John Sandford - Mad River

“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.”

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.