Mad River

it?”
    “Yeah. He went right to it. It was pretty high up, it was over a kitchen counter, so it was a little too high for him. That’s why he needed me. And I wasn’t going to say no, with a pistol pointed at my heart.”
    Virgil thought it over, and then said, “Those nights when you were in Bigham . . . what’d you do?”
    “Hung out, mostly. Didn’t have the money to do much. Shot some pool. Jimmy thought he was a pool shark. But he’s not. He looks like a pool shark, but he’s really bad at it.”
    “Was Jimmy hanging with anybody in particular? Did he seem tight with anyone?”
    McCall looked at Virgil for a long moment, then said, “You know, I got an answer to that, but I think I need to talk to a lawyer. Like you said, you’d get me a lawyer.”
    Virgil thought,
Ah, shit.
He’d been so close, but with the tape running, he had no choice. “All right. We’ll stop right here, get you to Marshall, and hook you up with an attorney.”
    He turned off the tape and said, “You motherfucker, you killed that cop. I hope you rot in hell.”
    That put a further dent in the conversation. McCall cowered against the passenger-side door until they got to the law enforcement center in Marshall, and Virgil turned him over to the sheriff.
    After spending a half hour on paperwork, he called Davenport and said, “One down. But somebody else is probably dead, unless Jim and Becky are out in another cornfield.”
    “They can’t hide for long,” Virgil said. “The governor just put the National Guard on the roads—they’re deploying at every intersection out there. As soon as they’re in, they’ll organize teams of troops and cops and hit every house on the prairie.”
    “How long will that take?”
    “Probably be in place by tomorrow morning, and the search’ll start by tomorrow afternoon.”
    “That means that they’ll probably kill them,” Virgil said. “I need Jimmy alive long enough to get the guy who paid him to kill Ag Murphy.”
    “Who’d that be?” Davenport asked.
    “Ag Murphy’s husband.”
    “Really? Well—good luck with that.”

13
    VIRGIL FINISHED UP with the sheriff’s department, copied the McCall interview to his laptop, and left the recorder in the LEC evidence room. He had a Diet Coke and a conversation with the sheriff and the Marshall police chief, then called Duke. Nobody had any idea where Sharp and Welsh had gone. Deputies were running all over Bare County, and the adjacent counties, looking for the Townes’ truck, but nobody had seen it.
    “I fear for what we’re going to find when we catch up to them,” Duke said.
    “So do I,” Virgil said. “I have no idea of whether they’re north, south, east, or west. I wish I knew, because I’d like to be there when we do find them.”
    •   •   •
    AFTER THAT, Virgil was at loose ends. Since he was there in Marshall, anyway, and because everybody had his cell phone number and would be in touch if anything broke, he called Sally Long. She answered on the third ring and said, “Virgil Flowers: you
did
call.”
    “If you’re not real busy, we could get dinner,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe go over to the Six and catch a movie.”
    “Or maybe just find someplace to talk about our feelings,” she said. And, into the silence, “Just kiddin’, there, cowboy.”
    “Jeez, you scared the heck out of me,” Virgil said. “Every time I do that, I get divorced.”
    •   •   •
    HE SPENT the next three hours at his hotel, much of it on the phone or the computer, keeping up. There was a long story about the murders, out of the
Star-Tribune
website, with profiles of the suspects; and more stories from Omaha, Kansas City, and Fargo. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis had picked up AP stories, which were rewrites of the
Star-Tribune
, but Los Angeles had a columnist on the ground. And television from everywhere.
    Channel Three out of the Cities had video from a National Guard MP detachment showing soldiers loading up a bunch of Humvees, and the reporter said that most of the MPs had gotten back from Iraq that past fall, and had serious experience running checkpoints and roadblocks.
    Virgil was mentioned in the
Star-Tribune
as a “top BCA agent and troubleshooter,” which meant that Ignace was sucking up to him.
    The last part of his motel time he spent making himself pretty and swell-smelling, buffing up his cowboy boots and shaving again. After a last check, he headed out the door, not feeling