Mad River (6 page)

“They came in like burglars. We think three of them, but it could have been two—the surviving witness wasn’t sure about that. At least one was a woman. But two men and a woman, that fits with what you’ve got going here.”

“Yes, it does,” Virgil said. “What kind of neighborhood was it? Was the house picked by chance?”

“I can’t say,” Price said. “They passed a lot of houses that looked as good as the O’Leary house. That had me confused. But now that it seems like these kids are from here in Shinder, it makes more sense. Mrs. O’Leary was from here in Shinder, and I guess she was flashing some expensive diamonds. . . .”

Price repeated the story about O’Leary and her jewelry. He said one of the intruders apparently came in through a back window that had been left unlocked, and then opened a back door for the others. They’d crept through a sleeping house, eventually entering the front bedroom where two women, sisters, were sleeping. One of them, Agatha Murphy, was staying at her parents’ house after separating from her husband some months earlier. The other, Mary O’Leary, was a senior in high school, six years younger than Agatha.

“They came in the bedroom, said they were there to do some robbing,” Price said. “Ag Murphy—they call her Ag—got up in their face, and one of them knocked her down. That spooked them, and they ran for it. But before they went, the leader shot Agatha in the forehead and killed her. Medical examiner said death was instantaneous. Mary O’Leary says that Agatha was kneeling on the floor when she got shot, and was no threat to the killer. He shot her down in cold blood. Just . . . nuts.”

Virgil: “Did they ask for money or jewelry?”

“Didn’t ask for anything. The leader said he was there to do some robbing, but then, the girl got on him, and he hit her and then shot her. Then they ran.”

“Can Mary identify them? Any way at all?”

Price shook his head. “The leader had a flashlight in their faces. Your crime-scene people couldn’t come up with prints, and we haven’t heard back about DNA but they weren’t too confident about that, either. They did find some denim threads on the windowsill, and some brown cotton threads that might have come from gloves . . . so they were ready to do it.”

“The back window . . . Did the O’Learys say why it was open?”

“They didn’t think it was. Everything else was locked. And I’ll tell you something—this is about the only bit of real detecting I’ve done: I saw that whoever opened that window pried it up with a knife, or maybe a screwdriver. A knife, I think. But I looked at all the other windows down that side of the house, and you know what? There’s not another knife-dent to be found. They went right straight to the open window and pried it up. It’s like they
knew
.”

“Nice piece of work there,” Virgil said. “Like the window had been spotted in advance.”

“The thing is, the windows have locking levers on both sides. They fold down to lock, up to unlock, but you can’t see what position they’re in from outside. You either knew the window was open, or you had to try them all. Or, you got a giant coincidence.”

“We got a saying about coincidences in the BCA,” Virgil said.

Price bit. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Nothing’s ever a coincidence, except when it is.”

“Jeez, I’ll write that down. That really helps,” Price said.

•   •   •

THEY TALKED FOR
a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, “What I’d like is for you to do two things for me—hunt around Bigham and find out if Jimmy Sharp, Becky Welsh, and Tom McCall were staying there for the last week or so. They couldn’t make the rent in the Cities, so they had to be staying somewhere cheap, or free. Maybe with some friends? I don’t know. . . . But if you find them, have some backup.”

“I’ll put the word out. If they were there, we should know today,” Price said. “What’s the other thing?”

“Find out where Jimmy’s car is. It’s an old black Firebird, the DMV has the tags. They apparently drove here in the Charger and left here in the truck. So, where’s the Firebird? We can’t find his old man’s truck, either, so they might have a new set of wheels . . . but maybe, maybe they went back to the Firebird. We really need to know how they’re traveling.”

“But if they had the Firebird when they hit the O’Learys’ house, why did they have to hijack a car?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder . . .” Price scratched his forehead again.

“Yeah?”

“They go into the O’Leary house, planning to rob it . . . I wonder how they thought they were going to get away? They couldn’t plan on finding a guy standing next to his car.”

Virgil said, “Huh.” They thought about that for a minute, then Virgil said, “Maybe they were planning to kill everybody in the house, and take a car. And panicked, instead.”

“Jeez . . . you think? There were five people there.”

