Mad River

carefully, leading with the muzzle of his shotgun. At the foot of the stairs, he found a bare lightbulb operated with a pull string; he pulled on the string and got some light. The basement had a workbench against one wall, with a disorderly pile of tools and boxes of nails and screws and bolts; the other walls were lined with shelves filled with all manner of junk—broken hoes and rakes, snow shovels, gas cans. One set of shelves was filled with old Ball jars, all empty.
    There was a closed door off to his right, and he pushed it open with a foot, still leading with the muzzle of the gun, and found more junk, including some antiques that his mother would have liked—crocks and creamers, an old chicken-watering can, a couple of battered-looking hoses, coils of outdoor extension cords. No living thing, other than a lot of insects and arachnids.
    A mousetrap, snapped shut, was visible under a shelf.
    He called, “Clear.”
    •   •   •
    THEY SPENT TEN MINUTES clearing the rest of the house, then Virgil called Duke, who asked without preamble, “Find anything?”
    “Yeah, we did,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    BOYKIN STAYED OUTSIDE, to direct traffic, while Jenkins, Shrake, and Virgil looked at the living room. They found bandages soaked with blood and pus, a couple of empty pill bottles, a lot of beer bottles, wrappers from various kinds of junk food, and a pile of gay porn movies. The television was still on, and showed an aerial shot of a line of police and military vehicles churning down a gravel road, throwing up a cloud of dust. An excited reporter was saying, “. . . hasn’t been confirmed but we’ve been told that it’s possible that state agents have cornered Welsh and Sharp in a house south of the tiny town of Arcadia.”
    Virgil said, “Ah, man.”
    While they waited for the carnival to arrive, Virgil checked the barn, where he found the Townes’ pickup.
    “They’ve got Gates’s truck. And they’ve had a lot of time,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    TEN MINUTES LATER, Duke and the Guard lieutenant colonel looked at the body in the shed, and then the living room—everybody else was kept outside—and then the colonel asked Virgil, “Using very short words, and speaking slowly, tell me what it all means.”
    “Shrake has more experience with this than I have, and he says that it appears that Mr. Gates’s body is in a later stage of rigor mortis,” Virgil said. “Rigor sets in three or four hours after death and can last two days, or a bit more, especially if it’s cold, and the body has apparently been outside since Mr. Gates was killed. If he’s in the later stages, then he was probably killed right after they killed the Townes and left the cornfield. They probably came right here.”
    Duke looked around, puzzled, and then, “But . . . that doesn’t help. The question is, when did they leave? If he’s been dead ever since they killed the Townes . . . they could be in Mexico.”
    “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