The houses here were well spaced, with broad lawns. He looked left and right, saw a light come on in the back of the next house to the west. He walked that way, up the front walk, and knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. A voice inside: “Who is it?”
“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
The door popped open, on a chain. A worried woman looked through the crack between the door and the jamb, and Virgil held up his ID.
“Can you tell me, does John Wigge live with anyone? Wife? Girlfriend?”
“We don’t know him very well, but he lives alone,” the woman said. “Has something awful happened?”
“Why would something awful happen?”
A man’s face appeared at the crack: “Because you’re beating on doors at two o’clock in the morning?” A St. Paul patrol car glided to a stop at the curb, and the man added, half apologetically, “We called 911.”
Virgil said, “That’s okay-I needed to talk to them.”
He walked out to the curb, holding up his ID, called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.”
A St. Paul sergeant came around the car and said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers.”
“That you, Larry?”
LARRY WATERS knew Wigge. “He’s divorced. His old lady moved back to Milwaukee. I haven’t heard that he was going out. He gone for sure?”
“The odds are pretty good. A guy who was at the scene, and knows him, says he was shot. We’re missing the body, though,” Virgil said. “He had a rep.”
“Yeah, and he deserved it,” Waters said. “Now he’s got all these crazy gun-fucks coming in here, driving around in GMCs with blacked-out windows. He’s contracting guys from all over the country, for security for the convention. There are some serious badass killers coming in.”
“I talked to Davenport… You know Davenport?”
“Sure.”
“He says the security company, Paladin, is owned by Ralph Warren.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Between you and me, Warren ’s a bigger asshole than Wigge,” Waters said. “He went bust about three times before he tapped into the city money and started building subsidized buildings all over town… Probably as dirty as Wigge, but he was putting the money into the envelopes instead of taking it out.”
“Paying people off?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t any big secret. But it was subtle. He’d keep somebody in the public employee unions happy, and they’d talk to their friends on the city council, and things got done. He didn’t just drop a load on somebody’s desk. You weren’t gonna get him on a camera.”
Virgil talked to Waters for another couple of minutes, asked him to call some St. Paul guys to put some tape on Wigge’s house until a crime-scene unit could get there or they found Wigge, whichever came second. Waters said he would, and Virgil headed downtown to David Ross’s address.
ROSS LIVED IN an apartment that had once been a warehouse-another of Warren ’s projects. Virgil leaned on the mailbox buzzer for a minute, was surprised when a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Jean Prestel was a schoolteacher, and looked like a schoolteacher, with short dark hair showing a streak of white over her ears-short and slender and earnest, and not somebody Virgil would have put with the dead, thick- necked David Ross. She was wearing a cotton nightgown with tiny teddy bears and little pink crossed ribbons on the breast, and she clutched her hands to her chest and asked, wide-eyed, “Oh my God, what happened?”
She fell to pieces when Virgil told her, and he sat on the couch with her and she wept, said, “What am I going to do now?” and “We didn’t have any time” and “We were talking about getting married” and “Are you sure it was David?” and she showed him a photograph and he said that it was, and she rolled facedown on the couch and seemed to try to scratch through the seat cushions, weeping, weeping…
When he got her to the quiet, stunned stage, he asked about relatives, and she called her aunt, who said she’d come over. Her mother lived in Sioux Falls. And he asked her about Ross and what he’d been doing.
“He was working with John-I don’t know exactly what he was doing, just, getting ready for the convention, I guess. But he got up every day at six o’clock and he’d go over to John’s and pick him up, and he’d stay with him all day.”
“How long had he been doing that?”
“Only a couple of weeks, and John said it wouldn’t last very long, but that things were really intense now… and now David’s dead? That can’t be right…” And she was gone again.
VIRGIL WAITED until Prestel’s aunt arrived, then eased out of the apartment, leaving them with the misery.
He looked at his watch again: four-fifteen. Had to get some sleep.
Needed to talk to Ralph Warren, needed to track Ray Bunton. Needed sleep even more.
He got an hour.
11
THE PHONE RANG.
Virgil was facedown on the bed: no coherent thought, just a lizard-like twitch. The phone didn’t quit. He finally crawled across the bed and flipped it open, noticing, before he did it, that it was 5:23. He’d been in bed for a little more than an hour.
The duty guy: “Man, Virgil, I hate to do this to you.”
Virgil groaned. “They found Wigge?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, the lemon in the mouth, the whole thing.”
“Where is he?” Virgil asked.
“You know up on Capitol Hill, the Vietnam veterans’ monument by the Veterans Service Building? Not the name wall, but the green statue?”
“Ahhh… jeez.” One of the best-known public spaces in the state, not ten minutes from where Virgil was lying.
“The St. Paul cops are there,” the duty man said.
“Tell them that I’m on the way.”
“Virgil… you know, the veterans’ monument isn’t the worst of it.”
“Huh?”
“The St. Paul cops say it looks like Wigge, was, uh…”
“… was crucified.”
THE VETERANS’ MONUMENT is more or less on the front lawn of the enormous white state Capitol Building. The emerald-green lawn, the size of several football fields, stretched from the steps of the Capitol, down a broad hill dotted with monuments and flanked by government buildings, almost to the interstate highway that went through St. Paul, and looked toward downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi.
Virgil had taken two minutes to stand in the shower before he dressed and rolled out, hair still wet. In the parking lot, he found his truck hemmed in between a van and a sedan, so closely that he could barely get the door open without dinging the van: always something, he thought, when you were in a crazy hurry.
Wigge’s body was beside the parking lot for the Veterans Service Building, and that’s where he found the usual clump of cop cars. He waved his ID at the cop at the entrance to the parking lot, dumped the truck, and walked through the early-morning light down to a gaggle of cops gathered at the statue. Waters, the cop who’d met Virgil
