Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  The voice actually sounded far away and satellite-fed: “This is Harold Chen with the Hong Kong Police Force. Is this Virgil Flowers?”

  “Yes, it is. . . . Hang on just one second.”

  Virgil said to Mai, “I gotta take this, it’s from China. . . . I’m gonna run outside, sometimes you can drop the calls inside here.”

  He went back to the phone as he walked toward the door. “Yes, Mr. Chen, thank you for calling me back. I’m looking for information about Chester Utecht, a man who died there a year or so ago. I’ve got the details in my notebook—”

  “I’m quite familiar with Mr. Utecht’s case.” Chen sounded like he’d just left Oxford. “Could I ask why you’re inquiring after him?”

  “We’ve had a series of murders here. . . .” Virgil told Chen about the murders in detail, and about the possible tie to Vietnam.

  When he was done, Chen said, “Well. Vietnam. I should tell you that Mr. Utecht was something of a character. One of the last of the old-time soldiers of fortune, so his death was . . . noticed. He had been suffering from a series of debilitating diseases in his final days. Both his liver and kidneys were failing. However, his death hadn’t appeared imminent when he saw his internist a few days before he died. The pathology suggests that he may have taken his own life, or perhaps accidentally overdosed, on pain pills and alcohol.”

  “Ah. A suicide,” Virgil said. “Nobody told me that on this end.”

  “There was no official finding of suicide,” Chen said. “The cause was recorded as ‘unknown.’ However, the pathologist, who is quite competent, told me privately that Mr. Utecht had some bruises on his arms above his elbows, and around his ankles, that would be consistent with restraint.”

  “Restraint.”

  “Yes. But restraint by who, or what—or even if there was any restraint—is unknown. We looked for something, but couldn’t find anything at all. The fact is, he was elderly, alone, sick, probably dying, and running out of money. The easiest answer is suicide or accident; however, I wasn’t entirely satisfied by that. I looked for anyone who might have had any animus toward him. Anyone who could have carried out such a sophisticated murder, or would have any reason to. I found nothing; and frankly, Utecht was not important enough to be the object of such a murder. Now you say there was a murder in Vietnam, that he was involved, and that others who were involved are also being killed.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Virgil said.

  “That may give me a few more questions to ask. But I can also tell you this: we are quite certain that Mr. Utecht had connections with your CIA in his past. He didn’t work for them, he wasn’t paid, but he had . . . connections, if you see what I’m saying. He helped them when he could, and they helped him when they wished.”

  “You don’t think the CIA is killing these people?”

  “I think nothing in particular,” Chen said. “But who really knows what happened in the last minutes before the victory? The whole business of the ship, this sounds like too complicated an operation for one man. If it were a CIA operation that had gone bad, if, as you say, you have photographs of a man raping a dead woman, if babies were killed . . . Well, this is an ugly thing. With the controversy about the CIA, perhaps they wouldn’t like to have this float up from the past. Especially if the men were willing to talk about it.”

  They let the satellite idle for a moment, then Virgil said, “Mr. Chen, if you’re curious, I will call you and tell you how this works out. I would deeply appreciate it if you would ask your questions and let me know the answers. I don’t like the sound of this CIA connection. I don’t like that.”

  “Yes, because what could you do? Your hands would be tied.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, details and phone numbers, then Virgil rang off, and as he walked back to the cabin, he could hear Mai talking. He stepped inside, and she smiled and said, “Daddy . . . I will be home when I will be home. We’re just going out fishing. I will see you when I see you. Good-bye.”

  THEY DROPPED the boat in the water and headed out, a good blue day without wind, the water like green-black Jell-O, not quite still, but jiggling from the distant passings of small motorboats. Virgil found a weed bed, and explained about musky fishing. “There’s a cliché about musky—that they’re the fish of ten thousand casts. Hard to catch. Which means, when you go musky fishing, you probably won’t actually have to deal with catching one.”

