Mad River (3 page)

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You think Ray Wylie Hubbard is better than Waylon Jennings?”

“I don’t know, but they’re both better than any of the Beatles,” Davenport said. “I’m going to bed. Hesitate to call.”

One good thing about a long drive in the dark, when you didn’t know anything about where you were going, or what you were going to do when you got there, was that you had lots of time to think.

Virgil had for years worked a sideline as an outdoors writer, a freelancer for the diminishing number of magazines that were actually about the outdoors, as opposed to outdoors technology. He knew which brands of fishing rods he liked, and what reels, and he knew something about guns and bows and snowshoes and about boats and canoes, and not as much as he would have liked about dogs—his job made it almost impossible to keep a dog—but not much about technology.

He wasn’t much interested in arguing whether a .308 was better or worse than a .30-06 on whitetail, or a Ranger a better boat than a Lund or a Tuffy, or a Mathews Solocam a better bow than a Hoyt or a PSE. He couldn’t have found his own ass with a GPS. He just did what most guys did, which was talk to his friends and try a few things out. The fact was, most of the known names worked pretty well, and you got used to what you had; you could punch all the half-inch holes in paper that you liked, but the fact is, when it came to hunting, anything in the bread box would do the job.

So when he wrote, he looked for
stories
instead of technology. He usually sold them. He’d even sold a two-part crime story to
The New York Times Magazine
. Now he was stepping up. Maybe.

A few months earlier, Davenport’s daughter had been shot in the arm, and he’d gone to see her in the hospital, and had seen her afterward at Davenport’s home. Her name was Letty, and she had been adopted by the Davenports after her alcoholic mother was killed on a case that Lucas Davenport had worked in northwestern Minnesota.

Virgil had known that she had been a dirt-poor country girl, but he hadn’t quite understood how bad it had been, and what she’d actually done to survive. One thing she’d done was wander around the countryside with a bunch of leghold traps and a .22, trapping raccoon, mink, and muskrats—mostly rats. She’d sold them to a local fur buyer for enough money to keep the family’s head above water. Had done this when she was ten years old . . .

He’d gotten pieces of the story when she was recovering from the wound, and somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that it was a terrific story. Here was what appeared to be a stylish young high-school girl, who’d shot a cop—the same crooked cop—on two different occasions, and recently survived a shoot-out with two Mexican narcos, leaving the narcos dead. He talked to Davenport about it, and then Letty, and wound up doing five long interviews, on five consecutive weekends, during the fall, as well as some research up in the Red River Valley.

He’d spent the next two months writing a girl’s short memoir of a nightmarish rural life—though she hadn’t at the time thought it particularly nightmarish, it just
was
—and sent it off to
The New York Times
Magazine
, to the editor who’d bought his earlier pieces.

The editor had gotten right back and said that while the
Times
wouldn’t buy it—it was simply too long—he’d sent it to a friend over at
Vanity Fair
, and they were definitely interested.

The problem was,
Vanity Fair
wanted to send Annie Leibovitz out to the Red River Valley with a ton of photo equipment to shoot Letty and Lucas Davenport, as part of a major editorial package. Both Letty and Davenport had the faces for it, and Letty loved the idea of meeting Leibovitz, who was one of her media heroines, but the Davenports had gotten their knickers in a psychological twist about what the attention would do to their daughter, about the whole gestalt of
Vanity Fair
, about how Letty had already had way too much attention from the press, and blah blah blah . . .

That all had to be worked through. Virgil didn’t want to piss anybody off, and the Davenports were good friends of his, but he really wanted the piece in
Vanity Fair
.
Really
wanted it. Maybe not as much as he’d wanted the Ranger, but it was like that, the same order of magnitude: about an 8.4 on the Richter scale.

Something else. He suspected that
Vanity Fair
liked the idea of having a gun-toting shit-kicking cop as a roving reporter. If he could nail down that job . . .

•   •   •

DURING THE DRIVE OUT
to Shinder, he considered a half dozen calming approaches he might take with the Davenports; he thought he might point out that all of the stories about Letty had been sensationalized TV trash, while his work was a sensitive retelling of the girl’s actual history. . . .

