Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Man, we sound like elephants in a cornfield,” Virgil said. “We gotta slow down.”

  From up ahead—a hundred yards, fifty yards?—Virgil heard a clank and both he and Jarlait paused, and Jarlait asked, “What do you think?” and Virgil said, “It sounded like somebody dropped a trailer.”

  They both listened and then they heard an engine start, and Virgil started running, Jarlait trying to keep up. At the end of the trail, they found a vehicle track through shoulder-high brush, an abandoned trailer sitting there, and then the end of a pasture, or fallow field, and on the other end of the pasture, a silver minivan bumped over the last few ruts and pulled onto the road a hundred yards away.

  Not a hard shot.

  Virgil lifted the rifle and put the sights more or less on the moving van and tracked it and picked up the house in the background, said, “Shit,” and took the rifle down.

  They were gone.

  And though Virgil didn’t know which one of the Viets was hurt, who had been bleeding, he believed that he’d caught something of Mai in the driver’s-side window, at the wheel.

  VIRGIL GOT on the radio and called a description of the van back to Queenen, who was holding the fort on the other side of the river. When they walked back past the trailer, they saw, sticking out between a spare wheel and the trailer frame, a manila envelope. Virgil looked at it and found “Virgil” scrawled across it.

  Inside were ten color photographs—crime-scene photos, in effect, of the house at Da Nang, apparently taken a day or so after the killings. Flies everywhere, all over the corpses. Two little kids, one facedown, one faceup, twisted and bloated in death. A woman, half nude, flat on her back, her face covered in blood. Another woman lying in a courtyard, apparently shot in the back. An old man, out in front of the house . . .

  Jarlait kept going back to the picture of the kids. “Little teeny kids, man. Little peanuts,” he said.

  “Bunton knew about it. So did all the others,” Virgil said. “They couldn’t have stopped it, the way they tell it—Warren did all the killing. But they all kept their mouths shut.”

  They thought about that for a few seconds. “Little kids,” Jarlait said. “I can see them coming over, to get the killer. But they killed Oren. Oren didn’t do shit. . . . Oren was a nice guy.”

  “The guy you shot on the other side. He’s the guy who shot Oren,” Virgil said.

  “All right,” Jarlait said. “So we’re all square with him. . . . Wonder how they happened to have the pictures with them?”

  “They were going to leave them on Knox’s body, to make their point.”

  NOT YET DONE, not by along way.

  As they crossed back over the river, Jarlait said, “Now we’ve broken two laws—illegal entry into Canada, then illegal entry into the States.”

  “Probably best not to emphasize that when we’re talking to people,” Virgil said.

  VIRGIL CLIMBED OUT of the canoe and helped Jarlait drag it on shore, then Jarlait said, “I gotta find out about Rudy.” Queenen had been standing at the end of the driveway, talking on a cell phone, when he saw them land, and came jogging down the slope toward them.

  He took the phone down as he came up and asked, “Anything new?”

  “Just what I told you on the radio. We hit one of them, though. There’s blood in their boat and there’s a blood trail up through the trees.” He held up the manila envelope with the pictures. “They left this for us.”

  Jarlait asked, “How’s Rudy?”

  Queenen said, “He’s at the hospital. Raines said they’re gonna do some surgery, but it’s basically to clean out a hole. Shot went under the skin by his armpit, and then back out. My guy’s getting his scalp sewn up, but he won’t need surgery.”

  Virgil: “The three Viets . . .”

  “Yeah. They’re all dead,” Queenen said. “All with multiple wounds. Rudy shot one of them when the grenade went off, and then he and the other guy shot each other, and I shot the second guy. The third guy, I guess you guys . . .”

  “Louis,” Virgil said. “Phem threw a flash-bang and tried to come in behind it. It hit a tree and bounced off and I was right there. Almost knocked me on my ass. . . . If Louis hadn’t been ready, they’d of had me.”

  “Well—what are you gonna do?” Queenen asked. He looked away, across the river. “I wish we’d gotten the other two assholes.”

