Heat Lightning (8 page)

He called Carol and asked, "So where's Ray Bunton?"

"Can't find him. The cops at Red Lake are all out working, there's nobody to talk to us. But they're gonna call back," she said.

"Check them every five minutes," Virgil said.

That done, he opened the photojournalism book to the section called "Techniques of the Sports Shooter" and settled in for a little study, trying out things with his new Nikon as he did it.

The good thing about the new digital cameras, like his D3, was that you could see the shot instantly. He was working on his panning technique, shooting the occasional passerby, when Mead Sinclair walked out of his house, looked both ways, and then turned toward Virgil's truck.

Virgil took a shot or two as Sinclair came up--couldn't hurt to have a couple of current shots--and went on past. Sinclair never looked at the truck. He seemed to be talking to himself, or maybe singing to himself, and he had a hand-sized spiral notebook in one hand, with a pen clipped to it, and up the block, he stopped and made a note, then continued on. An intellectual, Virgil thought.

At the end of the block, Sinclair crossed the street and started along the next block, and Virgil watched him through the windshield. At the end of the second block, he wrapped around to his right, headed out to Grand Avenue.

Virgil followed in the truck, crossed the street that Sinclair had taken, saw him walking up the block. Virgil took the opportunity to back up a bit, watched him in a narrow gap between the edge of a house and a tree trunk. Sinclair crossed the street at the corner, carefully looking both ways before he crossed, and a moment later was out of sight again.

He could lose him right there, but Virgil took the chance and drove on another block, then right, to the end of the block, and eased out, looking down the block, and saw Sinclair crossing Grand, heading into a restaurant.

Sinclair had just eaten, he'd said. Virgil hadn't been invited. . . . So why the restaurant? Virgil parked, waiting to see who he might come out with--or who might come out that was interesting.

Nobody came out but Sinclair, a minute or so after he went in. He recrossed the street, then turned away, down the block, retracing his steps: might be headed home. Virgil made a quick turn, went down to the end of the block, found a bush he could stop behind. A minute later, Sinclair appeared a block away, crossed the street again, and headed back toward his house.

Virgil said, "Shoot," and wrestled the truck in a quick U. Had he missed somebody? He should have waited outside the restaurant.

Nobody came out for ten minutes, and then it was two elderly ladies. Another five minutes, and two fat guys in golf shirts, one picking ferociously at his teeth with a toothpick. They got into a Cadillac and drove away; they seemed unlikely.

Virgil decided to look for himself. Walked down to the restaurant, stood at the hostess stand for a moment, checking out the ten or twelve people in the booths. They all looked unremarkable, and seemed focused on food or conversation. The hostess, who might have been a college girl from Macalester, came over and said, "One?"

"Ah, I was here to meet a guy, but I'm late, and I'm afraid I might have missed him. Good-looking older guy, still blond . . ."

"Oh--the professor?"

"Yeah. That's him," Virgil said.

"He was here, but made a call and then he left again. He might be trying to call you."

"Thanks," Virgil said. He backed away, glanced toward the rest-rooms, saw the old-fashioned black coin phone on the wall. "I'll try him again on the phone."

He went back and looked at it: the phone dial showed a number, and he jotted it down in the palm of his hand, under the number that Mai had written there.

Outside again, he thought about it. Sinclair had just walked four blocks to a cold phone to make a call. Interesting. . . .

He noted the time and called Carol. "See if you can get a subpoena for the phone records for a pay phone at Stern's Cafe, on Grand. Here's the number . . ."

"You want me to check informally first?" She meant that Davenport knew a guy who could tell them whether a subpoena would be a waste of time.

"If you could. Get in touch with Red Lake?"

"Not yet; still trying."

VIRGIL RANG OFF, looked at the phone for a moment, groped in his briefcase for his black book, punched in a number.

"Harold; it's Virgil Flowers in Minnesota."

"Yeah, Virgil. What's up?"

