Heat Lightning

15

THE NIGHT was full of stars and night lights, like a Van Gogh painting, and Virgil followed the red taillights of a million cars headed toward cabin country. He got off at the I-35 rest stop where Wigge had been shot and David Ross was killed, to take a leak at the restroom and to look at the scene again. There was no sign of a murder, and a young couple and two children were sitting at the pavilion in back, near the murder scene, eating white-bread sandwiches in the light of a fluorescent camping lantern.

On the way out the exit ramp, a tall thin blond kid with a backpack stuck his thumb out, and Virgil pulled over and popped the door. “Where you going?”

“ Duluth. Trying to get a ship out.”

“I can take you most of the way,” Virgil said.

The kid looked at all the lights on the dash as he settled down and asked, “Are you a police officer?”

“Yeah.”

“I know I’m not supposed to hitchhike along here-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Virgil said. “Not many roads out here that I didn’t hitchhike over.”

The kid, whose name was Don, had come off a farm outside of Blooming Prairie, had done a year at the University of Minnesota, working nights at UPS, throwing boxes, and finally realized that the whole thing wasn’t for him.

“I was too tired to read, and the university… the place is sunk in bullshit,” he said. “I tried to figure out how long it would take me to get through, and it might take me six years, going full time, because there’s so much bullshit that you can’t even figure out ahead of time what you need to take to graduate.”

Virgil had gone to the university, and they talked about that and looked at the stars, and the kid confessed that he had all three volumes of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. in his pack, and had read them so often that they were falling apart, and that he had just started Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and that he couldn’t get over the second paragraph.

He quoted part of it from memory: “In the offing the sea and sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”

“ London,” he said. “I’d give my left nut to go to London.”

“You got a ship for sure?” Virgil asked.

“I got a guy who says he’s got one, for sure. I’m probably gonna be lifting weight, but I don’t care-heck, I grew up on a dairy farm. There’s no ship that could be harder than that.”

Virgil thought he was probably right, and wished for a moment that he was going with him.

He dropped the kid at the I-35 intersection east of Moose Lake and cut cross-country to the west, thinking about the lakes he knew, and where he might bag out for the night, and still get a good couple of hours on the water before he had to move in the morning.

The lights of Duluth were fading off the far eastern horizon when his cell phone rang. He glanced at it, saw that it came from the northern Minnesota area code, thought Ray, and then Ray’s gonna tell me something…

He flipped open the phone and a man on the other end said, “Virgil Flowers? This is Rudy Bunch. The Red Lake cop?”

The young one. Virgil said, “Hey. How’s it going?”

“Not so good, man. We’re in deep shit up here. We’ve got a dead cop and Ray’s gone.”

Virgil peered into the dark; it was something like an embolism-part of his brain shut down for a minute. Then: “What?”

“Somebody shot Olen Grey on the side of the road. He was watching Ray. Ray’s gone,” Bunch said.

“Ray shot him?”

“We don’t know what happened, but… I think maybe somebody took Ray. We’re calling both the state and the feds. Where are you at? St. Paul?”

“No, no, I’m heading your way, I’m over by Grand Rapids,” Virgil said. He was still befuddled. “Man, what’re you telling me here? When was this? Have you closed down the roads?”

“No. We’re pretty sure it happened an hour and a half ago. Olen and Ray were going to buy groceries and Ray’s mom saw them leave. Then a guy named Tom Broad was driving out and he saw Olen’s car sitting kind of in a ditch, and he thought that was strange, but it was a cop car, so he didn’t do nothin’. Then he was driving back out to his house and saw the car still sitting there, so he stopped and looked and he could see Olen dead in the front seat. He called us, and… that’s what happened. There’s blood on the passenger side and there’s bullet holes in the passenger-side window, and shit, I think somebody took Ray.”

“Goddamnit. Listen, have you got a veterans’ memorial there?”

“We got a flagpole with an MIA flag,” Bunch said.

“Have somebody check it, see if they can find a body,” Virgil said. “You say you’ve got the state coming in? You mean us? The BCA?”

“Yeah, the crime lab,” Bunch said.

“Okay, freeze it… I’ll be there quick as I can.”

“What about Ray?”