“But then, they’re nuts,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

PRICE LEFT,
and Virgil went back to the phones. He called the O’Leary house, now curious about the victims of the first crime, and found that Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband was with her. He talked to Marsha’s mother, Mary Hogan, who said that Marsha had been particularly friendly with two women from Shinder, classmates, Bernice Sawyer and Harriet Washburn, whom Marsha had known since before kindergarten.

“For Shinder things, they’d be the best ones to talk to,” Hogan said. Her voice had an elderly scratch to it, but tough and dry, like a woman who’d seen some death.

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL TALKED TO SAWYER FIRST.
She was a thin, friendly woman with a big country kitchen. Her parents owned the local grain elevator, and her husband worked there. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about Ag being murdered. I thought, my God, what are they doing up there?”

Sawyer had gone to the class reunion, and the dance, and remembered that Becky Welsh had been working the food service, serving desserts.

“Marsha was wearing her diamonds. I don’t know how Becky could have missed them—the most diamonds anybody around here ever saw. Marsha did it on purpose. She had a couple of old rivals here, who wound up leading pretty modest lives, and she was . . .” Sawyer smiled. “Sticking it to them, I guess you’d say.”

She’d never heard of a Tom McCall. “He doesn’t live in Shinder, and I don’t believe he’s ever lived here, because I know everybody who lives here,” she said.

When he was done with Sawyer, Virgil touched bases with Washburn, because he couldn’t think of what else to do, and Washburn confirmed what Sawyer had said. Becky Welsh had almost certainly seen the diamonds. Washburn, who also claimed to know everybody who lived in Shinder, agreed that there was no Tom McCall, either in the present or in the immediate past.

Virgil left Washburn, went out and sat in his truck; then called Duke, learned that Duke had been in touch with the local media, and had been called by both KSTP and Channel Three television in the Cities.

“You ever heard of a kid named Tom McCall?” Virgil asked. “About the same age as Sharp and Welsh?”

“There are some McCalls in the county,” Duke said. “I haven’t specifically heard of a Tom.”

“Get somebody to call around to the McCalls you know,” Virgil said. “There may be a Tom McCall running with Sharp and Welsh.” He told him what he’d gotten from Davenport.

“Got any more ideas?” Duke asked.

“I’m sitting here in my truck thinking some up,” Virgil said. “I’ll let you know as they come along.”

“Do that.”

Virgil called him back one minute later. “I just had an idea, though it’s slightly disturbing.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think you should call up all the rich people in town, and make sure they’re alive.”

There was a moment of silence, then Duke said, “Mother of God.”

“Yeah. These kids are flat broke, they don’t even have gas money, probably. They need money. They gotta be looking for it.”

5

JIMMY SHARP,
Becky Welsh, and Tom McCall had driven to Shinder after the O’Leary and Williams murders.

Halfway back, Tom said, “I think we fucked up bad. The cops’ll never stop until they figure it out.”

“Fuck ’em,” Jimmy said. “They got nothing to go on. And fuck those O’Leary assholes. Kill them again, if I could.”

Becky patted his arm and said, “It just makes me so fuckin’ hot.”

Jimmy glanced at her. Made her so fuckin’ hot: yeah, well, that was a problem he didn’t want to talk about.

•   •   •

AND TOM DIDN’T WANT
to think about it. He’d been hanging around the edges of the Becky-Jimmy relationship for a while, and he knew something wasn’t quite right, but he didn’t know what it was. What he knew for sure was, he’d been hot for Becky since he’d first laid eyes on her in the ninth grade. After he left school, he hadn’t seen her for a while, but when he ran into the two of them in the Cities, it all came back.

Tom had never slept with a pretty woman. Those he’d gone with had been the leftovers, and he was the best they could do. Every time he’d touched Becky—taking her arm, touching her shoulder to direct her at something—she’d flinched away, as though he were diseased.

Why was that? Why did pretty women treat him like shit? Why did Becky look right through him as though he weren’t there? The longer it had gone on, the more his fantasy/dream sex had become mixed up with violence. He’d show them who the strong one was; he’d show them Tom the Barbarian . . .

Tom didn’t know what to think about the killing of Ag O’Leary or the black guy. He did know that he had nothing to do with it. He was just walking along and Jimmy suddenly went crazy and killed them. He was clean.

Would he stay clean if he hung around with Jimmy? If Jimmy went down for a couple of murders, where would that leave him and Becky? With Jimmy out of the picture . . .

