Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Why would something awful happen?”

  A man’s face appeared at the crack: “Because you’re beating on doors at two o’clock in the morning?” A St. Paul patrol car glided to a stop at the curb, and the man added, half apologetically, “We called 911.”

  Virgil said, “That’s okay—I needed to talk to them.”

  He walked out to the curb, holding up his ID, called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.”

  A St. Paul sergeant came around the car and said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers.”

  “That you, Larry?”

  LARRY WATERS knew Wigge. “He’s divorced. His old lady moved back to Milwaukee. I haven’t heard that he was going out. He gone for sure?”

  “The odds are pretty good. A guy who was at the scene, and knows him, says he was shot. We’re missing the body, though,” Virgil said. “He had a rep.”

  “Yeah, and he deserved it,” Waters said. “Now he’s got all these crazy gun-fucks coming in here, driving around in GMCs with blacked-out windows. He’s contracting guys from all over the country, for security for the convention. There are some serious badass killers coming in.”

  “I talked to Davenport. . . . You know Davenport?”

  “Sure.”

  “He says the security company, Paladin, is owned by Ralph Warren.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Between you and me, Warren’s a bigger asshole than Wigge,” Waters said. “He went bust about three times before he tapped into the city money and started building subsidized buildings all over town. . . . Probably as dirty as Wigge, but he was putting the money into the envelopes instead of taking it out.”

  “Paying people off?”

  “Yeah. Wasn’t any big secret. But it was subtle. He’d keep somebody in the public employee unions happy, and they’d talk to their friends on the city council, and things got done. He didn’t just drop a load on somebody’s desk. You weren’t gonna get him on a camera.”

  Virgil talked to Waters for another couple of minutes, asked him to call some St. Paul guys to put some tape on Wigge’s house until a crime-scene unit could get there or they found Wigge, whichever came second. Waters said he would, and Virgil headed downtown to David Ross’s address.

  ROSS LIVED IN an apartment that had once been a warehouse—another of Warren’s projects. Virgil leaned on the mailbox buzzer for a minute, was surprised when a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?”

  Jean Prestel was a schoolteacher, and looked like a schoolteacher, with short dark hair showing a streak of white over her ears—short and slender and earnest, and not somebody Virgil would have put with the dead, thick-necked David Ross. She was wearing a cotton nightgown with tiny teddy bears and little pink crossed ribbons on the breast, and she clutched her hands to her chest and asked, wide-eyed, “Oh my God, what happened?”

  She fell to pieces when Virgil told her, and he sat on the couch with her and she wept, said, “What am I going to do now?” and “We didn’t have any time” and “We were talking about getting married” and “Are you sure it was David?” and she showed him a photograph and he said that it was, and she rolled facedown on the couch and seemed to try to scratch through the seat cushions, weeping, weeping . . .

  When he got her to the quiet, stunned stage, he asked about relatives, and she called her aunt, who said she’d come over. Her mother lived in Sioux Falls. And he asked her about Ross and what he’d been doing.

  “He was working with John—I don’t know exactly what he was doing, just, getting ready for the convention, I guess. But he got up every day at six o’clock and he’d go over to John’s and pick him up, and he’d stay with him all day.”

  “How long had he been doing that?”

  “Only a couple of weeks, and John said it wouldn’t last very long, but that things were really intense now . . . and now David’s dead? That can’t be right. . . .” And she was gone again.

  VIRGIL WAITED until Prestel’s aunt arrived, then eased out of the apartment, leaving them with the misery.

  He looked at his watch again: four-fifteen. Had to get some sleep.

  Needed to talk to Ralph Warren, needed to track Ray Bunton. Needed sleep even more.

  Talk to Warren in the morning, and start the hunt for Bunton, he thought.

  He got an hour.

  11

  THE PHONE RANG.

  Virgil was facedown on the bed: no coherent thought, just a lizard-like twitch. The phone didn’t quit. He finally crawled across the bed and flipped it open, noticing, before he did it, that it was 5:23. He’d been in bed for a little more than an hour.