“I think Ray’s gone,” Virgil said.

CHARLES WHITING, the BCA agent-in-charge at Bemidji, said he’d sent the crime-scene crew and had been about to call St. Paul looking for Virgil. He said he would call the local cities, to have them check and then watch the veterans’ monuments.

“We can do the crime scene, but this is gonna be a federal case. The FBI has two guys on the way from Duluth,” Whiting said. “There might be some question about why we arrested Bunton and then turned him loose, and he gets killed the next day…”

“I’ve got some questions about that myself,” Virgil said. “I haven’t been to Red Lake for five years, but unless it’s changed, it’s a mess of roads and tracks, and how in the hell did the killer find him? How? The whole point of going up there is that nobody could find him if he didn’t want to be found.”

“Well-I don’t know. You left him at his mother’s house.”

“Yeah, but, she has a different last name,” Virgil said. “They didn’t look him up in the phone book.”

“No. She doesn’t have a wired phone, anyway, so that wasn’t it. You know, Virgil, I don’t know how they found him. But I will start pushing that question with the Red Lake cops.”

“Do that,” Virgil said. “Bunton had to be under observation. I thought the deal was everybody could spot an outsider in a minute.”

“I’ll push it. How far out are you?”

“I don’t know exactly, I’m somewhere out in the dark, on 2, south of Grand Rapids. Coming fast as I can…”

“You be careful up there in Red Lake. Olen Grey was a pretty popular guy, and they… you know. They’re gonna be looking for somebody to blame,” Whiting said. “We’ve had some problems, even before your stunt the other night. Some of the drug task-force guys went up there, undercover, and got their asses kicked out. They were told if they came back, they’d be arrested.”

“I’ll take care.”

ANOTHER TEN MINUTES, and Rudy Bunch called: “Nothing at the flagpole. Nobody’s seen anything there.”

“Okay. Chuck Whiting is calling the other towns around, telling them to keep an eye out,” Virgil told him.

“If we don’t find him, that’s good, right? There wasn’t too much blood in the car, on the passenger side. Ray might not have been hurt that bad.”

Virgil thought about the bag full of Wigge’s finger joints. “I don’t know, Rudy. I don’t know. I got a real bad feeling.”

HE WENT THROUGH Grand Rapids with lights and siren and never did slow down, heading northwest in the dark, and then Whiting called again. “They found him. Here in Bemidji. At the veterans’ monument on Birchmont Drive. Got the lemon in the mouth. Shot in the heart and the legs.”

“Any sign that he was interrogated?”

“No; he’s got some fingernails ripped loose, but it looks like he was fighting. Looks like he got the killer by the coat.”

“DNA?” Virgil asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t know anything but what I told you. I’m in my car, on the way over there. You know, the other night, when you guys went for the walk?”

“Yeah?”

“You must’ve walked right past the monument,” Whiting said. “It’s right there, where you guys were.”

VIRGIL WENT and looked at the body, another puddle of light with cops, but there was nothing to see other than Bunton’s distorted face. A local television reporter tried to get him to talk, but he referred everything to Whiting, said good-bye to the agent, and headed on north to Red Lake. As he crossed the line, he called Rudy Bunch on his cell phone, and Bunch said that Louis Jarlait would meet him in Red Lake.

JARLAIT FLAGGED HIM down outside the Red Lake Criminal Justice Center, said, “Follow me,” got in his own truck, and led Virgil through a profound darkness into the woods. Two or three miles out of town, Virgil saw the lights coming up: ten or fifteen cars lined up along the road, cops standing around.

They parked and climbed out, and Jarlait had a lollipop in his mouth and asked, “You want a sucker? Chocolate?”

“Sure.” Jarlait got a Tootsie Pop out of his truck, and Virgil unwrapped it as they walked toward the house.

Jarlait said, “I heard about Ray.”

Virgil: “Yeah… Who’s here?”

“Most of us Red Lake guys. Some of your people here from Bemidji we invited in. FBI is still on the way, they probably won’t get here till morning.”

“Anybody have any ideas about who did this? Strange cars, strange guys-how in the hell could he come in here and just do this?”

