Heat Lightning

at Wigge’s house, was among the dozen uniforms and three detectives, and he stepped over to Virgil and said, “This is bullshit, man. This is stickin’ it right up our ass.”

“Wigge for sure?”

“What’s left of him,” Waters said, his voice grim. “You’re not gonna believe this. And there ain’t no way we’re gonna keep it off TV-it looks like he was nailed up, or something. Like Jesus.”

WHEN VIRGIL had worked with St. Paul, he’d not known Wigge well, more to nod at than to talk to. When he looked down at the body, his first thought was, Time passes. Wigge was an old man. He hadn’t been old when Virgil knew him, but he was old when he was murdered.

“Hell of a goddamned thing.” Tim Hayes was a longtime St. Paul detective. A gaunt man, but with a small beer belly, he was watching the crime-scene people work over the body. “I understand you were looking for him up north.”

“Yeah.” Virgil pointed down the hill. “You see that building, that warehouse with the old painted sign on it? A guy who lives there was murdered off I-35 tonight and Wigge was with him, I think. There’s some blood on the ground up there, and I think it was Wigge’s. We’ll match it.”

“He probably spent some time wishing he’d died, before he did,” Hayes said. “Look at this…” They edged up to the body, which had been planted under a bronze statue of a Vietnam veteran, and Hayes said, “Look at his hands.”

He had no fingers or thumbs. The palms were all that remained, and in the center of each palm was a bloody hole. Virgil shook his head. “Ah, man. Ah, Jesus.”

“See that sack?” Hayes pointed at an ordinary brown paper grocery sack, the kind that might have held three cans of beer. “His fingers are in there. They didn’t just cut them off, they cut them off one joint at a time. With a pair of nippers of some kind. Brush cutters; tin snips. Something like that. I think there were, like, twenty-eight individual cuts. They tortured the shit out of him. He had bare feet, the bottom of his feet looked burned… they focused on his hands and his feet.”

Crucified; but Virgil didn’t think of Jesus, but of Jezebel, in 2 Kings 9:35, lying in the streets of Jezreel, and when the dogs were done, nothing was left but the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet.

Wigge was faceup; and between his gray lips, Virgil could see the yellow of the lemon.

“The shit’s gonna hit the fan today,” Virgil said, standing up, fighting the sour taste in his throat. “People are gonna be screaming for blood.” He looked down toward the town. “Republicans gonna be here in a month, everybody’s getting dressed up, and we got a crucified ex-cop on the front lawn of the state Capitol. Mother. Fucker.”

He called Davenport: seven o’clock in the morning in Washington, and Davenport rarely got up before nine. Davenport answered with “It can’t be that bad.”

“It’s worse,” Virgil said.

DAVENPORT LISTENED as Virgil told him about the night, starting with the call from Bunton, through the murders off I-35, to the body at the Capitol. When he finished, Davenport said, “I’ll call you back in five minutes or less.”

Virgil walked around, looking at the scene, oblivious to the growing roar of cars on the I-35 as the rush hour started. The television crews would be here anytime, and the politicians would jump in with both feet. Since there was nothing useful they could do, they’d start looking for somebody to blame. The whole thing would spin out of control…

A cop came by: “What’re you going to do about it?”

“What I am doing: try to find the guy who did this,” Virgil snapped.

“Try harder,” the cop said, squaring off a little. “Wigge was one of us.”

“Why don’t you go find the guy?” Virgil asked. “Gotta go write traffic tickets or some shit?”

Another nearby cop said, “Take it easy…”

DAVENPORT CALLED: “I yanked Rose Marie out of bed, she’s gonna do damage control,” he said. “I’m coming back, but I can’t get out until almost noon here. I won’t be back until late afternoon. Listen: we’re putting out the usual stuff to the media, Rose Marie will take care of it. But you gotta move. You gotta move, Virgil. What about Bunton?”

“I will get him today,” Virgil said. “So help me God.”

“I’ll call Carol and tell her to get into the office. We’ll start working the phones, we’ll push everybody to find him. TV is gonna be all over us anyway, we might as well put it out there.”

VIRGIL CHECKED the time, got a Minneapolis address for Ralph Warren, the owner of the security company, and headed that way. Found it, a white-stucco and orange-tile-roof Spanish-looking place off Lake of the Isles. Each square foot of the lot, Virgil thought, as he eased into the driveway, was worth more than his truck.

When he got out, a big man stepped out of the front porch, and then another came from the garage end of the driveway, both wearing black nylon windcheaters, both of them with their hands flat on their stomachs, as if they were holding in their guts. Actually, he knew, their hands were a quarter inch from a fast-draw weapon.

He called, “Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, here to see Mr. Warren.”

“Mr. Warren isn’t up yet,” said the man at the front door. Virgil was walking up the driveway, and the man said, “You should stop right there until we confirm your identity.”

“Get Warren,” Virgil said. He held up his ID.

The big man said something back into the house, and a third man looked out, nodded, and said, “Come on up to the porch.”

Virgil walked to the porch, and the third man said, “Can I ask why you need to talk to Mr. Warren?”

“Because one of his vice presidents just got chopped into pieces about the size of a cocktail weenie, and that was after they crucified him,” Virgil said. “Now, you wanna get him out of bed?”

“Who?” the man asked, but he was believing it.

“John Wigge.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“Can I talk to Warren, or what?”

VIRGIL WAITED in the entry, under the eye of the biggest of the three security men, while they got Warren. Warren was a man of middle height, an inch or two under six feet, with deep-set black eyes, a small graying mustache, and a gray scrubby-looking soul patch under his lower lip. He came out wearing a black silk dressing gown with scarlet Japanese characters on it, like the bad guy in a TV movie; if you squinted at him, he looked a little like Hitler.

“John Wigge…”

“… and David Ross.”

“… and Ross, too?” Warren was astonished, but not astonished enough. Virgil thought, He knows something.

“They were ambushed at a meeting with Ray Bunton at a rest stop up north on I- 35,” Virgil said. “Do you know what they were talking about? Why they were meeting?”

“I don’t know any Ray Bunton,” Warren said. “Is this about the veterans thing?”

“If you don’t know, how did you put that together?” Virgil asked.

“John told me. He said he knew the guys who were killed,” Warren said. “That’s why he had Dave Ross hanging out with him.”

“But why are you stacking up with security?” Virgil tipped his head toward the bodyguard still in the room. The other two had moved back to their posts, wherever they were. “Three guys around the clock?”

Warren shook his head. “Nothing to do with that. I’m providing security for the convention. I’ve got two hundred guys in it, armed-response guys, bodyguards. I’ve got plans for the whole works right here in my briefcase, and the Secret Service requires, you know-they require that we keep it all under guard. The plans, me, everything.”