Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

“Yeah? That guy up at that rest stop?”

  “Yeah. Ex-military, special forces,” Virgil said.

  “Probably Wigge’s man. Probably an accident. Warren wouldn’t have wanted Wigge to see it coming, because Wigge was a hard-ass himself. They’ve been tangled up forever—ever since Vietnam, anyway.”

  “So—what happened in Vietnam? Warren did the killing?”

  Knox nodded. They’d gotten as much equipment as they could onto the ship—even though that meant that some perfectly good stuff would be left behind—and called it a day. But when the last truck left, Knox said, and they knew the truck itself would be lifted onboard the ship, Warren and Wigge produced a couple of bottles of rum that they’d bought the day before from some Cambodian security guards, and they started mixing up rum and Cokes.

  “Cuba libres, they called them back then. Goddamn, they were good when it was hot outside,” Knox said. “So we’re sitting around drinking and we’d already had two or three gallons of beer, and we’re gettin’ pretty fucked up, and Warren says he’s gonna take a bath. We’re all laughing at him and giving him shit, and he pulls off his shirt and walks down to this house. Probably a hundred meters away. Pretty nice house, older, palm trees around it. Looked French, and this old guy used to yell at us in French, so maybe it was.

  “Anyway, there was this chick down there, we’d seen her a couple of times, coming and going on a bicycle, but . . . mmm . . . Warren goes down there carrying this gun—Chester gave us a couple of M16s, just in case—and he starts taking off all his clothes until he’s buck naked, and he’s drunk, and he gets under this water at the pump . . . and this chick comes along on the bike and she doesn’t see him until she’s already off it, and she tries to run around him, and he comes after her, and grabs her ass, and he’s drunk and sort of rubbing himself on her and laughing . . .

  “So the old guy comes out, and this time he’s got a rifle, and he points it up in the air and fires off a round and we’re all, like, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and the girl runs into the house past him and he comes running down from the porch screaming at Warren, and Warren is like picking up his clothes, but the old man keeps coming and he gets too close and Warren throws his clothes at him and grabs his gun and boom. Then he runs in the house after the chick, and there’s more shooting, like bam, bam, bam-bam-bam, and we’re all running down there, but not too fast, because of the shooting, and we only got the one other gun.

  “We get there, and there’s this dead guy in the yard. And we all freaked out. We all stopped, and I remember Chuck saying, ‘I’m getting the fuck out of here,’ and then there was some screaming from the house, and we can hear Warren yelling, and we’re all like going, ‘What the fuck?’

  “Then there’s nothing. We’re yelling, ‘Ralph, Ralph,’ and he yells, ‘I’m okay,’ and we go in there, look in there, and there’s these dead kids in the hallway, these two dead little kids, and we can hear this . . . this . . .”

  He stared away, across the lake, and Larry said, “Jesus Christ,” and Knox went on: “I went through that and I went into the next room, and here was Warren, and he was fuckin’ this chick. He was fuckin’ her, and I could see she was dead, or she was dying, but he was crazy drunk and he was just fuckin’ her. . . .”

  “Pictures,” Virgil said.

  Knox nodded. “I had this Instamatic. Like this little Kodak pocket camera. I was wearing fatigue pants, and, shit, I had this bad feeling that I could get blamed, that we could all get blamed, and Warren was banging her like mad and Sanderson was yelling at him and he wouldn’t stop, and Sanderson ran away and I took a shot of Warren banging this chick, and then I took off, but I took a shot of the kids, and the old man, and then I went running out of there. I was thinking if they tried to blame all of us we could use the pictures as evidence against Warren, who did the whole thing.”

  “But nothing ever happened?” Virgil asked.

  “Nah. We didn’t really understand it all at the time, but that whole country was going crazy. People were stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, people were trying to get out, they were stealing boats and robbing stores for money, it was crazy. Chester, when he found out about the killing, he freaked out. He said we had to get the fuck out of there and keep our mouths shut. That’s what we did. We all got jammed in that van and we took off for the airport, and we camped out there for four days before I could get out, but some of the guys—Warren, I think, and maybe Sanderson—went with the boat.”

