Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Do get the DNA. We’ll run it through every bank in the country,” Davenport said. “Chances are small, but if he’s really nuts . . .”

  “I don’t care about that. Wait a minute—I do care about that. What bothers me is, I bought everything that Knox said about Warren,” Virgil said. “Warren’s an asshole. But you know what? I bought everything Warren said about Knox, too. I don’t think you could fake it.”

  “But we’ve established that Warren’s a killer,” Davenport said. “That’s one fact to keep in mind.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Virgil said. “You got anything else for me?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Davenport said. “Some advice.”

  “Like what?”

  “Go fishing. I know a guy who lives out on the St. Croix, about a mile south of the I-94 bridge. He’s got a twenty-foot Lund and he hardly ever uses it. I can borrow the boat for you.”

  Virgil thought it over for a second, then said, “Not a bad idea. I’ve got all these snaky ideas in my head. If I could get out on a river for a while, maybe I could shake something loose.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “What about Warren?” Virgil asked.

  “Rose Marie knows him,” Davenport said. “There’s a cocktail party this evening at the Town and Country Club, for the Republican arrangements committee. Warren’ll be there, because he does the security, Rose Marie’s gonna be there, the governor’s giving a welcome talk. We’ll get Warren in a corner and hammer down the rough edges.”

  “He’s pissed,” Virgil said.

  “Well—you get that way when the necrophilia cat gets out of the bag,” Davenport said. “If this goes public, he’d be in trouble. Can you see the headlines on CNN: ‘Necrophiliac Runs Republican Security’?”

  “How would that be a change?” Virgil asked.

  “Funny. I’m laughing myself sick,” Davenport said.

  Virgil: “Tell me this: why did he bring in the cops on the photos?”

  “Maybe he thought he was being set up—that Knox was out there with a gun.”

  “But Knox . . . never mind. I was gonna say, Knox isn’t the killer,” Virgil said. “But Warren maybe believes that he is. I can’t seem to focus on that: and if Warren really believes that Knox is the killer—then Warren isn’t.”

  “You need some time on the water,” Davenport said. “Work it out.”

  DAVENPORT’S FRIEND called Virgil and said that he was standing on the sixth tee at Clifton Hollow golf course and that he wasn’t planning to be home soon. “If you walk around to the back of the house, the porch door will be open, and if you look up on the beam, you’ll see a nail with one of those pink plastic floats on it. That’s the boat key. Fold up the boat cover and leave it on the dock under the bungee cord. Lucas said you’d have your own fishing gear.”

  “Yeah. I’m heading down south of the Kinnickinnic, see if I can pick up some smallies,” Virgil said.

  “Throw a musky lure when you’re down there. There’s muskies in there; I’ve been trolling the whole river the last couple years. I’ve taken two forty-inches-plus just south of the Narrows, on the Wisconsin side around behind the hook, and I saw one that went maybe forty-eight.”

  “Thanks. I’ll leave a twenty for the gas, if that’s enough,” Virgil said.

  “That’s good—just stick it back up there with the key.”

  DAVENPORT’S FRIEND lived in a rambling cedar-shake and stone house down a long single-lane road on a bluff above the St. Croix River. Virgil left the 4Runner in the driveway, walked around back, found the key, and carried three rods and his emergency tackle box down eighty steps to the beach and a dock. The boat had a dried-on foam line that suggested it hadn’t been out for a while. He stripped off the canvas cover, snapped it under the bungee cord on the dock, dropped the motor, and fired it up.

  No problem. One minute later, he was a half mile down the river. Glanced at his watch: just three o’clock. He’d been up since five, but still, the day seemed like it was rolling on forever.

  The high Wisconsin bluffs on the St. Croix are such a dark green that in bright afternoon sunlight, they seem almost black. Virgil puttered through the Narrows, then hooked around behind the sandbars in back. With the sun hot on his shoulder blades, he set up a drift, faced into the east bank of the river, started dropping a lure a hand span from the bank, yanking it back in a quick retrieve.