And when he was done thinking about the Davenports, he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren’t answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks?

•   •   •

HE WAS STILL THINKING
about that when he came up to Shinder, running fast, and west, on State Highway 68. The Welshes, if that was actually the victims’ name, lived in the northeast part of town. Virgil knew that because he could see, across the barren, yet-to-be-planted prairie, a cluster of cars with their lights on, gathered around a house, and a bunch of houses with their lights on, all on the northeast corner of town.

He came to the intersection leading into town, turned north, rolled past a roadhouse and a gas station, and a line of grain elevators that went off at a diagonal to the northwest. He was on April Street, and took it north across Apple, Cherry, Peach, Pear, and Plum, to Main, where he took a right, crossed May, June, July, and August, turned left, and crossed Aspen, Birch, Cedar, Elm, Maple, and Oak toward the pool of light, realizing, as he did so, that the east-west streets south of Main were named after fruits, and alphabetized, and the east-west streets north of Main were named after trees, and alphabetized.

At the same time, the north-south streets were named after the months, apparently starting from the west edge of town and marching east. That meant that if a parent were told her kid was acting up at the corner of Pear and April, she would have an instant appreciation of the kid’s precise location. What would happen if the town built more than twelve north-south streets, Virgil couldn’t guess. In any case, it all seemed a little anal, even for Minnesota.

•   •   •

THE STREET LEADING
up to the crime scene was closed off by cop cars. Virgil parked, put on a baseball cap, because it was chilly, and climbed out of the truck. He was in what he thought must be the workingman’s corner of town—small white prewar clapboard houses, some of them crumbling badly, most of them with small front porches, most with one-car garages converted to rooms, with larger, newer, metal-sided garages in back. The neighbors were out sitting on the porches, wrapped in blankets or wearing their winter coats, watching. Some had brought out aluminum lawn furniture, including one recliner.

The cops had set up work lights to illuminate the house, and Virgil could see a half dozen people walking the lawn, like soldiers policing up cigarette butts.
Looking for evidence,
he thought. A young deputy walked toward him, thumbs hooked on a duty belt, and as Virgil came up, he called, “This is off-limits . . . who are you?”

“Virgil Flowers. I’m with the BCA.”

The cop looked him over: Virgil hadn’t changed clothes and was still in the jean jacket, open over the band T-shirt, jeans, and the cowboy boots. “You got any ID?”

Virgil had seen the sheriff, Lewis Duke, come out on the porch of the death house, and he said, “Sure,” and waved his arms in the air and shouted at the sheriff, “Hey, Lewis—it’s me, Virgil.”

The cop turned and saw the sheriff, an annoyed look crossing his face, wave Virgil over. The cop said, “So you’re a wiseass.”

Virgil said, “Maybe.”

“Don’t much care for wiseasses in Bare County,” the deputy said, as Virgil walked past him.

Virgil said, “Like I could really give a shit.” He himself didn’t much care for officious pricks.

•   •   •

LEWIS DUKE WAS A SHORT,
barrel-chested man who looked like he spent his spare time doing bench presses. He had a square, dry prairie face, thinning sandy hair, a short nose under glassy blue eyes, and a brush-cut mustache. He wore the same uniform his men did, but with five stars on the collar, and a Glock in a military-style thigh-mounted holster. He nodded at Virgil and said, “Agent Flowers.”

Virgil said, “Sheriff. I’ve been told you’ve got a bad one. Actually, I’ve heard you had two bad ones.”

“That’s correct,” Duke said. “The first one was worse—they were good folks. This whole family was white trash, but still, pretty gol-darned unpleasant.”

“Let’s take a look,” Virgil said.

“This way.”

Virgil followed Duke inside, along a path through the narrow living room demarked by two lines of blue masking tape. Duke said, “We put down the tape to keep people from wandering off into other parts of the house. We cleared it, of course, but nobody’s been in the rest of the house since then. We’re hoping your crime-scene specialists can pick up some DNA.”

