John Sandford - Mad River

“I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “These bandages. . Jimmy was hit pretty hard. There’s a lot of blood and he’s got a bad infection. I think they’re not long gone-maybe chased out when they saw the search going on. I think Jimmy is in big trouble.”

“Good,” Duke snorted. Then, “What the hell is all this?” He picked up a DVD box entitled The Isle of Men .

Virgil chewed back a grin and asked, “What does it look like?”

“It looks like some kind of. . homosexual. . awful. . Good grief.”

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of it here. Probably a hundred of them in the TV cabinet,” Virgil said.

“You mean. .?”

“It’s Mr. Gates’s.”

Duke said, “Huh,” and dropped the DVD. “Well, you learn something every day.”

The colonel said, “If they were here overnight, then they’ve been gone for more than twenty-four hours, and that means they probably got through the net, and they might be anywhere. But if they were here both nights, then they’re probably still right around here. We’ve got people crawling all over the place, stopping every vehicle they see.”

Virgil: “What I’m afraid of is, they’re holed up again. That they took off last night, drove ten miles, and then”-he gestured around the room-“did it again.”

“Oh, fuck me with a fence pole,” the colonel said.

Duke: “Hey. Language.”

The colonel ignored him. “Isn’t there any way your crime-scene people could figure out how old the blood is? How long it’s been drying? I mean. .”

Virgil explained that it didn’t actually work quite the way it did on TV, and that lab tests would take some time, and be mostly irrelevant by the time the tests came back.

The colonel asked, “Why couldn’t they just stick their thumb into one of the bandages. If it comes back bloody. .”

Virgil shrugged: “I don’t know. Maybe they could do that. They’ll be here pretty quick.”

Outside, the circus had resumed. Two helicopters were orbiting the house, and a line of TV trucks was stacked up on the road at the bottom of the hill.

Virgil asked Duke, “You want me to tell them?”

Duke said, “Virgil, I know you don’t like me, that you think I’m an asshole, like all you city people do. And I gotta admit, I don’t care for you that much, so I gotta tell you, given all of that, I appreciate the offer, because I know it has to hurt. But yes. I’d like you to tell them.”

So Virgil drove down to the end of the driveway and stopped at the edge of the road. Before he got out of the truck, he took his cell phone out of his pocket, pulled up a calculator, did a quick calculation, and wrote the number in the palm of his hand. The media guys were watching everybody coming down the hill, so when Virgil got out of the truck, walked to the middle of the road, and raised his hands in a “Come to Jesus” gesture, they stampeded over, not unlike a herd of hungry wildebeest.

He kept it simple: that state agents doing a systematic survey of remote farmsteads in conjunction with the Bare County sheriff’s office and the Minnesota National Guard had discovered the body of a male shooting victim. They’d also found signs that the house had been used as a hideout by the fugitives who robbed the Oxford credit union; the signs included blood-soaked bandages, which led investigators to believe that one of the robbers had been seriously wounded.

“When you say ‘fugitives,’ you mean Becky Welsh and James Sharp, correct?” one of the TV reporters asked.

“We would certainly like to talk to them about any involvement that they may or may not have had in these events,” Virgil said. He added that the victim had not yet been identified, and when he was, his name would not be released until next of kin were notified. That was routine cop-speak and drew no objections.

Ruffe Ignace, one of a half dozen newspaper reporters in the crowd, asked, “Virgil, do you have any idea when Sharp and Welsh left the farm-how far they may have gotten?”

“Can’t tell exactly, but we think they probably spent the night before last at the farm, maybe the day yesterday, and then left sometime between last night and this afternoon,” Virgil said.

A TV reporter said, “So you’re saying it was Welsh and Sharp.”

“No. I was replying to the substance of Mr. Ignace’s question, of when the fugitives left,” Virgil said.

Ignace said to the TV reporter, “Yeah, dumbass. And keep your mouth shut while I’m talking.”

The reporter said, “Hey, we’re live.”

Ignace said, “So am I.” To Virgil: “You cops are crawling all over the place, and if they went far. . somebody would have stopped them, or there would have been some shooting. So that means they’re close by.”

Virgil said, “Ruffe, that’s not exactly a question, but I’ll pretend that it was, and I’d love to be able to answer it. We don’t think they’ve been gone very long, but if they snuck out last night, at four in the morning, and killed the lights on the vehicle, and drove very cautiously at twenty miles an hour until it got light. . well, that’s forty miles or so. You know the formula: pi times the radius squared. If the radius is forty miles, square that, you get sixteen hundred, and you multiply that by pi. .” Virgil put his hand to his forehead and rolled his eyes up, as if making the calculation. “About five thousand twenty-six point, uh, point fifty-four square miles. That’s a lot of territory, which is our problem. Our biggest fear, of course, is that they’ve moved to another hideout, with the same kind of situation as we’ve got here.”

“You mean more dead people,” Ignace said.

“That’s our greatest fear,” Virgil said.

There were a few more questions, which Virgil answered or batted down, and then they went through the ritual of allowing each TV on-camera reporter to ask a question, mostly repetitive, so that cameramen could get a shot of them asking and Virgil answering.

That done, Virgil said, “We’re finished,” and walked back to his truck, where Jenkins had been waiting. Halfway back, Ignace cut him off and said, “I’ve got an exceptionally reliable source at Stillwater who said you did a focus group there, about where Sharp and Welsh might have gone from the robbery. Lo and behold, you and three other guys found this place, while two hundred people were looking elsewhere, and didn’t come up with jack shit. That’s a pretty interesting story, Virgil.”

“I really can’t talk about that right now,” Virgil said.

“Well, I’ve got all the information I need, and I’m going to write about it tomorrow morning, unless you say you’ll talk to me later,” Ignace said. “If you talk to me later, I’ll hold off until then.”

“You write what you want,” Virgil said, “but if you write that tomorrow morning, and it pisses off the people I’ve got to work with, then I will talk about it later. . but not to you. I’ll talk to Channel Three and the Pioneer Press .”

“It’s a shame you’re taking that attitude, because that means that I’ve got to leave the decision in the hands of the production-crazed morons on the city desk,” Ignace said. “If it were just you and me making a deal. .”

Virgil said, “Tell you what-you hold off, and I’ll talk to you later if I can clear it with my bosses. If I can’t, then you write what you’ve got, without me. But I’ll try to talk.”

Ignace thought about that for a moment, and then said, “Deal,” and walked away.

Back in the truck, Jenkins said, “Sweaty work,” and Virgil said, “Yeah,” and dug a Diet Coke out of the cooler in the back.

Jenkins said, “Davenport called and asked what you were up to. I told him to turn on the TV. Anyway, he wants a call back, when you can.”