Heat Lightning

facedown on the bed: no coherent thought, just a lizard-like twitch. The phone didn’t quit. He finally crawled across the bed and flipped it open, noticing, before he did it, that it was 5:23. He’d been in bed for a little more than an hour.
    The duty guy: “Man, Virgil, I hate to do this to you.”
    Virgil groaned. “They found Wigge?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah, the lemon in the mouth, the whole thing.”
    “Where is he?” Virgil asked.
    “You know up on Capitol Hill, the Vietnam veterans’ monument by the Veterans Service Building? Not the name wall, but the green statue?”
    “Ahhh . . . jeez.” One of the best-known public spaces in the state, not ten minutes from where Virgil was lying.
    “The St. Paul cops are there,” the duty man said.
    “Tell them that I’m on the way.”
    “Virgil . . . you know, the veterans’ monument isn’t the worst of it.”
    “Huh?”
    “The St. Paul cops say it looks like Wigge, was, uh . . .”
    “What?”
    “. . . was crucified.”
     
 
THE VETERANS’ MONUMENT is more or less on the front lawn of the enormous white state Capitol Building. The emerald-green lawn, the size of several football fields, stretched from the steps of the Capitol, down a broad hill dotted with monuments and flanked by government buildings, almost to the interstate highway that went through St. Paul, and looked toward downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi.
    Virgil had taken two minutes to stand in the shower before he dressed and rolled out, hair still wet. In the parking lot, he found his truck hemmed in between a van and a sedan, so closely that he could barely get the door open without dinging the van: always something, he thought, when you were in a crazy hurry.
    Wigge’s body was beside the parking lot for the Veterans Service Building, and that’s where he found the usual clump of cop cars. He waved his ID at the cop at the entrance to the parking lot, dumped the truck, and walked through the early-morning light down to a gaggle of cops gathered at the statue. Waters, the cop who’d met Virgil at Wigge’s house, was among the dozen uniforms and three detectives, and he stepped over to Virgil and said, “This is bullshit, man. This is stickin’ it right up our ass.”
    “Wigge for sure?”
    “What’s left of him,” Waters said, his voice grim. “You’re not gonna believe this. And there ain’t no way we’re gonna keep it off TV—it looks like he was nailed up, or something. Like Jesus.”
     
 
WHEN VIRGIL had worked with St. Paul, he’d not known Wigge well, more to nod at than to talk to. When he looked down at the body, his first thought was, Time passes . Wigge was an old man. He hadn’t been old when Virgil knew him, but he was old when he was murdered.
    “Hell of a goddamned thing.” Tim Hayes was a longtime St. Paul detective. A gaunt man, but with a small beer belly, he was watching the crime-scene people work over the body. “I understand you were looking for him up north.”
    “Yeah.” Virgil pointed down the hill. “You see that building, that warehouse with the old painted sign on it? A guy who lives there was murdered off I-35 tonight and Wigge was with him, I think. There’s some blood on the ground up there, and I think it was Wigge’s. We’ll match it.”
    “He probably spent some time wishing he’d died, before he did,” Hayes said. “Look at this . . .” They edged up to the body, which had been planted under a bronze statue of a Vietnam veteran, and Hayes said, “Look at his hands.”
    He had no fingers or thumbs. The palms were all that remained, and in the center of each palm was a bloody hole. Virgil shook his head. “Ah, man. Ah, Jesus.”
    “See that sack?” Hayes pointed at an ordinary brown paper grocery sack, the kind that might have held three cans of beer. “His fingers are in there. They didn’t just cut them off, they cut them off one joint at a time. With a pair of nippers of some kind. Brush cutters; tin snips. Something like that. I think there were, like, twenty-eight individual cuts. They tortured the shit out of him. He had bare feet, the bottom of his feet looked burned . . . they focused on his hands and his feet.”
    Crucified; but Virgil didn’t think of Jesus, but of Jezebel, in 2 Kings 9:35, lying in the streets of Jezreel, and when the dogs were done, nothing was left but the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet.
    Wigge was faceup; and between