"I got a killer who's executed two older guys, left their bodies on vet memorials, with lemons stuck in their mouths. Killed them with a .22, two shots, maybe silenced. You ever hear of anything like that, with the cartels, the mob, or anybody?"

"New one on me," Harold Gomez said. He was an agent with the DEA. "You got weird shit up there. I always said that."

"If you have a line into the FBI, into that serial-killer unit, whatever it is . . . could you check the lemon thing? Without burning up any of your personal credit?"

"Sure. I know a guy who knows those guys," Gomez said. "How fast you need it?"

"Well, if you get a hit, I need to know right away," Virgil said. "The killer guy, we don't know that he's left town. If he's crazy, if it's business, or what it is. If he's got a list, it could get ugly."

"I'll call--but to tell you the truth, it sounds more like some kind of goddamn Russian thing or Armenian or Kazakh. They're into the rituals and warnings and shit. The mob, those assholes just shoot your ass and bury you in the woods with Jimmy."

"Jimmy?"

"Hoffa."

"Oh, yeah. Listen--another guy told me that the Vietnamese executioners sometimes stick lemons in the mouths of the people they're going to execute," Virgil said. "Like gags. If you can find any reference to that . . . maybe old Vietnam guys or something?"

"Sounds kinky. Let me check," Gomez said. "You on your cell phone?"

"I am. One more thing, Harold? See if the guys in the serial-killer unit are looking at any chain of old veteran deaths. Even without lemons and memorials."

"Sure."

"I owe you, Harold."

HE CLICKED OFF, got ready to move, but Carol called back.

"We talked to a guy in Red Lake who knows Bunton, and they're out looking for a guy to call you back. Sandy dug up some pictures of him, she e-mailed them to you, along with every file she can find on him. Income tax, all of that. She can't get into the military records, but there's a reference in one of his DWI files that he was treated for alcoholism at the Veterans Administration Hospital, and that he did service in Vietnam . . . so he's ex-military."

"All right. I sort of knew that, but it all helps."

HE WAS FIVE MINUTES from a Starbucks, where he had an online account. He got a white chocolate mocha Frappuccino, found a table, and brought the computer up as he sipped.

The photos of Bunton showed a hard, square-looking man, always in T-shirts. In one photo, he glared at the camera, a headband tight around his forehead, an eagle feather dangling over one ear. With his pale eyes, he didn't look particularly Indian, Virgil thought--more like an IRA dead-ender. Was Bunton an Irish name? Or maybe Scots? Didn't sound a hell of a lot like Ojibwa.

Whatever.

The rest of the Bunton file told him what he'd already guessed--Vietnam, hanging out, motorcycles, alcoholism, dope, and sporadic employment involving automobile parts.

When he finished, Virgil shut down the computer, looked at his watch.

Goddamn Bunton.

He stood up to leave, but his phone rang. Carol. He sat down again, flipped it open, and said, "Yeah?"

"Informally, the phone call went to the Minneapolis Hyatt. I've got the number, but not the room. . . ."

THE MINNEAPOLIS HYATT is all tangled up in the Skyway system, and Virgil, operating on Kentucky windage, put his truck in the wrong parking ramp and debouched into the Skyway, not realizing that he wasn't where he thought he was. He spent ten minutes running around like a hamster in a plastic habitat, before he found a map and realized his mistake.

The hotel's lobby was empty, but the Hyatt desk was being run by a young woman who was far too sophisticated and generally out there to be running a hotel desk. Virgil had the uneasy feeling that if he asked her to connect a phone number to a room and a name, she'd call a manager, who might want to see a subpoena . . . blah-blah-blah.

He looked around and saw an elderly rusty-haired bellhop sitting on a window ledge, reading a sex newspaper called Seed, which, Virgil happened to know, was the publishing arm of an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Virgil went over and sat down next to him. The bellhop looked like a model for the next Leprechaun horror film, with a nose the size of a turnip and a bush of red hair shot through with gray.

