Heat Lightning

the computer?”
    “Business e-mails. They did a lot of celebrity business. Concerts. Not much personal stuff. I haven’t seen anything from your names—Utecht or Sanderson or Bunton or Knox.”
    “Anything that looks like anything—write the name down. Or print it.”
    Virgil began prowling the house and found a couple of phone numbers written on a Post-it pad next to the kitchen phone. One of the numbers was for Sanderson; the other was a northern Minnesota area code, and he got no answer when he called it. Red Lake? Had he been trying to reach Bunton?
    He copied the unknown number into his notebook and moved on. Found a loaded .357 Magnum in a kitchen towel drawer. Found another one, identical to the first, in a side table in a bedroom that had been converted into a TV room, with a massive LCD television. A third one, just like the first two, in a bedstand in the master bedroom.
    The bedroom also had a steel door, and a waist-high, pale yellow wainscoting on all the visible walls. When Virgil rapped the wainscoting with a knuckle, he found steel plate. So the bedroom, in addition to being fashionable, was also bulletproof. He pulled back the curtains and found a mesh screen over both windows. Wigge had been ready for a minor firefight, but the work wasn’t new: he’d been ready for years.
    Sandy called: “He’s got an address book here. Contacts.”
    “Print it out.”
    He found a briefcase in the back hallway, looked in it: black address book, checkbook, pens, notepad, sunglasses, Tums, Chap Stick, a one-inch plastic ring-binder with upcoming security assignments.
    He scanned the address book, but none of his names were in it. He found three numbers for Ralph Warren, owner of Paladin, Wigge’s boss. Virgil put the phone book in his pocket.
     
 
THEY WORKED AT IT for three hours, piling up paper—Sandy running the computer files through Wigge’s printer, the loose stuff through his tabletop Xerox machine. When they were done, they had a stack of paper three inches thick, everything from tax records to receipts.
    “I’m not sure it means a thing,” he told Sandy over bagels and cream cheese at a local bagel place. “The whole thing may fly back to Vietnam, right over the top of all this stuff with Warren. Just because he was a crook doesn’t mean that had anything to do with him getting shot.”
    “Yes, it does,” she said. “He went to Vietnam to steal bulldozers. He was a crook back then, and one way or the other, he got shot because he was a crook.”
    “You’re such a charitable soul,” Virgil said.
    “In some ways,” she said, and sort of wiggled her eyebrows at him.
    “You know, Sandy, sometimes . . .” He thought better of it. “Never mind.”
    “What?”
    “Ah, never mind.”
    “Chicken.”
     
 
THEY SAT chewing for a moment, and then Sandy said, “If you think this Knox guy is moving around, then, you know, I don’t know what you could do about it. But what if he has a place somewhere?”
    “You mean, a hideout?”
    “Sure,” she said. “He’s a rich crook, there might be people looking for him sometimes.”
    “Okay. How do we find a hideout?”
    She shrugged. “If you’ve got a hideout, you pay property taxes on it. If you pay property taxes, and if you’re greedy, you deduct the taxes from your income taxes, even if you want to keep the place secret. If you deduct from your income taxes, there’ll be a tax form.”
    “Can we look at tax files?” Virgil asked.
    “Absolutely.”
     
 
VIRGIL CHECKED his watch when they got out of the bagel place: 1 P.M. What next?
    “I’ll drop you at your car, then I’m going to run around for a bit and then head back to the office to look at the phone numbers from Knox’s place. Look at those tax records.”
    “Yup,” she said. “Soon as I get back.”
    He dropped her at her car in front of Wigge’s place. He called Sinclair, got no answer, and swung by, since he was so close. Rang the bell, still no answer.
    “Shoot.” Scuffed back down the sidewalk, looking up and down the street, hoping to see Mai, but didn’t. He stalled, but finally got back in his truck and drove across town to the office.
     
AT DAVENPORT’S SUGGESTION, Virgil had a computerized pen register hooked into the phones at Shirley Knox’s house, at Carl Knox’s house, at the business, and for both of their cell phones; and had gotten a warrant delivered to the phone company for lists of calls made by the Knoxes’ known phones.
    Though,