John Sandford - Heat Lightning

Not like she had a mouth on her.

Virgil fumbled for the phone, peered at the view-screen, hoping against hope that the call was from an 888 number, but it wasn’t.

Lucas Davenport. Virgil said aloud, “It’s Davenport.”

“That’s not good,” Janey said. She was a cop groupie and knew what a late-night call meant. Her last husband, Small, worked vice in St. Paul. Janey said he’d picked up some entertaining tips on the job, but unfortunately was deeply enmeshed in his model-train hobby, and when he began building the Rock Island Line in the living room, she moved out.

In any case, she knew Lucas. “So answer it.”

He did. “Yeah, Lucas,” Virgil said into the cell phone.

“You sound like you’re already awake,” Lucas said.

“Just getting ready for bed,” Virgil said. “I’m kinda beat up.”

“No, he isn’t,” Janey shouted. “He’s over here fuckin’ me.”

“Who was that?” Lucas asked. “Was that Janey Carter?”

“Ah, man,” Virgil said. “It’s Janey Small now. She got married to Greg Small over at St. Paul. They broke up.”

“There’s a surprise,” Lucas said. “Listen: get out to Stillwater. The Stillwater cops have a body at a veterans’ memorial. With a lemon.”

“What?” He swung his feet over the edge of the bed. “Two shots to the head?”

“Exactly,” Lucas said. “They’d like to move the body before the TV people get onto it. It looks exactly like Utecht, and you’re the guy. Tom Mattson is the chief out there, he called operations and they yanked me out of bed.”

“Okay, okay,” Virgil said. “I might need some backup. This could get ugly.”

“Yeah, I know-and I’m heading into D.C. tomorrow for more convention stuff. Del ’s going with me, the feds are briefing us on the counterculture people. You can have Shrake and Jenkins if you need them. I’ll be on my cell phone if you need some weight, and I’ll leave a note for Rose Marie.”

“Okay.”

“You gotta move on this,” Lucas said. “Take your gun with you.”

“I’m on my way. I’m putting on my boots,” Virgil said. “I got my gun right here.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said, and he was gone.

Janey said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

THREE-THIRTY in the morning, running not that late, he thought, ninety-five miles an hour east out of St. Paul, on an empty I-94, his grille lights flashing red and blue, hair wet from a shower, but feeling tacky in yesterday’s T-shirt, underwear, and jeans. Thumbed his cell, ramped up the exit onto I-694, got the operations duty guy, got a phone number for the Stillwater chief of police, punched it in, got the guy at the scene.

“Mattson,” the chief said.

“Hey-Virgil Flowers, BCA. I’m getting there fast as I can. I’m on 694 coming up to 36. You shut down the scene?”

“Yeah, we shut off the whole block,” Mattson said. “No TV yet, but there probably will be. People are coming out of their houses.”

“Was the guy on the ground, or do you have some kind of display?”

“He’s sitting up, leaning back against one of these memorial slab-things,” Mattson said. “We put a construction screen around him so there won’t be any photos. I guess Davenport probably told you about the lemon.”

“Yeah, he did,” Virgil said. “Who found him?”

“One of our guys. Sanderson-victim’s name is Bobby Sanderson- went out to walk the dog and didn’t come back,” Mattson said. “His old lady got worried and called in and we rolled a car around his route. Not like he was hidden or anything. He was right there, in the lights. Something going on with his old lady, though. She’s got a story you need to listen to.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “You think she had a hand in it?”

“No, no. I’m sure she didn’t,” Mattson said. “She’s a pretty messed-up ol’ gal. But something was going on with Sanderson. He might’ve known the killer.”

“Be there in ten minutes,” Virgil said. “You’re up on the hill, by the old courthouse?”

“Right there. We got coffee coming.”

VIRGIL WAS MEDIUM-TALL and lanky, mid-thirties, weathered, with blond hair worn on his shoulders, too long for a cop. He’d once sported an earring, but after two weeks decided that he looked like an asshole and got rid of it.

He’d been a high school jock, and played university-level baseball for a couple of years. When he didn’t show up for the third year, the coaches hadn’t beaten his door down. Good on defense, with a strong arm from third base, he just couldn’t see a college-level fastball, and was hitting.190 at the end of his second season.

He’d also picked up on the fact that the slender, brown-haired, big-boobed literature students, the ones who turned his crank, didn’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, didn’t know Mike Schmidt from Willie Mays, but could tell you anything you wanted to know about Jean-Paul Sartre or those other French guys. Derrida. Foucault. Whatever.

Virgil drifted through college, changing majors a couple of times, and wound up with a degree in ecological science. The demand for ecologists wasn’t that great when he got out of school, so he volunteered for Army Officer Candidate School. He’d been thinking infantry, but the army made him an MP. Got in some fights, but never shot at anyone.

Back in civilian life, there still wasn’t much demand for ecologists, so he hooked up with the St. Paul cops. After a few years of that, he moved along to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, pulled in by Lucas Davenport, a political appointee and the BCA’s semi-official wild hair. When he came over, Davenport had told him that they’d put him on the hard stuff. And they did.

VIRGILWAS A WRITER in his spare time; or, on occasion, got his reporting done by taking a few hours of undertime.

A lifelong outdoorsman, he wrote for a variety of hook-and-bullet magazines, enough that he was becoming a regular at some of them and was making a name. He told people it was for the extra money, but he loved seeing his byline on a story, his credit line on a photograph-and he loved it when somebody came up at a sports show and asked, “Are you the Virgil Flowers who wrote that musky article in Gray’s ?”

He loved pushing out on a stream, or a lake, at 5:30 on a cool summer morning with the sun on the horizon and the steam coming off the still water. He liked still-hunting for deer, ghosting through the woods with the snow falling down around him, shifting through the pines…

Virgil’s home base was in the south Minnesota town of Mankato, and he worked the counties generally south and west of the Twin Cities metro area, down to the Iowa line, out west to South Dakota. That had been changing, and Davenport had been pulling him into the metro area more often. Virgil had an astonishing clearance rate with the BCA, as he’d had with the St. Paul cops.

Nobody, including Virgil, knew exactly how he did it, but it seemed to derive from a combination of hanging out on the corner, bullshit, rumor, skepticism, luck, and possibly prayer. Davenport liked it because it worked.

THIS CASE HAD BEGUN in the town of New Ulm, right in the heart of Virgil’s home territory, when a man named Chuck Utecht had turned up dead and mutilated at the foot of the local veterans’ monument. He had a lemon in his mouth and had been shot twice in the head with a.22-caliber pistol. The.22 was a target shooter’s piece, or a stone-cold killer’s. It was not the kind of gun that a man would keep for self-protection or as a carry weapon. That was interesting.

Virgil had spent much of the two weeks going in and out of the Brown County Law Enforcement Center, working with the New Ulm cops and Brown County sheriff’s deputies, doing interviews, pushing the little bits of evidence around, looking for somebody who might hate Utecht enough to kill him. At the end of the two weeks, he’d been thinking about checking out the local food stores, to see who’d been buying lemons-at that point, he had zip. Nada. Nothing. Utecht had run a title company; who hates a title company?