  He tied a black-and-orange-rubber Bull Dawg lure onto one of the rods, flipped it out, retrieved it, showed her how the tail rippled at a certain speed, showed her how to cast with her arms and her back instead of her wrists, steadied her in the boat with a hand on her waist and back and occasionally her butt. Twenty or so casts out, the lure was hit by a small northern pike, two feet long, which hooked itself and then flipped once out of the water and gave up, and she reeled it in. Virgil wet a hand in the lake, grabbed the fish at the back of its head, unhooked it, and dropped it back in, looked up to see her watching in fascination.

  “You threw it back! That’s the biggest fish I ever caught!” she said.

  “Shoot . . . hmm, I didn’t think you’d want it. Besides, if you want one, we’ll catch more.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t really want one. I like fish . . . but . . .”

  So they went on around, and she caught two more northerns, which were easy, and lost a fish that Virgil thought might have been a small musky.

  “You fish for a while; I’m going to drink a Coke,” she said.

  So he fished as she sat in the boat, and then she said, “Is that a thunderstorm?”

  He looked off to the southwest, over his shoulder, and saw the anvil of cloud coming in. “Yeah . . . gotta be thirty miles away. We got time.”

  “Until you reminded me . . . I hadn’t thought about the Terrace for years—I was never that much for it. Too busy. Now that I look back, I wonder what I was busy at. I should have had some lazy friends, you know, just sit out there with root-beer floats and watch the sailboats. But what the heck did I do?” She stared at the water, and Virgil flipped the lure into a niche in the weed line, twitched it a few times, and she said, “You know what I did? I worked. But I worked at all this art stuff. Dancing. Photography. Writing. All the time. Obsessively. I hardly ever went and sat and laughed with friends.”

  “Madison is the best place in the world if you want to hang out,” Virgil said. “You see these old gray-bearded guys on their rusty bikes, they’ve been hanging out since the sixties. Never quit.”

  “Yeah, but . . . ah, I don’t know. And the Rat. What a dump; that’s what I used to say. What a dump. Just too busy . . . busy, busy, busy . . .”

  So they floated and talked and she cast some more, and once almost tipped over the side, and he said, eventually, “If you cast any more, you’re gonna be sore in the morning. You’re going to feel like this muscle”—he rubbed his knuckles up and down the big vertical muscle just to the left of her spine—“is made out of wood.”

  She’d caught five fish at that point. “One last cast.”

  “No point. You never catch anything on the last cast.”

  She cast, and didn’t catch anything. “All right. I submit to your greater knowledge, although it doesn’t make any statistical sense.”

  “Sure it does—if you catch something, that’s never your last cast,” Virgil said. “You always keep going for at least ten minutes. So you never catch anything on the last cast.”

  He sat next to the motor, saw a distant flash of lightning, counted the seconds, and then said, “Six miles, more or less. Better get off the lake.”

  They got off, cranked the boat out of the water, pulled the plug, tied on the canvas cover, walked up to the cabin, washed their hands, got a couple of beers, sat on the lakeside porch, and watched the storm coming in.

  When the first fat drops of rain hit around them, she said, “We probably ought to go jump in bed.”

  “Probably,” he said.

  SHE SAT
on the edge of the bed and let him take her clothes off; he did it from behind her, kneeling on the mattress, with his face buried in the pit of her neck, his hands working the buttons on her blouse and jeans.

  “Ah, God, this is where I can’t stand it,” he said. He popped the hooks on her brassiere.

  She giggled with the stress. “What? You can’t stand it?”

  “It’s always so wonderful . . .” He popped her brassiere loose and let his hands slip up her stomach and cup her breasts.

  “It can’t always be wonderful,” she said.

  “No, no, it’s always wonderful,” he said. “It’s just like opening your Christmas presents when you’re eight years old. Ah, jeez . . .”

  Then it was underpants and she was pulling on Virgil’s jeans, which still smelled a little fishy from one of the northerns they’d caught, and then they were all over the place, and somewhere during the proceedings, though Virgil didn’t bother to check the time, she began to make a low ohhhh sound and then Virgil lost track, but not for long.

