Mad River (5 page)

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 thought, 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.”

Duke said, “Kick it,” but Virgil didn’t. Instead, he reached out and turned the knob, and pushed the door open. They were looking at a mudroom, a half dozen ragged coats hanging from pegs, maybe fifteen ball caps moldering on a shelf, and four or five pairs of worn shoes and boots under a bench. Two beat-up umbrellas sagged in one corner, with an old single-shot .22 rifle with a rusty barrel. The place smelled like dirt and sweat.

Another closed door led into the kitchen; the door had a glass window in it, and Virgil looked through.

“Got a dead guy,” he said. Duke looked through the glass, and Virgil said, “Through the far door. You can see a shoe with a foot in it. He’s dead, unless he picked that spot to take a nap.”

Duke said, “I’m afraid to touch the doorknob.”

“Got to go in, in case he
isn’t
quite dead.” Virgil put his hand flat on the face of the knob, so he wouldn’t touch the parts that would have fingerprints, and turned it, and the door popped open. They stepped through the kitchen in a straight line, Duke leading with the M16; Virgil was not inclined to walk into a possible gunfight in front of a man with a machine gun. But the house was quiet. From the far door, to the living room, they could see the body—a middle-aged man with a five- or six-day beard, in a long-sleeved woolen undershirt and jeans, lying flat on his back with a bullet hole in his forehead.

Largas, behind Virgil, said, “That’s five. Good God almighty.”

4

THEY CLEARED THE HOUSE,
then Virgil told Duke, “We need to round up everybody in town who knew Rebecca Welsh and James Sharp, get them in one place so we can brainstorm with them. We need to figure out where Welsh and Sharp are, right now.”

Duke nodded, turned to a deputy, said, “Get those two girls we talked to, get them to name everybody who knows these people. We’ll meet up at the elementary school. . . .” He looked at his watch. “At eleven o’clock sharp. Get Don Watson to open the place up.”

The deputy left, and Duke asked Virgil, “What else?”

“The neighbor’s house down the road has a car outside, but I didn’t see anybody there. We ought to check all the neighbors, make sure folks are okay.”

Duke said, “I’ll get that going. What are
you
going to do?”

“I’ll call the crime-scene people, get them over here, talk to the DMV and find out what James Sharp, the old man, drives, and get people looking at it.” He thought for a second, then said, “Then I’m going to call my boss. . . . And listen, I need everything you’ve got on those Friday murders in Bigham. Who’s working that?”

“Ross Price, he’s our investigator. I’ll hook you up with him.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL STARTED
with the DMV—James Sharp Senior drove a ten-year-old, extended-cab, silver Chevy pickup—and then called Davenport. “Jimmy Sharp and Rebecca Welsh hung with a bunch of people in the Cities. I’ve got one name you could call to find out exactly who that might be . . . who else they know. I already spoke to her this morning, so she’s familiar with the situation.”

“You’re sure it’s Welsh and Sharp?” Davenport asked.

“It’s better than fifty-fifty. Sharp’s got a bad rep here in town as a bully who might sell a little dope. Welsh is his girlfriend. If you actually spot them up there, look to see if they might be driving his old man’s Chevy truck. I think the killers have it, whoever they are. Welsh’s folks’ car is still in their garage.”

“What’s your next move?”

“We’re having a séance over at the elementary school with everyone who knew Welsh and Sharp. If they’re running, I need to know which way they’re going.”

“Good luck with that,” Davenport said. “I’ll get things going here. Stay in touch.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL DOWNLOADED
Jimmy Sharp’s and Becky Welsh’s driver’s license photos to his cell phone, and spent a few minutes looking at them. Jimmy was a kid who a lot of people would have said was handsome—he had the cheekbones and the squared-off chin, but there was something about the cast of his features that wasn’t quite right: he looked sneaky. Becky should have been pretty: blond, small nose, big eyes, but there was a disappointment about her face—a disappointment with life—that made her look sad, and a little too hard.

But then, he thought, maybe makeup could fix it.

•   •   •

THE GATHERING AT
Gerald Ford Elementary School brought in about thirty townspeople, who were sitting on metal folding chairs, talking quietly among themselves, when Virgil arrived. Virgil had told Duke about the silver pickup, and Duke had called back to his office and had an alert broadcast through the local sheriffs’ association, which covered eight counties in the western part of the state.

Virgil was wearing the black sport coat and collared shirt he’d worn to church, which passed for fairly sober wear in a country town. He smiled at the crowd when he came in, with Duke trailing behind, and picked up a folded chair, shook it open, and planted it in front of the group.

