Mad River (4 page)

“Mmmm.” Virgil took another quick look around, then said, “I’ll tell you, Lewis, it feels like a domestic to me. This George guy bought a bunch of beer Friday night, and he and the old lady—or somebody—drank five cans of it, and maybe three more Buds. He’s wearing a T-shirt, and it’s been pretty cold out. He shaves, because I can see a little shaving nick under his ear, healing up, day or two old, but he’s not shaven here. Ann is wearing slippers. That all makes me think they’d been up late drinking Friday night, probably watching TV, got up Saturday morning and hadn’t been up long. They were killed early in the morning, while they were having coffee, before George had a chance to shave or Ann got completely dressed. No sign of a break-in, or anything. And if you were a robber, would you pick this place?”

Duke looked around and shook his head. “I guess not.”

“Whoever did it, took George’s wallet, I think. We’ll have the crime-scene guys check around for Ann’s purse, but I’ll bet it’s either gone, or the money’s gone. It looks to me like somebody came here, somebody they knew, but who might have been unwelcome. They have an argument, and boom. Whoever it was needed money, because they took the time to rob the bodies, even though they couldn’t have had much cash—I mean, George charged a twelve-pack on his Visa card.”

“So . . . an argument about money, with somebody that they knew,” Duke said.

“Feels that way to me,” Virgil said. “Somebody who might have expected to get some money. I think we’ve got to take a real quick look at this daughter . . . though, mmm, I’m not sure a daughter would have brought a gun in, to kill her parents. That doesn’t feel quite right.”

“We’ve got the names of a couple of her friends. We can find out where she is,” the deputy said.

“If she’s in the Cities, I’ll have somebody run over and talk to her,” Virgil said. “At the same time, we need to look at other possibilities. Friends, other relatives. People George has been hanging out with.”

“We can do that,” Duke said.

“I talked to the neighbors,” Darrell said. “I don’t think he had much in the way of friends. I can check out Ann, down at the nursing home.”

“Not much more we can do tonight, though,” Virgil said to Duke. “I’ll want to talk to the woman who found them. Have some of your people close the place up until Crime Scene gets here. They’re on the way, should be here in a couple of hours.”

Duke nodded and said, “I’ll take you over to the neighbor lady’s. The one who found them.”

•   •   •

THE NEIGHBOR LADY
was named Margery Garfield, and she didn’t know anything. She’d wanted to talk to Ann Welsh about trading shifts at the nursing home the next Monday night, so she could go to parent-teacher night at the school, and had been trying to find Welsh all day. “I seen their car was still in the garage, but I never did see them. I was knocking on the front door, and I felt something funny might be going on, so I went around to the back, and peeked through the glass, and I could see Ann on the floor. I didn’t know it was a body, at first, but then, my eyes got adjusted, and I was pretty sure it was a body, so I ran back home and called the sheriff.”

“You didn’t touch anything?” Virgil asked.

She shook her head. “I never went inside. I did put my hand on the window glass, trying to see in better.”

He talked to her a few more minutes, and finally ran out of ground; and she asked, “I suppose Crime Scene will be coming around?”

“Pretty soon,” Virgil said.

“They oughta be able to figure it out,” she said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL AND DUKE
said good-bye, and they went outside and Duke asked, “You get annoyed by that? The Crime Scene thing?”

“No. People watch TV. No way to stop that,” Virgil said.

“It’d get under my skin, after a while,” Duke said. “So, you’re going to stick around?”

Virgil nodded. “Sure. I’ll run over to the Ramada in Marshall. I’ll call back to the Cities tomorrow morning and see if I can get somebody to look for the daughter. I’ll give you my cell phone number, if you come up with anything overnight. Main thing is, we get the scene processed. But we won’t get much going at four o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Duke said: “Okay. I’m heading home. I’ll have my men seal up this place. I’ll be going to church in the morning, and I’ll be back here right after.”

“I’m planning to do that myself,” Virgil said. “The worship service starts at eight o’clock. I’ll be out here by nine-thirty or so.”

Duke tipped his head: “Little surprised to hear you’re churchgoing, Virgil, but I certainly approve. I’ll see you at nine-thirty, unless something breaks.”

3

VIRGIL CHECKED INTO
the Ramada across the street from Southwest Minnesota State University at a little after four o’clock in the morning, set the alarm for six-thirty, and was asleep as soon as he lay down. He’d slept on the plane from Miami to Minneapolis Saturday morning, had taken a nap after he got home on Saturday afternoon, and was still young enough that he could deal with a day on two hours of sleep.

Although, when the alarm woke him up in what seemed like an instant after he went to sleep, he would, he expected, be fairly cranky by early afternoon.

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.”