Heat Lightning

pounds of salt included with the pie. He cut the salt with three Cokes, and left feeling like the Hindenburg.
     
 
SINCLAIR LIVED IN A liver-colored Victorian with a wide porch and—Virgil counted them, one-two-three-four—mailboxes. A condominium, then, or an apartment. He left the car under an elm, or, as a good ecological-sciences guy would say, a doomed elm, climbed the porch, and looked at the mailboxes. Sinclair was in apartment 1. The outer door was locked, but there were four doorbells next to a speaker disguised as a wooden eagle.
    He pushed 1, and a moment later a female voice said, “Yes?” and Virgil said, “Virgil Flowers, BCA. I called Professor Sinclair an hour ago.”
    The door lock buzzed and Virgil let himself into the interior hallway. A sweeping stairway curved up to the left, protected by a walnut banister with gold-leaf accents. Top floor must be 3 and 4, Virgil thought. He stepped down the hall to his right, saw a 1 on a white door, and knocked.
    The door was answered by a young Asian woman, tall and slender, with an oddly asymmetrical face and a chipped central incisor. Her forehead was flecked with three inch-long white scars, like knife cuts, halfway between her hairline and her right eyebrow. They almost looked like initiation scars, or tribal scars, Virgil thought, although everything he knew about tribal scars could be written on the back of a postage stamp.
    “Dad’s on the porch,” the woman said. Nothing Asian about her accent. She sounded like she might have come from milking the local cow. “Come in.”
    Not pretty, he thought, but attractive. Tough upper lip; soft brown eyes.
    On the way through the apartment, she chattered away, friendly, loose: “Virgil Flowers. I like that. Classical and corny at the same time—like way out in the country. Do all the cops here wear cowboy boots? They don’t in Madison. . . . Did you ever go undercover as a singer or something? What does your shirt say? WWTDD? Is that a music group?”
    “I can’t talk about it, ma’am,” Virgil said.
    “Some kind of cop thing?”
    The condo had a glassed-in back porch, looking out on a square of lawn, and Sinclair was out there, a lanky older man with still-blond hair, gray stubble on his chin. Women of a certain age would go for him in a big way, Virgil thought. He looked a little like the actor Richard Harris, in a loose white cotton dress shirt, the sleeves turned up, a gold tennis bracelet glittering from one wrist. He was sitting at a table, clicking at a laptop, with a glass of lemonade next to his hand.
    When he saw them coming, he stood up and offered a soft, scholarly hand: “Mr. Flowers.” He was six-three, Virgil thought, a couple inches taller than he was, with broad shoulders and a still-narrow waist.
    “Mr. Sinclair,” Virgil said. Virgil turned to the woman and said, “You never mentioned your name.”
    “Mai.”
    “Mai Sinclair?” Virgil asked.
    “Yes. Not married. Unlucky in love, I guess,” she said.
    “Well, good,” Virgil said. Sinclair was smiling at them, sat back in his chair, pointed Virgil to the other one.
    “Do you handle homicides on a regular basis, Mr. Flowers?” he asked.
    “Call me Virgil,” Virgil said as he sat down and stretched out his legs. “Most of my homicides are pretty irregular. Damnedest thing. I’d give anything for a good old beer-bottle domestic. I sometimes get so confused, I don’t know what to do next.”
    “Well . . . Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses,” Sinclair said.
    Virgil laughed and clapped his hands. “You looked that up before I got here. You didn’t just pull that out. . . .”
    Mai had lingered, and asked, looking between them, “What?”
    “He’s quoting Virgil at me,” Virgil said. “That’s never happened before, and I’ve talked to some pretty smart fellas.”
    Sinclair, surprised that Virgil had recognized the line, said, “Well.”
    Mai said to Sinclair, “He won’t tell me what his T-shirt means. The ‘WW’ is ‘What Would,’ and the last ‘D’ is ‘Do,’ but he won’t tell me the rest.”
    “We can’t talk about it,” Sinclair said. “That’s the first rule.”
    “The first rule of what?” she asked.
    “Can’t talk about it,” Virgil said, nodding to her father.
    “What?” Hands on her hips.
    “Can’t talk about it,” Sinclair repeated, looking up at his daughter, shaking his head.
    She took them in for a moment, then said, “Well, poop on you