trustworthy. Ignace answered on the first ring and asked, without preamble, “You working on anything else for the
“No, but just between you and me, I’ve almost got a story locked up with
There was a long silence, then Ignace said, “If you aren’t lying, I’m going to kill myself.”
“Use a lot of pills and alcohol, that’s the best way,” Virgil said. “Guns and ropes, you can get it wrong and wind up a vegetable.”
“Aw. . Jesus.”
“So you wanted me to call?”
“Aw, Jesus.” More silence, then, “I went to the press conference this morning. I need some details that nobody else got. I’ll be just about exactly twenty-four hours behind the TV people.”
“What do I get?” Virgil asked.
“I can’t promise favorable mentions, because that would be unethical. But I can’t help it if I feel favorably toward you.”
“All right.” Virgil gave him a few crime-scene details about the bodies, the murder scenes, about how he’d linked the car in James Sharp Senior’s garage to the murders of Ag O’Leary Murphy and Emmett Williams.
“That’s good, that’s good stuff,” Ignace said. “So-off the record, just between you and me. . what are you doing for
After talking to Ignace, Virgil left Marshall and drove to Bigham, thinking about the O’Learys and the Murphys, and a little about Sally Long. Like this:
He teased at the Murphy puzzle; if it was true that Dick Murphy paid for the killing of his wife, Virgil had three potential witnesses, all of them mass murderers. In Virgil’s experience with mass murder, which was mostly through TV news, Sharp and his friends were likely to wind up dead before they ever got to a court.
As he was going past Shinder, he got the phone out again and called Davenport: “You said, and I quote, ‘Anything I can do.’”
Davenport temporized: “Well, that was maybe a little hyperbole.”
“I need to get into your database for Bigham,” Virgil said.
After a few seconds’ silence, Davenport said, “Okay. What are you looking for?”
“The baddest people in town. Not stupid, though,” Virgil said. “I want somebody you might go to if you were thinking about hiring a killer.”
“I won’t have anybody like that,” Davenport said. “The best I can do is, I might have somebody who could point you in the right direction.”
“That’ll work,” Virgil said.
“Give me a couple hours,” Davenport said.
Davenport had spent the best part of two years building a database of people in Minnesota who would talk to the cops, and who also knew a lot of bad people. He had a theory that every town of any size would have bars, restaurants, biker shops, what he called “nodes” that would attract the local assholes.
He was trying to get two informants in every node, and did that by selling what he called “Cop Karma.”
“Karma’s just another word for payback,” he told the more sophisticated of his recruits. “You stack up some good karma points with me, and the next time you drive into the ditch, if it’s not too serious, you could get yourself some payback.”
The network was paying dividends, but Davenport kept the whole thing close to his chest. “If you got some highway patrolman calling you up every ten minutes, trying to solve the local speeding crisis, it won’t work,” he said. “You only call on the heavy stuff.”
Getting Davenport involved gave Virgil even more time to think about Sally, and as he turned the crest of a hill and dropped down the valley that led into Bigham and to the Minnesota River, he decided that he really had to put Sally aside.
A romance, hasty or otherwise, would divert his attention from the investigation, and Sharp, Welsh, and McCall had to be stopped; and Murphy, if he was involved, had to be tagged.
As he came up to the first stoplight in town, he took out the cell phone again and punched in Nina Box’s number. As it had earlier in the day, it switched immediately to a recorded answering message. McCall had turned the phone off, but when he turned it on, the first thing he’d see would be five calls from Virgil.
He’d planned to go to the O’Learys’ place and have a long talk with them about Dick Murphy. Instead, he went to the Pumpkin Cafe, got a BLT and fries, and a Diet Coke, and read the local newspaper, and waited.
He was on his third Diet Coke when Davenport called back. “I’ve got two names and phone numbers for you. You’ll have to meet them somewhere private, because they don’t want to be seen with you.”
“Not a problem. Are they on their phones right now?”
“They are. Waiting for you to call,” Davenport said. “Don’t give them too much shit, and call me and tell me where you’re gonna meet, in case something goes wrong.”
“Are they gonna be a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be. But. . I don’t know some of them as well as I should.”
“Can they keep their mouths shut?” Virgil asked.
“If you use the right threats.”
The first guy was named Honor Roberts, and he said he’d meet Virgil at the Parker Bird Sanctuary where Bare County Road 6 crossed the Minnesota River. “There’s a chain across the entrance, but if you look close you’ll see that the lock is broke. You can lift it right off and come in. Be sure you put it back up when you come through.”
The second source was a woman named Roseanne Bush, who’d meet him in the town’s only tattoo parlor, which was called The Bush.
“We gonna be okay there?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, we’re not open till six. You can park in the back of the Goodwill store and walk down the alley. The door’ll be unlocked, just come on through.”
The bird sanctuary was ten miles northwest of town, a piece of damp land with a lot of bare-branched cottonwoods in the loop of an oxbow of the Minnesota River. There was nobody else on the road when Virgil lifted the chain off the steel post, went through, and replaced the chain. A gravel road wandered back into the woods, and Virgil, though an outdoorsman, had to wonder what kind of birds were being preserved. Crows? Blackbirds? Starlings? He didn’t know of any rare species going through there. Sandhill cranes, maybe? But didn’t they usually hang out in cornfields?
Roberts was sitting on the tailgate of a Chevy pickup truck, smoking a brown cigarillo down to the end. He was a tall, thin man, with ragged hair and bright blue eyes, dressed quite a bit like Virgil, in jeans and barn coat. He was wearing brown cowboy boots, and stood with the boots crossed at the ankle. He said, “Well, you look like Flowers, from what Davenport told me.”
“I am,” Virgil said. “We wouldn’t have called you up if it weren’t pretty important.”
“If it’s about these people going around shooting everybody, I don’t know much. I know Jimmy Sharp, but I never met either of the other two, far’s I know.”
“I’m not so concerned about Jimmy, unless you know where he is,” Virgil said.
“If I knew that, I’d call somebody up. That boy is nuts,” Roberts said.
“Okay. What I’m looking for is somebody you’d hire to do a killing for you. Who’d do it for money.”
Roberts said, “Huh.”
Virgil added: “Not a complete dumbass, who’d get caught and roll over on you.”
Roberts uncrossed his boots and snapped the cigarillo butt down the road. “That’s a tough one. Who do you think did the hiring?”
