Heat Lightning

13

VIRGIL SLEPT until ten o’clock, when Davenport called. “Where are you?”

“About to leave the motel. I slept a little late,” he said, sitting up in bed, scrubbing at his tangled hair.

“You gonna go talk to Shirley?” Shirley Knox was Carl Knox’s oldest daughter.

“That’s the plan,” Virgil said. They’d worked it out the night before. First the push from Shrake, then another push from Virgil.

“I’ll be running around with Rose Marie putting out brush fires,” Virgil said. “We’re pretty much guaranteeing people that it’ll all be over in a week. They just don’t want it to slop over into the convention.”

“Good going,” Virgil said.

“Hey, no pressure-if you can’t produce, we can always turn it over to the FBI.”

A USED Caterpillar 988B rubber-tire front-end loader, with a spade-nosed bucket, repainted and updated, sat on a patch of grass in front of Knox Equipment. A hand-lettered sign in the bucket said, in large black letters, “New Front Differential!” and under that, in smaller letters, “6000 hrs.”

A hard-faced, dark-haired young woman was behind the counter. Virgil walked in, sniffing at the odor of diesel fuel, scuffing his boot heels. The woman had one yellow pencil behind her ear and another in her hand, and was focused on a stack of invoices and a hand calculator. On the wall behind her were two color portrait photos, with a sign that read, “Our owners.” Under a picture of a square-faced man, a label said, “Carl.” The other picture, of the woman behind the counter, said, “Shirley.”

Shirley didn’t look up for a minute as Virgil waited at the counter. Her lips were moving, and then she jotted a number on an invoice and looked up and smiled and said, “Sorry. You caught me in the middle. Are you Dave?” She had one slightly crooked front top tooth, and the smile and the tooth gave her a sudden snaky charm.

“Nope. I’m Virgil. I’m looking for Mr. Knox.”

“Dad isn’t here,” she said. “If I could help you?”

Virgil shook his head, pulled his ID out, and said, “I really need to talk to him.”

She looked vexed. “I talked to Officer Shrake yesterday. I explained all this.”

“He’s out taking photographs,” Virgil said.

“That’s correct,” she said.

“Look-you, me, and all the wise guys on the corner, we all know that Carl is a big fat crook.”

“That’s not right…” She was sputtering, but faking it.

Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not recording anything, so you can save the act. We all know he’s a crook, we all know he’s hiding out because of these guys getting killed, and-I want to emphasize this, so you can tell him when you call him on your clean cell phone-we know why. Tell him we know all about the job in Da Nang, about stealing the bulldozers, and we don’t care. Now. If he doesn’t call me on my cell phone, we’re going to put out a press release that says we’re looking for Carl Knox in connection with these murders, and the TV stations will be on you like Holy on the Pope. So call him, tell him that, tell him Davenport doesn’t think he’s the killer, and tell him we need to talk.”

“I’m telling you, I have no way of reaching him,” she said, but she was lying through her teeth, and Virgil could see it, and she could see him seeing it. She smiled at him again, acknowledging all the knowing.

“Great. But when you call him, tell him that.” Virgil snapped a business card down on the counter. “My phone number.”

As Virgil turned to leave, she said, “He really is a photographer.”

He stopped. “So am I. Is your dad any good?”

“Pretty good.” She pointed to some big black-and-white prints hung along one wall, photos of old combines rusting in farm fields.

Virgil went over to look; they were okay, he thought, but not great. “Terrific shots,” he said. He looked at them in a way he hoped was pensive, then drifted back to the counter and said, “Listen. I know you don’t like us sniffing around, but I think your old man is in deep shit. Deeper than he might know. He better call us.”

“I’m telling you…”

“Okay, okay-I’m just sayin’.”

As he was going out the door, she called after him, “That Officer Shrake-does he work with you?”

“Sometimes,” Virgil said. “He give you a hard time?”

“No, not at all. He was quite charming,” she said.

“Shrake?”

“Yes. I was just thinking… what an attractive man he was.”

KNOX EQUIPMENT was in the far northwest of the metro area, off I-94, the better to send stolen equipment up the line to Canada. Virgil fought the traffic back into town, and when he hit Minneapolis, pulled the phone out of his pocket and called the Sinclairs’ apartment. No answer. He called Sandy and said, “I’ll be at Wigge’s house in twenty minutes.”

