Mad River

seventeen and the folks had a little dinner party, three other couples plus Virgil. One of the couples was Darrin and Marcia Wanger. Darrin was president of a local bank, a tall, broad-shouldered man with an engaging smile. Virgil remembered how he had caught his mother and Darrin Wanger touching each other with their eyes, and how he thought then,
My God, they’re sleeping together.
    Old times in the rectory . . . And who knows, maybe he was wrong.
    But even thinking about it now, he thought not. His mother said, “You put so little syrup on those pancakes that it got sucked right down inside. Take some more syrup.”
    •   •   •
    THEN IT WAS the best part of an hour in church, Virgil sitting in the back; but twenty people, mostly older, stopped to say hello to him, and touch him on the shoulder. Good folks. His father did his rave, and it all seemed well-reasoned and kind.
    At nine o’clock, he was on his way back to Shinder. Duke was just coming into town and Virgil turned in behind him and followed him down to the Welsh house. They got out of their trucks at the same time, and Duke nodded at Virgil and asked, “How was church?”
    “Fine. My old man did his sermon from Genesis 11 and 12, and moved on to the Palestinians and the Israelis. . . .” Virgil gave him a one-minute version, and Duke, though an asshole, proved a good listener, and when Virgil finished, he said, “Sounds like your father is a smart man.”
    “He is,” Virgil said. The crime-scene van was parked in the swale in front of the Welsh house, and Virgil asked, “You know what time they got here?”
    “About three hours ago . . . around six o’clock,” Duke said.
    He and Virgil went inside, where Beatrice Sawyer was working over George Welsh’s body. Sawyer was a middle-aged woman, more cheerful than she should be, given her job, and a little too heavy. She had bureaucrat-cut blond hair, went without makeup, and was wearing a lime-colored sweatshirt and blue jeans and boots. She saw Virgil and said, “Well, this one’s dead.”
    “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