Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “I should hope,” she said. “I still cry about Chuck, poor guy. I’ll be standing by the sink, and I’ll start crying.”

  “You were married a long time.”

  “Yup,” she said, and took a sip of root beer.

  “What do you know about Chuck’s dad, Chester?” Virgil asked. “When he died, did you guys go over?”

  “Chuck did—just to see . . . well, there wasn’t much of an inheritance. Eighteen thousand dollars, that was about it. He had an annuity, but that was gone the minute he died. Chester was cremated, and they put his ashes in the ocean, so . . . there wasn’t much left.”

  “I talked to a guy from China. A Hong Kong cop. He said that Chester might have had some contact with the CIA.”

  Utecht’s eyebrows went up, and she said, “You know, I wouldn’t doubt it. We used to joke about him being a spy. We even asked him once, and he joked about it—but when he was joking about it, his eyes didn’t look funny, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Chester was all over that area when he was young, after World War Two—Hong Kong, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. He knew a lot of French people from North Vietnam,” Utecht said. “He even spoke French. He stayed here a few times when he was in the States, and once he was joking about having kids in Thailand, but I’m not sure that was completely a joke, either. How does all of this figure in?”

  Virgil told her about the bulldozer heist and she said, “I knew about that. Chuck . . . it was the big adventure of his youth, but it was in seven or eight years before we got together, so I didn’t know the details. Do you really think all of this”—she waved her hand, meaning the killings—“could have anything to do with that?”

  “I’m pretty sure it does,” Virgil said. “I’m just not sure how. Have you ever seen or heard the name Mead Sinclair in any of Chuck’s papers, or did he ever mention that name?”

  She thought a moment, then said, “No, I don’t think so. Odd name. I can look, if you want. We’ve still got a lot of stuff.”

  “Well, if you see anything . . .”

  “Who is he?”

  So he explained about Mead Sinclair. She said, “If Sinclair was an antiwar activist, and Chester had contact with the CIA . . . do you think they might have been enemies or something? That this man is running a revenge feud?”

  “I don’t know. Honest to God, I keep going around in circles. My problem is, I’ve got two things in my head. One loop involves the guys getting killed here, because they did something that one of them is trying to cover up. The other loop involves Mead Sinclair and the CIA and people getting killed in Hong Kong, maybe, and God only knows what that motive would be. If I could put the two loops together, I might have something. And it seems like there should be a fit somewhere.”

  “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t get hurt.”

  BACK IN Mankato he picked up his dry clothes, repacked, and headed north to the Cities again. So Chester may have worked with the CIA, he thought. Which meant that there may have been more to the bulldozer heist than was apparent—and more to the Vietnam killings than was apparent.

  Or not.

  Damnit.

  He got on his cell phone and called Sandy. “Are you working today?”

  “Uh, I’ve got a class, but I could do a couple hours.”

  “I need to find out if Mead Sinclair had any direct clashes with the CIA, or has ever said anything about the CIA coming after him, or about CIA killers in Vietnam, or any kind of intelligence agencies doing anything to him, or about him, or bringing charges against him . . . anything like that.”

  “I’ll call you,” she said. “Or I might be around the office this morning, before lunch.”

  “I GOT A bunch of stuff,” Davenport said when Virgil checked in at the BCA at ten-thirty. “I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss, so I won’t be around. Andreno just called in, he’s on his way from the airport. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes or so. I’ll send him down to you—I got you John Blake’s office while he’s on vacation.”

  “What’s the guy’s name? Your friend?” Virgil asked.

  “Micky Andreno. I told him to bring a gold neck chain. Also, I got the Secret Service and the FBI asking about you—they want to know what the status is, they’re getting a little worried about the killings, especially after Wigge. Too many important people are going through town to have a psycho running loose, so you need to call a couple people and give them status reports.”

  “Pressure starting to build?”

