John Sandford: Mad River

So when he wrote, he looked for stories instead of technology. He usually sold them. He’d even sold a two-part crime story to The New York Times Magazine . Now he was stepping up. Maybe.

A few months earlier, Davenport’s daughter had been shot in the arm, and he’d gone to see her in the hospital, and had seen her afterward at Davenport’s home. Her name was Letty, and she had been adopted by the Davenports after her alcoholic mother was killed on a case that Lucas Davenport had worked in northwestern Minnesota.

Virgil had known that she had been a dirt-poor country girl, but he hadn’t quite understood how bad it had been, and what she’d actually done to survive. One thing she’d done was wander around the countryside with a bunch of leghold traps and a.22, trapping raccoon, mink, and muskrats-mostly rats. She’d sold them to a local fur buyer for enough money to keep the family’s head above water. Had done this when she was ten years old. .

He’d gotten pieces of the story when she was recovering from the wound, and somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that it was a terrific story. Here was what appeared to be a stylish young high-school girl, who’d shot a cop-the same crooked cop-on two different occasions, and recently survived a shoot-out with two Mexican narcos, leaving the narcos dead. He talked to Davenport about it, and then Letty, and wound up doing five long interviews, on five consecutive weekends, during the fall, as well as some research up in the Red River Valley.

He’d spent the next two months writing a girl’s short memoir of a nightmarish rural life-though she hadn’t at the time thought it particularly nightmarish, it just was -and sent it off to The New York Times Magazine , to the editor who’d bought his earlier pieces.

The editor had gotten right back and said that while the Times wouldn’t buy it-it was simply too long-he’d sent it to a friend over at Vanity Fair , and they were definitely interested.

The problem was, Vanity Fair wanted to send Annie Leibovitz out to the Red River Valley with a ton of photo equipment to shoot Letty and Lucas Davenport, as part of a major editorial package. Both Letty and Davenport had the faces for it, and Letty loved the idea of meeting Leibovitz, who was one of her media heroines, but the Davenports had gotten their knickers in a psychological twist about what the attention would do to their daughter, about the whole gestalt of Vanity Fair , about how Letty had already had way too much attention from the press, and blah blah blah. .

That all had to be worked through. Virgil didn’t want to piss anybody off, and the Davenports were good friends of his, but he really wanted the piece in Vanity Fair. Really wanted it. Maybe not as much as he’d wanted the Ranger, but it was like that, the same order of magnitude: about an 8.4 on the Richter scale.

Something else. He suspected that Vanity Fair liked the idea of having a gun-toting shit-kicking cop as a roving reporter. If he could nail down that job. .

During the drive out to Shinder, he considered a half dozen calming approaches he might take with the Davenports; he thought he might point out that all of the stories about Letty had been sensationalized TV trash, while his work was a sensitive retelling of the girl’s actual history. .

And when he was done thinking about the Davenports, he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren’t answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks?

He was still thinking about that when he came up to Shinder, running fast, and west, on State Highway 68. The Welshes, if that was actually the victims’ name, lived in the northeast part of town. Virgil knew that because he could see, across the barren, yet-to-be-planted prairie, a cluster of cars with their lights on, gathered around a house, and a bunch of houses with their lights on, all on the northeast corner of town.

He came to the intersection leading into town, turned north, rolled past a roadhouse and a gas station, and a line of grain elevators that went off at a diagonal to the northwest. He was on April Street, and took it north across Apple, Cherry, Peach, Pear, and Plum, to Main, where he took a right, crossed May, June, July, and August, turned left, and crossed Aspen, Birch, Cedar, Elm, Maple, and Oak toward the pool of light, realizing, as he did so, that the east-west streets south of Main were named after fruits, and alphabetized, and the east-west streets north of Main were named after trees, and alphabetized.

At the same time, the north-south streets were named after the months, apparently starting from the west edge of town and marching east. That meant that if a parent were told her kid was acting up at the corner of Pear and April, she would have an instant appreciation of the kid’s precise location. What would happen if the town built more than twelve north-south streets, Virgil couldn’t guess. In any case, it all seemed a little anal, even for Minnesota.

The street leading up to the crime scene was closed off by cop cars. Virgil parked, put on a baseball cap, because it was chilly, and climbed out of the truck. He was in what he thought must be the workingman’s corner of town-small white prewar clapboard houses, some of them crumbling badly, most of them with small front porches, most with one-car garages converted to rooms, with larger, newer, metal-sided garages in back. The neighbors were out sitting on the porches, wrapped in blankets or wearing their winter coats, watching. Some had brought out aluminum lawn furniture, including one recliner.

The cops had set up work lights to illuminate the house, and Virgil could see a half dozen people walking the lawn, like soldiers policing up cigarette butts. Looking for evidence, he thought. A young deputy walked toward him, thumbs hooked on a duty belt, and as Virgil came up, he called, “This is off-limits. . who are you?”

“Virgil Flowers. I’m with the BCA.”

The cop looked him over: Virgil hadn’t changed clothes and was still in the jean jacket, open over the band T-shirt, jeans, and the cowboy boots. “You got any ID?”

Virgil had seen the sheriff, Lewis Duke, come out on the porch of the death house, and he said, “Sure,” and waved his arms in the air and shouted at the sheriff, “Hey, Lewis-it’s me, Virgil.”

The cop turned and saw the sheriff, an annoyed look crossing his face, wave Virgil over. The cop said, “So you’re a wiseass.”

Virgil said, “Maybe.”

“Don’t much care for wiseasses in Bare County,” the deputy said, as Virgil walked past him.

Virgil said, “Like I could really give a shit.” He himself didn’t much care for officious pricks.

Lewis Duke was a short, barrel-chested man who looked like he spent his spare time doing bench presses. He had a square, dry prairie face, thinning sandy hair, a short nose under glassy blue eyes, and a brush-cut mustache. He wore the same uniform his men did, but with five stars on the collar, and a Glock in a military-style thigh-mounted holster. He nodded at Virgil and said, “Agent Flowers.”

Virgil said, “Sheriff. I’ve been told you’ve got a bad one. Actually, I’ve heard you had two bad ones.”

“That’s correct,” Duke said. “The first one was worse-they were good folks. This whole family was white trash, but still, pretty gol-darned unpleasant.”