Heat Lightning

figured out that my answer isn’t to dance with small repertory companies—and I’m not dedicated enough to make it with a big New York company. So I’m trying to figure out what to do.”
    “And what have you figured out?” Virgil asked.
    “I’m thinking . . . Don’t laugh . . .”
    “I won’t.”
    “Medicine,” Mai said.
    “Oooh. That could be tough. But my boss’s wife is a surgeon, and she is really fascinated by it, really into it.”
    “I could handle the academics,” she said confidently. “It’s just sometimes . . . you think, I’ll do all that work, years in school, and then . . . that’s it? That’s my life?”
    Shrake called: “These guys around Warren—we’ve been watching them all day. These guys are heavy hitters. They’re all wired up, they’re talking to each other—there’s a whole net around him. And he was down talking to John Crumb, who’s like some big deal with the Republicans, and Crumb’s got his own net, and they all knew each other. Man, this is tough stuff. Who are all these guys? I’ve never seen them before.”
    “He’s piping them in from someplace,” Virgil said. “Borrowing people, I guess—maybe all these security guys know each other or something.”
    “We can’t stay too close to him,” Shrake said. “I don’t know what good we’re gonna be able to do, Virgil. He’s just got too many guys.”
     
 
“WHO WAS THAT?” Mai asked.
    “We’re watching a guy—a suspect. I really . . . can’t talk to you about it. I mean, I really can’t.”
    “All right,” she said. “Gives me a little tingle, mysterious cop stuff.”
     
DAVENPORT DID MOST things well, Virgil thought, and among the things he’d done well was his lake cabin. The place was built of planks and cedar shingles and native stone, with a big fireplace and a comfortable living room and efficient kitchen, and two small comfortable bedrooms, all on one level.
    The place was surrounded by a patch of overgrown fescue; off to one side, a giant white pine loomed over the water’s edge; and Davenport had paid a deer-stand builder to build him a treehouse up in the pine, a deck with a few chairs and a roof, all up above the mosquitoes. A stone walk led to a forty-foot floating dock. A Tuffy fishing boat with a ninety-horse Yamaha outboard sat on a boatlift next to the dock.
    Virgil recovered the guest key from a fake rock next to a stone wall along the driveway, and they went inside, into the dimly lit living room, and Virgil pulled the drapes and let the sunlight flood in.
    “I don’t know much about fishing,” Mai said. “I’ve been fishing, but only with a bamboo pole.”
    “You’re a jock. You’ve got reflexes. It’ll take you two minutes to get a good start,” Virgil said. “Lucas keeps his stuff in the storeroom.”
    He took out two seven-foot light-action musky rods and a box of baits, humming to himself, and sat her down and showed her how to rig them, did it himself, then took it apart and made her do it. They were still doing it when his phone rang again. He dug it out, looked at it, said, “Huh,” and answered.
    The voice actually sounded far away and satellite-fed: “This is Harold Chen with the Hong Kong Police Force. Is this Virgil Flowers?”
    “Yes, it is. . . . Hang on just one second.”
    Virgil said to Mai, “I gotta take this, it’s from China. . . . I’m gonna run outside, sometimes you can drop the calls inside here.”
    He went back to the phone as he walked toward the door. “Yes, Mr. Chen, thank you for calling me back. I’m looking for information about Chester Utecht, a man who died there a year or so ago. I’ve got the details in my notebook—”
    “I’m quite familiar with Mr. Utecht’s case.” Chen sounded like he’d just left Oxford. “Could I ask why you’re inquiring after him?”
    “We’ve had a series of murders here. . . .” Virgil told Chen about the murders in detail, and about the possible tie to Vietnam.
    When he was done, Chen said, “Well. Vietnam. I should tell you that Mr. Utecht was something of a character. One of the last of the old-time soldiers of fortune, so his death was . . . noticed. He had been suffering from a series of debilitating diseases in his final days. Both his liver and kidneys were failing. However, his death hadn’t appeared imminent when he saw his internist a few days before he died. The pathology suggests that he may have taken his own life, or perhaps accidentally overdosed, on