Heat Lightning

kill other people. All the stress. We had one guy, a supply guy, flew into Vietnam as a replacement, trucked up to an advance base, fairly big base, never stepped off it in thirteen months. But once a day, some Vietcong with a mortar would fire one round into the base. That guy says when he got up in the morning that he’d start praying that he didn’t get hit that day, and he’d pray all day until the mortar came in, and then he’d stop praying until he got up the next morning. Literally prayed until his lips got chapped. Went on for a year . . . That’ll fuckin’ warp your head.”
    “Sanderson was in the Army, but he was never in Vietnam,” Virgil said. “He was in Korea, with some kind of missile unit.”
    Grogan frowned, leaned back. “You sure? This was a Vietnam vets group.”
    “That’s what his girlfriend says,” Virgil said. “The other guy, in New Ulm, wasn’t in the military at all.”
    “You checked all that?” Grogan asked.
    “Not really. Not with the government . . .”
    “Maybe there’s something you don’t know,” Grogan said. “Some kind of black ops.”
    Virgil shook his head. “I was an MP. I met every kind there was in the Army, most of them when they were drunk. These guys weren’t operators. Sanderson was a mechanic. Utecht ran a title service, and before that, he worked for State Farm.”
    Grogan said, “Huh. Well, then, you better talk to Ray. But I’ll tell you what, I think Sanderson was in Vietnam. He seemed to . . . know shit.”
    Ray’s last name was Bunton, Grogan said. “He’s part Chippewa and he’s got family all over. He’s got a place up in Red Lake. If he’s down here, he’s probably crashing with one of his relatives.”
    “He was in Vietnam?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah, he was pretty hard-core infantry,” Grogan said.
    “And he brought in Sanderson.”
    “Yeah. Don’t know why he’d do that, though, if Sanderson wasn’t in-country. That was part of the deal for this group,” Grogan said.
    “Thanks for that,” Virgil said, standing up.
    Grogan scratched his head and said, “You know . . . you probably want to talk to this professor who came to some of the meetings. The guys voted to let him in. I saw him—the professor—talking to Ray and Bob after the last meeting, out on the street. They were going at it for a while.”
    “Who’s the professor? You say they were arguing?”
    “Not arguing, just kinda . . . getting into it. One of those Vietnam discussions, where not everybody sees things the same way.”
    “I need that,” Virgil said. “What’s the guy’s name? The professor’s? Is he really a professor?”
    “Yeah, he is. University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mead Sinclair. He’s doing research on long-term aftereffects of the Vietnam War, is what he says,” Grogan said. “This last meeting, we were pushing him, and he said he actually was an antiwar guy during Vietnam, and then he says he was in Hanoi with the Jane Fonda group during the war.”
    “Bet that made everybody happy,” Virgil said.
    “A couple guys wanted to throw his ass out on the street—but most of them, you know, say, whatever . Jane Fonda’s old and that was a long time ago. Anyway, he sort of got into it with Ray and Bob. Maybe something came up. . . .”
    “That’s Mead Sinclair.” Virgil wrote it in his notebook.
    “Yep. Pretty snazzy name, huh?”
    Two names: Mead Sinclair, Ray Bunton.
    Virgil was out the door, halfway to his car, when Grogan called, “Hey, wait a minute. I might have something for you.” Grogan walked up the side of the building to an ancient Nissan pickup, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out an old leather briefcase. He dug around inside it for a moment, then pulled out a sheaf of xeroxed papers, stapled together. “When the professor asked if he could sit in, he sent me a paper he wrote on Vietnam. . . . I never read it. Maybe it’d be of some use.”
    He handed it over: a reprint from Mother Jones magazine, “The Legacy of Agent Orange.”
     
BACK ACROSS TOWN to BCA headquarters. Virgil left the truck in the parking lot, climbed the stairs to Davenport’s office, asked his secretary, Carol, where he could sit with a computer.
    “Lucas said you can use his office until he gets back. After that, we’ll find something else,” she said. “He said not to try to pick the lock on the gray steel file. Nothing else is locked.”
    “The gray steel one,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah. It’s got employee