Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  The protocol was gone. Now everybody and everything was up for grabs; and it was not too early to begin planning their exit.

  A lot to do . . .

  MAYBE TOO MUCH, the shooter thought later, his head in his hands. The years of killing had turned him into an animal—and then had tried to drag him down even further, turning him into a devil. Wigge, mostly conscious now, although the consciousness came and went, was spread on the rotting wood floor of the barn, a fluorescent lantern providing the only light, and Wigge was trying to scream.

  Trying unsuccessfully, because of the lemon in his mouth, held in place with duct tape.

  The shooter got up and slipped outside, into the cool of the night. Checking the countryside, looking for anything, for interlopers, for interference. For an ear, or an eye. And getting away from the sound of Wigge, whose moans sat heavily on his once-Catholic soul.

  INSIDE THE BARN, Wigge humped against the electric spark, but did no more than hump against it: the scout had waited until Wigge was conscious, then had nailed his hands to the floor, seven-and-a-half-inch spikes right through the palms. Not out of cruelty, but to underline Wigge’s helplessness, and the extent to which he would be mistreated if he did not cooperate. Wigge had passed out again as his hands were nailed down, but the scout was patient and efficient, and took off the big man’s shoes and pants and underwear, then popped an ammonium carbonate capsule under Wigge’s nose, and had started with the battery . . .

  The interrogation might have gone on to daylight hours, but Wigge’s heart quit a little after three o’clock in the morning and he died.

  He’d given them one name.

  The scout called the shooter, and the shooter said, “Maybe he really didn’t know the last man.”

  “He knew,” the scout said. “But he was a hard man. Harder than he looked.”

  “So now—we have the Indian and the Caterpillar man.”

  “And a dead man at the rest stop,” the scout said. “Now we have to move, or we could be closed down.”

  “The thing that worries me is that the Indian has no ties—he might just leave, and if he’s out roaming the highways, we might never find him,” the scout said. “We should concentrate on him. The Caterpillar man has a home and family, if Wigge was truthful, and I think he was. The Caterpillar man will be there.”

  “The coordinator has an idea about the Indian,” the shooter said. “We need to meet. You may have to work yet tonight.”

  “We’ve got no time,” the scout said. “Everything has to go fast.”

  “Huh.” The shooter looked at the dead man. “Poor soul,” he said. “This poor soul.”

  The scout said, “Operationally . . . taking him to the monument is crazy.”

  “But necessary,” the shooter said. “The sooner we do it, the better. We need the darkness. Call the coordinator from your car. I’ll take this poor soul in the van.”

  10

  VIRGIL WAS in the shower, tired but feeling pretty good, the best he’d felt since Bunton had whacked him. He was washing his hair, taking care with the bruise behind his ear.

  Whatever Mai had done, it had worked. He turned the heat up, let the water flow over his neck, did the second wash . . . and his cell phone went, and he said, “Shit,” and almost simultaneously thought, Mai? and he dripped shampoo all over the bathroom and half the motel room going after it.

  The caller ID said, “Bureau of Criminal . . .”

  “Yeah? Flowers.”

  “Dan Shaver. I got the duty tonight.” Shaver worked with the BCA. “You looking for a guy named Ray Bunton?”

  “Yes. You find him?”

  “No—but he’s calling you,” Shaver said. “He wanted your cell phone—I didn’t give it to him, told him to call back. He said he’s moving, but he’ll call from somewhere else. Doesn’t have a cell. Anyway . . . should I give him your number?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. Did he say when he’d call?”

  “He said he’d call me back in fifteen minutes,” Shaver said. “That was two or three minutes ago. He said he had to drive to another phone.”

  VIRGIL JUMPED BACK in the shower, rinsed off, brushed his teeth, got dressed, stared at the phone. More than fifteen minutes: then the phone rang, and he looked at the caller ID: “Number Not Available.”

  He clicked it: “Virgil Flowers.”

  “Flowers?” An old man’s voice, harsh with nicotine.

  “This is Virgil. Is this Ray?”

