Heat Lightning

BCA agent Del Capslock and his pregnant wife; and a spare, bespectacled woman named Elle, who was a nun and a childhood friend of Davenport’s; and Davenport’s ward, a teenager and soon-to-be-gorgeous young woman named Letty; and Davenport’s toddler, Sam.
    Weather came over and pinched his cheeks and said, “It’s about time you got here, you hunk.”
    He gave her a little squeeze and asked, “Why don’t you run away with me?”
    “Then you wouldn’t have a job and I’d have to support you,” Weather said.
    “Then he’d be dead and you wouldn’t have to support him,” Davenport said.
    “Still, couple good days at a Motel 6 in Mankato . . . might be worth it,” Virgil said to her.
    Davenport said, “Yeah, it would be. When you’re right, you’re right.”
    Elle, the nun, amused, said, “You guys are so full of it.”
    “The shrink speaks,” Del said. Elle was a psychologist.
    “Give the poor boy a hamburger, Lucas, and then let’s hear his story,” Elle said to Davenport. She patted a chair next to her in the patio set. “Sit next to me, so I can ask questions.”
     
 
DEL HAD BEEN doing counterculture intelligence for the upcoming Republican convention, and had been out of the loop on Virgil’s investigation. All the others had read about the killings in the newspapers, but knew nothing else. Davenport told him to start at the beginning, with Utecht, and let it all out. Virgil did, all the details he could think of, ending with the conversation with Knox.
    Then they wanted to see the pictures, and Virgil went out to the car to get them, and Davenport looked through them and handed them to Del and Sloan, and Elle got up to look, and Letty wanted to see, but Davenport snapped at her, “Get your nose out of there.”
    “It’s not fair,” and she sat down and put on a pout; Weather patted her on the leg.
    “If that’s actually Mr. Warren, then he is a very troubled man, with the kind of trouble you don’t cure yourself of,” Elle said. “If he did this, I would not be surprised to learn that he did similar things, here, over the years.”
    “Really,” Virgil said. He put the pictures back in the envelope. “What would we be looking for?”
    “If he’s a smart man . . . maybe dead prostitutes. Perhaps dead prostitutes in other cities. Bigger cities that he knows well, or that attract prostitutes, or an anonymous population of women. Brown women—Latinas, Filipinas, Malaysians, Vietnamese. Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”
    “Tortured?” Virgil asked. He was thinking of Wigge.
    She shook her head. “Not as such. Not coldly. Not calculated. He’d kill them in an excess of violence. Beat them. Strangle them. A violent show of dominance and sexuality.”
    Virgil looked at Davenport. “Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”
    Davenport shook his head. “There’s so much background noise, we’d never sort them out.”
    “DNA,” Sloan said. “If he’s raping them, they’ll have DNA in a DNA bank. Get some DNA from Warren, send it out there. Hell, circulate it everywhere.”
     
 
“YOU THINK Knox was really scared?” Del asked. Del knew Knox better than any of them.
    “Not scared—careful,” Virgil said.
    Del nodded. “That sounds like him. Where’d he get those guys?”
    “One of them told me Chicago—Chicago came up a couple of times during the conversation,” Virgil said. “There was a woman there, fishing, who told me when I was leaving that they looked like hoodlums. I guess they sorta did.”
    Del said to Davenport, “When we find him again, it’d be good to get some surveillance shots of these guys. If they’re heavy-duty, it might tell us where Knox’s connections go.”
    “We can do that,” Davenport said. To Virgil: “What kind of vibe did you get from him? From Knox? Does he know more than he’s telling us?”
    “Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “The guys he had with him, they were definitely working. They were looking out for somebody. Knox thinks Warren’s coming for him.”
    “Maybe,” said Sloan’s wife, “Warren’s afraid not so much of . . . of . . . what happened back then, but what it’d tell you guys. That you’d get DNA from him, based on the pictures, and then something would pop up.”
    Davenport said, “Hell of a thought.”
    Sloan said, “Warren has been walking along the edge for years—he’s got a full-time lawyer who does nothing but yell at city inspectors. Some of those