John Sandford - Heat Lightning

He’d talked to Utecht’s wife, Marilyn, three times, and even she didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about the man. His death had been more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, although, Virgil said to himself, that might be unfair. Marilyn may have been in the grip of some strong, hidden current of emotion that he simply hadn’t felt.

Or not.

Death had a strange effect on the left-behind people. Some found peace and a new life; some clutched the death to their breasts.

VIRGIL HAD KILLED a man the year before, and hadn’t quite gotten over it. He spoke with God about it some nights. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the killing might have made him a bit more sober than he had been, might have aged him a little.

On the other hand, here he was, tearing through the night, wearing a Bif Naked T-shirt and cowboy boots, with a guilty, semi-chafed dick. He made the turn on 36 and ran it up to a hundred and five. Willie Nelson came up on the satellite radio with “Gravedigger,” one of Virgil’s top-five Willie songs of all time, and he started to rock with it, singing along, and not badly, burning up the highway toward the lights of Stillwater.

HE GOT OFF AT Osgood Avenue and headed north, past the cemetery, through the dark streets, through a stop sign, without hesitating, over a hump toward a barricade and all the lights of the cops beyond. At the barricade, he held up his ID and a cop came over and looked at it, said, “It’s a mess,” and let him through. He rolled down a slope, found a hole in the pile of cop cars, stuck the truck into it, and climbed out.

There were cars from Washington County, Stillwater, Oak Park Heights, a fire truck, and even a cop car from Hudson, across the river in Wisconsin. No sign of the crime-scene van. Though it was coming up on four o’clock in the morning, local residents were clustering around the police barricades, chatting with the cops and each other, or standing on front lawns, looking down at the memorial. A number of them were carrying coffee cups, and when he got out of the truck, Virgil could smell coffee on the night air.

The courthouse was an old brown-brick relic with an Italianate cupola, sitting on a bump on a hill that looked down on the old river town. Virgil had been there once before, for a wedding out on the lawn-Civil War statue to one side, spires of the churches poking through the trees, narrow streets, clapboard houses from the days when the river was clogged with logs and made Stillwater temporarily rich.

Slightly down the bump from the courthouse, and across the street, the sixty-foot stainless-steel veterans’ memorial was glittering in the work lights set up by the firemen. In the middle of it, under a spear-pointed shaft reflective of the steeples down the hill, a gated fence, like the kind that gas-company workers set up around manholes, shielded the body from the public eye. Virgil walked on down, picked out a clump of big thick-chested men who looked like the local authority, and headed toward them.

One of the men, a square-shouldered fifty-year-old with a brush mustache, dressed in a rumpled suit, nodded at him, and asked, “You Virgil Flowers?”

“Yeah, I am,” Virgil said.

They shook hands, and the man said, “Tom Mattson,” and then gestured to the two men he’d been standing with and said, “Darryl Cunningham, Washington County chief deputy, and Jim Brandt, my assistant chief.”

Virgil shook their hands and noticed all three noticing his Bif Naked T-shirt and he didn’t explain it, because he didn’t do that. If they wanted to know, they could ask. “Where’s the crime-scene guys?”

Mattson shook his head, and Cunningham said, “There might have been some miscommunication. They didn’t get rolling as quick as they could.”

“A fuckin’ clown car would have been here by now,” Brandt fumed.

Cunningham said, “Hey, c’mon…” He was really saying, Not in front of the state guy.

“It happens,” Virgil said, letting everybody off the hook. “Mind if I take a look?”

THEY WALKED DOWN to the utility fence as a group, Mattson filling him in on how the body had been found. “He was out walking his dog, a German shepherd. The dog was shot right between the eyes. It’s down below, there.”

“Takes a good shot to kill a big shepherd with one round,” Virgil said.

“Especially since, if you missed, the dog would eat your ass alive. The girlfriend says it was security-trained.”

The utility fence was hip-high and consisted of two overlapping C-shaped metal frames covered with canvas panels. A space between the Cs allowed the cops to come and go. The fence was ten feet back from the body. Virgil stepped through the space between the two arcs of fence, watching where he put his feet, and eased up close enough to see the bullet wounds in Sanderson’s head; bullet wounds with some burn and debris. The muzzle of the gun hadn’t been more than an inch or two from Sanderson’s forehead.

A quarter of a lemon was visible between the victim’s thin lips, clenched by yellowed teeth. Sanderson looked like he was in his late fifties or early sixties. He had rough, square hands; a workingman’s hands.

The killing looked exactly like the Utecht murder. Virgil stared at the body for another ten seconds, was about to turn away when he noticed a hard curve in the jogging suit, slightly under the body.

He looked back over his shoulder: “So the crime-scene guys know, I’m going to touch his suit.” He checked the concrete between himself and the body to make sure he wouldn’t disturb anything, then duckwalked forward a couple of feet, reached out, and touched the hard curve. Shook his head, stood up.

“What?” Mattson asked.

“He’s got a gun in his pocket,” Virgil said.

“Are you shitting me?”

“No. I could feel the cylinder cuts,” Virgil said. “You might want to check and see if he’s got a carry permit, and if he does, when he got it.”

“That means… he knew something was coming.”

“Maybe,” Virgil said.

“CRIME SCENE’S HERE,” Cunningham said, looking back up the street.

Virgil stepped away, back to the fence, and out, and Mattson asked, “What do you think?”

“Same as New Ulm. The gunshots look identical. A.22, from two inches. One difference-Sanderson’s got some abrasions on his neck, like he was choked. Didn’t see that at New Ulm. But the lemon’s not public, yet, and that pretty much ties it up.”

“Some of the media know about the lemon,” Mattson said. “I had Linda Bennett from KSTP, she asked me if there was a lemon in his mouth.”

“Yeah, some of them know. We asked them not to report it. But they’ll be connecting the dots, the veterans’ memorial,” Virgil said, looking up at the hoops and struts of the memorial. “I hope we can hold the line on the lemon. Don’t need any copycats.”

“You actually know of any copycats?” Cunningham asked. He seemed genuinely curious.

Virgil grinned and said, “No, but I’ve seen them on TV shows.”

“Speaking of which,” Mattson said. Virgil looked up the hill and saw a white SUV do a U-turn at the barricade. A logo on the door said WCCO.

“I’m surprised they took so long,” Virgil said. “You guys ought to take five minutes to think about who’s going to say what. The whole bunch of them will be down here, and they’ll be all over you.”

They all looked over the fence at the body, which looked a little like a scarecrow, deflated and dead, and Brandt asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Wish you could tell me,” Virgil said. The crime-scene van was squeezing down the hill, and a cop car had to be moved so it could get past.

“You all through here?” Cunningham asked.

“Yeah-nothing much for me to do,” Virgil said. “I ain’t Sherlock Holmes.”