“White van,” Jarlait said. “It might have been a guy in a white Chevy van. We got people coming through here all the time, but there was a white van going kind of slow around, and one of our guys, Cliff Bear, passed it, and he, uh…”

Jarlait paused, and Virgil said, “What?”

“Well, he said the guy was an Indian man,” Jarlait said. “So he didn’t pay much attention.”

“He didn’t recognize him? Or the van?”

Jarlait shook his head. “No. Here’s the thing-Cliff thought he was an Indian man, but not one of us. He thought he looked like an Apache.”

“An Apache.”

“Yeah. You know, those skinny string bean little assholes,” Jarlait said. “BIA has a lot of Apache cops for some reason. They get sent up here sometimes.”

A half-dozen Red Lake cops were looking down at them as they walked up the road, working on the suckers, and one of the cops, Rudy Bunch, broke away from the group. Virgil noticed a man sitting on the side of the road, weeping. Jarlait walked over to him and squatted down next to him.

“Did you stop and see Ray?” Bunch asked.

“Yeah. Shot in the legs and head. Probably killed here, transported down there,” Virgil said. “What’s the situation with your guy?”

“Shot in the head. Cold. Looks like he was sitting right at the wheel. Looks like a.22.”

“That fits,” Virgil said. “Any reason that he’d be here?”

Bunch pointed back up the road. “Well, you were at Ray’s place, Ray’s mom’s place, it’s about a mile up that way. She says Ray and Olen was going into town. Looks like they got this far…”

Virgil scratched his head, looking up and down the road. “So… what’d he do? Flag them down? Fake an accident?”

“Olen never called in, so that’s not it,” Bunch said. “If he’d seen an accident, he would have called. I don’t know why he stopped, but he did, and here he is.”

“Would he have called for something like a flat tire?” Virgil asked.

“Ah, probably not. He didn’t… but who knows?”

Virgil looked up and down the road, shook his head. He didn’t know why Olen Grey had stopped, but he suspected that whatever happened, neither Grey nor Bunton had taken the situation as seriously as Virgil had. Maybe, Virgil thought, he hadn’t pounded it home hard enough. Ray had been frightened but had seemed to think once he got across the line into Red Lake, he’d be safe. As though that, alone, would be enough.

Then he’d gone to his mother’s house…

VIRGIL WALKED OVER, looked in the car. A white guy was working with gloves and a UV light on the far side; on the street side, Grey sat slumped in his seat, his safety belt still looped around his chest. He turned back to Bunch: “If an Indian man did the shooting-Louis told me somebody saw a guy who might be the shooter-that’d mean, what? That it’s somebody with connections up here?”

Bunch shrugged. “That was Cliff Bear who saw him-but he didn’t recognize him, and he would have recognized him if the guy was from up here. He could be from the Cities…”

“There are some drug connections between here and some Indian people down in the Cities, the way I understand it,” Virgil said. “Was Ray tied into that?”

“Not as far as I know. Ray used to do a little reefer, but you know-nothing serious,” Bunch said. “He wasn’t dealing or anything. Not up here, anyway.”

“It seems like Ray had to be fingered somehow,” Virgil said. “How would a guy who doesn’t know this place find his way back to Ray’s mom’s house, then shoot a cop who never even took his pistol out?”

Another Indian cop had edged over to listen, and now he chipped in: “You’re thinking what I’m thinking?”

“What are you thinking?” asked Virgil.

“That Olen recognized the guy who flagged him down? Didn’t think it was a big deal because it was another Indian guy?”

Virgil nodded at him. “Actually, I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s a good thought.”

Bunch said, “We got some assholes up here, and I’m not saying there aren’t people up here who wouldn’t shoot a man, because there are. So if Ray turned up dead, and you say, okay, Red Lake did it, I’d think about it. It’s possible. But this lemon deal? What about all these other people killed with lemons? You think Indian people did all of them?”

Virgil said, “No. I don’t. What I’m thinking is, they were killed by somebody who had the connections to get a killing done up here.”

The second Indian cop said, “Have to be drugs, then. That’s the only kind of organized crime we’ve got. Everything else is disorganized.”

THE GUY who’d been working in the car stood up, walked around the car, and asked Virgil, “You’re Virgil?”

“Yes.”

