Mad River

by John Sandford

  “They give me any excuse, damn right I would,” Shrake said.

  “But that’s the point—they didn’t give them an excuse,” Virgil said. “They threw away the guns, called ahead, and were coming in to surrender. So you would have stood in the ditch and blown them up with a machine gun?”

  Shrake sighed and said, “No, I guess not. Any excuse, though . . .”

  Virgil said, “Attaboy.”

  But then a thin, gray-faced old man in a tan button-front farmer shirt and green Sears work pants stepped over to Virgil, poked a finger at his chest, and said, “I saw you on TV. You’re an asshole.”

  “Thank you for your support,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  DAVENPORT CALLED AND SAID, “Henry—I mean, they’re gonna have to send in an environmental clean-up team to hose out his office.” Henry Sands was the BCA director, a recent political appointee. “And Rose Marie is madder than a hornet. You’re gonna take some shit.”

  “And where are you in all of this?” Virgil asked.

  “I’m behind you,” Davenport said. “Like, way behind you.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “But you’re okay,” Davenport said.

  “I’m okay?”

  “Yeah. The governor called, and told me he didn’t want to call you directly in case anybody ever asked, but . . . he likes it. As far as he’s concerned, you can be Queen of the May. And with Henry and Rose Marie being like they are, they will pay very close attention to what the governor has to say.”

  “I don’t even see how they can hear him,” Virgil said. “You know, with their lips stuck so firmly to his ass.”

  “Hey, hey . . . let’s not have any of that kind of talk. Let’s be a little modest and self-deprecating. At least for a couple weeks.”

  “Lucas, I wouldn’t turn down his help,” Virgil said. “I’ve got old men telling me I’m an asshole.”

  “Yeah, well, you got the right old man behind you. He’s gonna call Rose Marie and chill her out. You’ll probably still take some shit, but you know . . . the attorney general is already drafting a statement about investigating the circumstances of the shooting. How can you lose, in Minnesota, when the liberal do-gooders love your ass?”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED A FEW more minutes about managing the publicity, and then Virgil asked, “What do you think about Murphy? What do I do?”

  “Investigate him,” Davenport said. “You’ve got some stuff: track it down. And tell Jenkins and Shrake to get back up here: vacation’s over.”

  Virgil sent Jenkins and Shrake home, then went back to his room and stared at the ceiling for a while. Eventually, he got on the phone to Beatrice Sawyer, the crime-scene crew leader, and asked whether they’d recovered any money from the bodies.

  “Yes. We got one thousand and six dollars from Sharp’s wallet,” she said.

  “Twenties?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Might have come from an ATM?”

  She said, “Could have, I guess. But this feels like it came out in one chunk, and most people have limits that are lower than that.”

  There were three banks in town, a Wells Fargo, a Bigham First State Bank, and the Bare County Credit Union. Virgil made some calls and determined that Dick Murphy had three accounts at Wells Fargo. He called the BCA attorney and got a subpoena going.

  “You gonna need it right away?” the lawyer asked.

  “Tomorrow will be okay,” Virgil said.

  “We’ll serve it up here, this afternoon, and you should be good to go, first thing tomorrow,” the attorney said.

  Virgil made a list:

  1.Sharp was seen shooting pool and talking with Dick Murphy the night before the night of the shooting.

  2.Sharp had neither money nor gun as late as the afternoon before he murdered Agatha O’Leary.

  3.By that evening, he had a gun and $1,000 in cash.

  4.Sharp flashed the money at Welsh and McCall and bragged about being a hit man.

  5.Randy White felt that Murphy had solicited him to kill Ag O’Leary, but he declined.

  6.Ag told Murphy she wanted a divorce. Murphy believed he would inherit the best part of a million dollars if Ag died before the divorce.

  He had to investigate it all, but just wasn’t up to it right at that moment. He lay on the bed, his brain churning through it. Eventually, he sat up and made a call.

  “You got them,” Sally said.

  “Not me,” Virgil said. “Listen, I gotta tell you. I got four flat tires and no way to get them patched here in Bigham.”

  “Sounds like an emergency,” she said. “Have I told you about our emergency roadside service?”

  • • •

  THEY MET IN MARSHALL and walked along Main Street, looking in the store windows, bought Cokes at the drugstore and Virgil bought her a yellow rose at the flower shop, considered the pressure washers in the window of the hardware store, which would be useful for cleaning the hull of his boat, stopped to watch a funeral cortege go by, walked past the post office, and around and around, and Virgil told her about the ambush and the killings.

  Sally said, “They shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I don’t think so—but not a lot of people agree with me,” Virgil said.

  “Maybe you ought to talk to your father.”

  “I don’t really need the good Christian view. He’s a great guy but he sees both sides of everything, and mostly just confuses me,” Virgil said.

  “Do you think you’ll get Dick Murphy?”

  Virgil considered, then said, “No. Not unless something weird happens. If I could find the guy who gave or sold the gun to Murphy, then I’d have a better chance. If I find that Murphy took the money out of the bank, one thousand dollars the day that Ag O’Leary was murdered, that’d help. If I got both of those things, and the right jury, then . . . maybe. But I don’t think I’ll get both of those things. I might not get either one. When Murphy made the pass at Randy White, he backed off instantly. So he’s not real stupid.”

