Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  BACK AT the motel, he sprawled on the bed and started by calling the phone company to find out how he called Hong Kong, and whom to call.

  What he needed, it turned out, was the American consulate. After some switching around, he was told that the man he needed to talk to had gone to lunch and would be back in an hour. Virgil asked the woman how hot it was there, because he had the impression that Hong Kong was a hot place, and she said that it was eighty-four, and Virgil said that Minneapolis had been ninety that day, and the woman didn’t have a comment about that, so Virgil said he’d call back in an hour.

  He gave it an hour and a half, twelve-thirty in Minnesota, then talked to a man named Howard Hawn, who actually seemed interested in Virgil’s question, and explained that he spent quite a bit of time getting puke-covered American tourists out of the drunk tank. Hawn said that he had some contacts who would know about Utecht’s death, and he would find one and get a name back to Virgil.

  “But it probably won’t be until late in the afternoon—it’s hard to get people at this time of day. Lot of people take a break.”

  “Leave a name and number on my phone,” Virgil said, and Hawn said he would.

  “Pretty cool in Minneapolis today?” Hawn asked.

  “No, it was ninety—but I was up north yesterday, and it was cool at night, probably forty.”

  “Good sleeping weather,” Hawn said. “It was about eighty-seven here when I came in.” After that, there wasn’t much more to say, and Hawn said he’d leave a name and number when he got them, or have somebody call him directly.

  Virgil set his alarm clock for 7 A.M. and thought about Mead Sinclair, talking to two of the victims that night at the vet center, who spent all that time in Vietnam. Sinclair caused an itch, and had since Virgil first met him.

  And the nun, Elle, who knew a lot about crime and criminals, had picked him out of the whole circus to ask about . . . and she’d asked about Chester Utecht, and now that Virgil thought about it, Sinclair had shown up here in St. Paul shortly after Chester Utecht died in Hong Kong. He’d apparently taken leave from the University of Wisconsin, one of the great universities in the country, to work part time at Metro State? Now that he thought about it, that seemed passing strange. . . .

  The thoughts all tumbled over each other, and he got nowhere. He cooled out by thinking briefly about God, and considered praying that there wouldn’t be another murder and another middle-of-the-night call. He decided that praying wouldn’t help, and went to sleep, and dreamed of the fisherwoman with strong brown arms and gold-flecked married eyes.

  VIRGIL WAS picking the day’s T-shirt, undecided between Interpol and Death Cab for Cutie, when he remembered to check his cell for messages—there were none. Maybe Hawn hadn’t made the connection, or maybe the Chinese didn’t care, or maybe the request was bouncing around the halls of bureaucracy like a Ping-Pong ball, to be coughed up after Virgil was retired. He’d think about calling again later in the day.

  He slipped into the Death Cab for Cutie shirt, a pirated model sold by street people outside shows, checked himself in the mirror, fluffed his hair, and headed out into the day.

  Early and cool. Jenkins and Shrake would be helping with the surveillance on Warren, but they wouldn’t be around until 10 A.M. or so, and Del Capslock had suggested an early start with a real estate consultant named Richard Homewood, who, Del said, would be at his office anytime after six in the morning.

  Homewood worked out of a business condo on St. Paul’s west side, off the Mississippi river flats beside the Lafayette Freeway. Virgil called ahead, mentioned Del’s name, and Warren’s, and Homewood, who might have provided the voice for Mr. Mole in Wind in the Willows, suggested that he stop at a Caribou Coffee for a large dark with plenty of milk, and come on over.

  Virgil got the coffees, and found Homewood’s office by the street number: there was no other identification. He rang, and Homewood, who could have played Mr. Mole—he was short, chubby, bespectacled, long-haired, and bearded—answered the door, took the coffee, sipped, said, “Perfect,” and invited him in. The office was a paper cave, with bound computer printouts stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves that completely covered the walls except for two windows and a gas fireplace. The center of the big room was taken up by three metal desks, each with a computer and printer and office chair, but there was no sign that anyone worked there but Homewood.

