John Sandford - Mad River

“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.”

Virgil spent a fruitless Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone-people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.

The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.

Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”

“It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”

At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.

A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.

“I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”

“Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”

“That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”

Virgil drove northeast to Bigham, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.

Still cold.

It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck, though-even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.

He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.

The key thing about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.

They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.

“Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He. . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away. .”

“So. . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are. . you know. . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her-I’m sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”

She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know. . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.

“I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”

As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.

When he’d wrung her out, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.

“They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”

When Virgil went back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.

“We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now-it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and it’s what I would have done.”

“So it’s all coming down to the truck,” Virgil said.