  “You have to be a little stupid to pay somebody to kill your wife,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  They walked along and Sally said, “So when Larry and I were breaking up, and I found out about his little fling, I lay in bed for a couple nights and thought about killing him. I never would have done it, of course, but I thought about it, because it made me feel better. I came up with some general rules for killing your spouse. Number one: do it yourself.”

  Virgil was interested: “Really.”

  “Well, when you were getting all your divorces, didn’t you want to kill somebody?”

  “Mmm, no. I just mostly wanted to avoid alimony. The longest I was married was a year. There weren’t any kids, no houses . . . I couldn’t see why I ought to be on the hook forever.”

  “Are you?”

  “No. They were nice enough women, in their own way. They mostly just wanted a do-over,” Virgil said. “But I worried about it. One of them, we were married about ten days when I knew it wasn’t gonna last, and I kept obsessing about it: on the hook forever? For ten days? I could see myself supporting the next husband. I saw him as a big fat unshaven unemployed guy in a wife-beater T-shirt who sat around on a sagging couch and yelled at the kids—oh, yeah, eight ratty kids with drug habits. . . . I never felt like killing anybody, though.”

  Sally laughed and said, “Well, did she do that? Marry a guy like that?”

  “No, she married a small-business guy. He runs a grinder company, he has trucks that go around and pick up documents from big companies, that they’re getting rid of, and he grinds them up. He does all right.”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Virgil said, with the
first smile of the day. Nothing like having the ex-wife marry somebody more boring than yourself.

  They sat in the park for a while, and then went and got something to eat, and as they were finishing, Sally said, “I’m going back to the store. You, you have to go back to Bigham and get started.”

  “That’s not really what I want to do,” Virgil said.

  “I know what you want to do, but I’m not up for a nooner with a guy going through a depressive fit,” she said.

  “Nooner,” Virgil said. “I haven’t heard that word since I left Marshall. Makes me laugh.”

  “So . . .”

  He sighed and said, “Yeah. I’m going back.”

  25

  SO VIRGIL WENT BACK to Bigham, and the first thing he did was stop by the Bigham Gazette and talk to the editor, Bud Wright, who was also the lead reporter and photographer. “I have the information that would make a decent sidebar—is that right, sidebar?—okay, sidebar, and I’m willing to give it to you exclusively if you’ll give me a break and run it big,” Virgil told him.

  The editor/reporter said, “I can guarantee it.”

  “I am looking for somebody who can tell me where Jimmy Sharp’s pistol came from. It’s called a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber Hand Ejector, Military & Police. It has a six-inch barrel—”

  Wright said, “Slow down, slow down . . . A .38-caliber . . .”

  Virgil told him that there was reason to believe that Jimmy Sharp had acquired the gun in Bigham, so, “Somebody’s seen it. That doesn’t mean they’re in trouble—there’s no law against selling a gun—but I’d really like to know how it made its way to Jimmy.”

  They talked for ten minutes, and Wright said the paper would be on the street the next morning, the first “extra” in the history of the newspaper. When he finished the interview, he got Virgil to stand in front of a piece of seamless paper and took his picture.

  “If you find the gun, are you going to give us the first word on it?” Wright asked.

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Everything depends on the circumstances. But I sure would like to know where it came from.”

  He left Wright working on the story and walked down the street to the Burger King, got a package of fries, sat at a booth, and called Roseanne Bush and Honor Roberts and asked them to list all the people they knew who hung around with, or were friendly with, Dick Murphy.

  He spoke to Roberts last, and when he got off the phone, he had seven names.

  • • •

  THEN THE INVESTIGATION slowed down. During the hunt for Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp, he’d been working twenty-hour days, and something happened every single day. It was like being in a war.

  When he started investigating Murphy, it was like walking through waist-deep molasses.

  He worked the seven names all day and most of the first evening, and got more names from the people he spoke to, and worked those names the next day. Several people said that Murphy was unhappy with Ag. Two said that he’d mentioned her money—but not in a way that suggested he was anxious to get it for himself. The references, they said, had been joking: “If I were as rich as my old lady . . .”

  Virgil thought, Murphy was thinking about it.

  • • •

  LATER ON THE SECOND DAY, he got a call from the BCA attorney and was told that he could stop by the Wells Fargo and look at Murphy’s account history. He did, and found that Murphy had withdrawn not one thousand dollars, but fifteen hundred dollars two days before Ag was killed.

  With the help of the branch manager, he tracked the transaction to a young teller named George, who actually remembered it. “I gave him a thousand in twenties, and five hundred in fifties. I remember because we’re supposed to chat with customers and make them feel like we’re friendly, so I said, ‘Going on vacation?’ He said he was going to Vegas. I said, ‘Man, wish I was going with you.’ It was colder’n heck that day, and Vegas sounded pretty good.”

  The newspaper extra came out in the afternoon, with an end-of-the-world story about the killings of Welsh and Sharp. Virgil’s sidebar ran big, with a BCA phone number for information.

  Nobody called it.

