Mad River

we’re with you on this thing. We can put these guys in jail for Assault/Three, I think, but the way things are, they’ll get less than five years. Murphy can talk to the girlfriend all he wants, and she can talk to Atkins and McGuire. Those are the rules. If we could prove that Murphy is paying them to give false testimony, that’d be different. You don’t have anything like that.”
    “So they’re going to walk?” Virgil asked.
    “No. They’re going to jail—but at this point, all we’ve got against Murphy is a fairly weak circumstantial case that I don’t think we can convict on. We need Atkins to talk. If we can get him to talk, we can draw a better picture. We could show Murphy paying to hurt you. We can bring in Randy White’s testimony, which suggests that he wanted Ag O’Leary killed. We can bring in the money found in Sharp’s pocket. That might be enough. But you’ve got to get Atkins.”
    Atkins wouldn’t budge, and finally his attorney told Virgil to stop coming around.
    •   •   •
    APRIL DRAGGED INTO MAY, and the weather finally started getting warmer, if not much wetter, and people in southwest Minnesota began using the dreaded “D” word, for “drought.” On a very fine and dry May afternoon, a woman named May Lawson took a heavily weighted, chrome yellow Momentus golf club and beat her estranged husband to death with it, having caught him asleep on the couch in his new bachelor apartment. She then went back to the school where she taught fifth grade and pretended that nothing had happened.
    Her husband, Rolf, had been conducting an affair with another woman who worked at the DMV. Virgil took about two days to figure all that out, and the tests came back with May’s deoxyribonucleic acid all over the body—she’d apparently spit at him while beating him to death—and the school’s maintenance technician found the Momentus golf club in a dumpster behind the school. May had wiped it, but hastily, and hadn’t gotten all the prints, or all the blood, either.
    That took two weeks, including the arrest and paperwork, and when Virgil got back to Bigham, the case against Murphy felt colder than ever.
    Finally, Thomas and Hunstad sat him down and said, “Virgil, we talked to the big guy, and he said we should take a run at it. We’re dead in the water right now. What we think is, if we take a run at it, and put the evidence out there, we’ll probably lose. But if we do lose, and if the O’Learys sue Murphy for wrongful death, there’s a chance they can keep him from inheriting that money. And make him a killer in the eyes of the community, just like with O.J.”
    “If that’s all we got, I’ll take it,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    HE ARRESTED MURPHY that afternoon. Murphy was astonished and humiliated when Virgil marched him out of his old man’s office building and dropped him into the Bare County jail on a charge of murder.
    Duke came out to watch it, and said, as Virgil was leaving, “I don’t think you got him, unless there’s something I don’t know.”
    “We’ll see,” Virgil said.
    The next day, the local district court judge denied bail.
    •   •   •
    THE O’LEARYS WERE EXULTANT . . . for about two days. Virgil met them at the courthouse, and led the whole bunch to a conference room, for an interview with Hunstad and Thomas. When the attorneys finished, they told the O’Learys the truth: that a conviction was unlikely.
    “You mean he’s going to get away with it?” John O’Leary asked.
    “We’ll ruin him in the community, and the charge will follow him for the rest of his life. Then there’s the possibility of a wrongful death lawsuit, but that would be up to you.”
    “Wrongful death, my ass,” Jack O’Leary exploded. “He’s responsible for the murder of Ag. And he’s going to walk away from it? I don’t give a shit about the money, I want him in Stillwater.”
    “So do we,” said Hunstad. “I’m just telling you, it’s a tough case. If we had Welsh or Sharp . . . but we don’t. We’ve got hearsay and suggestions and some money they found on Jimmy Sharp. We’ve got a confirmed cop-killer as one witness, and a guy who used to hurt high school football players for money, as our second witness. It’s just tough.”
    Frank O’Leary said, “That fuckin’ Duke.”
    Then Marsha O’Leary started sobbing, and the whole family began to shake.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL TIDIED UP what he could, and