Free Mad River by John Sandford Page B

silver truck, though—even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.
    He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.
    •   •   •
    THE KEY THING about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.
    They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.
    “Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He . . . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away . . .”
    “So . . . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.
    “I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are . . . you know . . . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her—I’m sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”
    She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know . . . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.
    “I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”
    As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.
    •   •   •
    WHEN HE’D WRUNG HER OUT, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.
    “They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”
    •   •   •
    WHEN VIRGIL WENT back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.
    “We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now—it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and