  And he thought:

  Give me an anomaly that I can hang my hat on. There’s got to be one back there somewhere. Something that can’t be easily explained . . .

  He thought about Sinclair, and the two Vietnamese, Tai and Phem—but the fact was, Virgil had gone looking for clues at a place that dealt largely with veterans who’d had problems in Vietnam, where he’d encountered a man who’d spent his life dealing with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. What did he expect, Latvians?

  They were persons of interest, but at least temporarily opaque.

  He worked through the sequence from his first moments at Utecht’s death scene, through the drive out to look at Sanderson, to Wigge, to Bunton, to . . .

  Bunton. The thing about Bunton was, how did they find him? How did they find him that quickly? He could understand that somebody might find Carl Knox. With sufficient insight into how public records and computers worked, it was simply a matter of pounding paper . . . or electrons, or whatever it was that lived inside of computers.

  But Bunton was out in the woods. How did they even know that he was there? They probably got his name from Wigge or Utecht— Sanderson had been dead too quick to give up anything—but how did they come to Bunton’s mother’s house, which wasn’t even in the phone book?

  HE HOOKED INTO a smallmouth, a fifteen-inch bronze-backed fish that fought like a junkyard dog against the small tackle. He lifted it out of the water, unhooked it, slipped it back in.

  Hooked another, slipped it back.

  Worked his way through the sandbars and shallows and into deeper water, threw a few bucktails, looking for a musky, saw nothing but black water. A cigarette-like boat powered past at sixty miles an hour, rocking him, rolling him.

  He was a mile south of the Narrows, sitting behind the wheel of the boat, drifting, letting the sound of the river carry him along, when a small niggling thought crept into his head.

  He tried to ignore it and failed. Looked at the sun: the sun was still high, fishing would get nothing but better as evening came on. Still . . .

  Goddamnit.

  One last cast, nothing—you never catch anything on the last cast—and he reeled in, fired up the motor, and was moving, and moving fast. The Narrows was a no-wake zone, with a half-dozen beached cruisers taking in the afternoon sun, and people screamed at him as he went through at forty-two miles an hour, which was all he could squeeze out of the Lund.

  At the dock, he took care to tie up and cinch the cover down, but then he ran up the steps to the house, put the key and a twenty up in the rafters, hustled around the house to the truck.

  And he stopped and looked at it.

  The idea was goofy, but there was no driving it out of his head, and it made him sick. He walked away from the truck and called the BCA duty officer.

  “I’ve got a question for you.”

  FIVE O’CLOCK.

  They worked silently through the truck in the BCA garage. One guy changed the oil and hummed to himself, while the other guy worked it over with a bunch of electronic gear, then snapped his fingers at Virgil and pointed outside.

  “You got a microphone in there somewhere, and there’s a wire splice going up to your GPS antenna off your navigation screen—it’s probably broadcasting your location, like one of those LoJack things.”

  “You can hear it broadcasting?” Virgil asked.

  His heart was going like a trip-hammer, the anger surging into his throat. He’d given away Bunton. He’d been chumped.

  “No, but it might be broadcasting on demand,” the
tech said. “Or it might be broadcasting on a schedule, every half hour. That’s no problem with the new gear. Anyway, you definitely have a microphone in there. I could find it if you want me to, but it might let them know that we’re looking for it.”

  “You think it’s a voice recorder?” Virgil asked.

  “For sure. If it was just sending out the GPS, they wouldn’t need a microphone. What it probably is is a voice-activated microphone, hooked up to a digital recorder. Every little while, or maybe once an hour, it uploads whatever it’s recorded. They could do that with a cell-phone connection. Anything you said on a cell phone or a radio, they’d know about. They wouldn’t know what was coming from the other end, unless it was coming through a loudspeaker . . . but they’d hear you.”

  “How big would the package be? The bug?” Virgil asked.

  “Depends on the power supply. They either have to have a pretty good battery or they’ve tied into your twelve-volt system,” the tech said. “If they tied into the car, it could be pretty small. Maybe . . . twice the size of a cell phone.”