“I’m in my car, on the way,” she said.

A BCA INVESTIGATOR named Benson had been sent out to the house when Virgil reported the murders at the rest stop, had checked it for anything obvious, and had then sealed it. Benson had given the key to Sandy.

Sandy was sitting on the front porch with a white cat sitting next to her. The cat reflexively crouched, ready to run, when Virgil got out of his truck, but Sandy said “kitty” and scratched it between the ears, and the cat relaxed and stuck out its tongue.

“Virgil,” Sandy said. She stood up, and the cat jumped down along the foundation, behind some arborvitae, and Sandy dusted off her butt. She was a latter-day hippie and carried an aura of shyness, which was starting to wear since she went to work for Davenport. She wore glasses, which apparently made her self-conscious, and when she was talking to Virgil she often took them off, which left her moon-eyed with nearsightedness. She was carrying a laptop. Virgil pulled off a seal, and she followed him through the door, and inside, they both paused to look around in the dry unnatural stillness. Owner dead. They could feel it coming from the walls.

“Must be a computer somewhere,” Virgil said. They found a den, with bookshelves stuffed with junk paper-travel brochures, golf pamphlets, phone books, road maps, security-industry manuals and catalogs, gun books. The computer, a Sony, sat in the middle of it. Sandy brought it up, clicked into it. “Password,” she said.

“Can you get into it?”

“Yeah, but I have to go around…” She began hooking the computer to her laptop, and Virgil started pulling the drawers on two file cabinets. In ten minutes, Sandy was going through the computer files and Virgil had found both a will and six years of income tax records.

Wigge had retired from the St. Paul force when he was fifty and had been with Paladin ever since; he was a vice president of the personal services division. In the previous year, he’d made $220,000 from all sources. One of the sources was better than two million dollars in investments, most of which were already in place in the earliest income tax records.

Someplace along the line, and it couldn’t have been many years after leaving the police force, he’d had a windfall-but those years were the big tech-bubble years of the late nineties, so it was possible that he’d accumulated the money through either luck or intelligence.

His estate went to two sisters, one of whom lived in Florida, the other in Texas. Virgil didn’t know whether they’d be notified of Wigge’s death; notification wasn’t his problem. Total estate, including the house, would push past three million.

“Not bad for a cop,” Virgil told Sandy. “Anything in the computer?”

“Business e-mails. They did a lot of celebrity business. Concerts. Not much personal stuff. I haven’t seen anything from your names-Utecht or Sanderson or Bunton or Knox.”

“Anything that looks like anything-write the name down. Or print it.”

Virgil began prowling the house and found a couple of phone numbers written on a Post-it pad next to the kitchen phone. One of the numbers was for Sanderson; the other was a northern Minnesota area code, and he got no answer when he called it. Red Lake? Had he been trying to reach Bunton?

He copied the unknown number into his notebook and moved on. Found a loaded.357 Magnum in a kitchen towel drawer. Found another one, identical to the first, in a side table in a bedroom that had been converted into a TV room, with a massive LCD television. A third one, just like the first two, in a bedstand in the master bedroom.

The bedroom also had a steel door, and a waist-high, pale yellow wainscoting on all the visible walls. When Virgil rapped the wainscoting with a knuckle, he found steel plate. So the bedroom, in addition to being fashionable, was also bulletproof. He pulled back the curtains and found a mesh screen over both windows. Wigge had been ready for a minor firefight, but the work wasn’t new: he’d been ready for years.

Sandy called: “He’s got an address book here. Contacts.”

“Print it out.”

He found a briefcase in the back hallway, looked in it: black address book, checkbook, pens, notepad, sunglasses, Tums, Chap Stick, a one-inch plastic ring-binder with upcoming security assignments.

He scanned the address book, but none of his names were in it. He found three numbers for Ralph Warren, owner of Paladin, Wigge’s boss. Virgil put the phone book in his pocket.

THEY WORKED AT IT for three hours, piling up paper-Sandy running the computer files through Wigge’s printer, the loose stuff through his tabletop Xerox machine. When they were done, they had a stack of paper three inches thick, everything from tax records to receipts.

“I’m not sure it means a thing,” he told Sandy over bagels and cream cheese at a local bagel place. “The whole thing may fly back to Vietnam, right over the top of all this stuff with Warren. Just because he was a crook doesn’t mean that had anything to do with him getting shot.”