He glanced at Virgil and said, "You look like a hippie, but you're a cop." He was wearing a tag that said George. "Looking for hookers?"

"Nope. I'm trying to find out which room is connected to a particular phone number without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit," Virgil said. "The girl behind the desk looks like she lives for bureaucratic bullshit."

The bellhop looked at the girl behind the desk and said, "Somebody turned me in for smoking in the stairwell last winter. It was about a hundred below zero, which is why I was there instead of outside. I think she's the one. She's like this no-smoking Nazi. When I was bitching about it, she said it was for my own good. I said, 'What, getting fired?' Bitch."

"You think you could work this sense of anger and disenfranchisement into a room number? And a name?" Virgil turned his hand over; a folded-over twenty-dollar bill was pinched between his index and middle fingers.

"What's the number?" George asked as he lifted out the twenty.

"Atta boy," Virgil said. He wrote the number on a slip of paper and passed it over.

The bellhop disappeared into the back and a moment later was back. "Got the number and the names. It's Tai and Phem, a couple of Japs."

"Japs?" Virgil was puzzled. "The names sound Vietnamese."

George shrugged. "Whatever. I'll tell you what, though, they are bad, bad tippers. The other night, Tai--he's the tall one--orders a steak sandwich and fries at midnight. They don't give those things away, that's a thirty-dollar meal. He gave me a fuckin' buck."

"What else you got?"

"Well--just what everybody knows," George said. "They're Canadian."

"Canadian?"

"Yeah. They've been here, off and on, mostly on, for three months.

They're supposedly working on a big deal with Larson International to build hotels."

"Larson," Virgil said.

"Yeah, you know."

"I know." The chain that Sinclair worked for. "So they're high-fliers."

"Well, if they are, somebody's got them on a pretty friggin' tight expense account--either that, or they're putting down twenty percent for tips and keeping the cash."

"They're that kind of guys?" Virgil asked.

"They're, uh . . . They're some guys I wouldn't fuck with," George said.

"You're fuckin' with them now," Virgil said.

The bellhop looked startled. "You're not going to tell them."

"No. I just wanted to see if you'd jump," Virgil said, standing up, stretching. "You did, which means, you know, maybe you're not bullshitting me."

"You watch yourself, cowboy," the bellhop said. "Them Japs is some serious anacondas." He made a pistol shape with his thumb and forefinger, poked Virgil above the navel, and shuffled away.

VIRGIL HAD SPENT a good part of his life knocking on doors that had nobody behind them, entering rooms that people had just left, so he was mildly surprised when a slender man with longish hair, combed flat over the top of his head, and apparently nailed in place with gel, opened the door and said, pleasantly, "Yes?"

"Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Virgil said, flipping open his ID. "I talked to Mead Sinclair a while ago, he said you might be able to help me with some Vietnam-related stuff. Are you Mr. Tai?"

"Yes. Well . . . Okay, come in," Tai said. He was thin, with a face that was delicate but tough. The splice lines of a major scar cut down his forehead, another white scar line hung under his left eye, another below his lip. "We're working right now, it's coming up on early morning in Vietnam, the markets are opening . . ."

"Just take a couple of minutes," Virgil said.

He followed Tai into the suite's main room, where another Asian man sat on a couch, with a laptop on his knee and a telephone headset on his head. He was shoeless, wearing a T-shirt and blue silky gym shorts. "My partner, Phem," Tai said.

Phem didn't look up from his laptop but said, "What's up, eh?"

He said the "eh" perfectly: Canucks, Virgil thought, not Vietnamese.

Tai pointed at a chair, and Virgil settled in and said, "Have you ever heard of the Vietnamese, uh, what would you call it . . . custom? The Vietnamese custom of putting a lemon in a man's mouth, as a gag, before they execute him?"

Tai had arranged his face in a smile, which vanished in an instant. "Jesus Christ, no. What's up with that?"