After he got kicked out of the navy, Tom had gone to work for a desperate home security agency, which mostly meant he drove around dark suburban neighborhoods looking for false alarms. He never did find a house that had been broken into—in fact, he’d found a fairly small percentage of the houses he’d been sent to, because he got lost easily. That shortcoming got him fired—or laid off, as his supervisor put it.

When the unemployment ran out, he had a two-week job as a pizza delivery man, but had the same problem as he did with home security. When he got fired by the pizza joint, he landed a job as a door-puller for another security company. Door-pulling was exactly what it sounded like: he spent the evening driving around to suburban office complexes pulling on doors to make sure they were locked. He got fired from that one when a late-working accountant found him sitting on a step smoking a joint.

After that, things got tough. He tried sitting at an interstate off-ramp with a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless Navy Vet, Please Help,” but on an average six-hour day, pulled in only twelve dollars. On the other hand, the work wasn’t onerous, and he might have stuck with it, if he hadn’t met Jimmy and Becky at a Taco Bell.

They knew each other from the countryside. Tom had been born on a farm five miles east of Bigham, and met Becky and Jimmy in high school. They’d run into each other again in the Twin Cities, where Jimmy and Becky had gone looking for work. Six weeks after their reunion in the Twin Cities, here they were, cutting cross-country in the dark, and Tom, in his own dim way, was thinking over the possibilities.

•   •   •

A COLD CLOUDY
April night in the Minnesota countryside is darker than the inside of a coal sack. They sped along through the night, right on the edge of outrunning their headlights, missing a coon running down the road, the animal glancing back at them with amber eyes.

They got to Shinder in the middle of the night, pulled into the yard. The old man’s truck was sitting there, and Jimmy pulled around it and said, “Tom, get out and open the garage doors. Let’s get this thing out of sight.”

Tom got out in the headlights and pulled open the garage doors; a snowblower was blocking the entrance, and he jacked it around until Jimmy could squeeze by. They were pulling the doors shut behind the Charger when the old man hollered down from an upstairs window, “Who the hell is that?”

Jimmy called back, “It’s me.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Need to come in for a while. We could use some breakfast.”

“Get the hell out of here, you little fart. I don’t have anything for the likes of you. Now, scat.”

“Scat, my ass,” Jimmy shouted. He turned to the other two and said, “C’mon. Door’s never locked.”

“Get the fuck away from my house.”

Jimmy went through the back door, Becky behind him, Tom holding back. In the kitchen, Jimmy flipped on the light, went to the refrigerator, pulled it open, took out a plastic bottle of milk, and said to Becky, “There should be some oatmeal there in the bottom cupboard, next to the sink.”

She pulled open the cupboard door, and there was a cylindrical box of Quaker Oats on the shelf. She took it out and was holding it in her hands when the old man came storming down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“You fuckers get out of here,” he said. He waved his hand at Jimmy, a dismissive gesture. “You got no rights here no more. Give me that oatmeal.”

“Stay away from her,” Jimmy said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“No, you shut the fuck up. I’m tired, and we got some trouble over in Bigham, and I’m not putting up with any shit anymore. We’re gonna have breakfast and figure out—”

“I’m gonna throw your ass out,” the old man said. He took two steps toward Jimmy, and Jimmy pulled out the gun and pointed it at his forehead. The old man stopped, and sneered at him and said, “You got a gun? You think that makes you a man?”

“Don’t know about that, but I know that there’re some dead folks who don’t worry about that no more,” Jimmy said.

“Dead folks, you ain’t got the guts.” Then a wrinkle appeared in the old man’s forehead and he asked, “What the fuck you done?”

“Killed a white girl and this black dude over in Bigham,” Jimmy said. “I hate your old ass and I got half a mind to kill you, too.”

“Gimme that fuckin’ gun,” the old man said. He made the mistake of taking a step toward his son, and Jimmy shot him in the forehead.

Though the old man must’ve been dead instantly, his body apparently didn’t know that, and he took four quick backward steps on his heels, then fell in the doorway to the living room. Becky looked at Jimmy and said, “Crazy old fuck.”

Tom came in, looked at the body, and said, “Jeez, you killed your pa.”