He introduced himself, and Duke, and said, “Y’all may have heard what’s going on, here. We’re trying to find Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh. I can tell you that Mr. and Mrs. Welsh and the senior Mr. Sharp were all found shot to death. We haven’t been able to find Jimmy or Becky. We don’t know whether they were involved in the shootings, or if they might be victims, or maybe they don’t even know about them. Anyway, we need to find them, and since you all know one of them, or both of them, we were hoping you could throw out some ideas about where they might be, or might be going, or who we might contact to find that out.”

A square-faced man with straw-colored hair raised a hand and asked, “Isn’t it a little . . . abnormal . . . to be talking to everybody at once like this?”

Virgil said, “This is an abnormal situation. We were hoping that if you folks listen to each other, and mix it up a little, we’ll spark off some ideas. We’re brainstorming.”

A woman off to one side muttered, “I don’t know nothing about this.”

Virgil said, “Look, what kind of a kid was Jim? When you knew him? Who knew him best?”

Everyone looked around, and eventually most of them focused on a young man who stirred nervously and then said, “We used to hang out, some. Not like we were good friends.”

Virgil: “Was he a good kid, bad kid, middle-of-the-road?”

The young man said, “He was . . . okay . . . most of the time.”

Somebody snorted, then an older man said, “Oh, horseshit.”

That got them going.

•   •   •

JIMMY SHARP
was a thin young man of average height, with long black hair and what one man said was “a joker’s face, like the joker on a playing card.” That seemed mostly to mean Sharp’s smile, which often formed itself into a sneer, usually with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

A man named Ralph, who identified himself as one of Sharp’s teachers through sixth grade, said that he’d begun bullying other children in third or fourth grade, after he’d been held back the first time. “He was one of those kids who just started getting his hormones early, and probably got whacked around by his father, and he never got along with books, and that all turned him into a little punk. His mother, whose name was Jolene, if I’m not mistaken, took off from here about that time, and hasn’t been back, as far as I know.”

The crowd agreed that she hadn’t been back, and that she was an O’Hara, and the whole family was gone now since Bernice died. None of them had ever come back, and Jimmy had no other relatives around.

“He used to hang out at the Surprise. Butch thinks he was stealing from there, but never caught him. He wasn’t smart in school, but he could be clever when he wanted to be,” Harvey said.

“What’d he steal?” Duke asked.

“Ask Butch.”

“I hate to accuse somebody,” said an old man in an old blue suit, with a thin, prairie-dried face.

“You Butch?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. Kids would come in, you know, steal candy, try to steal cigarettes or comic books, or get me looking one way, and steal a
Penthouse
from under the counter. I’d catch them, and call up their parents, and that’d end that. But Jimmy . . . I never caught him because I think he was stealing
food
,” Butch said. “He’d hang around outside until I went to get something for somebody, and then he’d slip into the store and stick something in his pants, then go on over and look at the magazines and comics. I wouldn’t see him until he was right there, and I’d be watching him like a hawk, and he’d never take anything. But I think he was stealing. And I think he was stealing stuff like Dinty Moore stew. It seemed like I’d never sell that stuff, I’d never see it coming across the counter, but at the end of the month, it’d pretty much be gone.”

“But you hired him to work there . . .”

“Yeah, against my better judgment. He got out of school and couldn’t catch on with anybody—not even the army wanted him—so finally I gave him a job,” Butch said. “He lasted about a month. He kept bumping heads with the other kids, and I had to let him go. I won’t tell you what he called me when I gave him the news.”

“You afraid of him?” Duke asked.

“No, not exactly. I never felt like he’d come after me, but I did think that there might have been a lot of reasons for him being like he was . . . but, when all was said and done, he was sort of a bad kid. Just a mean, bad kid, who liked to see other people get hurt. Like I said, he might have had his reasons.”

“You know his old man?” Virgil asked.

“Of course. I know everybody in town. He was grown-up Jimmy Sharp.”

A woman said, “An asshole.”

Somebody else said, “That’s right.”

The crowd was getting into it now. “How about Becky?” Virgil asked.

“Wild kid,” somebody said. “She was going to New York or somewhere, to be an actress.”

“She was pretty,” somebody else said. “Had a face like an angel, when she was in grade school here.”

“She ever go to New York?”

“Nobody from here goes to New York,” Butch said. “They all come back to the Surprise.”

•   •   •

A WOMAN STOOD UP,
jeans and a turquoise-colored blouse, with a piece of silver Indian jewelry at her neck. She’d been sitting next to a man with a long brown ponytail, and Virgil tagged them as the town liberals.

