John Sandford - Mad River

Virgil sent Jenkins and Shrake home, then went back to his room and stared at the ceiling for a while. Eventually, he got on the phone to Beatrice Sawyer, the crime-scene crew leader, and asked whether they’d recovered any money from the bodies.

“Yes. We got one thousand and six dollars from Sharp’s wallet,” she said.

“Twenties?” Virgil asked.

“Yes.”

“Might have come from an ATM?”

She said, “Could have, I guess. But this feels like it came out in one chunk, and most people have limits that are lower than that.”

There were three banks in town, a Wells Fargo, a Bigham First State Bank, and the Bare County Credit Union. Virgil made some calls and determined that Dick Murphy had three accounts at Wells Fargo. He called the BCA attorney and got a subpoena going.

“You gonna need it right away?” the lawyer asked.

“Tomorrow will be okay,” Virgil said.

“We’ll serve it up here, this afternoon, and you should be good to go, first thing tomorrow,” the attorney said.

Virgil made a list:

1. Sharp was seen shooting pool and talking with Dick Murphy the night before the night of the shooting.

2. Sharp had neither money nor gun as late as the afternoon before he murdered Agatha O’Leary.

3. By that evening, he had a gun and $1,000 in cash.

4. Sharp flashed the money at Welsh and McCall and bragged about being a hit man.

5. Randy White felt that Murphy had solicited him to kill Ag O’Leary, but he declined.

6. Ag told Murphy she wanted a divorce. Murphy believed he would inherit the best part of a million dollars if Ag died before the divorce.

He had to investigate it all, but just wasn’t up to it right at that moment. He lay on the bed, his brain churning through it. Eventually, he sat up and made a call.

“You got them,” Sally said.

“Not me,” Virgil said. “Listen, I gotta tell you. I got four flat tires and no way to get them patched here in Bigham.”

“Sounds like an emergency,” she said. “Have I told you about our emergency roadside service?”

They met in Marshall and walked along Main Street, looking in the store windows, bought Cokes at the drugstore and Virgil bought her a yellow rose at the flower shop, considered the pressure washers in the window of the hardware store, which would be useful for cleaning the hull of his boat, stopped to watch a funeral cortege go by, walked past the post office, and around and around, and Virgil told her about the ambush and the killings.

Sally said, “They shouldn’t have done that.”

“I don’t think so-but not a lot of people agree with me,” Virgil said.

“Maybe you ought to talk to your father.”

“I don’t really need the good Christian view. He’s a great guy but he sees both sides of everything, and mostly just confuses me,” Virgil said.

“Do you think you’ll get Dick Murphy?”

Virgil considered, then said, “No. Not unless something weird happens. If I could find the guy who gave or sold the gun to Murphy, then I’d have a better chance. If I find that Murphy took the money out of the bank, one thousand dollars the day that Ag O’Leary was murdered, that’d help. If I got both of those things, and the right jury, then. . maybe. But I don’t think I’ll get both of those things. I might not get either one. When Murphy made the pass at Randy White, he backed off instantly. So he’s not real stupid.”

“You have to be a little stupid to pay somebody to kill your wife,” she said.

“Yeah.”

They walked along and Sally said, “So when Larry and I were breaking up, and I found out about his little fling, I lay in bed for a couple nights and thought about killing him. I never would have done it, of course, but I thought about it, because it made me feel better. I came up with some general rules for killing your spouse. Number one: do it yourself.”

Virgil was interested: “Really.”

“Well, when you were getting all your divorces, didn’t you want to kill somebody?”

“Mmm, no. I just mostly wanted to avoid alimony. The longest I was married was a year. There weren’t any kids, no houses. . I couldn’t see why I ought to be on the hook forever.”

“Are you?”

“No. They were nice enough women, in their own way. They mostly just wanted a do-over,” Virgil said. “But I worried about it. One of them, we were married about ten days when I knew it wasn’t gonna last, and I kept obsessing about it: on the hook forever? For ten days? I could see myself supporting the next husband. I saw him as a big fat unshaven unemployed guy in a wife-beater T-shirt who sat around on a sagging couch and yelled at the kids-oh, yeah, eight ratty kids with drug habits. . I never felt like killing anybody, though.”

Sally laughed and said, “Well, did she do that? Marry a guy like that?”

“No, she married a small-business guy. He runs a grinder company, he has trucks that go around and pick up documents from big companies, that they’re getting rid of, and he grinds them up. He does all right.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“That’s what I thought,” Virgil said, with the first smile of the day. Nothing like having the ex-wife marry somebody more boring than yourself.

They sat in the park for a while, and then went and got something to eat, and as they were finishing, Sally said, “I’m going back to the store. You, you have to go back to Bigham and get started.”

“That’s not really what I want to do,” Virgil said.

“I know what you want to do, but I’m not up for a nooner with a guy going through a depressive fit,” she said.

“Nooner,” Virgil said. “I haven’t heard that word since I left Marshall. Makes me laugh.”

“So. .”

He sighed and said, “Yeah. I’m going back.”

So Virgil went back to Bigham, and the first thing he did was stop by the Bigham Gazette and talk to the editor, Bud Wright, who was also the lead reporter and photographer. “I have the information that would make a decent sidebar-is that right, sidebar? — okay, sidebar, and I’m willing to give it to you exclusively if you’ll give me a break and run it big,” Virgil told him.

The editor/reporter said, “I can guarantee it.”

“I am looking for somebody who can tell me where Jimmy Sharp’s pistol came from. It’s called a Smith amp; Wesson.38-caliber Hand Ejector, Military amp; Police. It has a six-inch barrel-”

Wright said, “Slow down, slow down. . A.38-caliber. .”

Virgil told him that there was reason to believe that Jimmy Sharp had acquired the gun in Bigham, so, “Somebody’s seen it. That doesn’t mean they’re in trouble-there’s no law against selling a gun-but I’d really like to know how it made its way to Jimmy.”

They talked for ten minutes, and Wright said the paper would be on the street the next morning, the first “extra” in the history of the newspaper. When he finished the interview, he got Virgil to stand in front of a piece of seamless paper and took his picture.

“If you find the gun, are you going to give us the first word on it?” Wright asked.

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Everything depends on the circumstances. But I sure would like to know where it came from.”

He left Wright working on the story and walked down the street to the Burger King, got a package of fries, sat at a booth, and called Roseanne Bush and Honor Roberts and asked them to list all the people they knew who hung around with, or were friendly with, Dick Murphy.

He spoke to Roberts last, and when he got off the phone, he had seven names.

Then the investigation slowed down. During the hunt for Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp, he’d been working twenty-hour days, and something happened every single day. It was like being in a war.