John Sandford - Mad River

“You mean he’s going to get away with it?” John O’Leary asked.

“We’ll ruin him in the community, and the charge will follow him for the rest of his life. Then there’s the possibility of a wrongful death lawsuit, but that would be up to you.”

“Wrongful death, my ass,” Jack O’Leary exploded. “He’s responsible for the murder of Ag. And he’s going to walk away from it? I don’t give a shit about the money, I want him in Stillwater.”

“So do we,” said Hunstad. “I’m just telling you, it’s a tough case. If we had Welsh or Sharp. . but we don’t. We’ve got hearsay and suggestions and some money they found on Jimmy Sharp. We’ve got a confirmed cop-killer as one witness, and a guy who used to hurt high school football players for money, as our second witness. It’s just tough.”

Frank O’Leary said, “That fuckin’ Duke.”

Then Marsha O’Leary started sobbing, and the whole family began to shake.

Virgil tidied up what he could, and then was called to look at a situation in which a young woman, the daughter of a Rochester doctor, had gone missing. That ate up most of a week, until he established that she was living in Illinois with her rock guitarist boyfriend.

The next week, he was in Owatonna, where some high school dopers had broken into the veterinary medicine chest at the Fleet Farm store and run off with some serious shit: horse dope that would blow their hearts through their chest walls. Another week was gone.

But that same week, Tom McCall, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to one count of murder of the deputy sheriff Daniel Card, and was sentenced to life in prison. He was, however, because of past cooperation and the promise of further cooperation if it were needed, allowed the possibility of parole. He would be in his mid-fifties when he got out of Stillwater. Virgil’s only involvement had been written depositions, taken during sessions with McCall’s court-appointed attorney, describing McCall’s phone calls, his arrest, and the interview with Virgil in Virgil’s truck. They hardly mattered, given two eyewitness accounts of the shooting outside the bank. News reports said McCall showed no emotion at his sentencing.

A week after that, he was lying in bed, late at night, at home in Mankato, when Thomas, the special prosecutor, called.

“Randy White is gone,” Thomas said.

“What?”

“He’s gone. He was supposed to show up for a deposition today. We don’t know where. He didn’t show up at work either yesterday or today.”

“Ah, man.”

“We talked to Davenport,” Thomas said. “He says you should get over here and find him for us.”

So then he was back in Bigham.

White’s disappearance had the look and feel of something really bleak. He was gone, and his car was gone, but his apartment seemed lived-in-clothes in the closets, underwear on the floor. There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator, but it hadn’t been cleaned out, either.

Virgil had another talk with the newspaper editor, and got everybody in the county looking for White and his car.

The O’Learys asked Virgil, “What is this?”

Virgil couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even look full-time, because there was nothing to go on. There was no point in driving up and down the roads of Bare County, looking out the windows. .

May disappeared, and June came up.

And one day, Hunstad and Thomas said, “We can’t hold Murphy. It’s unethical. We don’t have a case. We’re going to drop the charges.”

Virgil said, “Give me a week.”

Thomas said, “Do you have anything more to work with than you did last week?”

Virgil shook his head. “No.”

“Then we’re going to call the O’Learys in and give them the news. If we can find White, we can refile.”

“What if Murphy had him killed?”

“You think you could prove that? You can’t even find his car, much less a body.”

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.

Hunstad, who was kind of cute, gave him a hug. “Next time you’re in the Cities, call me and we’ll have a cup of coffee,” she said.

The next day, she went to court and told the judge that with their main witness gone, the state had decided that they could not sustain the case, and so the charges were being dropped. “We reserve the right to refile, if we find Mr. White,” she said.

Virgil was sitting across the street when Murphy walked out of the jail with his attorney. They talked for a minute or two, then the attorney clapped him on the shoulder and headed for the courthouse parking lot. Murphy jaywalked across the street into a newsstand, and a minute later reappeared with a fresh pack of cigarettes, stuck one in his face, lit it, looked around, and then walked away.

Virgil said a short prayer that he’d get lung cancer.

The newspaper later that week hinted that White might have been killed; the paper didn’t say by whom, but everybody knew.

On the Twenty-seventh of June, Virgil was sound asleep in his boat on a quiet backwater of Pool 4 of the Mississippi River, off Alma, Wisconsin, while his pal Johnson Johnson beat the water with an aging Eddie Bait. Virgil’s phone rang, and Johnson Johnson said, “I told you to turn it off.”

“A young woman may be calling me,” Virgil said, digging for the phone. “If she got out of Marshall early enough, we’re gonna meet in Minneapolis.”

“You’re going to celebrate life?”

“That’s right,” Virgil said. He looked at the face of the phone and the call was, indeed, coming from the Marshall area code-but from an unknown number.

“Virgil Flowers.”

“Virgil, this is Bud Wright, at the Bigham Gazette .”

“Hey, Bud.”

“Have you heard?”

Virgil sat up. “That fuckin’ White. That fuckin’ White is back, right?”

“No, no. No. Dick Murphy didn’t make it home last night, or come to work this morning. One of Duke’s boys found his car down in Riverside Park.”

“I know it.”

“There was blood on the seat,” Wright said.

Virgil closed his eyes. Then, “Shit. I’m on my way.”

“Do you have any comment?”

“Yeah: ‘Shit, I’m on my way.’”

When Virgil got to Bigham, Murphy’s car had been taken to the sheriff’s impound area. Virgil went by Duke’s office and was told that Duke was out. The chill in the office was still deep, and a deputy named Jim Clark only reluctantly showed Virgil the car.

The car was a BMW 328i. The small blood spot was just below the headrest; Virgil could see no sign of a bullet hole. He had the deputy open all four doors, and without touching anything inside, he looked at the back of the headrest and then the backseat. There was no sign of a bullet exit hole on the back of the headrest, or an entrance hole on the backseat.

“What are you doing about the blood?” Virgil asked.

“Our crime-scene specialist is driving samples up to the BCA,” Clark said.

“Is Ross Price around?” Virgil asked. Price was the sheriff’s investigator.

“Somewhere,” the deputy said.

“I need to talk with him,” Virgil said.

The deputy closed the car and locked it, and led Virgil back inside. The dispatcher got ahold of Price, who said that he’d be back in ten minutes or so. Virgil went down in the basement, got a Diet Coke and a Nut Goodie, then waited on the steps outside the law enforcement center.

Price was prompt: just about ten minutes after he talked to the dispatcher, he rolled into the sheriff’s parking lot, and Virgil went over to talk to him.

“So how did all this come up?” Virgil asked. “Who figured out he was gone?”

Price said that late on Monday evening, Murphy had been seen at a local self-serve car wash, detailing his BMW. “We talked to a guy who saw him there, Lance Barber.”