Heat Lightning

wouldn’t disturb anything, then duckwalked forward a couple of feet, reached out, and touched the hard curve. Shook his head, stood up.
    “What?” Mattson asked.
    “He’s got a gun in his pocket,” Virgil said.
    “Are you shitting me?”
    “No. I could feel the cylinder cuts,” Virgil said. “You might want to check and see if he’s got a carry permit, and if he does, when he got it.”
    “That means . . . he knew something was coming.”
    “Maybe,” Virgil said.
     
 
“CRIME SCENE’S HERE,” Cunningham said, looking back up the street.
    Virgil stepped away, back to the fence, and out, and Mattson asked, “What do you think?”
    “Same as New Ulm. The gunshots look identical. A .22, from two inches. One difference—Sanderson’s got some abrasions on his neck, like he was choked. Didn’t see that at New Ulm. But the lemon’s not public, yet, and that pretty much ties it up.”
    “Some of the media know about the lemon,” Mattson said. “I had Linda Bennett from KSTP, she asked me if there was a lemon in his mouth.”
    “Yeah, some of them know. We asked them not to report it. But they’ll be connecting the dots, the veterans’ memorial,” Virgil said, looking up at the hoops and struts of the memorial. “I hope we can hold the line on the lemon. Don’t need any copycats.”
    “You actually know of any copycats?” Cunningham asked. He seemed genuinely curious.
    Virgil grinned and said, “No, but I’ve seen them on TV shows.”
    “Speaking of which,” Mattson said. Virgil looked up the hill and saw a white SUV do a U-turn at the barricade. A logo on the door said WCCO.
    “I’m surprised they took so long,” Virgil said. “You guys ought to take five minutes to think about who’s going to say what. The whole bunch of them will be down here, and they’ll be all over you.”
    They all looked over the fence at the body, which looked a little like a scarecrow, deflated and dead, and Brandt asked, “What the hell’s going on?”
    “Wish you could tell me,” Virgil said. The crime-scene van was squeezing down the hill, and a cop car had to be moved so it could get past.
    “You all through here?” Cunningham asked.
    “Yeah—nothing much for me to do,” Virgil said. “I ain’t Sherlock Holmes.”
    Cunningham said, “I talked to Jimmy Stryker at the sheriff’s meet last month, and he thinks you are.”
    Virgil said, “Well, we’re friends.”
    “He said you were friends with his sister, too—for a while,” Cunningham said.
    Virgil nodded at him, sharp and quick. “Ships passing in the night, Sheriff.” He wasn’t going to step into that bog. “I would like to talk to Sanderson’s girlfriend. We need to know why he was carrying a revolver.”
    Mattson nodded. “She’s available.”

3
    SANDERSON HAD lived three blocks from the veterans’ memorial, up the hill, past the courthouse, and down a dark side street. Brandt walked along with him, to show him the way and to fill him in on the dead man’s background.
    “We all knew him,” Brandt said. “He used to be a building inspector for the city. He was a carpenter before that. He was around all the time.”
    “Nice guy? Bad guy?”
    “You know—had a little mean streak, but wasn’t too bad when you got to know him. Short-guy stuff,” Brandt said. “He’d get in your face. But nobody, you know, took him all that seriously. Never knew him to actually get in a fight or anything. You’d see him, you might stop and chat. One of the guys around town.”
    “So . . . you said he used to work for the city,” Virgil said. “What was he doing now?”
    “He retired, took the pension, started rehabbing these old Victorians. He’d buy one, live in it, and rehab it,” Brandt said. “That’s how he met Sally. His girlfriend’s Sally Owen, she’s a decorator in one of the shops downtown.”
    “Younger woman?”
    “No, they must be about the same age. Sanderson was fifty-nine. Sally might even be a year or two older. Her husband was a contractor, died of a heart attack maybe three, four years ago. She and Bobby hooked up a couple of years back.”
    “Building inspectors have a reputation, sometimes, for taking a little schmear here and there,” Virgil said.
    Brandt shook his head. “Never heard anything like that about him. Didn’t have that smell. He’d tag a site, but I never heard that he was taking money.”
    “So, just a guy,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, pretty much.”
    “A veteran.”
    Brandt’s