  “Yeah. Listen, man, some really heavy shit is going down,” Bunton said; slang from the sixties.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about, Ray,” Virgil said.

  “Fuck that. I don’t know what’s happening, and neither do you. I’m digging a hole. Anyway, what happened is, two guys got shot up at the rest stop on I-35. The one up past North Branch. The one on the side going north. Maybe . . . half hour ago. I was there, but I didn’t have nothing to do with it. Some motherfucker come out of the woods with a fuckin’ silenced pistol and started mowing people down. . . . Jesus Christ, it’s like some kind of acid flashback . . .” And he made a huh-huh-huh sound as if he’d started trying to weep but couldn’t get it done.

  “Ray, Ray, stay with me, man. Two guys shot. Are they dead?” Virgil asked.

  “I think so, man. I think they’re gone. This motherfucker was a pro. I ran for my life, got the fuck out of there. I’m going to Wisconsin, man, you gotta get this motherfucker.”

  “Ray, you gotta know what’s going on,” Virgil said.

  “Fuck it, what I could tell you, that helps, is that the guy who got shot is John Wigge, he used to be a cop with St. Paul. Crooked motherfucker, too. Gone now. Gone now, motherfucker. They’re way down at the end, off to the side, there’s a, like, a shelter back in the woods. Dark, you can’t see shit back there.” After a second or two of silence, Bunton said, “I’m getting the fuck outa here.”

  “Ray, goddamnit, you gotta come in. We gotta talk. This looks really bad, man, you gotta . . .”

  “Fuck you guys. I’ll come in when you get this asshole,” Bunton said.

  And he was gone.

  VIRGIL GOT on the line to the BCA: Shaver took the call.

  “We may have a homicide. Bunton says two guys got shot at a rest stop on I-35 up past North Branch.”

  “Let me look on the map,” Shaver said. Then: “Yep, I see it. Haven’t heard anything. I’ll talk to the Patrol, get somebody started. You going up?”

  “I’m on the way,” Virgil said.

  VIRGIL WAS FIVE MINUTES from the I-35 junction in St. Paul, and fifty miles from there to the rest stop, running hard through the night, forty minutes, listening to Kid Rock singing “Cadillac Pussy.”

  Made him think of Mai: how in the hell could a woman who grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, as a dancer, for Christ’s sakes, not know about Hole? Courtney Love had been every girl’s hero—well, every girl of a certain kind, of which Mai was one. She must’ve been crying her eyes out when Kurt Cobain bit the big one. . . . Not know Hole?

  Virgil looked at his watch on the way up: just after midnight. Fumbled out his cell phone, found Davenport’s cell number, and punched it.

  Davenport answered on the second ring. “You know what time it is here?”

  “Washington? Should be just after one o’clock,” Virgil said. “You’re always up late—what’s the big deal?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “You know the band Hole?” Virgil asked.

  “Sure. Courtney Love. Pretty hot, twenty years ago.”

  “Thought you’d know,” Virgil said.

  Davenport said, “So—who’s dead?”

  “Bunton called me,” Virgil said. “He and a former St. Paul cop named John Wigge apparently got together at a rest stop off I-35. He says some guy, who he describes as a motherfucker and an asshole, shot and killed Wigge and another guy, whose name he doesn’t know. I’m on my way; we got the Patrol on the way.”

  “Where’s Bunton?”

&n
bsp; “He says he’s gonna dig a hole in Wisconsin,” Virgil said.

  “Gotta dig him out.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “You know Wigge?” Davenport asked.

  “Yeah. Not well. He’d retired when I made detective. I ran into him a few times at crime scenes,” Virgil said.

  “I heard that Wigge might take a dollar or two,” Davenport said.

  “I heard that. Bad guy. That was my feeling. Made a lot of cases, though,” Virgil said.

  “He went to a security service . . .”

  “Paladin,” Virgil said.

  “That’s the one,” Davenport said. “Armed-response guys, celebrity bodyguards. You know who Ralph Warren is?”

  “The money guy? The real estate guy?”