  “Of course. I’m not unhappy with what you’ve done, but these people don’t want to know about processes, they want the problem to go away,” Davenport said. “If you don’t get something quick, they may want to help. As in, use a bunch of their own people.”

  “That’d slow things down pretty good,” Virgil said.

  Davenport nodded. “Absolutely. Anyway, that means if Warren is a legitimate suspect, then let’s squeeze now, and hard. Get it done.”

  VIRGIL MADE calls to the FBI and the temporary Secret Service office that had been set up to protect the Republican National Convention. The agents he’d talked to seemed cool and skeptical, and when he was done, Virgil threw the receiver at the desk set and said, “Fuck you.”

  Shrake and Jenkins came by: “We gonna do it?”

  “Yeah. Our setup guy is on the way from the airport. We gotta round up Dan Jackson, I want to get the whole thing on video if we can, and get the guys in tech services to wire up Andreno, if we can pull this off today....”

  “Where’re we going to do it?” Jenkins asked.

  “Gotta be some place public or Warren won’t buy it,” Virgil said.

  “Be best if it was our choice,” Jenkins said. “We could set up in advance. With the security guys he’s got, if they pick location, they’ll spot us coming in to monitor the place.”

  Shrake: “How about Spiro’s on University, in Minneapolis? That’s fifteen minutes from Warren’s place, and he’s had projects on University, so he’ll probably know it. That might ease his mind a little. And the neighborhood is cut up, so we can monitor a little easier.”

  “All right. You guys set that up, I’ll wait for Andreno. Lucas wants us to push it, hard. Go for something right now.”

  SANDY CALLED. “Where are you?”

  “John Blake’s office.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  She had a file in her hand when she came through the door, and she passed it to him and he popped it open: anonymous stuff copied in a variety of fonts from different Web sites.

  “Something I find very interesting,” she said. “Starting in the sixties, Sinclair had a lot to say about the CIA. They were assassins, they were counterproductive, they destabilized progressive countries, they propped up right-wing dictatorships, blah-blah-blah. All the usual stuff, nothing specific. Nothing you didn’t read in the newspapers. It sort of tapered off in the eighties and the nineties. But then . . .”

  Big smile.

  “What’s the big smile?” Virgil asked.

  “Six years ago, a man named Manfred Lutz from Georgetown University wrote an article for Atlantic in which he said that Mead Sinclair basically made his reputation in the sixties counterculture by writing two lefty antiwar pieces, very well researched, very insightful, in Hard Times Theory magazine and another in Cross-Thought magazine, which Lutz says were small but influential magazines on the political left.”

  “I think I knew that,” Virgil said. “I saw those names somewhere.”

  “But did you know that Lutz claims that both Hard Times and Cross-Thought were CIA-sponsored vehicles?”

  Virgil took that in for a few seconds, then he said, “I didn’t know that. Was he saying that Sinclair was a CIA agent?”

  “No. Not exactly. He just lists Sinclair as among the people who benefited from publication in the magazines. Then, when that started a brouhaha, Sinclair apparently threatened to sue, and that shut everybody up. Sinclair
’s position is that he didn’t believe that they were CIA vehicles, because they published too many progressive and hard-left articles, but even if they were, he didn’t know it at the time. They were leading left-wing publications who were willing to publish his articles, and to pay him for them, and that’s all he knew. He even joked that maybe they were CIA, because they were about the only left-wing magazines that actually paid anyone.”

  “Where can I find Lutz?”

  “He lives near Washington. I wrote his office phone number on the article,” she said.

  “You’re amazing,” Virgil said. “I’ll call him right now.”

  LUTZ HAD A dark, gravelly voice with a New York accent. “How’d you find me?” he asked when Virgil identified himself.

  “One of our researchers did,” Virgil said.

  “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  “You could look up Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension online, call the number, and ask for Virgil Flowers.”

  “How do I know the CIA hasn’t put up a spoof?”

  “What’s a spoof?”