  “Get a flashlight and see if you can spot it. They’d have to put it in pretty quick. I’d just like to see if it’s Motorola, or Ho Chi Minh Radio Works.”

  The tech found the package after five minutes of looking; it was jammed under the front-left turn signal, taking power out of the lines coming into the light.

  “No telling where it’s from,” the tech said when they were outside again. “But it’s sophisticated. You saw how small it was—that’s way smaller than our stuff, and our stuff is pretty good.”

  “Could be Vietnamese?”

  “Don’t have to go that far,” the tech said. “Could be CIA.”

  THE CIA: Sinclair.

  Or maybe not. Why the hell would the CIA go out to kill a bunch of old-timey vets and general dipshits?

  Answer: The CIA wouldn’t. Virgil didn’t even believe that the CIA killed people, not in civilized countries, anyway. Maybe they hired mercenaries in the Middle East, but they really wouldn’t go around killing people on the streets . . . would they?

  His fuckin’ truck.

  Burned him.

  HE WALKED THROUGH the mostly empty building to his temporary office, shut the door and lay down on the floor behind the desk, closed his eyes.

  Sinclair . . .

  He thought about Sinclair: about Sinclair making the phone call from the cold phone to Tai and Phem. Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he have a cold cell phone? You could buy them over the counter. . . .

  Christ.

  Tai and Phem. Were they working with Sinclair, had Sinclair fingered him somehow? But he’d only talked to Sinclair once, for any amount of time. It’d take testicles the size of basketballs to hook that electronics package into Virgil’s truck, when it was parked almost outside the door. If Virgil had gotten up and walked out at some point, Sinclair wouldn’t have had time to get them out.

  They had to do it some other time, but when?

  In the motel lot? But he never told Sinclair where he was staying.

  Though he’d told Mai.

  HE’D FELT himself circling around her. Great girl, but . . . how in the hell did a hot young dancer-woman grow up in Madison, Wisconsin, in the nineties and not know what Hole was? How was that possible?

  When he’d suggested to her that you could have a good time at the University of Wisconsin, out on the Terrace or down in the Rat, she seemed uncertain. But how could you be a hot young dancer chick from Madison and not know about hanging out on the Terrace or down in the Rathskeller? Then, when he’d gone outside to talk to the guy from Hong Kong, he’d come back to find her talking to her father, to Sinclair. Or to somebody she’d said was Sinclair. Out on the lake, a few minutes later, she’d pushed the conversation to the Terrace, to the Rat, as though she were proving to him that she knew about them.

  She’d been covering herself, Virgil thought.

  He remembered a few times when her turn of phrase seemed off, or unusually formal; remembered because he was a writer and the words she’d used seemed tinny on his ear. She’d once asked him, “When do you return?” instead of, “When ya comin’ back?”

  He said to himself, “No goddamn way.”

  HE LAY ON THE FLOOR for another three minutes, then climbed the stairs to Davenport’s office. Carol’s office was out in the open, in a cubicle, and he rifled her Rolodex and found the home phone number and cell phone for Sandy.

  He caught her at home, on the way out: “I’ve got a date,” she protested. “Me and some people are . . .”

  “I don’t care if you’re going out to fuck Prince Charles, get your ass in here,” Virgil snarled. “Where are you?”

  She was intimidated, sounded frightened. “I live over by Concordia.”

  “Ten minutes, goddamnit. Be here in ten minutes.”

  Virgil couldn’t stand it, went out and walked around the parking lot, looked at his traitorous truck, kept checking his watch. She took fifteen minutes coming in, and during the interval, she’d gone from intimidated to pissed.

  “You know what? I’m pretty gosh-darned upset,” she said. Her glasses were glittering under the lights from the streetlamps. “You have no right to talk to me like that. I’ve done nothing but help.”

  “Walk while you’re talking,” Virgil said, and he set off toward the building entrance. Looked at his watch: almost six.

  She caught up and took a breath and said, “Okay. Something happened. Are there more dead people?”

