Heat Lightning

4

VIRGIL WAS staying at the Emerald Inn, made it back about a hundred feet in front of the first rush-hour car, went to his room, got undressed, set the alarm, and fell facedown on the bed.

Too much.

Four Leinie’s at the club, bedtime with Janey, then the murder. He’d started the day at five o’clock in the morning in Mankato, eighty miles south of the Twin Cities, and now was twenty-five hours down the line, with a hard day coming up.

He would have been asleep in forty seconds, except thirty seconds after he landed facedown, the nightstand beeped at him. Beeped again thirty seconds later; again thirty seconds after that. No point in resisting: it wasn’t going to quit.

He pushed up on his elbows, looked at the nightstand. Nothing there but a pile of dollar bills, the clock, and the lamp. Another beep. Had to be the clock, which had gone nuts for some reason. There was nothing to turn off except the alarm, and he needed the alarm, so he put the clock on the floor, pushed it under the bed, and dropped back on the pillow.

Another beep, right next to his ear.

Groggy, he looked at the nightstand. Nothing now but a pile of dollar bills and the lamp. He pulled open the only drawer, found a Gideon’s Bible, which he opened. The Gideon was not beeping him.

Another beep. The lamp beeped? With the feeling that he was actually going insane, he inspected the lamp but could find no sign of anything that might beep. He’d just drawn back from it, looking at his pillow, when it beeped again.

He was losing it, he thought. There was nothing there; the beep was in his head, and it would never go away. He flashed on a scene with himself at the Mayo Clinic, surrounded by shrinks, shaking their heads at the syndrome now known as Flowers’s Beep.

He reached out to the stack of dollar bills… and found his cell phone beneath them, thin enough to be invisible. The low-battery warning. Jesus. He staggered over to his briefcase, got out the charger, plugged it in, and thought later that he must have passed out while hanging in midair over the bed, falling onto the pillow.

WHEN THE ALARM went off at nine o’clock, he woke bright-eyed, but in the bright-eyed, dazed way that means he’d feel like death at two o’clock in the afternoon. He cleaned up, staring at himself in the mirror as he shaved, and then said to his own image, “You’re too old for that Janey thing. You gotta wake up and fly right, Virgil. This is the first day of the rest of your life. You don’t have to be this way.”

He wasn’t convinced. He got dressed, and spent a moment choosing a T-shirt that would go with his mood-eventually choosing one that said “WWTDD.” He pulled on a blue sport coat, stuck his notebook in the pocket, smiled at himself in the mirror.

Not bad, except for the black rings under his eyes. He checked his laptop, which was hooked into the motel’s wireless system, and found an e-mail from Shrake with the vet center’s address. Shrake had also run Sanderson through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, and the feds had come back with two hits, both DWIs in the 1980s.

After pancakes and bacon and a glance at the Star Tribune at a Country Kitchen, Virgil rolled along behind the last car in the rush hour, west on I-94, got off at 280 and then immediately at University Avenue. The vet center was in a long, old, undistinguished brown-brick building, between an art studio and an architect’s office. Virgil dumped the truck on the street and went inside.

THE WOMAN AT THE reception desk took a look at his ID and called the director, listened to her phone for a couple of seconds, then pointed Virgil down the hall. The director was a Vietnam-era guy named Don Worth. He must have been coming up on retirement, Virgil thought, mild-looking with his gray hair in a comb-over, brown sport coat and khakis with a blue button-down shirt, brown loafers. He shook Virgil’s hand after looking at his ID, pointed him at a chair, and said, “You need…”

Virgil took the photograph of Sanderson out of his briefcase and passed it across the desk. “He was murdered last night. Another man was murdered a couple of weeks ago in New Ulm, in exactly the same way. The bodies were left on veterans’ memorials. We think Mr. Sanderson was coming to a veterans’ discussion group, or therapy group, with a man named Ray.”

He explained briefly about the scene in the street and that Sanderson had suddenly started carrying a gun. He didn’t mention that the New Ulm victim was not a veteran. “So what I need is Ray’s name, and the names of the other people in the group.”

Worth leaned back in his chair and said, “The way the VA views these kinds of things is, all the information belongs to the veterans themselves, including names, and we’re not allowed to release it.”

“Under the circumstances…” Virgil began.

Worth picked up his sentence: “I’d be an asshole not to give you something. I don’t know Ray, but I think I’ve seen him. I don’t know what group he’s in, either. But we have a volunteer coordinator named Chuck Grogan who could tell you. Chuck owns Perfect Garage Doors and Fireplaces. It’s about two miles from here, on Snelling.”

PERFECT GARAGE DOORS was a storefront with parking in what looked like a burned-out lot next door; part of a brick wall still stuck up out of the ground in back, and had been thoroughly tagged by artists named Owl and Rosso. Virgil walked in, under a jingling bell, and found Grogan peering at an old paper wall-map of the Twin Cities. “You know what the trouble is,” Grogan said without preamble, “is that the roads aren’t always where the maps say they are.”

“That is one of the troubles,” Virgil agreed. Grogan was a square man with a gray mustache and sideburns, a big gut tucked into jeans, and motorcycle boots. If there wasn’t a Harley in his life, Virgil would have been astonished. He held up his ID: “I’m looking for a guy named Ray…”

THEY SAT IN Grogan’s office, a drywall cube ten feet on a side, in squeaking office chairs, garage-door-opener parts in the corners, and Virgil told him about it. Grogan couldn’t believe that Sanderson had been killed. “Like assassinated? Holy shit. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to talk to Ray, and the other guys in the group,” Virgil said. “See if anything came up in the group.”