  “I gotta get up to see Rudy,” Jarlait said. “His mom is gonna kill me.”

  Queenen said, “Virgil, you gotta come up and talk to these deputies. They’re getting antsy as hell. The sheriff’s on his way in.”

  Virgil nodded and said, “Let’s go.” To Jarlait: “Get your truck, head on out, but stay in touch.”

  BEFORE THEY TALKED to the deputies, they took a quick detour through the woods so Virgil could look at the bodies: Phem, Tai, and another Asian man he didn’t know. Had there been some other way to do this? Or had he really wanted to do it after being used around by the Viets? He’d think about it some other time.

  “Lotta blood,” he said to Queenen.

  ON THE WAY up the driveway, Virgil got on the cell phone and called Davenport. “What happened?” Davenport asked as soon as he picked up the phone.

  “We had a hell of a gunfight,” Virgil said. “We got three dead Vietnamese, and two got away, into Canada. We need to call the Mounties . . . hang on.” He turned to Queenen. “Did you call the Canadians?”

  Queenen said, “I called the office, they’re gonna get in touch.”

  Virgil went back to the phone. “I guess Bemidji’s getting in touch. There might be a little dustup coming there.”

  “Virgil, tell me you didn’t cross the river,” Davenport said.

  “I didn’t cross it by very much,” Virgil said. “I was in hot pursuit.”

  Davenport pondered for a moment, then said, “You thought that if these desperate killers encountered any Canadians, they’d ruthlessly gun them down to cover their escape, and so, throwing legal nit-picking to the wind, you decided to put your own body between the murderers and any innocent Canucks. ”

  “Yeah—that’s what I thought,” Virgil said.

  Davenport said, “We had a good talk with Mead Sinclair. We put him in Ramsey County overnight until we decide what to do. I don’t think he’d run. But—we’ve got a couple of guys coming in from Washington to speak to us.”

  “Who’s us?” Virgil asked.

  “Rose Marie, me, you, Mitford, hell, maybe the governor,” Davenport said. “They’ll be here this afternoon. You gotta get down here. I’m going to call around, see if I can get you a plane out of International Falls. You got somebody you can give the scene to?”

  “We’ve got a crew coming up from Bemidji, and there are two Bemidji guys here. There were three, but one got a scalp cut. . . . One of our guys from Red Lake got dinged up . . .”

  Virgil told him the whole story, a blow-by-blow. When he was done, Davenport asked, “Where’s this Raines guy?”

  “Still at the hospital, I think. There were gunshot wounds, so he might be talking to the International Falls cops.”

  Davenport said, “Okay . . . listen. Go talk to the deputies. Tell them to secure the scene. Keep them out of the house. Keep everybody out of the house. Then go in there and take a little look around. You were invited in . . . are there any file cabinets?”

  Virgil said, “You’re an evil fuck.”

  Davenport said, “Call me when you can move. I’ll find a plane.”

  VIRGIL DID ALL THAT: brought the deputies in, made them feel like they were on top of things. Let them look at the bodies; kept them out of the house. Got Queenen to talk to the sheriff when he arrived.

  A little over an hour later, Virgil was climbing into a Beaver float-plane that taxied right up to Knox’s dock. The plane felt like an old friend: Virgil had flown over most of western Canada in Beavers and Otters, and he settled down, strapped in. The pilot said her name was Kate, and they were gone.

  Virgil hadn’t fo
und much in Knox’s house. The big computer was used, apparently, for photography and games. There’d been another small desk in the main bedroom, with a satellite plug and a keyboard, and Virgil decided that Knox must travel with a laptop. In a leather jacket tossed on the bed, he had found a small black book full of addresses and phone numbers. There was no Xerox machine in the place, but he went and got his bag, took out his camera, and shot a hundred JPEGs of the contents, to be printed later. When he was done, he put the address book back in the jacket and tossed it back on the bed.

  When Davenport had called about the plane, he’d asked, “How things go? You know?”

  “Not much, but, um, I found like three hundred names and addresses in a private little book.”