  The duty guy: “Man, Virgil, I hate to do this to you.”

  Virgil groaned. “They found Wigge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, the lemon in the mouth, the whole thing.”

  “Where is he?” Virgil asked.

  “You know up on Capitol Hill, the Vietnam veterans’ monument by the Veterans Service Building? Not the name wall, but the green statue?”

  “Ahhh . . . jeez.” One of the best-known public spaces in the state, not ten minutes from where Virgil was lying.

  “The St. Paul cops are there,” the duty man said.

  “Tell them that I’m on the way.”

  “Virgil . . . you know, the veterans’ monument isn’t the worst of it.”

  “Huh?”

  “The St. Paul cops say it looks like Wigge, was, uh . . .”

  “What?”

  “. . . was crucified.”

  THE VETERANS’ MONUMENT is more or less on the front lawn of the enormous white state Capitol Building. The emerald-green lawn, the size of several football fields, stretched from the steps of the Capitol, down a broad hill dotted with monuments and flanked by government buildings, almost to the interstate highway that went through St. Paul, and looked toward downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi.

  Virgil had taken two minutes to stand in the shower before he dressed and rolled out, hair still wet. In the parking lot, he found his truck hemmed in between a van and a sedan, so closely that he could barely get the door open without dinging the van: always something, he thought, when you were in a crazy hurry.

  Wigge’s body was beside the parking lot for the Veterans Service Building, and that’s where he found the usual clump of cop cars. He waved his ID at the cop at the entrance to the parking lot, dumped the truck, and walked through the early-morning light down to a gaggle of cops gathered at the statue. Waters, the cop who’d met Virgil at Wigge’s house, was among the dozen uniforms and three detectives, and he stepped over to Virgil and said, “This is bullshit, man. This is stickin’ it right up our ass.”

  “Wigge for sure?”

  “What’s left of him,” Waters said, his voice grim. “You’re not gonna believe this. And there ain’t no way we’re gonna keep it off TV—it looks like he was nailed up, or something. Like Jesus.”

  WHEN VIRGIL had worked with St. Paul, he’d not known Wigge well, more to nod at than to talk to. When he looked down at the body, his first thought was, Time passes. Wigge was an old man. He hadn’t been old when Virgil knew him, but he was old when he was murdered.

  “Hell of a goddamned thing.” Tim Hayes was a longtime St. Paul detective. A gaunt man, but with a small beer belly, he was watching the crime-scene people work over the body. “I understand you were looking for him up north.”

  “Yeah.” Virgil pointed down the hill. “You see that building, that warehouse with the old painted sign on it? A guy who lives there was murdered off I-35 tonight and Wigge was with him, I think. There’s some blood on the ground up there, and I think it was Wigge’s. We’ll match it.”

  “He probably spent some time wishing he’d died, before he did,” Hayes said. “Look at this . . .” They edged up to the body, which had been planted under a bronze statue of a Vietnam veteran, and Hayes said, “Look at his hands.”

  He had no fingers or thumbs. The palms were all that remained
, and in the center of each palm was a bloody hole. Virgil shook his head. “Ah, man. Ah, Jesus.”

  “See that sack?” Hayes pointed at an ordinary brown paper grocery sack, the kind that might have held three cans of beer. “His fingers are in there. They didn’t just cut them off, they cut them off one joint at a time. With a pair of nippers of some kind. Brush cutters; tin snips. Something like that. I think there were, like, twenty-eight individual cuts. They tortured the shit out of him. He had bare feet, the bottom of his feet looked burned . . . they focused on his hands and his feet.”

  Crucified; but Virgil didn’t think of Jesus, but of Jezebel, in 2 Kings 9:35, lying in the streets of Jezreel, and when the dogs were done, nothing was left but the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet.

  Wigge was faceup; and between his gray lips, Virgil could see the yellow of the lemon.

