years younger than I am, and. . we just weren’t that close.”
She said her husband, Bradley Senior, was a plant engineer who installed computer-assisted wood-cutting machines and designed production lines, and was doing that at a local furniture factory. They’d been in town for six months and would be there for another three, and then would move on to the next job.
They talked about Emmett, and about growing up in Kansas City. Virgil decided after a few minutes that she had no real information. When he stood up to leave, she said, “I hate to ask you this, because this is all so terrible. . but, our car?”
“I’ll try to get it back to you quick as we can,” Virgil said. “I just can’t promise when that’ll be. Do you have some other way to get around?”
“The company rented us a car, but we’d like to get our own back. It’s pretty new.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Virgil promised.
Rogers had been straightforward about her distance from her brother, and though she was saddened and depressed by the killing, she was dealing with it. The O’Learys were a different matter.
Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was still in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband, John, was at home when Virgil arrived, taking a break from the hospital vigil, replaced by Marsha’s mother. The surviving daughter, Mary, and four sons, Jack, James, Rob, and Frank, were scattered around a large living room and dining room. Jack was playing light jazz on an upright piano, sounding quite a bit like Harry Connick Jr. Virgil could imagine sitting on the front porch on a moonlit night, spooning with a young neighborhood lady, while Jack’s piano tune trickled through the screen door. .
Virgil had called ahead, and Mary had met him at the door. She was a square-shouldered young woman of medium height, probably not yet twenty, with dark hair and large, dark, direct eyes, wearing two sparkly diamond studs at her ears. She had dark circles at her eyes and her nose was red, from crying. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans.
John was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, and the four boys came in as Mary introduced Virgil to her father. All of them had curly dark hair, conservatively cut, with dark eyes and broad shoulders. They were a bunch of good-looking, athletic Irishmen in sweatshirts and jeans and moccasins, with an easy air of money about them; and an ugly bitter air of tragedy.
“Why did this happen?” John O’Leary asked. “We’re the nicest goddamn people on the face of the earth.”
Virgil shook his head. “I’d tell you that it happens all the time, except that it doesn’t. It’s pretty rare,” Virgil said. “Random killings are just. . incomprehensible. We’ve got an idea now who did it, two or three loser kids from Shinder. They apparently knew your name, knew you were well-off. . they got desperate. That’s what we think.”
He told them what he knew about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, and the oldest three of the boys knew of Sharp and Welsh, and vaguely remembered McCall. “Didn’t really know them,” said Jack. “Jimmy Sharp was a year behind me and a year ahead of Jim, I think.”
Jim nodded and said, “That’s right. Becky was a year younger than me. Everybody said she was kind of a punchboard, but I never knew her well enough to know that. McCall was in there somewhere. He was one of those guys you don’t remember very well. . kind of joked around, but the jokes were always pretty lame. Maybe he was in the same grade as Becky? I don’t know. You think they really did it?”
“It looks that way,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that it’s McCall and two others, and they killed Mr. Sharp and Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because McCall knew them. . but I think it’s probably Sharp. And Becky Welsh.”
The three older O’Leary boys were in college-Jack in medical school, the other two in pre-med, all at the University of Minnesota. Mary was a senior in high school, Frank a sophomore. Ag had been the oldest of them, and, they said, probably had not known any of the suspected killers.
Frank said, “If Ag had gone to med school instead of getting married, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had that temper, if she’d just been quiet. .” And he sobbed once, stuck a knuckle in his mouth and turned away, and his father patted him on the shoulder.
“It’s not Dick’s fault,” John O’Leary said to Frank. Virgil hadn’t known that Ag was married; he assumed that “Dick” was her husband.
Mary: “If he’d taken better care of her, she wouldn’t have been here.”
“And then maybe it would have been you that got killed,” Jim snapped.
Virgil broke in: “Trying to backtrack a trail of what-if’s. . everybody does it, but it doesn’t help. The trail gets too twisted up, and you wind up damaging people who really don’t need it.”
Rob said, “We know that. We’ve even said that.”
Jim said, “But we keep doing it anyway.” He glanced at his father, then said, “Excuse the language, but it’s because Dick is such a. . dick.”
Virgil talked to them a bit more about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, but none of them knew of any direct connection between themselves and the three suspects, except that their mother, Marsha, and Sharp and Welsh all came from Shinder. “But Mom left Shinder before they were even born.”
Virgil nodded, but didn’t mention the diamonds worn to the reunion; it would just be another cause for unwarranted backtracking, and sleepless nights.
Instead, he said, “So tell me about Dick.”
Dick Murphy was a couple of years younger than Ag, but they’d both gone up to the University of Minnesota, where they’d dated, had become serious, and eventually, after Ag graduated, had married. Dick’s father ran an independent insurance brokerage in town, and Dick quit school after three years to go to work as a salesman.
“They’re pretty rich, Dick’s whole family,” Rob said. “Dick was a running back on the football team, pretty good, he was always bombing around in those Mini Cooper cars in high school, and then he got a BMW when he went to college. You know, he’s a sales guy-he talks good and he looks good, but he’s sort of a dick.”
“He really loved her, I believe,” John O’Leary said. “I wouldn’t have let them get married if I didn’t believe that.”
“Dad. .” Mary said. She seemed fondly exasperated.
“You don’t think so?” John asked. His tone of voice suggested that he had his own doubts, Virgil thought.
“In his way, maybe,” Mary said. “Ag was hot, and we’re pretty rich, too, and Dick sees himself driving around in a convertible with a hot rich chick. But I think it could have been some other hot rich chick, and he would have been just as happy.”
“I’d like to know more about how she lost the baby,” Jack said.
“He didn’t have anything to do with that,” Mary said. “If you’re thinking. . He didn’t.”
“Didn’t want it,” Jack said. “He almost told me so. He had it all planned out. First they’d get a boat, then they’d get a cabin, then they’d get a time-share at Park City. . then maybe they’d get a kid. Like when they were fifty.”
“Ah, jeez,” Mary said. “So he’s a dick. But he still didn’t have anything to do with the baby.”
They all sat around and looked at each other for a minute or so, then John said to Virgil, “Dick didn’t have anything to do with this. He’s not a bad guy.”
Jim: “Except that he’s a dick.”
“I’m perfectly willing to believe you, that he’s not a bad guy,” Virgil said to John. “But let me ask one last ugly question, and then I’ll leave it alone.”
“What you’re going to ask,” Jack said, “is, ‘Did Dick, the dick, get anything out of her death?’ And the answer is, ‘Uh, yes.’”
John said, “Jack. .”
Jack said, “The cop wants to know, Dad.”
They reminded Virgil of his relationship with his own father: fond, but contentious. Virgil said, “So tell me about it.”
Rob said to Virgil, “The day we’re born, the old man sends a check to Fidelity Investments for the full exempt gift amount, for that year. Then he sends another check every birthday, every year. We were all told from the time