  “Ray said he saw Sanderson back at home just a couple months later, so he didn’t go with the boat.”

  “Well, shit, they just took them to Indonesia,” Knox said. “That’s only, like, three or four days away.”

  “I don’t know anything about that part of the world,” Virgil said.

  They all sat there, staring at the lake, then Virgil said, “I’ll see what I can do about the photos. About attributing them to Ray. But . . . I don’t know. I’m gonna have to have them, and if we have to argue about it in court, Warren’s gonna know where they’re coming from anyway.”

  Knox bit his lip and then said, “What if I tell the guys from Chicago to put a bullet in your head and walk away?”

  “I’m heavily armed,” Virgil said.

  “That won’t work, then,” Knox said. He dipped into his jacket pocket and handed Virgil an envelope. “What I did was, I scanned the negatives and then I printed them out. I really don’t have the negs with me—if you can get him with these, I’ll bring the negs around as the final nail in the coffin. But I’m not giving them up. They might be the only thing between me and Ralph. As long as he doesn’t know where the negs are . . .”

  “When Wigge was killed, his fingers were cut off. He was tortured,” Virgil said. “If Warren was his good buddy, why’d he do that?”

  Knox said, “Because he’s nuts.”

  “But that’s worse than nuts—it’s unnecessary. The pro they brought in, he might be willing to kill some people, but he’s not gonna risk his neck so somebody can get his rocks off slicing a guy up.”

  Knox rocked back and forth on the bench for a moment, then said, “After Sanderson got killed, I sent Warren copies of the pictures. Didn’t say who had them, I just said, ‘Back off or the police get the pictures.’”

  “Ah, man. He’s been looking for the pictures,” Virgil said.

  “That’s what I think.” Knox turned his head to Virgil. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Pogues-Boy, I don’t think you’re gonna get him. He’s too well-connected. It was all too long ago. I don’t even know who could prosecute it as a crime. The Vietnamese? You think he’d get a fair trial? I don’t think anybody would send him back there. . . . I mean, I just think . . . I think he got away with it.”

  “Then why all the killing?”

  “Well—they couldn’t hang him for it, but if these pictures got out, that’d be the end of him, businesswise. Look at those little kids he gunned down. Look at him fuckin’ the dead woman. Nobody would touch him. He’d be like Hitler.”

  Virgil made Knox walk through it again, then said, “You think you’re okay where you’re at? For the duration?”

  “Couldn’t find me in a million years,” Knox said.

  WHEN THEY were gone, Virgil called Davenport.

  “I got a killer,” he said. “Might not be able to get him, because it was all so far away and long ago, but I’ve got pictures of the crime in progress.”

  “Anybody I know?” Davenport asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Long moment of silence, and then Davenport said, “Virgil, goddamnit ...”

  “Ralph Warren,” Virgil said.

  Longer moment. Then: “I gotta see the pictures. How fast can you get back?”

  “I’m heading out now,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back by dinnertime.”

  “Then come to dinner at my place. Six o’clock,” Davenport said.

  “See you then.”

  VIRGIL GOT his gear out of the cabin, threw it in the truck, and went to get a b
eer to drink as he headed south. The fisherwoman was putting the little girl in a new Mercedes station wagon, and she nodded at Virgil and asked, “Was that some kind of meet?”

  “What?”

  “Well, they told me in the bar that you’re a state investigator, and a writer, but you were up here on that awful murder, and all of you guys were wearing black sport coats like you’re covering up guns, and I could tell that those other guys were hoodlums of some kind.” The woman had a small handhold on his heart, and it was getting stronger. The way she could roll that fly line out there . . .

  “A meet. That’s what it was, I guess,” Virgil said. “I’d be happy if you kept it under your hat.”

  “Mmm. I’ll do that. Virgil Flowers? Is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She had little flecks of gold in her eyes.

  “Are you armed right now?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

  “Huh. Well, my name is Loren Conrad.”

