Mad River

paid him to kill Ag Murphy.”

“Who’d that be?” Davenport asked.

“Ag Murphy’s husband.”

“Really? Well-good luck with that.”

13

Virgil finished up with the sheriff’s department, copied the McCall interview to his laptop, and left the recorder in the LEC evidence room. He had a Diet Coke and a conversation with the sheriff and the Marshall police chief, then called Duke. Nobody had any idea where Sharp and Welsh had gone. Deputies were running all over Bare County, and the adjacent counties, looking for the Townes’ truck, but nobody had seen it.

“I fear for what we’re going to find when we catch up to them,” Duke said.

“So do I,” Virgil said. “I have no idea of whether they’re north, south, east, or west. I wish I knew, because I’d like to be there when we do find them.”

After that, Virgil was at loose ends. Since he was there in Marshall, anyway, and because everybody had his cell phone number and would be in touch if anything broke, he called Sally Long. She answered on the third ring and said, “Virgil Flowers: you did call.”

“If you’re not real busy, we could get dinner,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe go over to the Six and catch a movie.”

“Or maybe just find someplace to talk about our feelings,” she said. And, into the silence, “Just kiddin’, there, cowboy.”

“Jeez, you scared the heck out of me,” Virgil said. “Every time I do that, I get divorced.”

He spent the next three hours at his hotel, much of it on the phone or the computer, keeping up. There was a long story about the murders, out of the Star-Tribune website, with profiles of the suspects; and more stories from Omaha, Kansas City, and Fargo. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis had picked up AP stories, which were rewrites of the Star-Tribune, but Los Angeles had a columnist on the ground. And television from everywhere.

Channel Three out of the Cities had video from a National Guard MP detachment showing soldiers loading up a bunch of Humvees, and the reporter said that most of the MPs had gotten back from Iraq that past fall, and had serious experience running checkpoints and roadblocks.

Virgil was mentioned in the Star-Tribune as a “top BCA agent and troubleshooter,” which meant that Ignace was sucking up to him.

The last part of his motel time he spent making himself pretty and swell-smelling, buffing up his cowboy boots and shaving again. After a last check, he headed out the door, not feeling particularly guilty about it, either.

Sally was living in a small blue house not far from the university. A young blond woman, perhaps twenty years old, came to the door, crunching on a stalk of celery filled with orange pimento cheese spread. She said, “You must be Virgil. Sally’ll be right out.”

“Who’re you?” Virgil asked, as he stepped inside. The house was neatly kept, and sparsely furnished, like a bachelor woman might do it.

“Barbara,” the woman said. “I’m a student. I rent the garage loft from Sally.”

Sally took another five minutes and Virgil sat on the couch and watched Barbara munch through another two stalks of celery-Virgil turned down the offer of one, saying, “We’re going out to dinner”-and found out that Barbara was studying studio arts. “The problem is, I don’t have any talent,” she said.

“That’s a good thing to find out,” Virgil said.

“The other problem is, I’m not interested in anything else. So, what do you think I should do?”

“Why’d you italicize the you?”

“Because I’ve asked everybody else, and they all give me bullshit answers. So see, I’m relying on you to give me a non-bullshit answer.” She crossed her legs, and cocked her head, waiting for an answer.

“Well,” Virgil said, after a minute, “I never wanted to be a cop, but I just kind of got there. I didn’t plan it, but I found out that it’s pretty interesting. So, if I were you, I’d look around for something that seems like it might be an important job, and just pick it. Even if you’re not too interested in the general subject matter right now, if it’s really important, you’ll get interested in it later, when you start learning the details of it.”

She peered at him as she gnawed down the second of the two celery stalks, then said, “That sounded less bullshitty than most answers. Not entirely un-bullshitty, but mostly.”

“Well, good, then,” Virgil said. “I passed.”

“Passed what?” Sally asked, as she came into the room from the back of the house. “Are we talking kidney stones?”

Virgil stood up and thought, Ooo, and pecked her on the cheek. She was wearing a silky black blouse and tight black jeans, tucked into cowboy boots with turquoise cutouts that looked like they were right off the prairies of New York’s Upper East Side.

“Talking about what Barbara should do in life,” Virgil said. And, “Great boots. You got horses?”

“Two,” she said. “The old man’s got a ranch west of town.”

They talked about Barbara on the way out to the Blue Moon, a steak house that wasn’t terrible. And they talked about horses, which Virgil didn’t know much about, except that they sometimes bite people, and that the French sometimes ate them with both red and white sauces. Then they talked about Barbara’s problem.

“You know, when I was in high school, I was going to be a lawyer and do great things for the Indian people,” Sally said. “When I got to college and started talking to people, I found out that there are more lawyers helping the Indian people than the Indian people can really use. So then I didn’t know what to do, and when I got divorced, I called my dad, and he said, ‘Come back here and run the business.’ I couldn’t think of anything better at the moment-I figured I’d do it for a couple of years and then go back to school-but now, I find out that running the business is pretty interesting. And I have fourteen employees who depend on me to do good, and I kinda like that. The responsibility. It’s the first time I feel like I’m really doing something.”

“You are doing something,” Virgil said. “One of the problems with these kids I’m chasing is that they never did anything. I’m not sure how much of that is their fault, but if they’d had something to do, other than sit on their asses, or shoot pool. . none of this would have happened. Maybe.”

“Everybody needs something,” she said. Then, “You know what? Everybody deserves something.”

They got to the steak house, were seated in a U-shaped booth, and ate salads and pork chops, and gravitated together until their thighs were touching under the table, and Virgil began to feel really warm.

When the waiter took away the main-course plates, Virgil asked, “You want some dessert?”

She put her hand around his wrist and said, “Sure. I’d like a little Flowers.”

He got her back to the motel, and on the bed, and pulled off her boots one at a time and dropped them on the floor, then pulled off the tight jeans, stopped when the waistline got down to her knees, and turned his head up and laughed, and when she asked, “What?” he started pulling again and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since eleventh grade.”

She surprised him and said, “So have I-been waiting for you to do it.”

The jeans came off, and so did everything else, and they got busy, and an hour later, she muttered into his shoulder, “Well, that was better than pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, even.”