  “The shit’s gonna hit the fan today,” Virgil said, standing up, fighting the sour taste in his throat. “People are gonna be screaming for blood.” He looked down toward the town. “Republicans gonna be here in a month, everybody’s getting dressed up, and we got a crucified ex-cop on the front lawn of the state Capitol. Mother. Fucker.”

  He called Davenport: seven o’clock in the morning in Washington, and Davenport rarely got up before nine. Davenport answered with “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It’s worse,” Virgil said.

  DAVENPORT LISTENED as Virgil told him about the night, starting with the call from Bunton, through the murders off I-35, to the body at the Capitol. When he finished, Davenport said, “I’ll call you back in five minutes or less.”

  Virgil walked around, looking at the scene, oblivious to the growing roar of cars on the I-35 as the rush hour started. The television crews would be here anytime, and the politicians would jump in with both feet. Since there was nothing useful they could do, they’d start looking for somebody to blame. The whole thing would spin out of control. . . .

  A cop came by: “What’re you going to do about it?”

  “What I am doing: try to find the guy who did this,” Virgil snapped.

  “Try harder,” the cop said, squaring off a little. “Wigge was one of us.”

  “Why don’t you go find the guy?” Virgil asked. “Gotta go write traffic tickets or some shit?”

  Another nearby cop said, “Take it easy. . . .”

  DAVENPORT CALLED: “I yanked Rose Marie out of bed, she’s gonna do damage control,” he said. “I’m coming back, but I can’t get out until almost noon here. I won’t be back until late afternoon. Listen: we’re putting out the usual stuff to the media, Rose Marie will take care of it. But you gotta move. You gotta move, Virgil. What about Bunton?”

  “I will get him today,” Virgil said. “So help me God.”

  “I’ll call Carol and tell her to get into the office. We’ll start working the phones, we’ll push everybody to find him. TV is gonna be all over us anyway, we might as well put it out there.”

  VIRGIL CHECKED the time, got a Minneapolis address for Ralph Warren, the owner of the security company, and headed that way. Found it, a white-stucco and orange-tile-roof Spanish-looking place off Lake of the Isles. Each square foot of the lot, Virgil thought, as he eased into the driveway, was worth more than his truck.

  When he got out, a big man stepped out of the front porch, and then another came from the garage end of the driveway, both wearing black nylon windcheaters, both of them with their hands flat on their stomachs, as if they were holding in their guts. Actually, he knew, their hands were a quarter inch from a fast-draw weapon.

  He called, “Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, here to see Mr. Warren.”

  “Mr. Warren isn’t up yet,” said the man at the front door. Virgil was walking up the driveway, and the man said, “You should stop right there until we confirm your identity.”

  “Get Warren,” Virgil said. He held up his ID.

  The big man said something back into the house, and a third man looked out, nodded, and said, “Come on up to the porch.”

  Virgil walked to the porch, and the third man said, “Can I ask why you need to talk to Mr. Warren?”

  “Because one of his vice presidents just got chopped into pieces about the size of a cocktail weenie, and that was after they crucified him,” Virgil said. “Now, you wanna get him out of bed?”

  “Who?” the man asked, but he was believing it.

  “John Wigge.”

  “Are you shittin’ me?”

  “Can I talk to Warren, or what?”

  VIRGIL WAITED in the entry, under the eye of the biggest of the three security men, while they got Warren. Warren was a man of middle height, an inch or two under six feet, with deep-set black eyes, a small graying mustache, and a gray scrubby-looking soul patch under his lower lip. He came out wearing a black silk dressing gown with scarlet Japanese characters on it, like the bad guy in a TV movie; if you squinted at him, he looked a little like Hitler.

  “John Wigge . . .”

  “... and David Ross.”

  “... and Ross, too?” Warren was astonished, but not astonished enough. Virgil thought, He knows something.

  “They were ambushed at a meeting with Ray Bunton at a rest stop up north on I-35,” Virgil said. “Do you know what they were talking about? Why they were meeting?”

  “I don’t know any Ray Bunton,” Warren said. “Is this about the veterans thing?”

  “If you don’t know, how did you put that together?” Virgil asked.