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  She walked around the car and stopped before opening the door. And the little girl, maybe ten, was looking at Virgil out through the glass of the passenger-side window, solemn, as if something sad were about to happen. “Maybe if you come up again, during the week, we could go fishing.”

  17

  VIRGIL THOUGHT about the woman and daughter as he drove back. Had Mom been hitting on him, just the lightest, mildest of hits? What was the sadness in the small girl’s eyes? Had she seen other men spoken to when Dad wasn’t there?

  The whole thing seemed less like an invitation to romance than an invitation to a story of some kind. Not journalism, a short story. Something Jim Harrison might write.

  Virgil had had an interest in short stories when he was in college, but journalism seemed more immediate, something with its claws in the real world. The older he got, though, the wider he found the separation between reported facts, on one hand, and the truth of the matter on the other hand. Life and facts were so complicated that you never got more than a piece of them. Short stories, though, and novels, maybe, had at least a shot at the truth.

  He was so preoccupied by the idea that he almost ran over a mink that crawled out of a ditch, poised for a dash across the road. He dodged at the last minute, wincing for the crunch as the animal went under the tire, felt nothing, looked in the wing mirror and saw it scurry across the tarmac, unhurt.

  A small blessing.

  THE WORLD was little more than a month past the summer solstice, so the sun was still high in the sky when he got off I-94 and turned south on Cretin Avenue in St. Paul, past the golf course with all the rich guys with their short pants and stogies, and farther south, hooked west on Randolph, then over to Davenport’s house on Mississippi River Boulevard.

  He parked on the street so he wouldn’t block the three cars already in the driveway, and as soon as he stepped out, smelled the barbecue, heard the people talking in the back. He walked around the garage and pushed through the back gate, and Weather, Davenport’s wife, spotted him and called, “Virgil Flowers!”

  Davenport was there, with a former Minneapolis cop turned bar owner named Sloan, and his wife; and fellow BCA agent Del Capslock and his pregnant wife; and a spare, bespectacled woman named Elle, who was a nun and a childhood friend of Davenport’s; and Davenport’s ward, a teenager and soon-to-be-gorgeous young woman named Letty; and Davenport’s toddler, Sam.

  Weather came over and pinched his cheeks and said, “It’s about time you got here, you hunk.”

  He gave her a little squeeze and asked, “Why don’t you run away with me?”

  “Then you wouldn’t have a job and I’d have to support you,” Weather said.

  “Then he’d be dead and you wouldn’t have to support him,” Davenport said.

  “Still, couple good days at a Motel 6 in Mankato . . . might be worth it,” Virgil said to her.

  Davenport said, “Yeah, it would be. When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Elle, the nun, amused, said, “You guys are so full of it.”

  “The shrink speaks,” Del said. Elle was a psychologist.

  “Give the poor boy a hamburger, Lucas, and then let’s hear his story,” Elle said to Davenport. She patted a chair next to her in the patio set. “Sit next to me, so I can ask questions.”

  DEL HAD BEEN doing counterculture intelligence for the upcoming Republican convention, and had been out of the loop on Virgil’s investigation. All the others had read about the killings in the newspapers, but knew nothing else. Davenport told him to start at the beginning, with Utecht, and let it all out. Virgil did, all the details he could think of, ending with the conversation with Knox.

  Then they wanted to see the pictures, and Virgil went out to the car to get them, and Davenport looked through them and handed them to Del and Sloan, and Elle got up to look, and Letty wanted to see, but Davenport snapped at her, “Get your nose out of there.”

  “It’s not fair,” and she sat down and put on a pout; Weather patted her on the leg.

  “If that’s actually Mr. Warren, then he is a very troubled man, with the kind of trouble you don’t cure yourself of,” Elle said. “If he did this, I would not be surprised to learn that he did similar things, here, over the years.”

  “Really,” Virgil said. He put the pictures back in the envelope. “What would we be looking for?”