  WELL, HE THOUGHT as he lay on his back, the sweat evaporating from his stomach, he’d thought it would be pretty good, and it had been. And would be again in about, hmm, seventeen minutes.

  She said, “Why . . .” She giggled. “That was so crazy—all of a sudden, I realized, this afternoon, before we went out, you said you got a phone call from China. From China? You get calls from China?”

  “No, it’s this case. Trying to go back in time. There was a guy killed in Hong Kong a year or so ago, and there’s a question of how exactly he died. He’s connected with the guys here. The Chinese are going to look into it, see what they can find out.”

  “All the Chinese? That’s a lot of Chinamen.”

  “The Hong Kong police force.”

  “Really. Indians, Chinese, Hong Kong, the North Woods.”

  “Yeah . . . I gotta tell you, when I brought you up here, I was mostly thinking about this . . .” He slipped his hand up her thigh. “But I worry about your father and you. You don’t know anything about this case, do you?”

  She propped herself up on one elbow. “Why would I know anything about it? Why would you ask?”

  “Because your father, you know, he was talking to Ray and Sanderson, and when I asked what they were talking about, he didn’t have much to say. The thing is, if this killer even thinks your father was involved, he might go after him. And if you’re in the way . . . Look, I really, really don’t want you to get hurt, and if your father’s involved, you could be in the line of fire.”

  “Oh . . . Virgil. You don’t really think so? I mean, my father . . .” She trailed away.

  “Was he in Vietnam in 1975?”

  “He’s been there a lot. When I was a child, it seemed like he was gone all the time, but that was in the eighties. As I understand it, the Vietnamese really thought they had allies with the American people, and that he was one of them. So he was there during the war, and right after it, and later, he was there more. . . . He was there a lot. But 1975, I don’t know.”

  “I’m amazed he was never busted,” Virgil said.

  “Busted ...”

  “Arrested. By the feds . . . you know, ‘giving aid and comfort.’”

  “Well, when he went, he went as a journalist,” Mai said. “So that gave him some status.”

  “Still. You gotta ask him about it,” Virgil said. “If there’s anything, he’s got to talk to me.”

  “How many more killings do you think—”

  “I don’t know. . . . I’ll tell you something, but you gotta promise not to tell.”

  “All right, sure,” she said.

  “The last one, the killer was probably seen, and he was an Indian guy. Ray was an Indian guy. Some of these guys were living on the edge, and there’s a question of whether there was a dope deal going down somewhere. So . . . it’s all really confusing.”

  “Do you know who the other targets might be?”

  “Yeah, I talked to one the other day. I can’t really tell you his name—it’s, like, a legal thing. But he’s out there traveling around. He told me he’s safe. He’s got a security guy who travels with him, he says the president couldn’t find him. But hell, it’s possible he’s involved somehow.”

  “You’ll figure it out. Dad says you’re a pretty smart guy,” Mai said.

  “I don’t feel so smart; I feel like my head is stuffed full of cotton. Something is going on, and I don’t know what it is.”

  She squeezed him. “Feels like something is going on down here.”

  “I know what that is,” he said. “I have that completely under control.”

  “Right. Mr. Control.” She gave him a yank. “How many women have you slept with, Mr. Control?”

  “I have a list on my laptop,” Virgil said. “I’d hate to say without consulting my list.”

  “Just names, or . . . talent, as well?”

  “Everything. Names, photographs, résumés, criminal records. I give them all grades, too. For example, a couple of women might call me up, and I don’t remember them that well in the fog of all the women, but I’ve got to make a decision. So I look at my computer records, and one of them I’ve given a B-minus, and the other a C-minus. So the decision is clear.”

  “What’d I get?”

  “You got a B-plus,” Virgil said. “You could easily move up to an A, if you play your cards right.”

  “Lying in bed,” she said. “Joking.”