She said, “Jimmy and Becky are like a lot of kids from here—they’ve got no hope. There aren’t any jobs here, they’re not sophisticated enough or well-educated enough to move to the big city and work there, they see all these things on TV that they can never have. They give up. We don’t give them hope. We don’t even give them anything to work with.”

A heavyset man in a jean jacket said, “Come on, Sue. Plenty of good kids come from here. They just aren’t two of them.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Earl. Your boys are gonna get a farm that’s worth, what, right now . . . three or four million dollars? All they have to do is drive a tractor long enough, and they’ll be rich. But most people here don’t have a farm to give to their kids. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Virgil jumped in: “That’s all fine, but we really can’t change the culture in the next couple of days. I need to know more about these kids—what they’re like, where they’re probably going.”

“All they ever talked about was going to Los Angeles and working in the movies,” a young girl said. “If I were you, I’d start looking around Sioux Falls or out by Mitchell. They’re probably on their way.”

“Not if they’re driving Jim Sharp’s Chevy,” said a broad-shouldered man with oily blond hair. “The gol-darned tires on that thing won’t get them past Marshall. Jim brought it in for gas last week, and the deepest tread was the tread-wear indicators. Tires are like paper and the transmission sounds like it’s made out of rocks. Won’t get them fifty miles, unless they find new tires.”

“Becky worked for a while over at a McDonald’s in Marshall—maybe they went there. At least she knows the city,” a woman said.

•   •   •

THEY TALKED FOR
a few more minutes, until the people began repeating themselves, and Virgil called it off. Out on the school porch, he said to Duke, “We’ve got a couple dead-enders with a gun. We’ve gotta find that pickup, Lewis. The problem is . . . we might find more dead folks when we find the pickup.”

“I’ll get onto Marshall, have them check the place street by street,” Duke said. “And every other town for fifty miles around. We won’t be able to keep it quiet. We’ll start getting the media messing with us.”

“That’s not all bad,” Virgil said. “The more people spotting for us, the better. We’ll just have to put up with the bullshit that comes with it. Or really, you will—you’ll be the face on this thing, until we get them or there’s more shooting.”

“So maybe instead of sneaking around until they find out, we oughta just go ahead and bring the media in right away. Make an appeal.”

Virgil nodded. “Think about how you want to do that. We’re not even sure that these kids are involved . . . but we do need to find them.”

“Let me think about it,” Duke said. “What’re you going to do?”

“Call people up on the telephone,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

DAVENPORT,
working the phones with a couple of other BCA agents, had tracked down Jimmy Sharp’s last known address, a room in a postwar house on St. Paul’s East Side. The owner, whose name was Ronald Deutch, had originally rented the room to another man from Shinder, named Tom McCall. McCall had let Jimmy and Becky sleep in his room for the week before Deutch kicked all three of them out for non-payment of rent.

“As far as we could tell, all three of them were effectively homeless,” Davenport said. “Deutch was renting them the room for fifty dollars a week, and they were two weeks overdue and couldn’t come up with even a night’s rent. They left there two weeks ago, and the landlord hasn’t seen them since.”

“So there might be three of them, instead of two,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. You gotta see what you can find on this McCall guy.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL HAD BEEN WORKING
the telephone from his truck, where he could keep the phone plugged into the charger. He’d just hung up from the Davenport call when a man stepped up beside the truck and knocked on the passenger-side window. He was a thin man who wore a cowboy hat, a tan, western-style canvas sport coat, and rimless eyeglasses. Virgil ran the window down and the man said, “I’m Ross Price. I’m the—”

“Investigator,” Virgil said. “Hop in. We need to talk.”

Price got in and said, “Five dead. These kids have gone crazy.”

“If it’s them,” Virgil agreed. “I’ve talked to Duke about the murders Friday night, but I’d like to get the details.”

“I’ve been writing up everything. I’ve got files on my computer I could send you.”

“Do that. But just tell me what you’ve seen so far.”

Price looked out the window, scratched his forehead, then said, “It seems simple, but it feels complicated. I’ve never been the lead investigator on a murder where we really needed investigation. I’ve done two murders, but we knew who did both of them the minute we walked in the door. One was a bar fight, the other one was a domestic. But this one . . .”

Virgil nodded: “I know what you mean. My first murder investigation, you know, a real investigation, I was so confused that I didn’t know if I was coming or going. But, after a while, it smooths out. So just tell me what you saw, and what people told you.”

•   •   •

THE MURDER VICTIM
was named Agatha Murphy, shot in the head during what looked like a burglary gone bad. Or a robbery gone bad—Price wasn’t sure which it was.