warden was a tall, thin, pink-faced man in his thirties, with steel-rimmed spectacles; a career correctional bureaucrat named James Benson, he could have been an accountant. He was notable for his adamant opposition to capital punishment, which Minnesota did not have, and would never have, if Benson had anything to do with it.
“Virgil,” he said, standing up as Virgil came into the office. Virgil said, “How you doing, Jim?” and they shook hands.
“You must be pretty much in a rush. .”
“Unless the Guard finds them this morning, which could happen,” Virgil said. “You got my guys together?”
The warden nodded. “We’re herding them into a classroom right now. We’ve got the projector and screen set up with a laptop. I hope you know Windows.”
“Yeah, I should be okay,” Virgil said. “How’d you pick the guys?”
“Talked to everybody,” the warden said. “Your requirements were peculiar-people from out in the rural areas, shitkickers, I think you said, willing to cooperate, fairly bright. And that’s what we got. Bright, but not exactly geniuses. We’ve got what, a dozen of them?”
“Eighteen now,” Polgar said.
“I didn’t want them to be really dumb, that’s all,” Virgil said. “I don’t need geniuses for this.”
“Got you covered,” Benson said. “They’re just run-of-the-mill. . shitkickers.”
“Excellent,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”
“Let me know what happens,” Benson said.
Virgil and Polgar processed through several locked gates into the secure area and walked over to a classroom, where the inmates were waiting under the eyes of two guards. They were an odd assemblage for the prison: for one thing, they were all white, which was unusual, even for Minnesota. They were dressed in a variety of street clothes, jeans and sweatshirts for the most part.
They all wore the same skeptical look on their faces.
Polgar nodded at the two guards and went to the front of the room and said, “Okay. Everybody pay attention. You’ve got an idea of why you’re here, and you know that there may be some pretty good benefits for taking part. If you change your mind and don’t want to take part, let us know, and we’ll take you back to your unit. Raise your hand if you’ve changed your mind.”
He held up his hand as an example, and the group stirred, but nobody else raised a hand. Polgar said, “Good. I’m going to turn you over to Virgil, here, and he’s going to tell you what we need, and then we’ll turn the projector on for a little show.”
Virgil stepped up and said, “Most of you come from out in the countryside, just like I do, which is where I got the idea to ask for your help. I’m sure you’ve been watching television and know our problem-we’ve got a couple of kids running around killing people, and we need to stop the killing.”
“You gonna kill them when you catch them?” one of the inmates asked.
Virgil wanted to be as honest as he could be, since he needed them to work with him. He said, “You know what happens in these situations. We’d like to take them alive, because we’d like to talk to them. But this is not robbery or burglary or car theft-these kids are crazy and they’re killers. This kind of thing usually doesn’t end well. A lot of the time, these people kill themselves rather than give up. Or they decide to go down shooting. I can’t tell you any different. We will do whatever we have to, to stop them.”
There was another stir through the crowd, a rustle of grunts and two- and three-word exchanges, and a few nods.
“So what I’m going to do is tell you the story, what happened, and then we’re going to the computer,” Virgil said.
He told the group everything he knew, from the murder of Ag Murphy to discovery of the Welshes and old man Sharp, and all of the rest of it, right up to the credit union robbery. He described the shoot-out in the street.
“Jimmy Sharp was hit in the leg. From the description we got, the slug didn’t break any bones, but messed up the outside of his thigh. It won’t kill him, at least not right away. They couldn’t go to a hospital, of course, so they went to an isolated farmhouse to look for medicine. . ”
He described the scene at the Towne house, and McCall’s description of sex on the bed, and the murder of Edie Towne.
“So then McCall took off with the Jeep,” Virgil said. “He called me on a cell phone and gave himself up. I arrested him, and he told us about the cornfield where he thought Sharp and Welsh might be hiding. Like I said, we’d already found that, but it made me think he might be telling the truth about the rest of it. But that’s all we know. What I’d like to do is for you all to think about that, and between us, we’ll try to work out where Sharp and Becky Welsh might have run to.”
“How would we know that?” one of the inmates asked.
“You can’t know, for sure,” Virgil said. “But I believe there’s a good possibility that if we all think what
They talked it over for a while, and then Polgar fired up the computer and the projector, called up Google Maps, and threw up an aerial photo of Oxford, in which you could clearly see the roof of the bank. Virgil tapped the picture: “Here’s the bank. Here’s where the cop was. They came running out this way, to the waiting Tahoe-Becky Welsh was driving. After the shoot-out, they ran north.”
Virgil traced the killers’ route out of town, to the cornfield where they hid, and touched the Townes’ farmhouse. “From here, McCall ran further north, then east, and then north again, and then east, and then north.”
Polgar reduced the scale on the map, to include the entire route.
“I picked McCall up right here,” Virgil said, tapping the map. “Now, Becky Welsh kills Edie Towne and shoots Clarence, and she drives back up the road to the cornfield where Sharp is waiting. They know that McCall has run off. They don’t know why, but they must know that there’s a chance he’ll turn them in, so they can’t go anyplace that he might know about. They’ve got to go to someplace new. They’ve just got to invent this place.”
The problem had captured them.
A short thin man in the back row called, “They can’t go back toward town, or any place in a circle around the town, because there’s gonna be cops coming in from all directions. Did you know what kind of truck they stole from this guy?”
“Yeah, pretty quick,” Virgil said. “It hasn’t been seen since then.”
Somebody else said, “So they got off the road. They couldn’t go north, toward Bigham, because they’d figure that’s where all the sheriffs would be coming from.”
They all agreed that Sharp and Welsh would go sideways-east or west-out of the cornfield, probably turning at the first available road.
Virgil asked, “If it were you, would you go back toward Marshall? Remember, they’ve always been talking about going west, toward Los Angeles, but they killed two people in Marshall.”
“Didn’t you say that the ambulances and everybody were going to Marshall?”
“I did say that,” Virgil said.
“Wouldn’t they hear them?” the same guy asked.
Virgil looked at the map and considered. “You know, they might. It’s quite a ways, but it was pretty quiet out there.”
Somebody else said, “Nah. I had some cops coming after me one time, sirens and everything, and I never heard them until I saw the lights behind me.”
“Yeah, but, they gotta know that Marshall was going to be a hornet’s nest.”
After some more discussion, the inmates voted unanimously that Sharp and Welsh had gone east, toward the only country where they hadn’t yet done anything, or stirred anybody up. Since McCall might have betrayed them, they would have gotten off the big highway as soon as they could, and would have stayed off them: back roads only.
“Remember, the cops know what car they’re driving and it’s on television everywhere. They can’t go through any towns where people might see them. . Jimmy’s in pain and maybe bleeding still. He might not be able to go too
