Heat Lightning

later. When he was done, he put the address book back in the jacket and tossed it back on the bed.
    When Davenport had called about the plane, he’d asked, “How things go? You know?”
    “Not much, but, um, I found like three hundred names and addresses in a private little book.”
    “Not bad,” Davenport said. “For Christ’s sakes, don’t tell anybody about it.”
    “Get me a plane?”
    “Yup. Got you a bush pilot,” Davenport said.
     
 
VIRGIL TRIED TO chat with Kate, who was decent-looking and athletic and outdoorsy and had a long brown braid that reminded Virgil of all the women in his college writers’ workshop; but Kate, probably shell-shocked by being hit on by every fly-in fisherman in southwest Ontario, didn’t have much to say.
    So Virgil settled into his seat and went to sleep.
     
KATE PUT him on the Mississippi across the bridge from downtown St. Paul. Davenport was waiting; Virgil threw him the backpack, thanked Kate, climbed up on the dock, and pushed the plane off: Kate was heading back north.
    Davenport asked, “You okay?”
    “Tired,” Virgil said. “Still alive. Anybody talking to the Canadians? Anybody seen Mai and the other guy?”
    “We’re talking to them, they went down and recovered the boat, they’ve got some guys working the other side. But not too much.”
    “Goddamnit,” Virgil said. “We were too goddamn slow getting across.”
    “Nothing works all the time,” Davenport said. “On the whole, you did pretty damn good. Knocked it all down, settled it. Now, if we can get the Republicans in and out of town without anybody getting killed, we can all go back to our afternoon naps.”
    Virgil handed him the manila envelope.
    “What’s this?”
    “Something to think about,” Virgil said.
     
 
DAVENPORT LOOKED AT the photos as they walked out to his car. When they got there, he put them back in the envelope and passed them across the car roof. “Hang on to these until I can figure something out.”
    They were meeting the two guys from Washington in a conference room off Rose Marie’s office at the Capitol. “They want to talk about Sinclair—that’s all we know,” Davenport said.
    “Is Sinclair still in jail?” Virgil asked.
    “No. We let him out this morning. Put a leg bracelet on him, told him not to go more than six blocks from his house. He’s at his apartment now,” Davenport said. “There are some very strange things going on there—I’m not quite sure what. Some kind of inter-intelligence-agency pie fight, the old guys from the CIA against the new guys in all the other alphabet agencies.”
    “Who’s Sinclair with?”
    “The old guys, I think, but I’m just guessing,” Davenport said. “The thing is, he hasn’t asked for an attorney. He’s actually turned down an attorney, though he says he might ask for one later. He thinks the fix is in.”
    “Is it?”
    “Well, we’re having this meeting—”
    “You can’t just throw dirt on the whole thing.”
    “Maybe you can’t—but maybe you can. Who knows? Not my call.”
    “We got bodies all over the place.”
    “And we got three dead Vietnamese. There’s your answer for the dead bodies. If nobody mentions the CIA, why, then, should anybody get all excited about mentioning them?”
    Virgil looked at Davenport and asked, “Where do you stand on this?”
    Davenport said, “Basically, at the bottom of my heart: if you do the crime, you do the time. And I don’t like feds.”
     
 
ON THE WAY across the Mississippi, Davenport said, “You need to get over to Sinclair’s place. If you look behind the seat, you’ll see that laptop that Mickey carried into the meeting with Warren.”
    Virgil twisted in the seat, saw the laptop, picked it up.
    Davenport said, “Take it with you. What I want you to do is, while we’re all real hot, I want you to go into Sinclair’s place with the laptop turned on. You can stick it in your pack with those photographs—they ought to distract him from thinking too hard about you being bugged—and talk to him for a while. He seems to like you for some reason. Find out what he wants. Find out what he’d do. What he’d admit to. Might get him, you know, at home, when his guard’s down a bit.”
    “Is that why you turned him loose?” Virgil asked.
    “Maybe.”
    “Did they take the bug out of the truck?” Virgil asked.
    “Not yet, but what difference would it make? There’s nobody to listen to it.”
    “Mai’s still out there,” Virgil