  “Not bad,” Davenport said. “For Christ’s sakes, don’t tell anybody about it.”

  “Get me a plane?”

  “Yup. Got you a bush pilot,” Davenport said.

  VIRGIL TRIED TO chat with Kate, who was decent-looking and athletic and outdoorsy and had a long brown braid that reminded Virgil of all the women in his college writers’ workshop; but Kate, probably shell-shocked by being hit on by every fly-in fisherman in southwest Ontario, didn’t have much to say.

  So Virgil settled into his seat and went to sleep.

  KATE PUT him on the Mississippi across the bridge from downtown St. Paul. Davenport was waiting; Virgil threw him the backpack, thanked Kate, climbed up on the dock, and pushed the plane off: Kate was heading back north.

  Davenport asked, “You okay?”

  “Tired,” Virgil said. “Still alive. Anybody talking to the Canadians? Anybody seen Mai and the other guy?”

  “We’re talking to them, they went down and recovered the boat, they’ve got some guys working the other side. But not too much.”

  “Goddamnit,” Virgil said. “We were too goddamn slow getting across.”

  “Nothing works all the time,” Davenport said. “On the whole, you did pretty damn good. Knocked it all down, settled it. Now, if we can get the Republicans in and out of town without anybody getting killed, we can all go back to our afternoon naps.”

  Virgil handed him the manila envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something to think about,” Virgil said.

  DAVENPORT LOOKED AT the photos as they walked out to his car. When they got there, he put them back in the envelope and passed them across the car roof. “Hang on to these until I can figure something out.”

  They were meeting the two guys from Washington in a conference room off Rose Marie’s office at the Capitol. “They want to talk about Sinclair—that’s all we know,” Davenport said.

  “Is Sinclair still in jail?” Virgil asked.

  “No. We let him out this morning. Put a leg bracelet on him, told him not to go more than six blocks from his house. He’s at his apartment now,” Davenport said. “There are some very strange things going on there—I’m not quite sure what. Some kind of inter-intelligence-agency pie fight, the old guys from the CIA against the new guys in all the other alphabet agencies.”

  “Who’s Sinclair with?”

  “The old guys, I think, but I’m just guessing,” Davenport said. “The thing is, he hasn’t asked for an attorney. He’s actually turned down an attorney, though he says he might ask for one later. He thinks the fix is in.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, we’re having this meeting—”

  “You can’t just throw dirt on the whole thing.”

  “Maybe you can’t—but maybe you can. Who knows? Not my call.”

  “We got bodies all over the place.”

  “And we got three dead Vietnamese. There’s your answer for the dead bodies. If nobody mentions the CIA, why, then, should anybody get all excited about mentioning them?”

  Virgil looked at Davenport and asked, “Where do you stand on this?”

  Davenport said, “Basically, at the bottom of my heart: if you do the crime, you do the time. And I don’t like feds.”

  ON THE WAY across the Mississippi, Davenport said, “You need to get over to Sinclair’s place. If you look behind the seat, you’ll see that laptop that Mickey carried into the meeting with Warren.”

  Virgil twisted in the seat, saw the laptop, picked it up.

  Davenport said, “Take it with you. What I want you to do is, while we’re all real hot, I want you to go into Sinclair’s place with the laptop turned on. You can stick it in your pack with those photographs—they ought to distract him from thinking too hard about you being bugged—and talk to him for a while. He seems to like you for some reason. Find out what he wants. Find out what he’d do. What he’d admit to. Might get him, you know, at home, when his guard’s down a bit.”

  “Is that why you turned him loose?” Virgil asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Did they take the bug out of the truck?” Virgil asked.

  “Not yet, but what difference would it make? There’s nobody to listen to it.”

  “Mai’s still out there,” Virgil said.

  “So yank it out—but go see Sinclair first.”

  “OK.”

  “Did that truck thing do any good?” Davenport asked. “You know, pretending you were still with the truck?”

  “I think it killed three people,” Virgil said. “They bought the whole thing.”

  “You are a shifty motherfucker,” Davenport said.