  “Ah, well . . .” He sat up, looked down at her. “It’s what happens when you become a cop. Something curdles your sense of humor. My problem is not really that I sleep with so many women. My problem is that I fall in love with them.”

  She was lying facedown on top of the sheet with her face turned toward him, and he ran his hand down her back and over the rise of her butt. “Women don’t understand how beautiful they are. They don’t understand it. They get beauty all confused with personality, or charisma, or a nice smile . . . but they really don’t see the simple beauty of this . . .” and his hand glided again over her bottom. “It’s a goddamn tragedy that you can’t see it. But you can’t; I know you can’t. And it’s just so beautiful.”

  19

  VIRGIL WAS moving early the next morning, out at dawn, heading southwest out of the Twin Cities, still feeling the glow of the afternoon and evening with Mai. He’d spoken with Shrake the evening before, after he’d dropped Mai, and Shrake said that he and Jenkins had spotted several more bodyguards working the streets around Ralph Warren’s home.

  “We gave it up. We were staying way back, but they were still going to see us. We can get on him again tomorrow, but it seems like he’s moving at night, if he’s doing these killings. We need to do something electronic with his truck, to follow him, or something—this ain’t working.”

  Virgil spoke to Davenport, and they agreed that Shrake and Jenkins would resume the surveillance in the morning, just tight enough to keep track of Warren’s general location. “We ought to try the sting, see what happens,” Virgil told Davenport. “We need an undercover guy who Warren wouldn’t know, and between him and his pals, they’ll know a lot of cops around town.”

  “I’ll make some calls,” Davenport said. “I’ve got an ex-cop in Missouri who could do it. He’d be perfect for the job.”

  SO VIRGIL got up early, headed back to Mankato, his home base, with ten pounds of dirty clothes. He lived in a compact 1930s brick house on the edge of downtown, on a block with trees and quite a few kids. When he bought it, the house had belonged to an elderly widower whose children were moving him to a nursing home. The old man had been a mechanic before he retired, and had restored cars as a hobby. His two-and-half-car garage was nearly as big as the house, and provided good room for both Virgil’s truck and his boat.

  He left the truck in the driveway, checked the place to make sure everything was okay, stuck the dirty clothes in the washing machine, collected his mail, paid bills, and walked downtown and dropped them off at a mailbox. He got
an early-morning cup of coffee and a croissant at a coffee shop.

  Eating the croissant as he went, he walked back home, put the clothes in the dryer, and made a phone call to Marilyn Utecht, hoping he wasn’t waking her up; but she was an early riser, and said, “Come on ahead.” He got in the truck and headed to the town of New Ulm, which had at one time been the least ethnically diverse town in the United States—everybody had been of German ancestry.

  UTECHT WAS working in her still dew-wet yard when he got there, digging dandelions with a paring knife, tossing them into a bucket.

  “How’re you doing?” Virgil asked as he crossed the lawn.

  She said, “Okay,” and stood up, and “I got a job.”

  “Good. Get you out and about,” Virgil said.

  She smiled and said, “It’s not much of a job . . . part time at a day-care center. But I always liked little kids, and I don’t really need a lot of money.”

  “Don’t you get diseased?”

  “Oh, yeah. Keeps your immune system going, that’s for sure,” she said. “So, Virgil—what’s up? You want a root beer or anything? Or is it still too early?”

  “Sure, I’ll take a root beer.”

  THEY SAT in lawn chairs in the backyard, a pool of uninflected grass surrounded by a white board fence, and drank root beer, and Virgil said, “You’ve been reading about what’s going on.”

  She shivered and said, “I can’t believe it. I just . . . can’t . . . believe it. Are you going to catch him? Whoever’s doing it?”

  “Hope so. He’s a psycho, whoever he is, and I think he’s compelled to do this,” Virgil said. “We’ve got one suspect, who we’re watching, and one fellow who we know is a target, who’s protected, and sooner or later, something is going to crack open. I hope we’re in a position to move when it does.”