“Ron Mapes. I’m with the Bemidji office.” He was a balding, ginger-haired man wearing surgical gloves. “I just talked to our guys in Bemidji at the veterans’ memorial. They say that Bunton may have slashed him with his fingernails. Got some blood and a little skin.”

“That’s terrific. Get it to the lab quick as you can.”

Mapes nodded. “Of course. Not much up here, so far, except footprints.”

“Yeah?”

Mapes led the way back down the road, pointed out two footprints marked with little orange plastic flags.

“Can you tell anything from them?” Virgil asked.

“Couple things-he’s got a small foot. Size eight or nine, I’d guess,” Mapes said. “The shoes had no cleats or even ripples-they were flat leather bottoms with low heels. Like loafers. They weren’t boots of any kind, or sneakers. More like dress shoes.”

“So a small guy,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. The ground is damp and he didn’t sink in too deep. Put that with the small foot, and I’d say a small guy with small feet. We figure-the officers here figure-that he had the Bunton house under surveillance somehow, which means that he had to be parked back in the woods somewhere. There’s a boat landing road a hundred yards or so from the Bunton place; it’s possible he was back in there. We’ll check in the morning when it gets light-can’t see much with just a flash.”

“What do you think you’d find?”

Mapes shrugged. “Well, I’m hoping for a matchbook that says ‘Moonlight Café, St. Paul, Minnesota,’ and inside is written, ‘Call Sonia.’”

“That’d be good,” Bunch said.

Virgil was patient. “What,” he asked, “do you think you’ll find?”

“Best case? More blood. If he was doing surveillance from up close, he was walking through heavy brush in the dark. If he scratched himself… But that’d be best case. More likely, a little fabric, which we might be able to match with some of his clothing, if we find him. If he fell, maybe a handprint. Or maybe he did drop something-who knows?”

“Find any.22 shells on the street?” Virgil asked.

“Nope.”

“So if he’s using a silencer-we think he might be using a silencer-he either took the time to pick up the ejected shells, or he had some kind of little catch basket rigged on the side, or he’s really good at hand-capturing them.”

“That seems likely,” Mapes said. “You could silence a single-shot, but this isn’t a single-shot. These people were shot in a hurry.”

“He’s a professional,” Bunch said.

“That’s right,” Virgil said.

VIRGIL STAYED until four in the morning, hoping against hope that they might find something. They went back to Bunton’s place, where his mother sat in a rocker staring at a wall, and looked at what Bunton had left behind: a motorcycle saddlebag with a few shirts and a pair of jeans, but not a single piece of paper.

At four o’clock, he told Jarlait and Bunch that he was heading back to Bemidji to get some sleep.

“Let me ask you something,” Jarlait said. They were off by themselves, leaning on Jarlait’s truck. Up and down the street, people were standing in their yards, watching the cops at Bunton’s place. “We’ve been talking about the white van and the Indian man, and dope. I know goddamn well that the dope people in Minneapolis got shooters. Or they could get them if they needed them. And when we started talking about dope, you were thinking about something. Do you know something? Do you know where the connection is? Between all the lemons and Ray? That has to do with the dope people?”

Virgil thought about Carl Knox. Carl Knox had put money into dope dealers, the BCA’s organized-crime people said, but nobody had been able to prove it, because he’d never dealt dope himself. All he did was provide financing, and then only at four or five levels above the street. His return was smaller, but also safer.

“Virgil?”

“It’s something I gotta think about,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a guy… I can’t talk about it, really… but there’s a guy in all of this who was a moneyman for dope dealers. Might still be.”

“We need to know this shit, because that’s one of our friends sitting back there dead in that cop car,” Jarlait said. “Ray… Ray was okay, but this was gonna happen sooner or later, one way or another, with Ray. He was gonna ride his bike into a phone pole, or he was gonna piss off the wrong guy. But Olen… Olen didn’t deserve anything like this. He was a good guy.”

“Like I said, I got a guy,” Virgil said. “I don’t know if he’s involved, but I’m going after him.”

“Like soon?”

“Like tomorrow morning,” Virgil said. “You guys: stay in touch.”

“We will. You stay in touch with us, too,” Jarlait said. “If something happens, and we can get in on it, we want in.”