Mad River

Minneapolis.”
    “You’re going to celebrate life?”
    “That’s right,” Virgil said. He looked at the face of the phone and the call was, indeed, coming from the Marshall area code—but from an unknown number.
    “Virgil Flowers.”
    “Virgil, this is Bud Wright, at the
Bigham Gazette
.”
    “Hey, Bud.”
    “Have you heard?”
    Virgil sat up. “That fuckin’ White. That fuckin’ White is back, right?”
    “No, no. No. Dick Murphy didn’t make it home last night, or come to work this morning. One of Duke’s boys found his car down in Riverside Park.”
    “I know it.”
    “There was blood on the seat,” Wright said.
    Virgil closed his eyes. Then, “Shit. I’m on my way.”
    “Do you have any comment?”
    “Yeah: ‘Shit, I’m on my way.’”

26
    WHEN VIRGIL GOT TO BIGHAM, Murphy’s car had been taken to the sheriff’s impound area. Virgil went by Duke’s office and was told that Duke was out. The chill in the office was still deep, and a deputy named Jim Clark only reluctantly showed Virgil the car.
    The car was a BMW 328i. The small blood spot was just below the headrest; Virgil could see no sign of a bullet hole. He had the deputy open all four doors, and without touching anything inside, he looked at the back of the headrest and then the backseat. There was no sign of a bullet exit hole on the back of the headrest, or an entrance hole on the backseat.
    “What are you doing about the blood?” Virgil asked.
    “Our crime-scene specialist is driving samples up to the BCA,” Clark said.
    “Is Ross Price around?” Virgil asked. Price was the sheriff’s investigator.
    “Somewhere,” the deputy said.
    “I need to talk with him,” Virgil said.
    The deputy closed the car and locked it, and led Virgil back inside. The dispatcher got ahold of Price, who said that he’d be back in ten minutes or so. Virgil went down in the basement, got a Diet Coke and a Nut Goodie, then waited on the steps outside the law enforcement center.
    Price was prompt: just about ten minutes after he talked to the dispatcher, he rolled into the sheriff’s parking lot, and Virgil went over to talk to him.
    “So how did all this come up?” Virgil asked. “Who figured out he was gone?”
    Price said that late on Monday evening, Murphy had been seen at a local self-serve car wash, detailing his BMW. “We talked to a guy who saw him there, Lance Barber.”
    “Friend of Murphy’s?”
    “No. Lance is a baker, he works at Bare Bakers. He’s an older guy, must be close to seventy. He went through the fast wash, and saw Murphy down there. As far as we know, he was the last one to see him,” Price said. “He said he saw Murphy shining up his headlights with a rag when he went into the automatic wash, and he was just going through the drier when Murphy drove out the exit lane.”
    That was that. Murphy didn’t go to work the next day, and didn’t answer his landline phone or his cell phone, either one. His father went around to his apartment and let himself in, and there was no sign of him.
    “Then, we found his car parked down at Riverside Park,” Price said. “It was unlocked, and we found that blood on the seat. Our crime-scene guy, Bob Drake, took a blood sample, just to make sure it was Murphy’s, along with some hair and what looked like semen samples from Murphy’s bed for comparison. Then we locked up the car so your guys could really get into it, if it turns out to be Murphy’s blood, as I expect it’ll be.”
    Virgil nodded, and then said, “And nothing since?”
    “He hasn’t charged anything on any credit cards, hasn’t used an ATM, left two hundred dollars in cash in the top drawer of his chest of drawers. Hasn’t used his cell phone. Doesn’t have another car that we know of.”
    “You think he might have faked it?”
    Price hesitated, then said, “I’m not smart enough to figure out what happened. It’s all weird.”
    “Just asking what you think,” Virgil said.
    “What I
think
is, there’s some chance he faked his own death, and his old pal Randy White set up a hideout and picked him up. Then I asked myself, ‘Why would he do that?’ As long as Randy is gone, Dick’s not going to go to trial for murder. And then, there’s Ag’s money. He still hasn’t gone to probate with the will. . . . Everybody’s been waiting for that, because they’re talking about the O’Learys suing for wrongful death. Anyway, he’d be leaving that money behind, at least for now, and