“Smart,” Virgil said. Never hurt to flatter a sheriff, for those who needed it. The inside of the house was a reflection of the outside: poorly kept except for a gigantic LG television that sat against the only wall big enough to take it, with a couple of green La-Z-Boy imitations facing it. A green plastic bowl sat between the chairs, as though it might have contained popcorn; the house didn’t smell like popcorn, but like years of bacon grease and nicotine.

Duke led the way to the kitchen. A fat man in a white T-shirt lay on the kitchen floor, looking up at the ceiling—eyes wide open—with a big bloody splotch in the center of his chest. A broken coffee cup lay on the floor beside him, with a damp brown splatter stain on the floor that probably had been coffee, but might have been something like apple cider. A woman lay in a doorway leading through what looked like a mudroom. She may have been running for the back door, but had been shot before she got there. She was facedown.

“Who found them?” Virgil asked.

“Neighbor lady. She’d been trying to talk to Miz Welsh all day, about changing shifts at the nursing home,” Duke said. “She walked over and knocked on the back door, about the fifth time she’d done it, and then peeked inside and saw Miz Welsh layin’ on the floor. She called us.”

“I’ll need to talk to her,” Virgil said.

“Sure. But she doesn’t have much to say.”

Virgil squatted next to each body, one at a time, and looked at them closely. The woman gave him nothing, but the man’s dark pants showed a flash of white against the floor. Virgil got his nose right down on the kitchen linoleum and saw that it was an inside-out back pocket. When he stood up, he found Duke and a deputy staring at him, as if he was about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

“Have your guys figured out when this might have happened?” Virgil asked.

Duke said, “Well, George, there, was seen walking out of the Surprise market between nine and ten o’clock last night. Uh, Friday night. We haven’t been able to find anybody who saw him today. I mean, Saturday.”

“You know what he bought at the Surprise?”

Duke looked at the deputy, who said, “Well, no, I guess we didn’t ask that.”

The deputy was wearing plastic evidence gloves and Virgil asked, “You got any more of those? The gloves?”

“Yeah . . . don’t you?”

“In my truck. I’d rather not go back, if you’ve got some handy,” Virgil said. Another prick; it always had something to do with the training.

The deputy glanced at Duke, who nodded, and the deputy said, “Two seconds.” He left, and Duke said to Virgil, “Haven’t seen much of you.”

“I’ve been busy back east. Besides, do you really want to see the likes of me?”

“Maybe not,” Duke conceded. “Not when it’s on this kind of business.”

They looked at the bodies for a few seconds, then the deputy was back and handed Virgil a pair of yellow plastic gloves. Virgil pulled them on, and stepped over to the kitchen sink and pulled open the cupboard beneath it. A trash can was there, and he pulled it partway out, found a plastic grocery bag near the bottom of the can, under a bunch of empty beer cans. He opened the bag, found a receipt from the Surprise with a time stamp that said 8:45
PM
. It also said that $10.25 had been charged on a Visa card with a number ending in 4508 for a twelve-pack of Miller High Life.

“He bought the beer at eight forty-five,” Virgil said. He tipped the trash can back and forth a few times, digging around, found five Millers, plus three empty Bud Lights.

“Huh,” he said. He stood up, stepped to the refrigerator and pulled open the door, expecting to see the rest of the Millers. No beer. He said to Duke, “No beer.”

Duke asked, “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the killers took it with them.” He looked around for a few more seconds, then peeled off the gloves and said, “So, you said this family was trashy?”

“That’s what I’ve been told. Darrell here covers this area.”

Darrell, the deputy with the evidence gloves, said, “George never managed to hold a job for long. I guess Ann was down at the nursing home for quite some time now. George has anger issues, argues with the neighbors, doesn’t keep the place up. That sort of thing. You think that’s important?”

“What about kids, or in-laws?”

“Got a daughter, named Rebecca, she’s up in the Cities, as far as anyone knows. That’s the last we heard. Haven’t tried to get in touch with her yet, but we’re looking around for a contact.”