  Lutz thought about the question for a minute, then said, “Ah, hell. I stand by my story, even if you are the CIA. The CIA sponsored those magazines. Period. End of story. I’m not talking about a little clandestine support—I mean, they were CIA fronts. They cranked out these mind-numbing leftist proclamations and articles, mind-numbing even for the time. In return, they had entrée into all the left-wing intellectual circles of the time, both here in the U.S. and in Europe.”

  AT THAT MOMENT, a man stuck his head in the door: he was chunky, square-faced, with short, curly hair and a bald spot at the crown of his head. He had small black eyes, fight scars under them, a nose that had been hit a few times. Virgil said to Lutz, “Hang on a minute,” and asked, “Mickey?”

  The man showed some completely capped white teeth. “Yup, Virgil?”

  “Sit down, I got a guy I gotta talk to.”

  “I gotta shit like a shark, man.”

  “Down the hall to the left. . . .”

  VIRGIL WENT BACK to the phone. “Okay, where were we? Listen, you not only suggest that the magazines were CIA fronts, you hint that Mead Sinclair and a couple of other guys were agents. Not dupes, but agents.”

  “I’m still of that opinion,” Lutz said. “I can’t get it printed, because Sinclair says that it will harm his reputation and that he’ll sue. That scares everybody off, because I can’t provide any documentary proof. But that’s my opinion.”

  “So how’d you get to that opinion?”

  “Mostly because of the . . . smoothness of his arrival. One day you never heard of him, the next day he’s all over the place, publishing articles, giving speeches. And it’s not only that, it’s also the quality of the response. Sinclair would say something, and somebody in the government would actually respond to it, they’d debate him instead of ignoring him. That put him right in the heat of the battle—this terrific-looking blond guy with big ideas, who was willing to risk going to North Vietnam, to Hanoi, in the middle of the war.

  “He gets arrested at demonstrations, but he’s always pretty quick to get out. Always the terrific PR photos. And if you look at it, and you’re cynical enough, you can see that it was certain congressmen and some people in the Johnson and Nixon administrations who actually made him into a lefty big shot. Because they gave him attention. And when you look at those people, you can see that every single one seems to have a tie to the intelligence community.”

  Virgil didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, finally: “Interesting.”

  Lutz said, “Yeah,” with a skeptical tone right there. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I’m trying to solve some murders that seem to go back to Vietnam.”

  “If you solve them, and they do go back, I’d like to hear about it. I’d like to write about it,” Lutz said.

  “Keep an eye on the news. The whole story is out there right now, and it’s getting bigger. I’ll give you my number.”

  Virgil gave him his number, and Lutz said, “Virgil Flowers. That’s an operator’s name if I ever heard one. You’re really CIA, aren’t you? You’re gonna bug my house and my office and my car . . .”

  “We don’t have to,” Virgil said. “We already replaced your fillings with microphones.”

  Lutz laughed and said, “Maybe that’s why old ABBA songs keep running through my head.”

  “Jesus Christ, we’re not that cruel,” Virgil said.

  ANDRENO WAS wearing tan slacks and a powder-blue golf shirt, a thick gold chain around his neck. He chewed gum. Virgil looked at him and thought, Perfect.

  “How ya doin’?” Andreno asked, shaking Virgil’s hand. His hand was still damp—from the water faucet in the restroom, Virgil hoped.

  “Let’s get the other guys.”

  They gathered in Virgil’s temporary office, Jenkins and Shrake and Andreno, and Virgil showed them the copies of the photographs.

  “That’s pretty crude of old Ralph,” Jenkins said. He held one of the photos close to his face, studying the rape photo. “That’s him, all right.”

  Shrake was looking at the other photos, took the rape photo from Jenkins. “But what if he just flat denies it—says he never went to Vietnam, that it’s not him. . . . It could be somebody else.”

  “Probably can’t get him for Vietnam,” Virgil said. “Too long ago, there’s only one witness still alive, and he probably wouldn’t testify anyway. We need to shake him up—Warren—freak him out. Get him to argue. We need to get him to give us something.”

