Heat Lightning

Girlfriend?”
    “We don’t know him very well, but he lives alone,” the woman said. “Has something awful happened?”
    “Why would something awful happen?”
    A man’s face appeared at the crack: “Because you’re beating on doors at two o’clock in the morning?” A St. Paul patrol car glided to a stop at the curb, and the man added, half apologetically, “We called 911.”
    Virgil said, “That’s okay—I needed to talk to them.”
    He walked out to the curb, holding up his ID, called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.”
    A St. Paul sergeant came around the car and said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers.”
    “That you, Larry?”
     
LARRY WATERS knew Wigge. “He’s divorced. His old lady moved back to Milwaukee. I haven’t heard that he was going out. He gone for sure?”
    “The odds are pretty good. A guy who was at the scene, and knows him, says he was shot. We’re missing the body, though,” Virgil said. “He had a rep.”
    “Yeah, and he deserved it,” Waters said. “Now he’s got all these crazy gun-fucks coming in here, driving around in GMCs with blacked-out windows. He’s contracting guys from all over the country, for security for the convention. There are some serious badass killers coming in.”
    “I talked to Davenport. . . . You know Davenport?”
    “Sure.”
    “He says the security company, Paladin, is owned by Ralph Warren.”
    “Yeah, that’s right. Between you and me, Warren’s a bigger asshole than Wigge,” Waters said. “He went bust about three times before he tapped into the city money and started building subsidized buildings all over town. . . . Probably as dirty as Wigge, but he was putting the money into the envelopes instead of taking it out.”
    “Paying people off?”
    “Yeah. Wasn’t any big secret. But it was subtle. He’d keep somebody in the public employee unions happy, and they’d talk to their friends on the city council, and things got done. He didn’t just drop a load on somebody’s desk. You weren’t gonna get him on a camera.”
    Virgil talked to Waters for another couple of minutes, asked him to call some St. Paul guys to put some tape on Wigge’s house until a crime-scene unit could get there or they found Wigge, whichever came second. Waters said he would, and Virgil headed downtown to David Ross’s address.
     
 
ROSS LIVED IN an apartment that had once been a warehouse—another of Warren’s projects. Virgil leaned on the mailbox buzzer for a minute, was surprised when a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?”
    Jean Prestel was a schoolteacher, and looked like a schoolteacher, with short dark hair showing a streak of white over her ears—short and slender and earnest, and not somebody Virgil would have put with the dead, thick-necked David Ross. She was wearing a cotton nightgown with tiny teddy bears and little pink crossed ribbons on the breast, and she clutched her hands to her chest and asked, wide-eyed, “Oh my God, what happened?”
    She fell to pieces when Virgil told her, and he sat on the couch with her and she wept, said, “What am I going to do now?” and “We didn’t have any time” and “We were talking about getting married” and “Are you sure it was David?” and she showed him a photograph and he said that it was, and she rolled facedown on the couch and seemed to try to scratch through the seat cushions, weeping, weeping . . .
    When he got her to the quiet, stunned stage, he asked about relatives, and she called her aunt, who said she’d come over. Her mother lived in Sioux Falls. And he asked her about Ross and what he’d been doing.
    “He was working with John—I don’t know exactly what he was doing, just, getting ready for the convention, I guess. But he got up every day at six o’clock and he’d go over to John’s and pick him up, and he’d stay with him all day.”
    “How long had he been doing that?”
    “Only a couple of weeks, and John said it wouldn’t last very long, but that things were really intense now . . . and now David’s dead? That can’t be right. . . .” And she was gone again.
     
 
VIRGIL WAITED until Prestel’s aunt arrived, then eased out of the apartment, leaving them with the misery.
    He looked at his watch again: four-fifteen. Had to get some sleep.
    Needed to talk to Ralph Warren, needed to track Ray Bunton. Needed sleep even more.
    Talk to Warren in the morning, and start the hunt for Bunton, he thought.
    He got an hour.

11
    THE PHONE RANG.
    Virgil was