“Yes, it does,” she said. “He went to Vietnam to steal bulldozers. He was a crook back then, and one way or the other, he got shot because he was a crook.”

“You’re such a charitable soul,” Virgil said.

“In some ways,” she said, and sort of wiggled her eyebrows at him.

“You know, Sandy, sometimes…” He thought better of it. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Ah, never mind.”

“Chicken.”

THEY SAT chewing for a moment, and then Sandy said, “If you think this Knox guy is moving around, then, you know, I don’t know what you could do about it. But what if he has a place somewhere?”

“You mean, a hideout?”

“Sure,” she said. “He’s a rich crook, there might be people looking for him sometimes.”

“Okay. How do we find a hideout?”

She shrugged. “If you’ve got a hideout, you pay property taxes on it. If you pay property taxes, and if you’re greedy, you deduct the taxes from your income taxes, even if you want to keep the place secret. If you deduct from your income taxes, there’ll be a tax form.”

“Can we look at tax files?” Virgil asked.

“Absolutely.”

VIRGIL CHECKED his watch when they got out of the bagel place: 1 P.M. What next?

“I’ll drop you at your car, then I’m going to run around for a bit and then head back to the office to look at the phone numbers from Knox’s place. Look at those tax records.”

“Yup,” she said. “Soon as I get back.”

He dropped her at her car in front of Wigge’s place. He called Sinclair, got no answer, and swung by, since he was so close. Rang the bell, still no answer.

“Shoot.” Scuffed back down the sidewalk, looking up and down the street, hoping to see Mai, but didn’t. He stalled, but finally got back in his truck and drove across town to the office.

AT DAVENPORT’S SUGGESTION, Virgil had a computerized pen register hooked into the phones at Shirley Knox’s house, at Carl Knox’s house, at the business, and for both of their cell phones; and had gotten a warrant delivered to the phone company for lists of calls made by the Knoxes’ known phones.

Though, he thought, if they were really a bunch of crooks, they probably had unregistered phones, pay-as-you-go, which were cheap at Wal-Mart. Benson, the guy who’d sealed Wigge’s house, was compiling the numbers from the Knoxes. Virgil stopped by his office: “Anything interesting?”

He shrugged, tapped on his computer for a moment, then printed out a list of numbers. “This is what we got. Numbers. It’s a pretty big business-the numbers I’ve been able to find all go out to places that a heavy-equipment operator might call. But there are some that I couldn’t tell you who the people are… but none of them’s name is Knox.”

Virgil checked the numbers against the number from Wigge’s pad: nothing matched.

“Well, keep piling them up,” Virgil said. “I’m done at the house, if you want to take a team over.”

SANDY CALLED HIM on his cell phone as he was walking up to Davenport ’s office. “Where are you?”

“About thirty feet down the hall,” he said.

She hung up and stuck her head out of Davenport ’s office. “Carl Knox has a cabin,” she said. “What was that number you found at Wigge’s? Was it up north?”

“Yup. You got Knox’s number?”

“Yes, but it’s not under his name-it’s under one of his daughter’s names, Patricia Ann Knox-Miller. But the cabin is his. He deducts the taxes.”

“What’s the number?” He opened his notebook as she read out the number for the cabin.

“That’s weird,” he said when she’d finished.

“What?”

“That’s the number,” he said. He looked up at her. “We found the hideout.”

VIRGIL CALLED the number again, and once again failed to get an answer. Since he had the phone in his hand, he called the Sinclair number again, and this time, Mead Sinclair picked up the phone.

“I’d like to talk to you; I’ve got a Vietnam story for you,” Virgil said.

“Always happy to hear Vietnam stories,” Sinclair said. “Especially the ones where the American imperialist running-dogs get their comeuppance.”

Virgil thought about that for a second, then said, “I bet you really pissed a lot of people off in your day.”

“You have no idea,” Sinclair said. “When are you coming over?”

“Right now.”

“ARE YOU going north?” Sandy asked.

“Probably-but right now, I’m going over to the Sinclairs’. Could you get some plat books and spot Knox’s place for me? Just send it to my e-mail.”

“When are you going?”

“Don’t know,” Virgil said.

“I was thinking of going dancing tonight,” Sandy said. “If you’re around, we’ll be at the Horse’s Head.”