  “Yes. He owns Paladin. The word was, when Warren was building that shopping center/condo complex on the river, the lowlife was screwing up the ambience. So Warren sent in some of his security people to clean the place up, and Wigge covered for him. He got the job at Paladin as a payoff.”

  “Huh. I was probably still in Kosovo when that happened. How far did Wigge let it go? I mean, beating people up? Running them off? More than that?”

  “Don’t know. A couple of mean old street guys just . . . went away. What you heard was, they were screwin’ with Warren, hanging out on the corner with ‘Work for Food’ signs. Wanted to be paid to stay away. Then they went away. Supposedly, if you ask Wigge about these old guys, he’ll tell you they went to Santa Monica.”

  “Wonder if Utecht and Sanderson and Bunton were involved with Warren?” Virgil asked.

  “A good detective would find that out,” Davenport said.

  “A good detective would call up Sandy and tell her to do the research,” Virgil said.

  “He would,” Davenport agreed. They both thought about that, then Davenport said, “Listen, try to be a little careful about this. Warren’s been throwing a lot of money at the Republicans, helping out with the convention. He hurried up a big block of condos at Riverside. He’s providing them free for delegates. He’s pretty political. I’m not telling you to back off, but be polite.”

  “I’ll be good,” Virgil said. Far up ahead, he could see flashing cop-lights. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Hey—Virgil?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not pulling a boat, are you?”

  “No. I’m not,” Virgil said. “Swear to God.”

  “Good. Stay out of the fuckin’ boat and on the case,” Davenport said. “If there are really two guys down, and one of them is an ex-cop, you’ll start taking some heat.”

  “Talk to you,” Virgil said.

  THE REST STOP ran a half mile or so parallel to the highway. A patrolman was parked at the entrance, half blocking the “cars” lane, waving cars into the “trucks” lane. He waved Virgil through, and Virgil went on down to the parking lot. A Chisago County sheriff’s car was parked by the main rest stop pavilion, and four more cars, two patrol and two sheriff’s, were parked at the far end of the lot, engines running, headlights aimed back into the woods along the edge of the rest area. The cop at the pavilion pointed Virgil toward the end, where Bunton had said the bodies would be.

  Virgil parked, got a flashlight from his equipment bin, and hopped out. A highway patrol sergeant hustled toward him, carrying another oversized flashlight.

  “Flowers?”

  “Yeah. Two down?”

  “One, at least. It’s complicated. I’m Dave Marshall. Come on. I’ve got your crime-scene guys on the way, this belongs to the BCA.”

  “Did you find them, or had they already been found?”

  “We found him, after your call.” He gestured back up at the rest stop. “We’ve moved all the traffic into the truck lane, we’re still letting people pee, but nobody comes into this area. I’ve got a guy back in the woods on the north side, keeping an eye on that.”

  THE BODY WAS that of a large man, lying on his back, in the trees, arms outspread. He had high, thick cheekbones and a linebacker’s neck: a guy in good shape, carrying no fat, somewhere between thirty and forty. His pant legs had been pulled up when he went down, and his thick, hairy legs stuck down into incongruous red-striped white athletic socks. His mouth was open: no lemon.

  “There’s a Beretta, there, off the trail,” Marshall said, turning the flashlight on it.

  Virgil spotted it, nodded. “I’m gonna need to pick it up,” he said. “You got any gloves in your car?”

  “Yeah. You want them now?”

  “You said there was some confusion. Tell me about the confusion.” Marshall nodded. “Look—this guy was probably shot right here.” He pointed down to the flagstone path. “You can see blood on the stones, where he bled out, and then he was dragged back into the brush. See the scrapes? See the heel marks? And there’s more of a blood trail. . . .” His flashlight spotted the blackish stripes of blood on the leaves of the trailside weeds.

  “Now, look over here . . .” He led the way thirty feet down the path. “Another patch of blood. Not as big as the first one, but significant. We thought maybe that the dead guy had been shot once and ran, but there’s no blood on the path between here and there, and this puddle . . . patch, whatever . . . seems like it might have taken a few minutes to accumulate. Also . . .” He pointed the light back off the trail. “We have a second pistol, a Glock.”

