Heat Lightning

UTECHT WAS working in her still dew-wet yard when he got there, digging dandelions with a paring knife, tossing them into a bucket.

“How’re you doing?” Virgil asked as he crossed the lawn.

She said, “Okay,” and stood up, and “I got a job.”

“Good. Get you out and about,” Virgil said.

She smiled and said, “It’s not much of a job… part time at a day-care center. But I always liked little kids, and I don’t really need a lot of money.”

“Don’t you get diseased?”

“Oh, yeah. Keeps your immune system going, that’s for sure,” she said. “So, Virgil-what’s up? You want a root beer or anything? Or is it still too early?”

“Sure, I’ll take a root beer.”

THEY SAT in lawn chairs in the backyard, a pool of uninflected grass surrounded by a white board fence, and drank root beer, and Virgil said, “You’ve been reading about what’s going on.”

She shivered and said, “I can’t believe it. I just… can’t… believe it. Are you going to catch him? Whoever’s doing it?”

“Hope so. He’s a psycho, whoever he is, and I think he’s compelled to do this,” Virgil said. “We’ve got one suspect, who we’re watching, and one fellow who we know is a target, who’s protected, and sooner or later, something is going to crack open. I hope we’re in a position to move when it does.”

“I should hope,” she said. “I still cry about Chuck, poor guy. I’ll be standing by the sink, and I’ll start crying.”

“You were married a long time.”

“Yup,” she said, and took a sip of root beer.

“What do you know about Chuck’s dad, Chester?” Virgil asked. “When he died, did you guys go over?”

“Chuck did-just to see… well, there wasn’t much of an inheritance. Eighteen thousand dollars, that was about it. He had an annuity, but that was gone the minute he died. Chester was cremated, and they put his ashes in the ocean, so… there wasn’t much left.”

“I talked to a guy from China. A Hong Kong cop. He said that Chester might have had some contact with the CIA.”

Utecht’s eyebrows went up, and she said, “You know, I wouldn’t doubt it. We used to joke about him being a spy. We even asked him once, and he joked about it-but when he was joking about it, his eyes didn’t look funny, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“ Chester was all over that area when he was young, after World War Two- Hong Kong, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. He knew a lot of French people from North Vietnam,” Utecht said. “He even spoke French. He stayed here a few times when he was in the States, and once he was joking about having kids in Thailand, but I’m not sure that was completely a joke, either. How does all of this figure in?”

Virgil told her about the bulldozer heist and she said, “I knew about that. Chuck… it was the big adventure of his youth, but it was in seven or eight years before we got together, so I didn’t know the details. Do you really think all of this”-she waved her hand, meaning the killings-“could have anything to do with that?”

“I’m pretty sure it does,” Virgil said. “I’m just not sure how. Have you ever seen or heard the name Mead Sinclair in any of Chuck’s papers, or did he ever mention that name?”

She thought a moment, then said, “No, I don’t think so. Odd name. I can look, if you want. We’ve still got a lot of stuff.”

“Well, if you see anything…”

“Who is he?”

So he explained about Mead Sinclair. She said, “If Sinclair was an antiwar activist, and Chester had contact with the CIA… do you think they might have been enemies or something? That this man is running a revenge feud?”

“I don’t know. Honest to God, I keep going around in circles. My problem is, I’ve got two things in my head. One loop involves the guys getting killed here, because they did something that one of them is trying to cover up. The other loop involves Mead Sinclair and the CIA and people getting killed in Hong Kong, maybe, and God only knows what that motive would be. If I could put the two loops together, I might have something. And it seems like there should be a fit somewhere.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t get hurt.”

BACK IN Mankato he picked up his dry clothes, repacked, and headed north to the Cities again. So Chester may have worked with the CIA, he thought. Which meant that there may have been more to the bulldozer heist than was apparent-and more to the Vietnam killings than was apparent.

Or not.

Damnit.

He got on his cell phone and called Sandy. “Are you working today?”

“Uh, I’ve got a class, but I could do a couple hours.”

“I need to find out if Mead Sinclair had any direct clashes with the CIA, or has ever said anything about the CIA coming after him, or about CIA killers in Vietnam, or any kind of intelligence agencies doing anything to him, or about him, or bringing charges against him… anything like that.”

“I’ll call you,” she said. “Or I might be around the office this morning, before lunch.”

“I GOT A bunch of stuff,” Davenport said when Virgil checked in at the BCA at ten-thirty. “I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss, so I won’t be around. Andreno just called in, he’s on his way from the airport. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes or so. I’ll send him down to you-I got you John Blake’s office while he’s on vacation.”

“What’s the guy’s name? Your friend?” Virgil asked.

“Micky Andreno. I told him to bring a gold neck chain. Also, I got the Secret Service and the FBI asking about you-they want to know what the status is, they’re getting a little worried about the killings, especially after Wigge. Too many important people are going through town to have a psycho running loose, so you need to call a couple people and give them status reports.”

“Pressure starting to build?”

“Of course. I’m not unhappy with what you’ve done, but these people don’t want to know about processes, they want the problem to go away,” Davenport said. “If you don’t get something quick, they may want to help. As in, use a bunch of their own people.”

“That’d slow things down pretty good,” Virgil said.

Davenport nodded. “Absolutely. Anyway, that means if Warren is a legitimate suspect, then let’s squeeze now, and hard. Get it done.”

VIRGIL MADE calls to the FBI and the temporary Secret Service office that had been set up to protect the Republican National Convention. The agents he’d talked to seemed cool and skeptical, and when he was done, Virgil threw the receiver at the desk set and said, “Fuck you.”

Shrake and Jenkins came by: “We gonna do it?”

“Yeah. Our setup guy is on the way from the airport. We gotta round up Dan Jackson, I want to get the whole thing on video if we can, and get the guys in tech services to wire up Andreno, if we can pull this off today…”

“Where’re we going to do it?” Jenkins asked.

“Gotta be some place public or Warren won’t buy it,” Virgil said.

“Be best if it was our choice,” Jenkins said. “We could set up in advance. With the security guys he’s got, if they pick location, they’ll spot us coming in to monitor the place.”

Shrake: “How about Spiro’s on University, in Minneapolis? That’s fifteen minutes from Warren ’s place, and he’s had projects on University, so he’ll probably know it. That might ease his mind a little. And the neighborhood is cut up, so we can monitor a little easier.”

“All right. You guys set that up, I’ll wait for Andreno. Lucas wants us to push it, hard. Go for something right