  Homewood sipped, pointed Virgil at an office chair, asked, “How’s Del?” but didn’t seem too interested when Virgil told him about Del’s wife being pregnant; and then he asked, “Are you really looking at Ralph Warren?”

  “Yes—but not the way you probably think,” Virgil said. “This is not a corruption investigation.”

  “Then what?”

  Virgil said, “I can’t give you all the details, but a group of men went to Vietnam a long time ago, when they were still young, and this group is now being murdered. The men whose bodies are being left at the veterans’ monuments.”

  “The lemon murders. The lemons in the mouth.”

  Virgil frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Television, last night, and this morning. The papers must have it. The lemon murders.”

  “Damn it. We’d held that back,” Virgil said.

  “Well—it’s on the news now. So, Warren, how’s he tied in?”

  “He was one of the guys,” Virgil said.

  Homewood leaned forward, hands on his knees, intent. “Wait a minute. You think Warren’s a killer?”

  “We don’t think anything, other than this killer is killing these guys. There are only two left alive, and I’m going to talk to Warren. Del told me you might have some background that I couldn’t get anywhere else.”

  Homewood leaned back, looked around the jumble of the office, and then waved a hand at it. “I’m a real estate consultant, Virgil. Nobody knows as much about real estate in the Twin Cities as I do. I know what the values are, what the values should be, what the values will be. Ralph Warren has made a living by selling pie in the sky to a dozen city councils. Bullshitting them into providing taxpayer financing, buying council votes when he had to, buying planners and inspectors, threatening people. Makes a hash out of my values: I tell you, I can see what’s going to happen. He sold the city on one deal, twenty years ago, it’s now in its twelfth refinancing; the city’s still on the hook for eight million dollars, sixteen million if you count all the interest over the years, all so Ralph Warren could take out a mil. I mean, the guy—if you’d told me that he’s a killer, I’d say, probably.”

  “Who’s he threatened? That you know for sure?”

  “Me,” Homewood said. “I testified for the Minneapolis Planning Board against a ridiculous, absurd proposal for low-income housing—and I’m in favor of low-income housing, don’t misunderstand me, but this was a fraud. A straight-out fraud. We came out of the hearing and Warren was laughing, and he came over to me, joking, and he said, ‘Don’t fall off no high bridges,’ like it was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. I kept a gun in my desk drawer for six weeks after that. Every time I heard a sound at night, I jumped.”

  “But he never did anything,” Virgil said.

  “People don’t believe me when I tell them what’s going to happen,” Homewood said. He shrugged. “Warren figured that out. If I’m not going to have any effect, why worry about me? People believe what they hope will happen, and that’s what Warren peddles to them—hope that something good will happen. Something good does happen, but only for Warren. And then the taxpayers wind up holding the bag, just like they have with Teasdale Commons.”

  “So he’s an asshole,” Virgil said.

  “More than that.” Homewood shook a finger at him. “He’s a criminal and a sociopath. How often do you have one of those, in the same . . . environment . . . as a bunch of crazy awful murders, and he didn’t have anything to do with them?”

  “That’s a point,” Virgil said. “That’s a point.”

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE were t
hrowing a Nerf football around the BCA parking lot when Virgil pulled in, and Virgil took a pass and the three of them threw it around for a few more minutes. The NFL preseason was around the corner, and as they headed inside, the three of them agreed that the Vikings were screwed this year.

  Inside, they borrowed Davenport’s office again and Virgil briefed them on Ralph Warren. “I’m going to get Sandy to research him, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re going to find anything in research. We’ll find it in some kind of action. He’ll do something. So we watch him. If nothing happens for a couple of days . . . we might try a sting.”

  “What do we have to sting him with?” Jenkins asked.

  “I’ve got some photos from Vietnam, of him raping a dead woman. Or a dying woman, anyway,” Virgil said. “If somebody were to call him, and offer them for sale, and if that guy were an out-of-town hoodlum like Carl Knox might hire . . . it might have enough credibility to get him to act.”

  “Yeah, and if he’s as bad a dude as you think, his action might be to blow somebody’s head off,” Jenkins said.