Grogan was shaking his head. “I’m the moderator of that group. Bob was only there three times, I think. He came with Ray. Didn’t say much, asked some questions.”

“Why was he there, then?”

Grogan made his hands into fists and looked down at them, turned them over, then said, “I think… he had a problem. In Vietnam. What it was, I don’t know. We don’t push that. If it’s going to come out, it’ll come out. And it usually does, you know? Even with these hard guys.”

“You mean, like, atrocities or something?” Virgil asked.

“No, no. But seeing death, seeing dead people, having people trying to kill you, maybe trying to kill other people. All the stress. We had one guy, a supply guy, flew into Vietnam as a replacement, trucked up to an advance base, fairly big base, never stepped off it in thirteen months. But once a day, some Vietcong with a mortar would fire one round into the base. That guy says when he got up in the morning that he’d start praying that he didn’t get hit that day, and he’d pray all day until the mortar came in, and then he’d stop praying until he got up the next morning. Literally prayed until his lips got chapped. Went on for a year… That’ll fuckin’ warp your head.”

“Sanderson was in the Army, but he was never in Vietnam,” Virgil said. “He was in Korea, with some kind of missile unit.”

Grogan frowned, leaned back. “You sure? This was a Vietnam vets group.”

“That’s what his girlfriend says,” Virgil said. “The other guy, in New Ulm, wasn’t in the military at all.”

“You checked all that?” Grogan asked.

“Not really. Not with the government…”

“Maybe there’s something you don’t know,” Grogan said. “Some kind of black ops.”

Virgil shook his head. “I was an MP. I met every kind there was in the Army, most of them when they were drunk. These guys weren’t operators. Sanderson was a mechanic. Utecht ran a title service, and before that, he worked for State Farm.”

Grogan said, “Huh. Well, then, you better talk to Ray. But I’ll tell you what, I think Sanderson was in Vietnam. He seemed to… know shit.”

Ray’s last name was Bunton, Grogan said. “He’s part Chippewa and he’s got family all over. He’s got a place up in Red Lake. If he’s down here, he’s probably crashing with one of his relatives.”

“He was in Vietnam?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, he was pretty hard-core infantry,” Grogan said.

“And he brought in Sanderson.”

“Yeah. Don’t know why he’d do that, though, if Sanderson wasn’t in-country. That was part of the deal for this group,” Grogan said.

“Thanks for that,” Virgil said, standing up.

Grogan scratched his head and said, “You know… you probably want to talk to this professor who came to some of the meetings. The guys voted to let him in. I saw him-the professor-talking to Ray and Bob after the last meeting, out on the street. They were going at it for a while.”

“Who’s the professor? You say they were arguing?”

“Not arguing, just kinda… getting into it. One of those Vietnam discussions, where not everybody sees things the same way.”

“I need that,” Virgil said. “What’s the guy’s name? The professor’s? Is he really a professor?”

“Yeah, he is. University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mead Sinclair. He’s doing research on long-term aftereffects of the Vietnam War, is what he says,” Grogan said. “This last meeting, we were pushing him, and he said he actually was an antiwar guy during Vietnam, and then he says he was in Hanoi with the Jane Fonda group during the war.”

“Bet that made everybody happy,” Virgil said.

“A couple guys wanted to throw his ass out on the street-but most of them, you know, say, whatever. Jane Fonda’s old and that was a long time ago. Anyway, he sort of got into it with Ray and Bob. Maybe something came up…”

“That’s Mead Sinclair.” Virgil wrote it in his notebook.

“Yep. Pretty snazzy name, huh?”

Two names: Mead Sinclair, Ray Bunton.

Virgil was out the door, halfway to his car, when Grogan called, “Hey, wait a minute. I might have something for you.” Grogan walked up the side of the building to an ancient Nissan pickup, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out an old leather briefcase. He dug around inside it for a moment, then pulled out a sheaf of xeroxed papers, stapled together. “When the professor asked if he could sit in, he sent me a paper he wrote on Vietnam… I never read it. Maybe it’d be of some use.”

He handed it over: a reprint from Mother Jones magazine, “The Legacy of Agent Orange.”

BACK ACROSS TOWN to BCA headquarters. Virgil left the truck in the parking lot, climbed the stairs to Davenport ’s office, asked his secretary, Carol, where he could sit with a computer.

“Lucas said you can use his office until he gets back. After that, we’ll find something else,” she said. “He said not to try to pick the lock on the gray steel file. Nothing else is locked.”

“The gray steel one,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. It’s got employee evaluations and that sort of thing in there,” she said. Carol was one of the rubbery blondes who dominated the state bureaucracy; sergeant-major types who kept the place going.

“Okay. I won’t,” Virgil said.

He sat in Davenport’s chair, took a good look at the lock on the gray steel cabinet, and Carol asked from over his shoulder, from the doorway, “What do you think?”

“Not a chance,” he said. “If it was standard file, I could pop it. This is more like a safe. Lucas’s idea of a joke.”

“I’ve never figured out where he keeps the key,” she said.

“Probably on a key ring.”

“Huh. I doubt it. A key ring would break the line of his trousers.” She did a thing with her eyebrows, then said, “Ah, well,” and, “Rose Marie’s in the building.”

“She’s not looking for me?” Rose Marie was the state commissioner of public safety, the woman who got Davenport his job, with overall responsibility for the BCA and several other related agencies, like the highway patrol.

“Hard to tell,” Carol said, and she went back to her desk.

Virgil turned to the computer, wiggled his fingers, called up Google, and typed in Mead Sinclair.