“ Sandy, you know…”

“What?”

“If I went dancing with you, I don’t think Lucas would like it,” Virgil said. “We’re in the same group.”

“Don’t get your honey where you get your money,” she said, one fist on her hip.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Virgil said. “But-think about it.”

“I refuse to think about it,” she said. “You think about it, when you’re driving your lonely ass up to some godforsaken cabin in the North Woods.”

“ Sandy…”

VIRGIL WANTED to check with Davenport in person, but Carol, his secretary, said he was in his third crisis meeting at the Department of Public Safety downtown. “He’ll be completely insane by the time he gets back. I know he wants to see you. He wants to make sure there’s not a boat on the back of your truck.”

“I’ll be back,” Virgil said.

In the hallway, he ran into Shrake, who was coming down the hall carrying a tennis racket with a cannonball-sized hole through the face of it, the strings hanging free. Virgil didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “Hey-Shirley Knox sorta liked your looks.”

“Yeah?” Shrake said. “I sorta liked hers, too.”

“Gotta be careful,” Virgil said.

“I’m cool,” Shrake said. “So, uh… what’d she say about me?”

THE DAY WAS getting away from him, he thought, sliding from afternoon into evening as he got to Sinclair’s apartment. Sinclair was barefoot, wearing white cotton slacks and a black silk shirt open at the throat. “Mai’s not here,” he said. “We should be able to talk in peace and quiet.”

“She dancing?”

“Grocery shopping. She’s running around somewhere, looking for a particular kind of food store. Some place that has seafood and weird spices.”

“Gorgeous and a good cook.”

Sinclair laughed. “She taught herself to cook fourteen things really well. Two weeks of dinners. Every other Wednesday, rain or shine, we have Korean bulgogi. Not bad. But today is okra gumbo day. Good gumbo, but you know, sometimes I’ll wake up on gumbo day and I think I can’t look another okra in the face… I can’t tell her that, of course.” He led the way to the back porch and his stack of papers. “What’s your Vietnam story?”

Virgil laid it out: the theft of the bulldozers, the shoot-out at the house, the deaths of the men in the circle of thieves.

“That’s a great story, Virgil,” Sinclair said, sitting back in a lounge chair, fingers knitted behind his head. “The business about the shooting in the house. The murders. That was a wild time-you think this could be a comeback?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said.

“I did some research on you, you know, after you picked up that line from Virgil,” Sinclair said. “You’re a writer.”

“I write outdoor stuff,” Virgil said.

“Hey-I read that story about the moose hunt up in the Boundary Waters, and packing that moose out in the canoes. That’s good stuff, Virgil. There’s a great American tradition of outdoor writing, of exactly that kind. Teddy Roosevelt did it,” he said, and Virgil got red in the face, flushing, pleased by the flattery, had to admit it.

Sinclair let him marinate in his ego for a moment, then continued: “Anyway, this Vietnam story, what you just told me. If you could get Bunton to repeat that, or any of them to repeat that, if they’d go on the record-and if there’s a connection going back to those old days-I could put you in touch with a guy on the New York Times Magazine. They’d buy it in a minute.”

“You think so?”

“I’ve been publishing for forty years in those kinds of magazines-they’d buy it,” Sinclair said. “I mean, aside from the facts of the matter, it’s a terrific story. A bunch of American rednecks flying into Vietnam as the place goes up in flames, to steal millions of bucks’ worth of bulldozers? Are you kidding me? Keep your notes, buddy.”

Virgil nodded. “But what do you think about the story?”

Sinclair ran his tongue over his lower lip, then shook his head. “I’ve worked with the Vietnamese for a long time. They can be a subtle bunch of people and they know how to nurse a grudge. On the other hand, they can be the biggest bunch of homeboy hicks that you could imagine. So I suppose it’s possible that there’s a Vietnamese connection…”

“But you don’t believe it.”

Sinclair shrugged. “I didn’t say that. Millions of people were killed back then. Millions. Whatever happened in that house, however bad it was… was nothing. And the lemon thing. That’s pretty obvious. It’s like a flag to attract your attention. Have you thought about the possibility that it’s coming from another direction?”

“Yeah, I have,” Virgil said. “I’ve even got a guy I’m thinking about. But I don’t want to take my eye off the Vietnamese connection, either.”