  “There’re ways around that. We could work that out,” Virgil said. “But we’d have to work it so that he talked about it.”

  “So let’s watch him for a while,” Shrake said. “Just the three of us?”

  “Just the two of you, for today,” Virgil said. “I’m running around poking sticks into things. You can talk to Lucas and see if he can give you somebody else.”

  “What’re you poking your stick into?” Shrake asked.

  “I’m going to ask a woman up to Davenport’s cabin for the day and I’m gonna try to get her on the couch so that . . .” He spun and looked at the big map of Minnesota on Davenport’s wall.

  Jenkins said, “You gonna get this chick on the couch so that . . . what?”

  “So I can betray her,” Virgil said. “I need to get some stuff out of her about her father. Without her knowing what I’m doing. So I can fuck with her old man.”

  They all thought about that for a while, then Shrake said, “Well, shit. We’re cops.”

  18

  MAI WAS HAPPY to hear from him: “I’m standing outside an ice cream parlor on Grand Avenue, thinking about eating a giant ball of fat and sugar, so my ass will blow up to the size of a dirigible.”

  “Want to go fishing?”

  “Sure. Where?”

  “My boss has a cabin up north—two hours from here,” Virgil said. “It’s pretty far, but we could be there by early afternoon, go fishing, go for a walk, whatever, and be back here by bedtime.”

  “There’s this restaurant at Grand and Victoria that makes good sandwiches and desserts,” she said. “I’ll go get some. You can pick me up outside—if that’s not too quick for you.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Virgil said, and he was running.

  DAVENPORT’S CABIN was twenty miles east of Hayward, a bit more than two and a half hours from the Cities, but they ate lunch in Virgil’s truck and never slowed down and made good progress. Mai had never been in a police vehicle before, other than Virgil’s, and wanted to know what all the pieces were, and for a while, when nobody was around on Highway 70, Virgil ran with lights and sirens to give her the feel. Mai was wearing blue jeans and a black cotton blouse, and her physical presence was all over the truck, her high-pitched girly voice, a tendency to giggle at vulgar jokes, a flowery scent.

  “Peach blossom,” she told him.

  “I thought perfumes were called ‘Sin’ or ‘Obsession,’” Virgil said.

  “Eh, that’s so inane. Do you wear a scent?”

  He smiled at the word. “Aftershave sometimes, ‘Big Iron Panzer Diesel. ’ It makes me feel more masculine.”

  They talked growing up in the Midwest, about going to Big Ten rival schools in Madison and Minneapolis. She confessed to never having gone to a Wisconsin football or basketball game, though she’d once gone on a date to a wrestling match, Wisconsin against the University of Iowa. “We got crushed,” she said. “I mean, they got crushed. I personally didn’t wrestle.”

  “I bet that disappointed everybody.”

  “Especially my date,” she said, and patted him on the thigh.

  Virgil said, “Have I told you about my illustrious baseball career?”

  “You haven’t mentioned it.”

  “The salient fact is, I couldn’t hit a college fastball. I could hit the covers off a high school fastball, but not a college fastball. Anyway, I played for a couple of years and we went down to Madison three or four times a season. I’d hang out on the Terrace, eat ice cream, try to pick up women at the Rat ...”

  “Successfully?”

  “Well—college successfully,” Virgil said. “Never got laid, but we got some to talk to us.”

  She asked him how he felt about shooting people. He’d shot two people in his life, and had shot around a couple more. Of the people he’d shot, one man and one woman, he’d killed the man and had shot the woman in the foot. The same woman, as she lay wounded on the sidewalk, had been shot and killed seconds later by a second woman.

  “Does it make you feel bad? Shooting people?” She was genuinely curious; the question wasn’t a hidden accusation.

  “Yes. Of course. People, you know . . . Neither of those people I shot had children, and here they are, at the end of millions of years of evolution, ancestors lived through the ice ages, hunted bison and mammoths, and here it all ends in a puddle of blood on some street, or out in a weed field. Their whole line, whatever potential they may have had in the centuries ahead of us . . .”

  “That sounds pretty dry and intellectual.”

