Mad River

back door for the others. They’d crept through a sleeping house, eventually entering the front bedroom where two women, sisters, were sleeping. One of them, Agatha Murphy, was staying at her parents’ house after separating from her husband some months earlier. The other, Mary O’Leary, was a senior in high school, six years younger than Agatha.
    “They came in the bedroom, said they were there to do some robbing,” Price said. “Ag Murphy—they call her Ag—got up in their face, and one of them knocked her down. That spooked them, and they ran for it. But before they went, the leader shot Agatha in the forehead and killed her. Medical examiner said death was instantaneous. Mary O’Leary says that Agatha was kneeling on the floor when she got shot, and was no threat to the killer. He shot her down in cold blood. Just . . . nuts.”
    Virgil: “Did they ask for money or jewelry?”
    “Didn’t ask for anything. The leader said he was there to do some robbing, but then, the girl got on him, and he hit her and then shot her. Then they ran.”
    “Can Mary identify them? Any way at all?”
    Price shook his head. “The leader had a flashlight in their faces. Your crime-scene people couldn’t come up with prints, and we haven’t heard back about DNA but they weren’t too confident about that, either. They did find some denim threads on the windowsill, and some brown cotton threads that might have come from gloves . . . so they were ready to do it.”
    “The back window . . . Did the O’Learys say why it was open?”
    “They didn’t think it was. Everything else was locked. And I’ll tell you something—this is about the only bit of real detecting I’ve done: I saw that whoever opened that window pried it up with a knife, or maybe a screwdriver. A knife, I think. But I looked at all the other windows down that side of the house, and you know what? There’s not another knife-dent to be found. They went right straight to the open window and pried it up. It’s like they
knew
.”
    “Nice piece of work there,” Virgil said. “Like the window had been spotted in advance.”
    “The thing is, the windows have locking levers on both sides. They fold down to lock, up to unlock, but you can’t see what position they’re in from outside. You either knew the window was open, or you had to try them all. Or, you got a giant coincidence.”
    “We got a saying about coincidences in the BCA,” Virgil said.
    Price bit. “Yeah? Like what?”
    “Nothing’s ever a coincidence, except when it is.”
    “Jeez, I’ll write that down. That really helps,” Price said.
    •   •   •
    THEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, “What I’d like is for you to do two things for me—hunt around Bigham and find out if Jimmy Sharp, Becky Welsh, and Tom McCall were staying there for the last week or so. They couldn’t make the rent in the Cities, so they had to be staying somewhere cheap, or free. Maybe with some friends? I don’t know. . . . But if you find them, have some backup.”
    “I’ll put the word out. If they were there, we should know today,” Price said. “What’s the other thing?”
    “Find out where Jimmy’s car is. It’s an old black Firebird, the DMV has the tags. They apparently drove here in the Charger and left here in the truck. So, where’s the Firebird? We can’t find his old man’s truck, either, so they might have a new set of wheels . . . but maybe, maybe they went back to the Firebird. We really need to know how they’re traveling.”
    “But if they had the Firebird when they hit the O’Learys’ house, why did they have to hijack a car?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I wonder . . .” Price scratched his forehead again.
    “Yeah?”
    “They go into the O’Leary house, planning to rob it . . . I wonder how they thought they were going to get away? They couldn’t plan on finding a guy standing next to his car.”
    Virgil said, “Huh.” They thought about that for a minute, then Virgil said, “Maybe they were planning to kill everybody in the house, and take a car. And panicked, instead.”
    “Jeez . . . you think? There were five people there.”
    “But then, they’re nuts,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    PRICE LEFT, and Virgil went back to the phones. He called the O’Leary house, now curious about the victims of the first crime, and found that Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was in the hospital, suffering from