“And it felt pretty fuckin’ good,” Jimmy said. “Help me drag his ass into the living room. I want to eat some oatmeal, and I don’t want to look at him while I’m doing it.” To Becky he said, “Go on. Cook us up some oatmeal.”

•   •   •

THE BODY DOWNSTAIRS
did cause some unease, and Tom eventually got a blanket and went out and slept in the Charger. Jimmy and Becky went and slept in Jimmy’s old bed, which smelled of mold, but neither was about to sleep in the old man’s. Becky insisted on sex, whining until Jimmy gave in. They took a shower together, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t going to work—it just didn’t work for him—and they went in the bedroom and Becky went down on him, and it still didn’t work.

Then he went down on her, after threatening to kill her if she told anyone, and she definitely believed that he would kill her, after what she’d seen that night, and with the body in the front room, but when she screamed down five or six or eight orgasms, she couldn’t have cared less about the body.

Maybe nothing else worked, but Jimmy was good with his hands and mouth.

•   •   •

THEY GOT A RESTLESS
couple hours of sleep, and wound up back in the kitchen, eating more oatmeal. Jimmy said, “We need to get rolling, if we’re going to Hollywood. We get out there, we’ll be okay.”

“What about your pa?” Tom asked. He glanced nervously at the kitchen doorway, where he could see a leg below the knee, a shoe, and a dirty white sock.

“Fuck him. Who’s gonna know? Everybody in town hates his ass, nobody ever comes here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll take the Charger over to Marshall tonight and ditch it.”

“No gas in the Charger,” Tom said. “I tried to heat her up last night, when I was sleeping out there, and it ran for three minutes and died. No gas.”

“You dumb shit,” Jimmy said.

“Good thing I did it,” Tom said. “If we’d tried to go anywhere, we would of got about a mile, and then we would’ve been walking, where everybody could see us. Don’t got enough money between the three of us to buy a gallon of gas.”

Jimmy said, “Well, we got a few bucks. When I shot that bitch last night, I saw a wad on the dresser and grabbed it.”

Becky said, “Really? How much?”

“Quite a bit,” Jimmy said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. Becky reached out and said, “Let me see,” but he pulled it back and stuck it in his pocket.

“None of your business,” he said. “But we need more. We need a clean car that will get us where we’re going, and we don’t have enough to get one.”

Tom said, “We could just get bus tickets—”

“Fuck a bunch of buses,” Jimmy said. “Let me check the old man.”

They walked through the kitchen to the body, couldn’t look directly at him, but felt his pockets and came up empty. Jimmy said, “Must be upstairs.” He went up to the old man’s bedroom, came back down a minute later, and said, “Eighteen dollars and thirty cents. We got more off the black dude.”

Becky said, “We might get a couple of bucks off my folks.”

Jimmy said, “Good idea. We’ll take the old man’s truck.”

•   •   •

BECKY’S FOLKS
didn’t have any money, but they had the same attitude that James Sharp Senior had, and they didn’t like Jimmy at all. Old man Welsh was hungover, and not about to put up with any shit.

“Do I look like I’m made of money? When I was your age, I’d been working for five years.”

“That’s ’cause you could get a job way back then,” Becky said. “You can’t get one now, and I mean,
you
can’t get one now. How long you been eatin’ off Mom?”

“You little fuckin’ brat, I raised you and fed you and now you come around with your peckerwood friends with your hands out—”

“You just call me a peckerhead?” Jimmy asked, his voice quiet.

“Peckerwood,” the old man said. “I said peckerwood. But you want me to call you a peckerhead? Okay, you’re a peckerhead.”

Becky’s mother snorted at that: funny stuff. She stopped smiling when Jimmy took out the .38.

“Now, we don’t need that,” Becky’s father said.

“You think I’m a peckerhead now?” Jimmy asked. He pointed the gun at Welsh’s chest. “Come on, say it.”

“You’re not one, you’re not one,” Ann Welsh said. She farted in fear, and the smell spread through the kitchen and Tom said, “Aw, Jesus . . .” and waved his hand in front of his face.

“Let’s just calm down.” Welsh lifted his hands, like cowboys used to do on TV when they were giving up.

“No. I want to hear you call me a peckerhead again,” Jimmy said.

Becky said, “Yeah, call him a peckerhead.”

Welsh was sweating furiously now, and he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

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.”