Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”
“Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”
“That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”
Virgil drove northeast to Bigham, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.
Still cold.
It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck, though-even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.
He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.
The key thing about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.
They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.
“Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He. . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away. .”
“So. . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are. . you know. . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her-I’m sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”
She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know. . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.
“I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”
As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.
When he’d wrung her out, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.
“They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”
When Virgil went back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.
“We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now-it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and it’s what I would have done.”
“So it’s all coming down to the truck,” Virgil said.
“We got some media on the way,” Duke said. “We need to figure out who’s going to talk.”
“Not me,” Virgil said. “We usually leave that to you elected guys.”
Duke nodded. “Good enough. What are you going to do?”
“Just wait,” Virgil said. “There’s not much more to do. They’ll pop up, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Tomorrow. I just pray to God they don’t kill anyone else.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I think there’s a good chance that they will,” Virgil said. “I think there’s a good chance that they already have-they parked that truck in somebody’s garage, and that somebody is already dead, and they’re on their way to Los Angeles.”
“Now what?”
Virgil said, “Well, I’m here. I think I’ll go talk to a couple of O’Learys. The other guy who got killed. . Emmett Williams? You know where I’d find his people?”
“His sister lives here, he was staying with her. I’ll get her address if you want it, but that looked to us like a killing of opportunity. They were running and he just got in the way and got shot down. I don’t think there’s much in it, for you.”
“Probably not,” Virgil agreed. “But what else am I gonna do?”
Virgil got addresses for the O’Learys and Williams’s sister, and got them spotted on a city map by the sheriff’s secretary. The O’Learys lived out from the center of town, on a ridge overlooking the river; Williams’s sister, whose name was LuAnne Rogers, lived in an apartment building on the edge of the downtown, a few blocks from the courthouse. Virgil drove over, parked in front of a hardware store, and walked back across the street. Rogers’s apartment was over a bridal and prom dress shop. Virgil climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.
The door was opened by a small boy, maybe five. “Your mom home?” Virgil asked.
A woman called, “Just a minute,” and Virgil heard dishes clattering, and then a lanky good-looking black woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Can I help you?”
“I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I want to chat with you about your brother, if you’re Miz Rogers.”
“Yeah, I am. Come in.”
Virgil stepped inside, and the woman said to the boy, “You go on and play your game. I’m putting you on the watch, one half hour.”
The boy scuttled away, and the woman said, “He’s got a Wii skateboard game.”
Virgil said he was sorry about her brother, and asked if she knew, or if any of her friends might know, if there was any connection between Williams and Sharp, Welsh, or McCall.
“That’s the first time I ever heard those names,” she said. “You know who did it?”
Virgil said, “Maybe. We’re looking for three young people, two men and a woman. You’ll be hearing about it on TV.”
“I don’t allow much TV in here,” she said. “And if I don’t allow Brad to watch it, I can’t watch myself. But I guess I’ll make an exception.”
She said again that she hadn’t heard of any of the three. “Emmett was here for two weeks, and he was going back home next week. He really didn’t have time to meet anybody up here.”
“Where’s home?”
“Kansas City. He’d been hassled around by his ex-wife down there, and he came up here to get away for a while. Then. .” She teared up a bit, and wiped the tears away. “Emmett and I weren’t real close. He was seven