  “Because I’ve thought about it a lot. Intellectualized it. At the time, I felt pretty bad. I find you feel less bad the further you get away from it—but I dunno, it could come back on you later.”

  She said, “It’d be a pretty big load, killing people,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, you are what you do,” Virgil said. “That’s my take on it. I’m officially a killer. I think about it.”

  He asked why her father, big shot that he was, a leading antiwar critic, environmental activist, full professor at the University of Wisconsin, deigned to take a year to teach at Metro State.

  “Burnout. Pressure to perform all the time,” she said. “Always had to be out front on every issue. Maybe just getting old—things didn’t work out the way he thought they would. Also, maybe, he didn’t impress anybody at Wisconsin anymore. His big days are gone. He still impresses people at Metro State.”

  “Why didn’t he get one of those fellowships or foundation grants and go live in New York or Paris or something? Go for long walks.”

  She shrugged. “Some people are teachers and take it seriously. He does. That’s what he is—a teacher. So he looked for a job where he could stay in touch with things at Wisconsin.”

  “And you came with him,” Virgil said.

  “I’m trying to break the Madison spell—I’ve gotta get out of there. If I’m going to do anything with my life, I’ve got to start figuring out what it is. I can’t take dance lessons forever. I’ve pretty much figured out that my answer isn’t to dance with small repertory companies—and I’m not dedicated enough to make it with a big New York company. So I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

  “And what have you figured out?” Virgil asked.

  “I’m thinking . . . Don’t laugh . . .”

  “I won’t.”

  “Medicine,” Mai said.

  “Oooh. That could be tough. But my boss’s wife is a surgeon, and she is really fascinated by it, really into it.”

  “I could handle the academics,” she said confidently. “It’s just sometimes . . . you think, I’ll do all that work, years in school, and then . . . that’s it? That’s my life?”

  Shrake called: “These guys around Warren—we’ve been watching them all day. These guys are heavy hitters. They’re all wired up, they’re talking to each other—there’s a whole net around him. And he was down talkin
g to John Crumb, who’s like some big deal with the Republicans, and Crumb’s got his own net, and they all knew each other. Man, this is tough stuff. Who are all these guys? I’ve never seen them before.”

  “He’s piping them in from someplace,” Virgil said. “Borrowing people, I guess—maybe all these security guys know each other or something.”

  “We can’t stay too close to him,” Shrake said. “I don’t know what good we’re gonna be able to do, Virgil. He’s just got too many guys.”

  “WHO WAS THAT?” Mai asked.

  “We’re watching a guy—a suspect. I really . . . can’t talk to you about it. I mean, I really can’t.”

  “All right,” she said. “Gives me a little tingle, mysterious cop stuff.”

  DAVENPORT DID MOST things well, Virgil thought, and among the things he’d done well was his lake cabin. The place was built of planks and cedar shingles and native stone, with a big fireplace and a comfortable living room and efficient kitchen, and two small comfortable bedrooms, all on one level.

  The place was surrounded by a patch of overgrown fescue; off to one side, a giant white pine loomed over the water’s edge; and Davenport had paid a deer-stand builder to build him a treehouse up in the pine, a deck with a few chairs and a roof, all up above the mosquitoes. A stone walk led to a forty-foot floating dock. A Tuffy fishing boat with a ninety-horse Yamaha outboard sat on a boatlift next to the dock.

  Virgil recovered the guest key from a fake rock next to a stone wall along the driveway, and they went inside, into the dimly lit living room, and Virgil pulled the drapes and let the sunlight flood in.

  “I don’t know much about fishing,” Mai said. “I’ve been fishing, but only with a bamboo pole.”

  “You’re a jock. You’ve got reflexes. It’ll take you two minutes to get a good start,” Virgil said. “Lucas keeps his stuff in the storeroom.”

  He took out two seven-foot light-action musky rods and a box of baits, humming to himself, and sat her down and showed her how to rig them, did it himself, then took it apart and made her do it. They were still doing it when his phone rang again. He dug it out, looked at it, said, “Huh,” and answered.