA duty officer, and told him to run it.

  After a moment, the duty officer asked, “Uh, where are you, Virgil?”

  “In Shinder. Minnesota. Out west,” Virgil said.

  “Where’s this car?”

  “Sitting in a garage out here,” Virgil said. “I’m looking at it.”

  “You got your gun with you?”

  “Yeah. What’s up, Dave?”

  “The thing is, people are looking all over for that car,” the duty officer said. “A guy was apparently murdered for it in Bigham, night before last. The same people probably murdered a young girl just a couple blocks away from there, about five minutes before that. . . . I mean, you need some backup, man, or get the hell out of there.”

  Virgil got the details, and said, “I’ll check with you later.”

  He looked at the house: still dead quiet. He thought about it, then called Davenport, who said, without first saying hello, “You’re about to fuck up a perfectly good Sunday morning, aren’t you?”

  “You know those murders in Bigham Friday night?” Virgil asked.

  “Just what I heard around the office, when Ralph came back. Why?”

  “Apparently the killers stole a car from one of the victims,” Virgil said. “So, I was out here looking at these two dead people, and tried to track down their daughter to see if she might know something. To cut the story short, I’m looking at that car. So now, we have four dead. We might have a spree.”

  “Ah, shit,” Davenport said. “Who’ve you told?”

  “You and Dave Jennings,” Virgil said. “I gotta tell Duke, but, uh, you might want to talk to the patrol guys and get the early warning system going.”

  “All right. You talk to Duke, I’ll start jackin’ people up. Who’re we looking for?”

  “Right now, I’d like to talk to a Jimmy Sharp and a Rebecca Welsh, who were both living somewhere there in the Cities. That’s about all the detail I’ve got, but I will get back to you with more.”

  “Do you think Sharp and Welsh . . . ?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a possibility.”

  “Quick as you can,” Davenport said. “If it’s a spree, we gotta move.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL GOT ON THE PHONE to Duke, told him where he was, told him what had happened, and asked him to come over with some deputies. “There’s nothing moving here now, but that could change,” Virgil said.

  Duke said, “I’m activating the SWAT. And me’n a couple other men’ll be there in four minutes. You hang tight.”

  Not like he had some other goddamn pressing thing to do, Virgil thou
ght, looking up at the weathered old house.

  • • •

  FOUR MINUTES IN THE CITIES and New York and Chicago and LA were different from four minutes in Shinder, where four minutes was quite literal: you could drive from one end of town to the other in four minutes, with a choice of routes, in a place where two cars in the same block was a traffic jam.

  Fifteen seconds after Virgil got off the phone with Duke, the sirens started, rapidly got louder, and four minutes after they talked, a shoal of sheriff’s cars piled into old man Sharp’s farmyard. Duke was alone in the lead car; he got out, walked around to the trunk, popped it open and took out an M16 and a magazine, and snapped the magazine into place.

  He said to Virgil, “I’m good.”

  Fifteen seconds later, Virgil was surrounded by six deputies and Duke. He pointed toward the garage. “We’ve got two dead at the Welsh house, two dead in Bigham, and the stolen car here. I think that’s enough to go into the house without a warrant—somebody could be dying inside. So. One of you guys come with me, and the rest of you post around the house in case we get a runner. Don’t shoot unless it’s in self-defense. We really need to talk to somebody.”

  Duke said, “I’ll be going in with you, and John Largas, he’ll come, too.” He nodded at an older deputy. “The rest of you take the corners of the house.”

  Virgil looked around: there was a woodlot a hundred yards or so behind the house, and some scrubby lilacs along the drive, but no real cover other than the garage. He said, “Somebody can post up beside the garage, but you guys on the other side, stay close to the house. I mean, get your backs right against it. You don’t want to be standing out in the middle of the yard where somebody could shoot you down before you know it. All these places got deer rifles and shotguns. Okay? Everybody understand?”

  They all nodded, and the group broke up, the deputies pulling their pistols, and Virgil led Duke and Largas to the back door. Virgil pounded on it for fifteen seconds, shouting, “Police. Open up. Open up.”