Shock Wave

and Virgil got a Diet Coke, and they sat down at the far end, away from a foursome that had just come off the course.
    “This is pretty awful,” Mackey said, after a couple of swallows. “They’re friends of mine. I feel like I’m betraying them.”
    “Things were going to get awful the minute you picked up that phone,” Virgil said. “The other way to look at it is that you’re an honest citizen, doing your duty.”
    “Doesn’t feel that way,” Mackey said. They sat looking at each other for a moment, then he asked, “Do they have to know that I’m the one who turned them in?”
    “I don’t know,” Virgil said, though he thought it would probably all come out, if the case ever got to court. “It depends what happens. I was talking to a psychologist about all of this, and explained that you were all teachers in the same school. He suggested that this might involve some personal relationship between you and Jeanne Shepard.”
    Mackey didn’t say anything, but took another hit on his beer. Virgil took one, and finally Mackey said, “Pat’s a golfer. Not very good, but he works at it. He asked me to give Jeanne some lessons, so they could play together.”
    “Something happened there?”
    Mackey shook his head. “Jeez. You know? It didn’t take long. A little kissy-squeezy stuff. Then one day she came out for a lesson, and we saw Pat teeing off with his regular foursome, knew he’d be gone for at least five hours. We dropped my car off at Walmart, and took her car over to her place.”
    “Is she the one who told you about Pat taking the money?”
    “Yeah . . . I’m not sure why. I kind of think she wouldn’t mind if somebody spilled the beans and Pat went away,” Mackey said. “She could get a divorce, probably get the house. They’ve got a fifteenyear mortgage, almost paid off. Start over, maybe have another kid. She’d like to focus on her art.”
    “She a good painter?”
    “If you like sunsets,” Mackey said. “I never cared that much for them, myself.”
    “You think she’d talk to me?”
    Mackey said, “If you came onto her, like you came onto me—like you already knew about it, and like lying would get her in trouble, too . . . Yeah, she’d tell you about it. Things haven’t been good between her and Pat for quite a while.”
    “Does she know about Marilyn Oaks?” Virgil asked.
    “No. Pat told me about that. I think he might be lining her up as the next Mrs. Shepard.”
    His affair with Jeanne Shepard, Mackey said, had begun right after golf season started, the second week of April. It had been going hot and heavy through May, but in the last couple of weeks Jeanne Shepard seemed to be cooling off. Then, he said, he found out that “she’d blabbed to her friend Bernice, who’s got the biggest mouth in Butternut Falls. No way she was going to keep the secret, and we got in an argument over that.”
    Bernice, he said, had already outed one affair at the school, which had ended with resignations and divorces.
    “Huh. Sounds like you’ve got a little rats’ nest over at the high school.”
    “Nah. You know, it’s just pretty human,” Mackey said. “People getting to be middle-aged, and rearranging their lives. Pat and Jeanne have a ten-year-old daughter. Pat doesn’t care much for her, and I do, and we’d make a nice little family.”
    “Well . . . might still happen,” Virgil said.
    “I don’t think so, really,” Mackey said. “It all looks pretty bleak, with you figuring me out. I would never have made the call if it hadn’t seemed to be slipping away.”
    Jeanne Shepard, Mackey said, was at home. Pat Shepard, he said, was out on the golf course, “probably on number three. He and his friends aren’t fast, they’ll be out there for another three hours.”
     
     
    VIRGIL CALLED DAVENPORT, to tell him about the political break, but Davenport was out of touch. He called Ahlquist and said, “I need an honest prosecutor to come talk to a woman with me. Like right now.”
    “You got a break?”
    “Not on the bomber; something else. I need a prosecutor who can keep his mouth shut, and isn’t much interested in politics.”
    “I’d have to think about that for a couple days,” Ahlquist said.
    “C’mon, man—it’s something I don’t want to talk about yet. I could do it on my own, but it’d be better if I had a guy.”
    “Let me talk to Theodore Wills. He’s the county attorney. Get back to you in five.”
     
     
    MORE LIKE TEN. In the