Mad River

Virgil stayed in touch for two weeks, until the DNA came back on the blood: it was almost certainly Murphy’s, because it matched hair, blood, and semen samples from Murphy’s bed. Murphy had taken no money from his bank account, never used his cell phone or credit cards in that time. Then more DNA samples came back, on the car, and they were all Murphy.

A crime-scene tech who’d taken apart the car seat said, “I don’t know how he was killed, if he was killed, but there was more blood there than it looked like. It wasn’t just a spot. He bled through the spot for a while, and it ran down the inside of the fabric. Not a whole lot, but it wasn’t just a wipe, or a smear.”

“So what killed him?” Virgil asked.

“I’m thinking aliens.”

“You mean like, Canadians?”

Then, a day after the second set of DNA samples came back, Davenport called.

“You’re not on the TSA’s no-fly list, are you?”

“I hope not,” Virgil said. “Where am I flying to?”

“Houston. By God, Texas.”

“Why is that?”

“I thought you’d want to talk to Randy White, who was picked up yesterday afternoon after a DUI stop.”

“Sonofagun,” Virgil said.

Virgil flew into George Bush Intercontinental Airport the next morning, and two hours later was interviewing Randy White at the Harris County Jail.

When a guard brought White to the interview room, Virgil asked, “Randy, what the hell happened to you?”

White sat in the chair on the other side of the interview desk and said, “I couldn’t deal with it anymore. You gonna take me back?”

Virgil said, “I don’t know.”

“I got a decent job down here.”

“You know about Dick Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. . I feel bad about it, but I just couldn’t handle it,” White said. “Everybody’s telling me that it’s my information that’ll send him up, but you know what? I really don’t know if he wanted to kill Ag. I’d be the one to send him up, but I don’t know. So I took off.”

Virgil looked at him for a moment, but saw no guile in his eyes. He asked, “You really don’t know about Dick?”

“Well, yeah: he got out,” White said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Virgil said. “What I meant was, he’s disappeared.”

“What?”

Virgil peered at him. White’s reaction was a little too dramatic. Off-key. “Goddamnit, Randy, if you’re lying to me, I’ll put you in Stillwater as an accessory to murder.”

“Virgil-when I took off, Dick was in jail, and I never been back,” White said. “I don’t know what happened up there. I don’t read the newspapers, I don’t have a TV yet. I just don’t know.”

“Did Murphy pay you to leave?” Virgil asked.

“No, no. I just couldn’t deal with it.”

“I’m gonna want to look at your bank account.”

Randy laughed: “And you’ll see that the most I’ve had in it is about a hundred dollars.”

“Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp in cash. He paid some guys to beat me up, in cash. So he’d give you cash.”

“But he didn’t,” White said. He brushed hair out of his eyes and said, “I’ll tell you, Virgil-I liked Ag. More than I should have, since she was my buddy’s wife. I never would have lifted a finger to hurt her, for no amount of money. If I really thought that Dick done it, I’d hang him myself.”

Virgil looked at him, and then asked, quietly, “You didn’t do that, did you?”

White said, “No! No. I been here since I ran away. Virgil, I been here every day. You can ask. I’m working on a roof-tile crew.”

But again, a little flat, a little off-key.

Virgil stared at him, and White stared back; they were locked up, and White never flinched. Something going on here, Virgil thought. He denies everything, but he’s defiant. Had he arranged for Murphy to disappear? But White wasn’t smart enough to engineer that. He wasn’t smart enough to get Murphy out of jail, and then kill him. Not nearly smart enough.

Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’m gonna call my boss and see what he wants to do. So, I’m going to ask the folks down here to hold on to you for a while. Give you some time to think about it. We’re talking murder here, and you’re involved in this somehow. If you’re hiding Murphy. .”

White shook his head and looked at the guard and said, “Let’s go. I’m tired of talking to him.”

He stood up and Virgil said, “You gotta think about it hard, Randy. This is a life-altering decision. If you really liked Ag that much. .”

Virgil trailed off, and turned his head to face the concrete-block wall. A thought prowling there.

The guard touched White on the shoulder, and they stepped toward the door that would take him back to a cell. As the guard opened the door, Virgil turned and called, “Randy!”

White turned to look at him, and Virgil said, “It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who paid you, didn’t they? It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who shipped you out of town so Murphy’d get out of jail. And then they killed him.”

White opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out for a moment, and there was panic in his eyes. Then he said, “No,” and “Fuck you,” and to the guard, “Let’s go. This guy is a crazy man.”

Virgil called Davenport and told him what he thought. Davenport said, “You don’t have one inch of proof, Virgil. You saw it in his eyes? Give me a break: You don’t even know that Murphy is dead. If he is, and an O’Leary did it, it could have been any one of. . How many? Four or five? Who are you going to hang it on?”

“Goddamnit, Lucas, I know.”

“Yeah. Well, both you and I know the biggest organized crime guy in Minnesota. We’ve both had long chats with him, and we’ve never touched him. Why is that?”

“No proof,” Virgil said.

“Exactly. Tell you what: get back up here. It’ll take a couple days to process the paper on White, and then I’ll send a couple guys down there to get him, if you still want him. You go talk to the O’Learys, see if you can shake anything loose.”

Virgil got a late flight out to Minneapolis and was home in Mankato by midnight. The next morning, he called John O’Leary and said that he wanted to talk with him and his children. O’Leary asked, “About what?” and Virgil said, “Dick Murphy.”

O’Leary said he, Marsha, Mary, and Frank could be there, but that the older three boys were all in the Cities. Virgil said he’d talk to the boys later.

“What’s going on?” John O’Leary asked. “Talk to them later? You think we had something to do with Murphy. . disappearing?”

“I found Randy White,” Virgil said.

“Yeah? So what? Does he know where Murphy is?” He asked the question with a hard edge in his voice. A real question, Virgil thought. If Murphy had been murdered, John O’Leary didn’t know about it.

“I’ll talk to you about that when I see you,” Virgil said. “Anyway, what’s a good time?”

After a moment of silence, O’Leary said, “Make it seven o’clock. I’m going to get the boys down from school. If you want to talk to us, you can talk to us all at once.”

Bigham Was a little more than two hours away, straight up the Minnesota River Valley, so Virgil had the best part of a day to kill. He caught up with his bills, filed expense reports, did some laundry, and caught up with a muskie forum on the ’net. When he was current with the world, he got the power washer out of the garage and