but he wasn’t inclined to stop, though he couldn’t have told anybody why. He’d been nursed by his mother when he was a child, so he probably wasn’t suffering from a lack of breast contact; but nevertheless, here he was, lapping like a yellow Lab, when the phone rang.
He looked at the face of it, said, “Goddamnit, the most inconvenient. . I gotta answer it.”
He picked up the phone and the BCA duty officer said with a rush, “I’m patching through a woman who says she’s Becky Welsh and she says she’s going to kill a man if you don’t talk to her.”
And he was gone and Virgil said, “Becky?”
Becky said, “You sonofabitch, you said there was a sex encounter with Tom McCall, but there was no sex encounter-that motherfucker raped me.” She started crying again, and the muzzle of the gun was shaking, and the clerk backed up against the cigarette rack, his mouth hanging loose in white-faced fear.
“Becky, Becky. . I gotta know it’s really you and not a trick,” Virgil said. “Where’d he rape you? Where in the house?”
“It was in that back room, down the hall to the left. . no, to the right. It had a table with a big stack of magazines on it, and they had these pink shades on the bedside lamps.”
She was exact. Virgil said, “Becky, don’t hurt anybody else. Tell me where you are and I’ll bring you and Jimmy in. The other cops around here, they want to kill you, because that police officer got killed in Oxford. They’ll do it, too: they’ll shoot you down like a couple of dogs, but I’ll bring you in, like I brought in Tom McCall.”
“Fuck that, you’re gonna kill us anyway, one way or another,” she said. “But I want it straightened out, on TV. I didn’t have no sex encounter, he raped me. . and I’ll tell you what, I’m so pissed off I might just kill this man here to prove to you how pissed I am-”
“No, no, no, don’t do that. . Becky, I talked to some people who told me they thought you’d probably been raped. That a woman wouldn’t have voluntary sex under. . those circumstances.”
“That’s right, no way I was going to have a voluntary sex encounter,” Becky said.
“This guy you’ve got, let him go, and I’ll fix you up to talk directly to the TV woman, so you can straighten her out,” Virgil said.
“
“The man you’re with. . what does he do?” Virgil asked. He could feel the desperation clutching at his throat. “What does he do?”
“Runs a gas station store-”
“Ah, for cryin’ out loud, Becky, you guys were trying to find jobs. Right? Weren’t you? Tom McCall said you were looking everywhere, this poor guy is just like you. Got a horseshit job and just trying to pull it together. Don’t shoot him, I’m beggin’ you.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I will kill somebody every day until this sex encounter gets straightened out. Just pull up next to them in the truck and shoot them in the head.”
“Becky. . I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.”
She was gone. Virgil held on to the phone, said, “Becky? Becky? Becky?” and then a man said, “She’s gone, Virgil. I got the number. It’s a Verizon phone, and I got Verizon looking for the location, but it’ll be a few minutes-”
Sally, at his shoulder, said, “Oh my God. .”
Virgil said to the duty officer, “Get it get it get it. . see if they can track the phone with the GPS.”
Becky told the clerk to lie down on the floor, and said, “I’m parked right outside, and I’ll shoot you big-time if you move. You better be goddamn certain, when you move, that I’m gone or I’ll put a bullet right through your forehead.”
She walked out to the truck carrying the grocery bags, threw them in the back, and took off. She was watching the counter where the clerk was, and saw no movement. She turned in the street and headed north, rolled out to the end of town, to a curl in the Mad River, and threw the cell out the window, into a ditch full of cattails. Then she reversed, went around the single block, away from the store, and turned south. A moment later she was heading out of town, and thirty seconds after that, she turned off on a side track and killed her lights again, to drive on in the dark.
Three minutes after Becky hung up, Virgil was pulling on his jeans, with the phone pressed to his ear, and the duty man said, “I got a call from the Bare County sheriff, says a gas station clerk just called them from the town of Arcadia, says he was held up by Becky Welsh. They’re rolling.”
It took Verizon nine minutes before they found the cell where the phone call came in. Their phone did have GPS enabled, and a Verizon technician said that it wasn’t moving. It was near the bridge over the Mad River, north of Arcadia.
Virgil punched off and called Duke, who snapped, “What?”
“You’re headed down to Arcadia?” Virgil asked.
“Fast as we can get there.”
“Becky called me on a cell phone she took off that clerk, and the phone has a GPS,” Virgil said. “The GPS shows it as being near a bridge on the Mad River, north of town. Right on the north edge.”
“Bet they’re hiding there in the weeds, just like they did in that cornfield.”
“Don’t kill them if you don’t have to,” Virgil said.
“You coming?”
“Fast as I can.”
Virgil ran out to his truck, Sally chanting, “Go, go,” as he went out the door. Lights and siren all the way: and he punched up the number for Daisy Jones at Channel Three. It was nearly midnight, but she answered on the second ring and said, “Virgil.”
“Off the record.”
“Okay.”
“Becky Welsh just called me,” he said. “The call came from a small town-”
“So it worked.”
“Yeah, but she says if we don’t retract that story about a sex encounter, she’ll kill somebody else every day,” Virgil said. “We need you to go on, with her claim: she says that Tom McCall raped her. I believe her. I’m afraid that we won’t get to her in time, and she’ll kill somebody tomorrow morning if you don’t do this story.”
“I can do it,” Jones said. “I’ll call the station now. We’ll put it on every half hour.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“You know where she’s calling from?” Jones asked.
“We know where she was a half hour ago. We know where the cell phone is. But I honest to God can’t believe that she’s that dumb. This isn’t quite right.”
“What town?”
“Arcadia,” Virgil said.
“I’m coming as soon as I file. I’ll likely see you there.”
“Don’t talk to me-talk to the sheriff.”
For a certain type of personality, found mostly on the plains, in the South and the Southwest, there is a great sense of pleasure in going out on the rural roads at night and driving as far and fast as you can. When you come up to a high spot on an overcast night, you can see domes of light scattered around the landscape, reflected off the clouds, marking the towns, almost like illuminated chessmen scattered around a vast chessboard.
Virgil was that kind of personality.
When he was a teenager too young to drive, he’d occasionally hitchhike somewhere ridiculous, like up to the Twin Cities or over to Sioux Falls, to do something ridiculous, like buy an ice-cream cone, and scare the brains out of his parents. When he was old enough to have a car, he roamed hundreds of miles out across the prairie, listening to the FM stations come and go, with all the newest pop and rock, dodging oncoming lights that might be cop cars,