  “Sandy . . . I need to get into the Wisconsin driver’s license bureau, whatever it’s called, and I’ve got to retrieve a license and look at the photograph.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You’re gonna have to find a way. Talk to a friend in Wisconsin, talk to somebody.” He stopped short and stepped next to her and said, “Sandy, you gotta help me. I don’t know this shit, and I’m desperate.”

  She put her hands on her hips: “Neither do I. If it was the middle of the day and I had some support . . .” Then her eyes slid sideways behind her glasses, and she said, “You know, the duty guys coordinate with Wisconsin. Maybe they could get it?”

  “Atta girl. See, I didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “C’mon, keep talking, let’s go. Who do you know in Canada?”

  WHILE SHE WAS working the phones and the computers, Virgil went back to the floor of the office, eyes closed, looking for anything. Finally crawled to his briefcase, found his phone book, fished the phone off the top of the desk, lay down again, and called Red Lake.

  Now that things were starting to crack up, the luck was running with him. Jarlait was off duty, but had stopped at the law-enforcement center to shoot the shit with a friend. He came up, and Virgil said, “You know that Apache dude that your friend saw on the reservation the day Ray was killed?”

  “Could have been an Apache.”

  “Look, you got basically two kinds of guys up there—Indian guys and white guys. Maybe a black guy every once in a while, but not too often. So if you see a guy who isn’t white and isn’t black . . .”

  “Spit it out,” Jarlait said.

  “You think your pal could have seen a Vietnamese and thought he was an Apache?”

  Long pause. Then: “Huh. You know? I know some Vietnamese, and some of them do look like Apaches. Yeah, you get the right-looking Vietnamese . . .”

  THE STUFF FROM Canada got back quicker than the stuff from Wisconsin. The Canada request was apparently routine for the Canadians, who turned around a couple of passport photos for Tai and Phem. Tai and Phem were definitely of Vietnamese heritage, small slender men with dark eyes and good smiles, and neither one of them was the Tai or Phem that Virgil met at the hotel.

  “Ah, man.”

  “This is getting a little scary,” Sandy said. “This woman, Mai . . . do you know her?”

  “Yeah, we’ve talked,” Virgil said.

  “Does she seem pretty nice?”

  “I guess,” he said. “Goddamnit, I was a
fuckin’ chump.”

  “Hey, how often do you deal with spies?” she asked.

  Mai photos came in. She was nice-looking, round-faced, pleasant, and not the Mai that Virgil knew.

  “Now what?” Sandy asked.

  “Now I gotta go talk to somebody,” Virgil said.

  “Let me tell you something sincere before you go talk to somebody,” she said.

  “Okay . . .”

  “You smell like a fish.”

  FUCK A BUNCH of fish. Virgil was in the truck two minutes later, running with lights, rolling down to I-35 and then left on I-94 across town to Cretin, south on Cretin to Randolph and over to Mississippi River Boulevard, to Davenport’s house. There were lots of lights, and Virgil parked in the driveway and walked up and pounded on the front door. Davenport popped it open, standing there in a tuxedo with a satin shawl collar, his tie draped around his neck, untied, and he said, “There’s a doorbell, Virgil.”

  “Man . . .”

  “Come on in.”

  They went and sat in Davenport’s living room, and Virgil laid it out: Sinclair and Tai and Phem and Mai. “They’re not here by accident. And I had to wonder about Sinclair, a couple of the things he said. . . . I mean, he led me straight to them, making that phone call. What do you think if you’re doing surveillance on a guy, and he walks out to a cold phone and makes a call like that? You think he’s got something going on. And he calls right in to Phem and Tai . . . like he was pointing me at them.”

  “Maybe not. I’ve had some dealings with these kinds of people,” Davenport said, “Their problem is, they’re smart, but they’re not smart enough to know that they’re not as smart as they think they are. It gets everybody in trouble.”

  “What I can’t get over is that they used me, and the truck, to locate Bunton. At least Bunton. Maybe gave them a lead on Knox, maybe gave them a lead on Warren—Christ, they heard everything I said when we were setting Warren up.”