“Which is why you were harassing Tai and Phem.”

“Checked them out-they seem like they’re on the up-and-up,” Virgil said. “That’s what the Canadians tell us, anyway. But who knows? They could be some kind of crazed Vietnamese hit team.”

Sinclair nodded. “They could be. On the other hand, they could just be a couple of gooks who got lucky and were born in Canada instead of a reeducation camp.”

“You still pissed about that?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “And they’re still pissed at me. They don’t believe that I didn’t tell you about them.”

Mai came back carrying two big grocery sacks, plunked them on the counter; she was wearing a simple white blouse and blue jeans, and looked terrific. She even looked like she smelled terrific, but when Virgil sniffed, he smelled raw crab. She asked, “Can you stay for dinner?”

Virgil thought about the okra. Okra is essentially a squid that grows in the ground instead of swimming in the ocean. He said, “I can’t. I’m looking for a guy. Wouldn’t mind walking you around the block, though.”

“You should ask my daddy if it’s okay.”

“REALLY BORED,” she said. They ambled along, and somewhere down the block she took hold of a couple of his fingers, and they went the rest of the way hand in hand. “ St. Paul would be a nice place to live if you had something to do. I don’t have anything to do.”

“There’s always sex,” Virgil said. “You’re away from home, where nobody knows you. You could indulge all your sexual fantasies and nobody would ever find out.”

“But who would I sleep with?”

“We could put a notice in the paper, ask for volunteers.”

“Did you ever find that guy you were looking for?” she asked.

“Yes, I did. He told me a strange story, which I just told to daddy. Something weird is going on. But I’ll crack it,” Virgil said.

“You think?”

“These things have a rhythm,” Virgil said. “You get something going… it’s like a plot in a novel. You start out with an incident, a killing, and there are millions of possibilities, and you start eliminating the possibilities. Pretty soon, you can see the line of the story and you can feel the climax coming. We’re not there yet, but I can feel it. It’s taking form.”

“Be careful,” she said. “This whole thing is pretty creepy.”

BACK AT THE apartment, inside, at their door, she said, “You’re sure you can’t stay?”

“Got to move along,” Virgil said; but he took a minute to kiss her. Didn’t exactly catch her by surprise, but he felt a second of what might have been resistance, which surprised him, because they’d been getting along and he rarely miscalculated in these kinds of things-Sandy, for example, you wouldn’t feel her stiffen up-and then Mai melted into him and the kiss got long and his hand drifted to her backside…

“We gotta find a place,” she said. She patted his chest. “The other night when I was sitting on your back… I got pretty warm.”

“Well, I know a cabin over in Wisconsin,” Virgil said. “We could go up for the day… but today and tonight, I’m working. I’m hunting for this guy-”

“ Wisconsin. Let’s go soon. I mean, I really need to go soon.”

VIRGIL LEFT HER at the door and headed back to the motel, checked his e-mail.

Sandy had sent along a PDF file of a large-scale plat map, with an arrow pointing at the precise location of Knox’s cabin on the Rainy River outside of International Falls, two hundred yards from Canada. A strange place for a cabin, for anyone else-but maybe not for a guy who did a lot of business there and might want to cross over without all the bureaucratic hassle of the border.

He called Davenport to tell him what he’d found out during the day.

When Virgil had finished, Davenport said, “I can’t deal with this anymore. I got a tip that some real trouble is headed this way, and I need to work it. Nothing to do with Knox or your killings.”

“Okay. Well, it’s gonna break, I think.”

“You going to International Falls?”

“Yeah. You know it?”

“I played hockey up there a few times when I was in high school,” Davenport said. “It’s a long way. Maybe you oughta see if you could get the Patrol to fly you up there-rent a car when you get there.”

“Ah, I’m thinking about driving up tonight,” Virgil said. “Get a few hours’ sleep. The day’s shot anyway, might as well drive. I could hit Knox’s place first thing in the morning.”

“Your call,” Davenport said. “I got problems of my own. Just get this thing done with.”

VIRGIL SET HIS alarm clock, and crashed. He woke at nine o’clock, scrubbed his mouth out, got his stuff together, and headed for the truck.

He always had fishing gear with him. He could drive for five hours, bag out at a backwoods motel, rent a boat at a resort in the morning, get in a couple hours on the water, and still make it to International Falls before noon.

Another good night to drive.