Mad River

guys?”
    “Talked to everybody,” the warden said. “Your requirements were peculiar—people from out in the rural areas, shitkickers, I think you said, willing to cooperate, fairly bright. And that’s what we got. Bright, but not exactly geniuses. We’ve got what, a dozen of them?”
    “Eighteen now,” Polgar said.
    “I didn’t want them to be really dumb, that’s all,” Virgil said. “I don’t need geniuses for this.”
    “Got you covered,” Benson said. “They’re just run-of-the-mill . . . shitkickers.”
    “Excellent,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”
    “Let me know what happens,” Benson said.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL AND POLGAR processed through several locked gates into the secure area and walked over to a classroom, where the inmates were waiting under the eyes of two guards. They were an odd assemblage for the prison: for one thing, they were all white, which was unusual, even for Minnesota. They were dressed in a variety of street clothes, jeans and sweatshirts for the most part.
    They all wore the same skeptical look on their faces.
    Polgar nodded at the two guards and went to the front of the room and said, “Okay. Everybody pay attention. You’ve got an idea of why you’re here, and you know that there may be some pretty good benefits for taking part. If you change your mind and don’t want to take part, let us know, and we’ll take you back to your unit. Raise your hand if you’ve changed your mind.”
    He held up his hand as an example, and the group stirred, but nobody else raised a hand. Polgar said, “Good. I’m going to turn you over to Virgil, here, and he’s going to tell you what we need, and then we’ll turn the projector on for a little show.”
    Virgil stepped up and said, “Most of you come from out in the countryside, just like I do, which is where I got the idea to ask for your help. I’m sure you’ve been watching television and know our problem—we’ve got a couple of kids running around killing people, and we need to stop the killing.”
    “You gonna kill them when you catch them?” one of the inmates asked.
    Virgil wanted to be as honest as he could be, since he needed them to work with him. He said, “You know what happens in these situations. We’d like to take them alive, because we’d like to talk to them. But this is not robbery or burglary or car theft—these kids are crazy and they’re killers. This kind of thing usually doesn’t end well. A lot of the time, these people kill themselves rather than give up. Or they decide to go down shooting. I can’t tell you any different. We will do whatever we have to, to stop them.”
    There was another stir through the crowd, a rustle of grunts and two- and three-word exchanges, and a few nods.
    “So what I’m going to do is tell you the story, what happened, and then we’re going to the computer,” Virgil said.
    He told the group everything he knew, from the murder of Ag Murphy to discovery of the Welshes and old man Sharp, and all of the rest of it, right up to the credit union robbery. He described the shoot-out in the street.
    “Jimmy Sharp was hit in the leg. From the description we got, the slug didn’t break any bones, but messed up the outside of his thigh. It won’t kill him, at least not right away. They couldn’t go to a hospital, of course, so they went to an isolated farmhouse to look for medicine. . . .”
    He described the scene at the Towne house, and McCall’s description of sex on the bed, and the murder of Edie Towne.
    “So then McCall took off with the Jeep,” Virgil said. “He called me on a cell phone and gave himself up. I arrested him, and he told us about the cornfield where he thought Sharp and Welsh might be hiding. Like I said, we’d already found that, but it made me think he might be telling the truth about the rest of it. But that’s all we know. What I’d like to do is for you all to think about that, and between us, we’ll try to work out where Sharp and Becky Welsh might have run to.”
    “How would we know that?” one of the inmates asked.
    “You can’t know, for sure,” Virgil said. “But I believe there’s a good possibility that if we all think what
we
would have done, we might come pretty close to what they’ve done.”
    •   •   •
    THEY TALKED IT over for a while, and then Polgar fired up the computer and the projector, called up Google Maps, and threw up an aerial photo of Oxford, in which you could clearly