  Davenport said, “That was a long shot—I don’t know what else you could have done, but who wants to be known as the guy who supplied the gun to Jimmy Sharp?”

  “I was hoping he supplied it to Murphy,” Virgil said.

  “Same thing, since everybody in town knows you’re looking for Murphy.”

  • • •

  MURPHY RETURNED FROM VEGAS after a week and went back to work at his father’s insurance agency. John O’Leary said Murphy hadn’t done anything with the will—if he had, the O’Learys would know about it, since they were all in it.

  • • •

  THE CASE AGAINST Duane McGuire and Royce Atkins—and implicitly, against Murphy—was handled by two special prosecutors appointed by the state attorney general. They also investigated the shooting of Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp.

  The attorneys, Sandy Hunstad and Brett Thomas, eventually found that they had no case against the deputies who killed Welsh and Sharp. While they were critical of the sheriff’s command and control, they said publicly that problem was one of management, and was not a criminal affair.

  Duke issued a defiant statement, supporting the actions of his deputies, but everyone was left with a sour taste. A half dozen people took the time to tell Virgil that he should be ashamed of himself for his criticism of Duke, who was only trying to defend the citizens against a couple of crazies. Only one told him that he thought Virgil was right, and Virgil suspected that guy was nuts.

  The case against McGuire and Atkins was clearer, but the level of the charge was not. Since they’d used only fists and boots, and no other weapons, and Virgil was not seriously injured, Hunstad said that it was unlikely they could sustain a charge of Assault in the First Degree, and would probably have to drop to Assault/Three.

  They could, however, file the Assault/One, because there were special provisions for an assault on a police officer. Because the prison penalty was much stronger—up to twenty years—they would have more to work with in trying to convince Atkins to give up Murphy. In other words, to extort a confession . . .

  But Atkins wouldn’t talk. The only thing they had that pointed directly at Murphy was McGuire’s belief that Atkins was paid by Murphy.

  • • •

  THEY WERE WORKING through those possibilities when one of Duke’s deputies—one of the men who shot up Welsh and Sharp—encountered Virgil on the street, pulled him aside, and said, “You’re an asshole for what you’re saying about us, but that’s neither here nor there. What you need to know is, I saw Dick Murphy’s car over at Royce Atkins’s girlfriend’s house on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, first thing, she was at the jail talking to Royce, and then to Duane. . . . They’re cooking something up.”

  Virgil said, “Thank you.”

  The next day, McGuire began tap-dancing: he was no longer exactly sure that anybody got paid to beat up Virgil. It might have been, he said, a misunderstanding on his part.

  Virgil talked to the attorneys, and Thomas said, “Look, Virgil, we’re with you on this thing. We can put these guys in jail for Assault/Three, I think, but the way things are, they’ll get less than five years. Murphy can talk to the girlfriend all he wants, and she can talk to Atkins and McGuire. Those are the rules. If we could prove that Murphy is paying them to give false testimony, that’d be different. You don’t have anything like that.”

  “So they’re going to walk?” Virgil asked.

  “No. They’re going to jail—but at this point, all we’ve got against Murphy is a fairly weak circumstantial case that I don’t think we can convict on. We need Atkins to talk. If we can get him to talk, we can draw a better picture. We could show Murphy paying
to hurt you. We can bring in Randy White’s testimony, which suggests that he wanted Ag O’Leary killed. We can bring in the money found in Sharp’s pocket. That might be enough. But you’ve got to get Atkins.”

  Atkins wouldn’t budge, and finally his attorney told Virgil to stop coming around.

  • • •

  APRIL DRAGGED INTO MAY, and the weather finally started getting warmer, if not much wetter, and people in southwest Minnesota began using the dreaded “D” word, for “drought.” On a very fine and dry May afternoon, a woman named May Lawson took a heavily weighted, chrome yellow Momentus golf club and beat her estranged husband to death with it, having caught him asleep on the couch in his new bachelor apartment. She then went back to the school where she taught fifth grade and pretended that nothing had happened.

  Her husband, Rolf, had been conducting an affair with another woman who worked at the DMV. Virgil took about two days to figure all that out, and the tests came back with May’s deoxyribonucleic acid all over the body—she’d apparently spit at him while beating him to death—and the school’s maintenance technician found the Momentus golf club in a dumpster behind the school. May had wiped it, but hastily, and hadn’t gotten all the prints, or all the blood, either.

  That took two weeks, including the arrest and paperwork, and when Virgil got back to Bigham, the case against Murphy felt colder than ever.

  Finally, Thomas and Hunstad sat him down and said, “Virgil, we talked to the big guy, and he said we should take a run at it. We’re dead in the water right now. What we think is, if we take a run at it, and put the evidence out there, we’ll probably lose. But if we do lose, and if the O’Learys sue Murphy for wrongful death, there’s a chance they can keep him from inheriting that money. And make him a killer in the eyes of the community, just like with O.J.”

  “If that’s all we got, I’ll take it,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  HE ARRESTED MURPHY that afternoon. Murphy was astonished and humiliated when Virgil marched him out of his old man’s office building and dropped him into the Bare County jail on a charge of murder.