Heat Lightning

pointed the light back off the trail. “We have a second pistol, a Glock.”
    He continued, pointing the flashlight back into the brush: “Now, we’ve got a little track between here and the parking lot. Like somebody was trying to stay under cover. And we have more traces of blood. . . .”
    “Maybe there was a shoot-out and the shooter was hit.”
    “Possible,” Marshall said, “but the word we got from you, from your source, was that there was one shooter and two victims. What it looks like, to me, is that the one guy got killed. The other guy was wounded, and the shooter carried his ass over to the parking lot. He took his gun with him. There’s another drop of blood on the sidewalk.”
    Marshall took him through the brush, spotting the blood trail. They carefully stayed off the trail itself so crime scene could work it, and at the parking lot, Virgil looked both ways and then at Marshall and said, “I’m buying your story.”
    “We put out word to local hospitals, for a guy with any kind of a wound where it’s not clear where it came from . . .”
     
 
VIRGIL WENT BACK to look at the body, and Marshall went out to his car to get some gloves. When he came back, he said, “Your crime-scene guys might get pissed if you mess with the pistol.”
    Virgil said, “That’s why they pay me the big bucks. To put up with crime scene.”
    He pulled the gloves on, knelt next to the Beretta, studied it for a moment, then gently lifted it, popped the magazine. Pressed down on the top round: the magazine was light one round. He worked the action and a round popped out of the chamber.
    Sniffed the barrel, and smelled oil.
    Okay. The dead man hadn’t fired a shot, unless he’d reloaded after he was dead. Virgil slipped the magazine back in the butt of the pistol, replaced the pistol as he’d found it, and put the ejected round on top of it.
    “So what does that tell you?” Marshall asked.
    “That he didn’t see it coming. That he didn’t get a shot off. That the shooter wasn’t wounded by him,” Virgil said.
    “I knew that,” Marshall said.
    Virgil went to the second gun, repeated the sequence: same story—an unfired gun.
    “Two guys, plus one shooter. Your story looks even better,” Virgil said. He pulled off the gloves. “You got any veterans’ monuments around here?”
    “Every town, just about,” Marshall said.
    “Start calling up the local cops—tell them to keep an eye out,” Virgil said. “The killer’s gonna dump the dead guy’s body on a monument somewhere.”
     
 
VIRGIL WALKED BACK up the parking lot, looking for surveillance cameras. Didn’t find any. Asked the patrolman at the pavilion. “Don’t think they’ve got any,” he said. “Probably should.”
    “Doesn’t seem right,” Virgil said. “They’ve got them everywhere else.”
    He looked around a little more, found nothing, and was walking back toward Marshall when the crime-scene van rolled by. The head guy gave Virgil the required ration of shit about messing with the scene, then shut up, because he’d worked Homicide and would have done the same thing Virgil had done.
    “Good to get the name as soon as we can,” Virgil said. “We need to look at his place, make sure nobody’s turning it over.”
    So they did the wallet first.
    David Ross, thirty-two. Ross had a Virginia driver’s license, but also a checkbook with an address in St. Paul.
    “I’m going down there. You get anything . . . call me. I don’t care how stupid it is,” Virgil said.
     
 
BACK DOWN the highway, flying through the night, talking to the duty guy at the BCA, vectored into Wigge’s house. Wigge lived in Highland Park, one of the nicer neighborhoods in town. The house was dark, but when Virgil walked toward the front door, two lights came on, spotlighting him on the driveway. He continued to the front door and knocked, and the instant he knocked, more lights came on inside.
    Security systems. Serious security. Nobody came to the door.
    The houses here were well spaced, with broad lawns. He looked left and right, saw a light come on in the back of the next house to the west. He walked that way, up the front walk, and knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. A voice inside: “Who is it?”
    “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
    The door popped open, on a chain. A worried woman looked through the crack between the door and the jamb, and Virgil held up his ID.
    “Can you tell me, does John Wigge live with anyone? Wife?