  “Yeah, I know. I remind you of yourself when you were younger.”

  “Not much younger,” Davenport said.

  Virgil made a rude noise and they rolled through St. Paul to BCA headquarters, and Davenport dropped Virgil beside his truck. “The meeting with the Washington guys is in an hour, or an hour and fifteen minutes, so you don’t have much time,” Davenport said. “Do what you can.”

  AT THE TRUCK, Virgil lay down beside the front fender, looked up at the transmitter. A couple of wires led into the turn signal box, and he yanked one of them out of the transmitter. That would kill it; creeped him out to think about the thing giving up Ray Bunton.

  Ten minutes to Sinclair’s. He parked in the street, turned on the laptop recorder, slid it into the pack, put the envelope on top of it, threw the pack over his shoulder, and walked to Sinclair’s place.

  He pushed the doorbell, and Sinclair answered immediately, as though he’d been waiting for it: “Who is it?”

  “Virgil.”

  The door buzzed and he went on through, and Sinclair was waiting at the open door to his apartment.

  “What happened to Hoa?” he asked.

  “Made it to Canada,” Virgil said.

  Relief showed in Sinclair’s face. “I couldn’t help liking her,” he said. “What about the other guys?”

  “Phem and Tai, whatever their real names are, are dead,” Virgil said. He was thinking of the recorder. “So’s another guy that I never met. Another guy got out. Either he’s wounded, or Mai is. We found a blood trail, but it was in Canada, and they had an exit route all set up. We called the Canadians with a description of the vehicle, but they haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Phem and Tai. Not bad guys, actually, for a killer and a torturer,” Sinclair said.

  “I’ll quote you when I write my article for the Atlantic,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, right. Fur ’n’ Feather is more like it. . . . When did you get back?”

  “Ten minutes ago,” Virgil said. “I talked to my boss on the phone, and he told me you were here.”

  THEY’D MOVED through the apartment, talking, out to the porch. Virgil tossed his pack on the table, undid the quick-release buckles, pulled out the envelope of photographs, left the end of the laptop hanging out, one of the tiny camera lenses facing Sinclair.

  He handed the envelope to Sinclair: “They left them for us. Deliberately, I’m sure.”

  Sinclair slid them out of the envelope, thumbed through them, then looked at them carefully, one at a time. He looked up and said, “That’s bad—and they’re real. I’ve had some trai
ning in this stuff. If they’re not real, they’re better than anything we could do.”

  “They’re real,” Virgil said. “We got some shots from the last guy they were looking for. Carl Knox. He took some right at the time of the shootings. The bodies look the same, the way they landed. No way to fake that.”

  Sinclair leaned back and said, “What are you guys planning to do?” Virgil shrugged. “It’s not up to me. There’s a big meeting, forty-five minutes from now—I’ve got to go—with some guys from Washington.

  I suspect we’re about to shovel a whole bunch of dirt over the whole thing.”

  “That’s one way to handle it,” Sinclair said. “What about me?”

  “Hard to avoid the fact that you were helping out,” Virgil said. “People already know . . . lots of cops, probably some newspeople. Gonna be hard to make it go away. I suspect what will happen is that you’ll wind up on trial in one of those intelligence courts, the secret-testimony ones, and then . . . what it is, is what it is.”

  Sinclair bared his teeth. “I could get really fucked, if that happens,” he said.

  Virgil spread his hands. “Shouldn’t have signed up with them.”

  “There was pressure. I told you about my daughter,” Sinclair said. “They were gonna fuck me over with that whole thing about the agency. I’d lose my job at the university . . . I’d be cooked.”

  “Shit happens,” Virgil said.

  Sinclair grinned and said, “You’re a lot rougher than you look, Virgil. You look like some kind of rockabilly, straw-headed, woman-chasing country punk.”

  Virgil said, “Thank you.”

  “But you went and broke down the program, and shot a bunch of people up, and here you are, looking me in the face and telling me that I might be going to prison.”

  Virgil stood up. “I gotta go. I wanted to tell you about Mai.”