  “That’s gonna be tough,” Andreno said. “If he’s smart, he’ll keep his mouth shut. Deny, deny, deny. Imply a deal, acknowledge a deal, wink and nod, but not put it in words.”

  “He’s a psycho,” Virgil said. “You gotta stick a sliver under his fingernails. You got to get him to cook off a couple of wild shots.”

  “I can get into my wise-guy mode, give him some shit about rapin’ dead women,” Andreno said. “But if this guy is really smart . . .”

  “What if he just doesn’t buy it?” Shrake asked. “This is pretty thin stuff.”

  “The photos aren’t thin,” Virgil said. “Knox sent him some xeroxes and didn’t hear anything back. So it’s him, and he knows it. And maybe they wouldn’t work in court, but if they got out there, started making the rounds, he’d be finished, socially, politically. You could stick a fork in him. We gotta hope they set him off.”

  “I need to take a look at this restaurant ahead of time,” Andreno said. “If he’s really got top-end security guys, they’re gonna have some electronic gear. They’re gonna check me for a wire.”

  “We’re not gonna wire you,” Shrake said. “We got something way more cool. We’ll show you downstairs.”

  Andreno nodded, snapped his Juicy Fruit, and looked at Virgil. “What’s my story?”

  THE STORY, they’d decided, was that Andreno had been hired by Carl Knox to provide security against whoever was killing the people involved in the bulldozer heist, who Knox suspected was Warren. But Andreno and Knox had a falling-out. Knox was at his cabin up north, and Andreno had been out in the woods with mosquitoes and black-flies and ticks all day, and that wasn’t his scene. There’d been an argument, and Knox had fired him and refused to pay his fee.

  “So you knew where the pictures were, which was inside a fake book, and you took them on the way out. You want money for them—you were supposed to get five thousand bucks a week toward a guarantee of twenty-five thousand, plus expenses, and that’s what you want: thirty thousand. If he doesn’t want to buy the pictures, you’ll see if anybody else does.”

  “You have to tell Warren that you know that he’s behind the killings, you have to make him believe that you believe,” Virgil said. “You have to convince him that you don’t care about that, that Knox doesn’t care, maybe even that Knox approves, to get rid of witnesses. Also, you gotta suggest to him that
you’ll tell him where Knox’s hideout is.”

  Andreno said, “What about the negatives?”

  “You don’t know anything about the negatives,” Virgil said. “If Knox has negatives, then Warren’s got another problem—but who knows if he’s got any? Warren’s gotta solve the Andreno problem first. Get these pictures out of the way.”

  DAVENPORT SHOWED UP as they were working out the details, had a backslapping reunion with Andreno.

  “Don’t get my boy shot,” Davenport said to Virgil after Virgil told him how they’d work the approach.

  “Yeah, don’t get his boy shot,” Andreno said.

  “We should be okay—we’ll have it scouted, we’ll be inside, it’ll all be on tape,” Virgil said. “We’ll make movies of everybody coming and going.”

  “What could possibly go wrong?” Jenkins asked.

  20

  THE “WAY MORE COOL” surveillance device was a laptop computer, brought in by the film guy, Dan Jackson. The computer had two battery slots, one of which had been replaced by a high-definition digital video recorder with four tiny cell-phone cameras, four tiny microphones, and a transmitter.

  “The way it works is, you hit F-10. The computer doesn’t come up, but it starts the recorders and transmitter. It’ll pick up every word within ten feet, and it records wide-angle photographs in all four directions, and transmits,” Jackson said. “You’re gonna want to sit away from the kitchen . . . it really picks up plates and silverware. And you’re gonna want to set the computer so one of the lenses is looking across the table at Warren and one of them is looking at you. They got wireless there, so you could have it open and be working on it, so they know it’s really a working computer. When he shows up, you get offline, and close the lid, and shove it off to the side.”