Heat Lightning

Virgil grinned and said, “No, but I’ve seen them on TV shows.”

“Speaking of which,” Mattson said. Virgil looked up the hill and saw a white SUV do a U-turn at the barricade. A logo on the door said WCCO.

“I’m surprised they took so long,” Virgil said. “You guys ought to take five minutes to think about who’s going to say what. The whole bunch of them will be down here, and they’ll be all over you.”

They all looked over the fence at the body, which looked a little like a scarecrow, deflated and dead, and Brandt asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Wish you could tell me,” Virgil said. The crime-scene van was squeezing down the hill, and a cop car had to be moved so it could get past.

“You all through here?” Cunningham asked.

“Yeah-nothing much for me to do,” Virgil said. “I ain’t Sherlock Holmes.”

Cunningham said, “I talked to Jimmy Stryker at the sheriff’s meet last month, and he thinks you are.”

Virgil said, “Well, we’re friends.”

“He said you were friends with his sister, too-for a while,” Cunningham said.

Virgil nodded at him, sharp and quick. “Ships passing in the night, Sheriff.” He wasn’t going to step into that bog. “I would like to talk to Sanderson’s girlfriend. We need to know why he was carrying a revolver.”

Mattson nodded. “She’s available.”

3

SANDERSON HAD lived three blocks from the veterans’ memorial, up the hill, past the courthouse, and down a dark side street. Brandt walked along with him, to show him the way and to fill him in on the dead man’s background.

“We all knew him,” Brandt said. “He used to be a building inspector for the city. He was a carpenter before that. He was around all the time.”

“Nice guy? Bad guy?”

“You know-had a little mean streak, but wasn’t too bad when you got to know him. Short-guy stuff,” Brandt said. “He’d get in your face. But nobody, you know, took him all that seriously. Never knew him to actually get in a fight or anything. You’d see him, you might stop and chat. One of the guys around town.”

“So… you said he used to work for the city,” Virgil said. “What was he doing now?”

“He retired, took the pension, started rehabbing these old Victorians. He’d buy one, live in it, and rehab it,” Brandt said. “That’s how he met Sally. His girlfriend’s Sally Owen, she’s a decorator in one of the shops downtown.”

“Younger woman?”

“No, they must be about the same age. Sanderson was fifty-nine. Sally might even be a year or two older. Her husband was a contractor, died of a heart attack maybe three, four years ago. She and Bobby hooked up a couple of years back.”

“Building inspectors have a reputation, sometimes, for taking a little schmear here and there,” Virgil said.

Brandt shook his head. “Never heard anything like that about him. Didn’t have that smell. He’d tag a site, but I never heard that he was taking money.”

“So, just a guy,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“A veteran.”

Brandt’s forehead wrinkled. “Yeah. We asked Sally when we talked to her. Two years in Korea, during the Vietnam War. Drafted, got out as quick as he could. We could check, to pin it down, but that’s what she said.”

“Probably need to check,” Virgil said.

“The guy in New Ulm-he was a vet?”

“Nope. No, he was the right age for the draft, but he had a heart murmur or something,” Virgil said. And it bothered him-why had a nonvet been left at a veterans’ monument?

WALKED ALONG A BIT. Then Virgil asked, “You find anybody who heard the shots? Three shots?”

“Nope. That’s unusual. Every time a car backfires, we get calls,” Brandt said. “Even a.22 is pretty noticeable, especially in the middle of the night. We’re still knocking on doors, but the further away we get from the scene, the less likely it is that somebody would have heard anything.”

Virgil thought: Silencer? Silencers were so rare in crime circles as to be almost mythical. A few leaked out on the street from military sources, but that was almost all on the East Coast, and people who got them were usually jerkwaters showing off for their gun-club pals. Still, somebody should have heard a shot on a quiet street, with houses only a couple hundred feet away.

A professional assassin might have a silencer… but the only professional assassins he knew about, other than one that Davenport had tangled with, were like copycat killers-on television.

SANDERSON’S HOUSE was an 1890s cream-and-teal clapboard near-mansion that had been reworked into a duplex, set back and screened from the street by a hedge of ancient lilacs. A scaffold was hung on one side of the house, with a pile of boards set up on two-by-sixes, and covered with a plastic sheet, on the ground below it.

As they passed the driveway on the way to the front walk, Virgil could see a pickup truck and, behind it, the dark rounded shape of a fishing boat. A Stillwater cop answered the doorbell. They stepped inside to heavy-duty air-conditioning that made the hair prickle on Virgil’s forearms.

Sally Owen was sitting on a bar chair next to a work island in the kitchen. The kitchen had been recently refurbished with European appliances with a deep-red finish and black granite countertops. Virgil could smell fresh drywall, and the maple flooring was shiny and unblemished by sand or age.

“Miz Owen,” Brandt said. “This is Virgil Flowers, he’s with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he’s going to be handling this… incident. Uh, he wanted to chat with you…”

“You don’t look like a police officer,” Owen said, with a small sad smile. “You look like a hippie.”

“I was out dancing last night,” Virgil said. “I came on the run.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Brandt said. “I gotta get back.”

When he’d gone, Owen said, “So. You’re telling me that you got rhythm?”

“Hard to believe, huh?” Virgil said. There was another bar chair across the counter from her, and he pulled it out and slid onto it.

“Hard to believe,” she said, and then she turned half away and her eyes defocused, and Virgil had the feeling that he wasn’t really talking to her at that instant, she’d gone somewhere else. Owen had short brown hair with filaments of gray, and deep brown eyes. She’d never been a beautiful woman, but now she was getting a late-life revenge on her contemporaries who had been: she had porcelain-smooth skin, with a soft summer tan; slender face and arms, like a bike rider’s; an attractive square-chinned smile.

Virgil let her go for a moment, to wherever she’d gone, then brought her back. “Did you know that Bobby took a gun with him tonight?”

Brown eyes snapped back: “No… are you sure?”

“Yes. You knew he had a gun?”

She nodded. “He has some hunting rifles, but there’s only one pistol… it was a pistol? It must have been.”

“Yes.”

She stood up. “Let me look.” She led him back through the house, to the bedroom, a neat, compact cubicle with a queen-size bed, covered only with sheets, with a quilt folded back to its foot, two chests of drawers, and a closet with folding doors. Owen knelt next to one of the bureaus, pulled out the bottom drawer, pushed a hand under a pile of sweatshirts, and said, “It’s gone.”

She stood up and shook her head. “He never took it before. I would have known.”

“Chief Mattson said you had a story about Bobby,” Virgil said. He drifted back toward the kitchen, pulling her along as if by gravity. “What happened the other night?”

She busied herself, getting coffee. “All I’ve got is instant… I told him not to go out.”