Mad River (16 page)

•   •   •

STILLWATER PRISON SITS
on a hill in Bayport, Minnesota, a few miles south of the town of Stillwater, and why it wasn’t called Bayport prison, Virgil didn’t know; nor was he curious enough to find out. The prison was not a particularly welcoming place, but neither was it particularly grim. Virgil had been inside perhaps a dozen times. He called ahead two minutes before he got there, parked across the street, locked up his guns, and walked over to the administration building.

An assistant warden named Ron Polgar was waiting for him and escorted him to the warden’s office. The 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
we
would have done, we might come pretty close to what they’ve done.”

•   •   •

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 far. They come from around there, and they do know the countryside.”

“So they go east, and never would jog north,” said a hulking blond in the front row. “They jog south.”

“Why is that?” Virgil asked.

“Look at the map. The Minnesota River comes slanting down across there, and they’d get pinned against the river. You can only cross it on main highways, and you said that they needed to stay away from where people could see them. Back roads only.”

They all looked at the map, and then somebody said, “Bob’s right.”

Somebody else said, “But they could be thinking of hiding out in the woods. Lots of woods around the river, all the rest is farmland.”

“They need to eat, they need maybe to see some TV, see what the cops are doing,” said the blond man. “No. I believe they’d jog south, and keep jogging south to get past those little towns around there.”

A very tall man with overgrown eyebrows said, “They gotta get off the road. I can feel that in my gut. Gotta get off the roads. Cops got helicopters, they’re looking everywhere. You could run for a while, but the longer you run, the more scared you’d get. Could you guys run for an hour? I don’t think I would.”

They all thought about it, and Virgil said, “I want to hear everybody on that. Think about what this guy just said. How long could you stand to run?” He pointed at a road, and traced it going east. “From here to here is one minute. From here to here is four or five minutes. These are sections, so each one is about a mile.”

The argument started and flowed around the group, and they started voting with shows of hands, at each intersection. But at each intersection, the possibilities multiplied, and it became apparent that there was no one solution—but there were other solutions that seemed, to the inmates, impossible. “You just can’t go there,” one of them said about a particular route. “You just run into too many people.”

They asked questions about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, to get an idea of what kind of people they were, and one man said, “I was kind of like them, up to the time I got caught. I’ll tell you what, they won’t go too far from home. They won’t get down into no strange country, where they don’t know how things work. They might try to go up to the Cities, since they been there, but too many people would see them. . . . I’d say, they might go over into the next county, but not too much farther.”

“I bet they go someplace down around I-90, thinking that maybe if things quiet down, they could make a break for it some night. Get a long way down the road, east or west.”

A couple of other inmates, who’d been silent up to that point, chipped in to disagree: people like Sharp and Welsh, they thought, might talk about LA, but they’d never go there, not when push came to shove. They might go to Worthington, or Windom, but it’d be unlikely that they’d go much farther than that, especially since Sharp had been wounded.

Eventually, after two hours, Virgil had three relatively small circles on the map of south-central Minnesota. Most of the inmates—there were always a few holdouts—thought they’d be in one or the other, and most thought that the middle one, one that bent to the southeast, would be the most likely.

The circle took in the southeastern corner of Bare County.

“I think we’re done,” Virgil said, looking at the map. “I appreciate the help, and I’ll tell the warden that, and anybody else who’ll listen.”

They all seemed pleased with that, and then the hulking blond man raised his hand and Virgil nodded at him.

“I’ll tell you something. Jimmy and Becky were partners, and Jimmy got shot. Tom McCall said they went to this house to get medicine, and she fucked him on the bed there. He’s lying. She wouldn’t fuck him like that. A woman wouldn’t do that. They’ll put out almost anytime, but they wouldn’t if somebody got shot in a bank robbery. That kind of thing don’t get women hot. It pushes some other button.”

“There is some evidence that they had a sexual encounter on the bed in the back,” Virgil said.

“I didn’t say they didn’t fuck, I said she didn’t fuck him,” the blond man said. “What happened was, he raped her. The thing is, a bank robbery, and a bunch of shooting, could get a guy all hot. Wouldn’t get a woman hot, not if somebody was hurt. Not if it was a friend.”

Half the crowd looked skeptical, and half looked like they might agree. The blond said, “Think it over. You’re McCall, you’re hot for this chick, but you’ve never been able to get to her. Here’s your last chance, ’cause you’re going to turn them in. What have you got to lose? They’re already gonna get you for a bunch of murders, what’s a little rape, even if they believe her? So, you fuck her. But she’s still trying to get away—get medicine, get back to Jimmy. She’s gonna take out fifteen minutes to fuck somebody after they just killed this farm lady, and somebody else might come at any minute? I don’t believe it. I believe McCall fucked her, but I think it was a straight-out rape.”

Again, the crowd was divided, but Virgil said to the man, “I know Tom McCall just a little bit, from having talked to him. I believe you might be right. He’s a fuckin’ weasel.”

“I am right,” he said.

“And I’ll follow it up,” Virgil said. To the rest of the group: “I want to thank everybody for your help. I’ll do whatever I can to see you get credit for it. And keep an eye on the TV. You’ll see how the story comes out, and whether or not you were right.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL,
back on the street, called Davenport and told him that he was coming through St. Paul before heading back west. “Meet you at Cecil’s,” Davenport said. “I’ll buy you lunch and you can tell me about it.”