  He continued, pointing the flashlight back into the brush: “Now, we’ve got a little track between here and the parking lot. Like somebody was trying to stay under cover. And we have more traces of blood. . . .”

  “Maybe there was a shoot-out and the shooter was hit.”

  “Possible,” Marshall said, “but the word we got from you, from your source, was that there was one shooter and two victims. What it looks like, to me, is that the one guy got killed. The other guy was wounded, and the shooter carried his ass over to the parking lot. He took his gun with him. There’s another drop of blood on the sidewalk.”

  Marshall took him through the brush, spotting the blood trail. They carefully stayed off the trail itself so crime scene could work it, and at the parking lot, Virgil looked both ways and then at Marshall and said, “I’m buying your story.”

  “We put out word to local hospitals, for a guy with any kind of a wound where it’s not clear where it came from . . .”

  VIRGIL WENT BACK to look at the body, and Marshall went out to his car to get some gloves. When he came back, he said, “Your crime-scene guys might get pissed if you mess with the pistol.”

  Virgil said, “That’s why they pay me the big bucks. To put up with crime scene.”

  He pulled the gloves on, knelt next to the Beretta, studied it for a moment, then gently lifted it, popped the magazine. Pressed down on the top round: the magazine was light one round. He worked the action and a round popped out of the chamber.

  Sniffed the barrel, and smelled oil.

  Okay. The dead man hadn’t fired a shot, unless he’d reloaded after he was dead. Virgil slipped the magazine back in the butt of the pistol, replaced the pistol as he’d found it, and put the ejected round on top of it.

  “So what does that tell you?” Marshall asked.

  “That he didn’t see it coming. That he didn’t get a shot off. That the shooter wasn’t wounded by him,” Virgil said.

  “I knew that,” Marshall said.

  Virgil went to the second gun, repeated the sequence: same story—an unfired gun.

  “Two guys, plus one shooter. Your story looks even better,” Virgil said. He pulled off the gloves. “You got any veterans’ monuments around here?”

  “Every town, just about,” Marshall said.

  “Start calling up the local cops—tell them to keep an eye out,” Virgil said. “The killer’s gonna dump the dead guy’s body on a monument somewhere.”

  VIRGIL WALKED BACK up the parking lot, looking for surveillance cameras. Didn’t find any. Asked the patrolman at the pavilion. “Don’t think they’ve got any,” h
e said. “Probably should.”

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Virgil said. “They’ve got them everywhere else.”

  He looked around a little more, found nothing, and was walking back toward Marshall when the crime-scene van rolled by. The head guy gave Virgil the required ration of shit about messing with the scene, then shut up, because he’d worked Homicide and would have done the same thing Virgil had done.

  “Good to get the name as soon as we can,” Virgil said. “We need to look at his place, make sure nobody’s turning it over.”

  So they did the wallet first.

  David Ross, thirty-two. Ross had a Virginia driver’s license, but also a checkbook with an address in St. Paul.

  “I’m going down there. You get anything . . . call me. I don’t care how stupid it is,” Virgil said.

  BACK DOWN the highway, flying through the night, talking to the duty guy at the BCA, vectored into Wigge’s house. Wigge lived in Highland Park, one of the nicer neighborhoods in town. The house was dark, but when Virgil walked toward the front door, two lights came on, spotlighting him on the driveway. He continued to the front door and knocked, and the instant he knocked, more lights came on inside.

  Security systems. Serious security. Nobody came to the door.

  The houses here were well spaced, with broad lawns. He looked left and right, saw a light come on in the back of the next house to the west. He walked that way, up the front walk, and knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. A voice inside: “Who is it?”

  “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

  The door popped open, on a chain. A worried woman looked through the crack between the door and the jamb, and Virgil held up his ID.

  “Can you tell me, does John Wigge live with anyone? Wife? Girlfriend?”

  “We don’t know him very well, but he lives alone,” the woman said. “Has something awful happened?”