John Sandford - Mad River

“Thanks,” Virgil said. “He was dead last night, too. Are you going to get anything off them?”

“Too early to tell, but I doubt that it’ll be anything conclusive if it’s a domestic. He was shot from eight to ten feet away, judging from the powder traces-there is some, but not much. The shooter was standing where you are, these two were standing where they fell. We’ll recover both slugs, and they should be in reasonable shape-not hollow points, they look to be solids. We’ll be able to identify the gun, if you come up with it. There were no shells around, and I won’t know for sure until we pull the slugs, but it was probably a revolver.”

“If you get DNA, why won’t it be conclusive?” Duke asked.

“Because if it’s a domestic, there’s a lot of reasons for the shooter’s DNA to be all over the place,” Sawyer explained. “There doesn’t appear to have been a struggle-no defensive or offensive marks on George’s hands or arms, which means that the killer didn’t close with him. Shot him from a distance.”

“But you might get some DNA that would narrow it down,” Duke said.

“Possibly,” Sawyer said. “But juries don’t usually convict on the outside chance that somebody committed a murder.”

“They do if I tell them to,” Duke said. He didn’t smile.

Another man, wearing a surgeon’s mask and yellow gloves, came in from the back and said, “Hey-ya, Virgie.”

“Hey, Don.” Don Baldwin was a tall, thin man with a sharp nose who wore heavy black-plastic fashion glasses because he played in a punk-revival band on his nights off. Like Sawyer, he was wearing a sweatshirt and blue jeans. “What’re you doing back there?”

“Looked like somebody might have slept in the back bedroom. We’re working it,” he said.

Virgil said, “Um,” and then, “You look at their car?”

“Yeah, we’ll process it. . I won’t say that I expect much from it.”

“All right,” Virgil said. He turned to Duke and said, “Let’s run down the daughter. I need to talk to her friends.”

“Darrell’s got the names.”

As it turned out, Rebecca Welsh didn’t have many friends. The Bare County deputies had come up with three names from high school, and only two still lived in the county. Nobody, including her parents, knew exactly where the third one was, but one of the deputies said he’d been told she was hooking out in Williston, North Dakota, among the oil crews.

Of the other two, Virgil spoke first to Carly Redecke, a short, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl whom he found working at the same store where George Welsh had bought his last beer. Though she wasn’t exactly working when he found her: she was in the back room, sitting on a couple of beer cases, smoking a cigarette.

“I haven’t heard from her since last summer,” Redecke said of Welsh. “She had a place somewhere up in the Cities and was doing night restocking at a Home Depot.”

“Do you have a phone number for her?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t have that number anymore,” Redecke said. “I called it at Christmas, and I got one of those messages that the phone had been disconnected. But I still got it, if you want it.”

Virgil made a note of the number, asked her if she knew anyone who might know better where Welsh would be.

“There’s a bunch of old Shinder people up in the Cities-I was up there myself for a while, but it scared me, so I came back. I’m thinking of trying over in Sioux Falls. There’s nothing here.”

“Of the old Shinder people, was she hanging with anyone in particular?”

“Wooo. . you might try calling Mickey Berenson. She keeps track of everybody. I got her number, I think it’s still good.”

Redecke didn’t have much more, other than to say that Welsh was “the hottest girl ever to come out of this place. She could be like a movie star.”

On his way over to see the second woman, he called Mickey Berenson, who was sleeping when he called. He explained the situation, and said, “. . so we’re trying to get in touch with her.”

“Oh, jeez, I haven’t seen her in a long time. You know, she was hanging out with Jimmy Sharp. He’s from Shinder, too, he was two grades ahead of us. I think they were getting serious.”

She didn’t have Sharp’s number, either, but said Sharp’s father lived in Shinder, and might know where his son was, and maybe Becky, too. Virgil thanked her, and went on to Caroline O’Meara’s house, and found her loading sacks of used clothing into the bed of a Toyota Tacoma. She and her mother, O’Meara said, were on their way to a flea market, and were already running late. “I talked to Becky, mmm, last fall, I think, about Halloween. She was back with Jimmy Sharp, they were cruising around town in Jimmy’s dorkmobile.”

“And that would be. .”

“A black Pontiac Firebird, about a hundred years old. Like he was king shit, or something. My boyfriend said he’d be lucky to get it back to the Cities before the tranny fell on the ground.”

“You sound like you don’t care for him,” Virgil suggested.

“Well, he’s an asshole. Ask anyone. He was the biggest bully the whole time I was in school,” she said.

“You know where he works?”

“No. I doubt that he works. Might sell a little pot or something. He had a job down at the Surprise for a while.”

“I was just there.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You come to Shinder, you wind up at the Surprise. If you live here, you wind up working there, sooner or later. Jimmy got fired after he got in a fight with Larry Panero. Larry wouldn’t hurt a fly, but Jimmy got on him and never quit.”

“Huh. Where could I find Jimmy’s father?”

Sharp’s father lived in an old wind-burned farmhouse at the far northwest corner of town. O’Meara had told him to look for the only red-painted place at the end of January Street, with a dirt track leading up to the side of the house: “Mean old redneck, is what he is.” A broken-down garage sat at the end of the track.

Virgil pulled into the dooryard and got out. There’d been a little breeze, early, but that had gone, and the place was dead silent-so silent that he paused, just to listen, and heard nothing at all. The nearest neighboring house was probably two hundred yards away, with an old car parked in front of it, but there was no movement there, either.

Virgil paid attention to the general vibe, then stepped back to the car, climbed inside, got his gun, and slipped it into his back waistband, under his jacket. Bad feeling. He went to the back stoop, knocked, got no response, knocked louder. Still no response. He backed off and looked toward the garage, with its antique side-folding doors. The doors were partly open, and after another look around, he went that way.

The car inside the garage was a newer Dodge Charger, with current Missouri plates. There was nobody around the garage, and he turned to walk away when he noticed the bumper stickers. One side featured an oval Thizz Hands sticker, and the other a sticker that said, “Free Li’l Boosie.” Li’l Boosie, Virgil believed, was currently spending his days in the Louisiana State Pen for issues involving guns and drugs; and, judging from the house, he thought it exceedingly unlikely that Old Man Sharp-he didn’t know the old man’s first name-was a big gangsta rap fan.

Which made the car, in the eyes of a perceptive law enforcement official, something of an anomaly. Virgil noted the car’s tag number, went back to his truck, called the number into the BCA duty officer, and told him to run it.

After a moment, the duty officer asked, “Uh, where are you, Virgil?”

“In Shinder. Minnesota. Out west,” Virgil said.

“Where’s this car?”

“Sitting in a garage out here,” Virgil said. “I’m looking at it.”