  “John told me. He said he knew the guys who were killed,” Warren said. “That’s why he had Dave Ross hanging out with him.”

  “But why are you stacking up with security?” Virgil tipped his head toward the bodyguard still in the room. The other two had moved back to their posts, wherever they were. “Three guys around the clock?”

  Warren shook his head. “Nothing to do with that. I’m providing security for the convention. I’ve got two hundred guys in it, armed-response guys, bodyguards. I’ve got plans for the whole works right here in my briefcase, and the Secret Service requires, you know—they require that we keep it all under guard. The plans, me, everything.”

  “So this doesn’t have anything to do with Wigge?” Virgil was skeptical.

  “No, no. This is strictly the convention,” Warren said. “You think this guy, the killer—you don’t think he’d come after . . . people who know John?”

  Virgil shrugged. “We don’t know what he’s doing, Mr. Warren. So the security is not a bad idea. But you’re telling me that you didn’t know about this meeting, about what’s going on. Wigge never told you anything about it?”

  “I think it might go back to his cop days—he said the Mafia might be involved,” Warren said.

  “The Mafia.” Virgil let the skepticism show.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “In Minnesota?” Virgil asked.

  “The Mafia is here,” Warren said. “If you don’t believe that, I can’t help you.”

  “I know it’s here—I know both guys,” Virgil said. “Their average income last year was fourteen thousand dollars, from delivering pizza.”

  They talked for another five minutes, but Warren didn’t know what was going on; he wanted a few details about Wigge’s death, shook his head when Virgil told him about the torture.

  “Why did they torture him?” he asked.

  “They must think he knows something. They’re trying to find something out. I don’t know what that is.”

  “Well, I sure as shit don’t—”

  The conversation was interrupted by Virgil’s cell.

  Carol said, “We got a break, I think. I got a number for you, it’s a cop out in Lake Elmo.”

  VIRGIL EXCUSED himself, walked out on the front lawn, and called Roger Polk, who was in Lake Elmo, all right, but turned out to be a Washington County deputy sheriff. “The Liberty Patrol is on a run up to Grand Rapids for a funeral—”

  Virgil said, “Wait, wait. The Libe
rty Patrol?”

  “Bunch of bikers who provide security for the funerals of guys who get killed in Iraq. You know—they’ve got these antiwar church goofs who show up at the funerals to scream at the kid’s parents? About how the kid deserved to die?”

  “Yeah, I read something about that,” Virgil said.

  “The Patrol backs them off. Anyway, they met yesterday after work, and rode up to Duluth, sixty of them, about, riding in a pack. They’re staying overnight in Duluth, and then they’re heading over to Grand Rapids. One of the guys’ wives is my sister-in-law, and she heard the thing on the radio, about Ray Bunton. She says that Ray Bunton was riding with them. She knows him. He’s gone before.”

  “All right, all right. That’s good, that’s terrific,” Virgil said.

  VIRGIL SAID GOOD-BYE to Warren, trotted back to his truck, got out his atlas. Minnesota is a big state, but a good part of the northern third, where Bunton was heading, was vacationland: thousands of cabins on hundreds of lakes, surrounded by thirty thousand square miles of forest, bogs, and prairie.

  As long as Bunton stayed on a highway, it’d be possible to locate him. If he were headed into the Red Lake reservation, as his uncle said he was, he’d be a lot harder to find. There was a history of animosity between the Red Lake tribal cops and outside cops, especially when it came to arresting tribal members.

  And if Bunton weren’t headed specifically to Red Lake, if he was planning to stop at one of the tens of thousands of cabins scattered all over hell, all off-highway, he’d be impossible to locate.

  Best shot to catch him was on the highway and Bunton knew it—that was probably why he went up in a pack, using the other riders for cover.

  VIRGIL GOT on the phone, talked to the highway patrol office in Grand Rapids. Because of the potential for trouble at the funeral, the Grand Rapids office knew where the Liberty Patrol was—still in Duluth. “They’re eating down on the waterfront, making a little tour of it, picking up some Duluth guys.”