Heat Lightning

Altogether, he knew exactly what Bunton would be like, but nothing about what he did for a living. It was possible, Virgil thought, that he didn’t do anything.

CAROL STUCK HER head in. “ Sandy got the Sinclair guy. Phone number and address.”

“Excellent. Now I’ve got another guy I need to look for…”

He gave her the information on Bunton.

ON THE PHONE, Sinclair had a straight, clear teacher’s voice, a classroom voice. He hadn’t known about the Sanderson murder, he said, because he didn’t watch much TV, and hadn’t gotten into the habit of reading the local papers. “I get most of my news online,” he said.

“But you knew Robert Sanderson,” Virgil said.

“I knew who he was, but I didn’t actually know him,” he said. “We talked for a few minutes the other night, after the meeting… had a little debate about American actions in Vietnam.”

“I’d like to come over and talk to you about the whole meeting,” Virgil said.

“Come on over-but get something to eat first. We’re just sitting down to lunch here, and I’m afraid there’s not enough for three.”

Sinclair gave Virgil a street address on Lincoln Avenue, one of the better parts of St. Paul, two or three miles west of the BCA office, up the hill from downtown. Having been disinvited from lunch, Virgil went to an I-94 diner and had a chicken potpie, with roughly a billion calories in chicken fat, which added flavor to the two pounds of salt included with the pie. He cut the salt with three Cokes, and left feeling like the Hindenburg.

SINCLAIR LIVED IN A liver-colored Victorian with a wide porch and-Virgil counted them, one-two-three-four- mailboxes. A condominium, then, or an apartment. He left the car under an elm, or, as a good ecological-sciences guy would say, a doomed elm, climbed the porch, and looked at the mailboxes. Sinclair was in apartment 1. The outer door was locked, but there were four doorbells next to a speaker disguised as a wooden eagle.

He pushed 1, and a moment later a female voice said, “Yes?” and Virgil said, “Virgil Flowers, BCA. I called Professor Sinclair an hour ago.”

The door lock buzzed and Virgil let himself into the interior hallway. A sweeping stairway curved up to the left, protected by a walnut banister with gold-leaf accents. Top floor must be 3 and 4, Virgil thought. He stepped down the hall to his right, saw a 1 on a white door, and knocked.

The door was answered by a young Asian woman, tall and slender, with an oddly asymmetrical face and a chipped central incisor. Her forehead was flecked with three inch-long white scars, like knife cuts, halfway between her hairline and her right eyebrow. They almost looked like initiation scars, or tribal scars, Virgil thought, although everything he knew about tribal scars could be written on the back of a postage stamp.

“Dad’s on the porch,” the woman said. Nothing Asian about her accent. She sounded like she might have come from milking the local cow. “Come in.”

Not pretty, he thought, but attractive. Tough upper lip; soft brown eyes.

On the way through the apartment, she chattered away, friendly, loose: “Virgil Flowers. I like that. Classical and corny at the same time-like way out in the country. Do all the cops here wear cowboy boots? They don’t in Madison… Did you ever go undercover as a singer or something? What does your shirt say? WWTDD? Is that a music group?”

“I can’t talk about it, ma’am,” Virgil said.

“Some kind of cop thing?”

The condo had a glassed-in back porch, looking out on a square of lawn, and Sinclair was out there, a lanky older man with still-blond hair, gray stubble on his chin. Women of a certain age would go for him in a big way, Virgil thought. He looked a little like the actor Richard Harris, in a loose white cotton dress shirt, the sleeves turned up, a gold tennis bracelet glittering from one wrist. He was sitting at a table, clicking at a laptop, with a glass of lemonade next to his hand.

When he saw them coming, he stood up and offered a soft, scholarly hand: “Mr. Flowers.” He was six-three, Virgil thought, a couple inches taller than he was, with broad shoulders and a still-narrow waist.

“Mr. Sinclair,” Virgil said. Virgil turned to the woman and said, “You never mentioned your name.”

“Mai.”

“ Mai Sinclair?” Virgil asked.

“Yes. Not married. Unlucky in love, I guess,” she said.

“Well, good,” Virgil said. Sinclair was smiling at them, sat back in his chair, pointed Virgil to the other one.

“Do you handle homicides on a regular basis, Mr. Flowers?” he asked.

“Call me Virgil,” Virgil said as he sat down and stretched out his legs. “Most of my homicides are pretty irregular. Damnedest thing. I’d give anything for a good old beer-bottle domestic. I sometimes get so confused, I don’t know what to do next.”

“Well… Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses,” Sinclair said.

Virgil laughed and clapped his hands. “You looked that up before I got here. You didn’t just pull that out…”

Mai had lingered, and asked, looking between them, “What?”

“He’s quoting Virgil at me,” Virgil said. “That’s never happened before, and I’ve talked to some pretty smart fellas.”

Sinclair, surprised that Virgil had recognized the line, said, “Well.”

Mai said to Sinclair, “He won’t tell me what his T-shirt means. The ‘WW’ is ‘What Would,’ and the last ‘D’ is ‘Do,’ but he won’t tell me the rest.”

“We can’t talk about it,” Sinclair said. “That’s the first rule.”

“The first rule of what?” she asked.

“Can’t talk about it,” Virgil said, nodding to her father.

“What?” Hands on her hips.

“Can’t talk about it,” Sinclair repeated, looking up at his daughter, shaking his head.

She took them in for a moment, then said, “Well, poop on you both. I’ll go iron my underwear.”

“You wrote a paper, about twenty years ago, about Agent Orange, and how the Vietnamese tried to refoliate with kudzu,” Virgil said.

“So you looked up my vita on the Internet,” Sinclair said.

“I did,” Virgil said. “But I also read the paper in my senior seminar-I majored in ecological science-and I remembered it when I looked it up. We talked about it for quite a while; about the unexpected effects of good intentions.”

Sinclair was pleased. “The paper was controversial, but shouldn’t have been-it was a good piece of work,” he said. “But we were coming out of the Reagan years, and the triumphalism, and nobody wanted to hear about the collateral damage we’d caused around the world with these crazy military adventures.” He leaned forward, intent now, jabbed his finger at Virgil in a professorial, mentor-to-student way. “I’ll tell you, Virgil, what this country needs more than anything in the world-more than anything-is a sane energy policy. That’s what I’m writing about now. Energy, environment, it all ties together. Instead, we get wars, we get military adventures, we spend two years fighting about whether a president got a blow job, a little squirt in the dark? I mean, who could really care? This country does everything but take care of business. We just… ah, that’s not what you’re here for…”

He settled back, looked tired. “So. What’re you here for?”

“I mostly agree with everything you just said, to get that out of the way,” Virgil said. “But. Robert Sanderson got himself killed in a pretty unpleasant way, and his body was dropped on a veterans’ memorial…”

Virgil detailed the Sanderson killing, and then the Utecht murder, pointing out the similarities, and how, two nights before the killing, Sanderson was seen arguing with two men in the street outside his house.

“At least one of them was Ray Bunton. We’re looking for him, but haven’t found him yet. When we went down to the vet center to inquire, they told us that you’d been sitting in on their therapy sessions, the talk. And that you’d spoken to Bunton and Sanderson afterward. We’re wondering if they might have said anything that would cast some light on this murder.”

Sinclair made a moue and, after a moment’s consideration, said, “I have to tell you, Virgil, it runs against the