Heat Lightning

and tell him we need to talk.”
    “I’m telling you, I have no way of reaching him,” she said, but she was lying through her teeth, and Virgil could see it, and she could see him seeing it. She smiled at him again, acknowledging all the knowing.
    “Great. But when you call him, tell him that.” Virgil snapped a business card down on the counter. “My phone number.”
    As Virgil turned to leave, she said, “He really is a photographer.”
    He stopped. “So am I. Is your dad any good?”
    “Pretty good.” She pointed to some big black-and-white prints hung along one wall, photos of old combines rusting in farm fields.
    Virgil went over to look; they were okay, he thought, but not great. “Terrific shots,” he said. He looked at them in a way he hoped was pensive, then drifted back to the counter and said, “Listen. I know you don’t like us sniffing around, but I think your old man is in deep shit. Deeper than he might know. He better call us.”
    “I’m telling you . . .”
    “Okay, okay—I’m just sayin’.”
    As he was going out the door, she called after him, “That Officer Shrake—does he work with you?”
    “Sometimes,” Virgil said. “He give you a hard time?”
    “No, not at all. He was quite charming,” she said.
    “Shrake?”
    “Yes. I was just thinking . . . what an attractive man he was.”
     
 
KNOX EQUIPMENT was in the far northwest of the metro area, off I-94, the better to send stolen equipment up the line to Canada. Virgil fought the traffic back into town, and when he hit Minneapolis, pulled the phone out of his pocket and called the Sinclairs’ apartment. No answer. He called Sandy and said, “I’ll be at Wigge’s house in twenty minutes.”
    “I’m in my car, on the way,” she said.
     
 
A BCA INVESTIGATOR named Benson had been sent out to the house when Virgil reported the murders at the rest stop, had checked it for anything obvious, and had then sealed it. Benson had given the key to Sandy.
    Sandy was sitting on the front porch with a white cat sitting next to her. The cat reflexively crouched, ready to run, when Virgil got out of his truck, but Sandy said “kitty” and scratched it between the ears, and the cat relaxed and stuck out its tongue.
    “Virgil,” Sandy said. She stood up, and the cat jumped down along the foundation, behind some arborvitae, and Sandy dusted off her butt. She was a latter-day hippie and carried an aura of shyness, which was starting to wear since she went to work for Davenport. She wore glasses, which apparently made her self-conscious, and when she was talking to Virgil she often took them off, which left her moon-eyed with nearsightedness. She was carrying a laptop. Virgil pulled off a seal, and she followed him through the door, and inside, they both paused to look around in the dry unnatural stillness. Owner dead. They could feel it coming from the walls.
    “Must be a computer somewhere,” Virgil said. They found a den, with bookshelves stuffed with junk paper—travel brochures, golf pamphlets, phone books, road maps, security-industry manuals and catalogs, gun books. The computer, a Sony, sat in the middle of it. Sandy brought it up, clicked into it. “Password,” she said.
    “Can you get into it?”
    “Yeah, but I have to go around . . .” She began hooking the computer to her laptop, and Virgil started pulling the drawers on two file cabinets. In ten minutes, Sandy was going through the computer files and Virgil had found both a will and six years of income tax records.
    Wigge had retired from the St. Paul force when he was fifty and had been with Paladin ever since; he was a vice president of the personal services division. In the previous year, he’d made $220,000 from all sources. One of the sources was better than two million dollars in investments, most of which were already in place in the earliest income tax records.
    Someplace along the line, and it couldn’t have been many years after leaving the police force, he’d had a windfall—but those years were the big tech-bubble years of the late nineties, so it was possible that he’d accumulated the money through either luck or intelligence.
    His estate went to two sisters, one of whom lived in Florida, the other in Texas. Virgil didn’t know whether they’d be notified of Wigge’s death; notification wasn’t his problem. Total estate, including the house, would push past three million.
    “Not bad for a cop,” Virgil told Sandy. “Anything in