Mad River

by John Sandford

  Jimmy said, “Easy. Just what I told you. Call me a peckerhead.”

  Welsh said, “Don’t point the gun—”

  “Call me a peckerhead, or goddamnit, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out,” Jimmy said.

  Welsh whimpered, and Jimmy smiled at the sound, and Welsh licked his lips and muttered, “Peckerhead.”

  Jimmy shot him in the heart, and Ann Welsh turned on a dime and made for the back door, got three steps and Jimmy, stepping along behind her, shot her in the back of the head. He looked at them on the floor and turned to Becky and asked, “You hate me now?”

  Her eyes were steel gray and she shook her head once: “No. Fuck ’em. They ruined my life.”

  Tom said, “We better get out of here.”

  Becky said to Jimmy: “Let’s go to Marshall. I know where we can get it all—car, money, everything.”

  6

  VIRGIL SPENT A FRUITLESS Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone—people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.

  The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.

  Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”

  “It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”

  At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.

  A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.

  “I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”

  “Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”

  “That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL DROVE NORTHEAST TO BIGHAM, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.

  Still cold.

  It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck, though—even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.

  He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.

  • • •

  THE KEY THING about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.

  They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.

  “Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He . . . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away . . .”

  “So . . . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are . . . you know . . . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her—I’m sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”

  She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know . . . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.

  “I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”

  As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.

  • • •

  WHEN HE’D WRUNG HER OUT, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.

  “They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”

  • • •

  WHEN VIRGIL WENT back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.

  “We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now—it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and it’s what I would have done.”

  “So it’s all coming down to the truck,” Virgil said.

  “We got some media on the way,” Duke said. “We need to figure out who’s going to talk.”

  “Not me,” Virgil said. “We usually leave that to you elected guys.”

  Duke nodded. “Good enough. What are you going to do?”

  “Just wait,” Virgil said. “There’s not much more to do. They’ll pop up, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Tomorrow. I just pray to God they don’t kill anyone else.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “I think there’s a good chance that they will,” Virgil said. “I think there’s a good chance that they already have—they parked that truck in so
mebody’s garage, and that somebody is already dead, and they’re on their way to Los Angeles.”

  “Now what?”

  Virgil said, “Well, I’m here. I think I’ll go talk to a couple of O’Learys. The other guy who got killed . . . Emmett Williams? You know where I’d find his people?”

  “His sister lives here, he was staying with her. I’ll get her address if you want it, but that looked to us like a killing of opportunity. They were running and he just got in the way and got shot down. I don’t think there’s much in it, for you.”

  “Probably not,” Virgil agreed. “But what else am I gonna do?”

  • • •

  VIRGIL GOT ADDRESSES for the O’Learys and Williams’s sister, and got them spotted on a city map by the sheriff’s secretary. The O’Learys lived out from the center of town, on a ridge overlooking the river; Williams’s sister, whose name was LuAnne Rogers, lived in an apartment building on the edge of the downtown, a few blocks from the courthouse. Virgil drove over, parked in front of a hardware store, and walked back across the street. Rogers’s apartment was over a bridal and prom dress shop. Virgil climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

  The door was opened by a small boy, maybe five. “Your mom home?” Virgil asked.

  A woman called, “Just a minute,” and Virgil heard dishes clattering, and then a lanky good-looking black woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I want to chat with you about your brother, if you’re Miz Rogers.”

  “Yeah, I am. Come in.”

  Virgil stepped inside, and the woman said to the boy, “You go on and play your game. I’m putting you on the watch, one half hour.”

  The boy scuttled away, and the woman said, “He’s got a Wii skateboard game.”

  Virgil said he was sorry about her brother, and asked if she knew, or if any of her friends might know, if there was any connection between Williams and Sharp, Welsh, or McCall.

  “That’s the first time I ever heard those names,” she said. “You know who did it?”

  Virgil said, “Maybe. We’re looking for three young people, two men and a woman. You’ll be hearing about it on TV.”

  “I don’t allow much TV in here,” she said. “And if I don’t allow Brad to watch it, I can’t watch myself. But I guess I’ll make an exception.”

  She said again that she hadn’t heard of any of the three. “Emmett was here for two weeks, and he was going back home next week. He really didn’t have time to meet anybody up here.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Kansas City. He’d been hassled around by his ex-wife down there, and he came up here to get away for a while. Then . . .” She teared up a bit, and wiped the tears away. “Emmett and I weren’t real close. He was seven years younger than I am, and . . . we just weren’t that close.”

  She said her husband, Bradley Senior, was a plant engineer who installed computer-assisted wood-cutting machines and designed production lines, and was doing that at a local furniture factory. They’d been in town for six months and would be there for another three, and then would move on to the next job.

  They talked about Emmett, and about growing up in Kansas City. Virgil decided after a few minutes that she had no real information. When he stood up to leave, she said, “I hate to ask you this, because this is all so terrible . . . but, our car?”

  “I’ll try to get it back to you quick as we can,” Virgil said. “I just can’t promise when that’ll be. Do you have some other way to get around?”

  “The company rented us a car, but we’d like to get our own back. It’s pretty new.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Virgil promised.

  • • •

  ROGERS HAD BEEN straightforward about her distance from her brother, and though she was saddened and depressed by the killing, she was dealing with it. The O’Learys were a different matter.

  Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was still in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband, John, was at home when Virgil arrived, taking a break from the hospital vigil, replaced by Marsha’s mother. The surviving daughter, Mary, and four sons, Jack, James, Rob, and Frank, were scattered around a large living room and dining room. Jack was playing light jazz on an upright piano, sounding quite a bit like Harry Connick Jr. Virgil could imagine sitting on the front porch on a moonlit night, spooning with a young neighborhood lady, while Jack’s piano tune trickled through the screen door. . . .

  • • •

  VIRGIL HAD CALLED AHEAD, and Mary had met him at the door. She was a square-shouldered young woman of medium height, probably not yet twenty, with dark hair and large, dark, direct eyes, wearing two sparkly diamond studs at her ears. She had dark circles at her eyes and her nose was red, from crying. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans.

  John was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, and the four boys came in as Mary introduced Virgil to her father. All of them had curly dark hair, conservatively cut, with dark eyes and broad shoulders. They were a bunch of good-looking, athletic Irishmen in sweatshirts and jeans and moccasins, with an easy air of money about them; and an ugly bitter air of tragedy.

  “Why did this happen?” John O’Leary asked. “We’re the nicest goddamn people on the face of the earth.”

  Virgil shook his head. “I’d tell you that it happens all the time, except that it doesn’t. It’s pretty rare,” Virgil said. “Random killings are just . . . incomprehensible. We’ve got an idea now who did it, two or three loser kids from Shinder. They apparently knew your name, knew you were well-off . . . they got desperate. That’s what we think.”

  He told them what he knew about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, and the oldest three of the boys knew of Sharp and Welsh, and vaguely remembered McCall. “Didn’t really know them,” said Jack. “Jimmy Sharp was a year behind me and a year ahead of Jim, I think.”

  Jim nodded and said, “That’s right. Becky was a year younger than me. Everybody said she was kind of a punchboard, but I never knew her well enough to know that. McCall was in there somewhere. He was one of those guys you don’t remember very well . . . kind of joked around, but the jokes were always pretty lame. Maybe he was in the same grade as Becky? I don’t know. You think they really did it?”

  “It looks that way,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that it’s McCall and two others, and they killed Mr. Sharp and Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because McCall knew them . . . but I think it’s probably Sharp. And Becky Welsh.”

  The three older O’Leary boys were in college—Jack in medical school, the other two in pre-med, all at the University of Minnesota. Mary was a senior in high school, Frank a sophomore. Ag had been the oldest of them, and, they said, probably had not known any of the suspected killers.

  Frank said, “If Ag had gone to med school instead of getting married, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had that temper, if she’d just been quiet . . .” And he sobbed once, stuck a knuckle in his mouth and turned away, and his father patted him on the shoulder.

  “It’s not Dick’s fault,” John O’Leary said to Frank. Virgil hadn’t known that Ag was married; he assumed that “Dick” was her husband.

  Mary: “If he’d taken better care of her, she wouldn’t have been here.”

  “And then maybe it would have been you that got killed,” Jim snapped.

  Virgil broke in: “Trying to backtrack a trail of what-if’s . . . everybody does it, but it doesn’t help. The trail gets too twisted up, and you wind up damaging people who really don’t need it.”

  Rob said, “We know that. We’ve even said that.”

  Jim said, “But we keep doing it anyway.” He glanced at his father, then said, “Excuse the language, but it’s because Dick is such a . . . dick.”

&nbs
p; • • •

  VIRGIL TALKED TO them a bit more about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, but none of them knew of any direct connection between themselves and the three suspects, except that their mother, Marsha, and Sharp and Welsh all came from Shinder. “But Mom left Shinder before they were even born.”

  Virgil nodded, but didn’t mention the diamonds worn to the reunion; it would just be another cause for unwarranted backtracking, and sleepless nights.

  Instead, he said, “So tell me about Dick.”

  Dick Murphy was a couple of years younger than Ag, but they’d both gone up to the University of Minnesota, where they’d dated, had become serious, and eventually, after Ag graduated, had married. Dick’s father ran an independent insurance brokerage in town, and Dick quit school after three years to go to work as a salesman.

  “They’re pretty rich, Dick’s whole family,” Rob said. “Dick was a running back on the football team, pretty good, he was always bombing around in those Mini Cooper cars in high school, and then he got a BMW when he went to college. You know, he’s a sales guy—he talks good and he looks good, but he’s sort of a dick.”

  “He really loved her, I believe,” John O’Leary said. “I wouldn’t have let them get married if I didn’t believe that.”

  “Dad . . .” Mary said. She seemed fondly exasperated.

  “You don’t think so?” John asked. His tone of voice suggested that he had his own doubts, Virgil thought.

  “In his way, maybe,” Mary said. “Ag was hot, and we’re pretty rich, too, and Dick sees himself driving around in a convertible with a hot rich chick. But I think it could have been some other hot rich chick, and he would have been just as happy.”

  “I’d like to know more about how she lost the baby,” Jack said.

  “He didn’t have anything to do with that,” Mary said. “If you’re thinking . . . He didn’t.”

  “Didn’t want it,” Jack said. “He almost told me so. He had it all planned out. First they’d get a boat, then they’d get a cabin, then they’d get a time-share at Park City . . . then maybe they’d get a kid. Like when they were fifty.”