  “If he’s a smart man . . . maybe dead prostitutes. Perhaps dead prostitutes in other cities. Bigger cities that he knows well, or that attract prostitutes, or an anonymous population of women. Brown women—Latinas, Filipinas, Malaysians, Vietnamese. Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”

  “Tortured?” Virgil asked. He was thinking of Wigge.

  She shook her head. “Not as such. Not coldly. Not calculated. He’d kill them in an excess of violence. Beat them. Strangle them. A violent show of dominance and sexuality.”

  Virgil looked at Davenport. “Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”

  Davenport shook his head. “There’s so much background noise, we’d never sort them out.”

  “DNA,” Sloan said. “If he’s raping them, they’ll have DNA in a DNA bank. Get some DNA from Warren, send it out there. Hell, circulate it everywhere.”

  “YOU THINK Knox was really scared?” Del asked. Del knew Knox better than any of them.

  “Not scared—careful,” Virgil said.

  Del nodded. “That sounds like him. Where’d he get those guys?”

  “One of them told me Chicago—Chicago came up a couple of times during the conversation,” Virgil said. “There was a woman there, fishing, who told me when I was leaving that they looked like hoodlums. I guess they sorta did.”

  Del said to Davenport, “When we find him again, it’d be good to get some surveillance shots of these guys. If they’re heavy-duty, it might tell us where Knox’s connections go.”

  “We can do that,” Davenport said. To Virgil: “What kind of vibe did you get from him? From Knox? Does he know more than he’s telling us?”

  “Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “The guys he had with him, they were definitely working. They were looking out for somebody. Knox thinks Warren’s coming for him.”

  “Maybe,” said Sloan’s wife, “Warren’s afraid not so much of . . . of . . . what happened back then, but what it’d tell you guys. That you’d get DNA from him, based on the pictures, and then something would pop up.”

  Davenport said, “Hell of a thought.”

  Sloan said, “Warren has been walking along the edge for years—he’s got a full-time lawyer who does nothing but yell at city inspectors. Some of those places over on the riverfront, in Minneapolis, you could punch your fist through the walls.”

  “That’s a long way from being a killer, though,” Davenport said.

  “But he is a killer,” Virgil said. “We know that for sure. I got it from Ray, who knew there’d been killing, and I got it specifically from Knox, and I don’t think Knox was lyin
g. That isn’t Knox in those pictures.”

  ELLE SAID,“Virgil, I’m very interested in the older Utecht. Chester. Am I wrong to think that he’s actually the beginning of the sequence of deaths?”

  “Well—that’d be one way to look at it,” Virgil said. He hadn’t looked at it that way. “I didn’t ask, but I get the impression that he was an old guy who died, you know, a while back. Like a year or so. Nobody ever said it wasn’t a natural death, so I assumed that it was.”

  She had cool, level eyes. “The circumstances of his death—they would be interesting to know.”

  “Yeah. Now that you mention it, they would. I’ll check. Anybody know what time it is in Hong Kong?”

  “Early morning, I’d guess,” Davenport said.

  “I’ll try to call somebody before I go to bed,” Virgil said. “The embassy maybe? There must be some kind of police liaison in the embassy.”

  Elle said, “I have another . . . interest. This man Sinclair. If I understand you correctly, he would be almost exactly as old as the murder victims. And we know he was in Vietnam at that time, or around that time. Where was he when these murders took place in Vietnam?”

  Virgil pulled on his lip, shook his head. “All right. That’s another thing I can check. I’m friendly with his daughter; maybe I can start with her.”

  THEY WORKED through it, and Davenport asked, “How’d they get to Bunton? There’s a mystery for you. An Indian hitter? An Apache?”

  “Geronimo returns,” Del said.

  So they sat and ate hamburgers and hashed it all over, and drank some beer, and Virgil lay back in a wooden recliner, looking at the stars that peeked out from behind the shine of city lights, and Letty came over and perched on the end of the recliner and was very cute and tried to wheedle the photos from him. He told her that she was too young, and she went steaming off.

  Davenport had been watching from the corner of his eye and gave Virgil the thumbs-up. Virgil stood up and stretched and said, “Think I’ll go call China,” which was something that he’d never done.