Heat Lightning

staying way back, but they were still going to see us. We can get on him again tomorrow, but it seems like he’s moving at night, if he’s doing these killings. We need to do something electronic with his truck, to follow him, or something—this ain’t working.”
    Virgil spoke to Davenport, and they agreed that Shrake and Jenkins would resume the surveillance in the morning, just tight enough to keep track of Warren’s general location. “We ought to try the sting, see what happens,” Virgil told Davenport. “We need an undercover guy who Warren wouldn’t know, and between him and his pals, they’ll know a lot of cops around town.”
    “I’ll make some calls,” Davenport said. “I’ve got an ex-cop in Missouri who could do it. He’d be perfect for the job.”
     
 
SO VIRGIL got up early, headed back to Mankato, his home base, with ten pounds of dirty clothes. He lived in a compact 1930s brick house on the edge of downtown, on a block with trees and quite a few kids. When he bought it, the house had belonged to an elderly widower whose children were moving him to a nursing home. The old man had been a mechanic before he retired, and had restored cars as a hobby. His two-and-half-car garage was nearly as big as the house, and provided good room for both Virgil’s truck and his boat.
    He left the truck in the driveway, checked the place to make sure everything was okay, stuck the dirty clothes in the washing machine, collected his mail, paid bills, and walked downtown and dropped them off at a mailbox. He got an early-morning cup of coffee and a croissant at a coffee shop.
    Eating the croissant as he went, he walked back home, put the clothes in the dryer, and made a phone call to Marilyn Utecht, hoping he wasn’t waking her up; but she was an early riser, and said, “Come on ahead.” He got in the truck and headed to the town of New Ulm, which had at one time been the least ethnically diverse town in the United States—everybody had been of German ancestry.
     
 
UTECHT WAS working in her still dew-wet yard when he got there, digging dandelions with a paring knife, tossing them into a bucket.
    “How’re you doing?” Virgil asked as he crossed the lawn.
    She said, “Okay,” and stood up, and “I got a job.”
    “Good. Get you out and about,” Virgil said.
    She smiled and said, “It’s not much of a job . . . part time at a day-care center. But I always liked little kids, and I don’t really need a lot of money.”
    “Don’t you get diseased?”
    “Oh, yeah. Keeps your immune system going, that’s for sure,” she said. “So, Virgil—what’s up? You want a root beer or anything? Or is it still too early?”
    “Sure, I’ll take a root beer.”
     
 
THEY SAT in lawn chairs in the backyard, a pool of uninflected grass surrounded by a white board fence, and drank root beer, and Virgil said, “You’ve been reading about what’s going on.”
    She shivered and said, “I can’t believe it. I just . . . can’t . . . believe it. Are you going to catch him? Whoever’s doing it?”
    “Hope so. He’s a psycho, whoever he is, and I think he’s compelled to do this,” Virgil said. “We’ve got one suspect, who we’re watching, and one fellow who we know is a target, who’s protected, and sooner or later, something is going to crack open. I hope we’re in a position to move when it does.”
    “I should hope,” she said. “I still cry about Chuck, poor guy. I’ll be standing by the sink, and I’ll start crying.”
    “You were married a long time.”
    “Yup,” she said, and took a sip of root beer.
    “What do you know about Chuck’s dad, Chester?” Virgil asked. “When he died, did you guys go over?”
    “Chuck did—just to see . . . well, there wasn’t much of an inheritance. Eighteen thousand dollars, that was about it. He had an annuity, but that was gone the minute he died. Chester was cremated, and they put his ashes in the ocean, so . . . there wasn’t much left.”
    “I talked to a guy from China. A Hong Kong cop. He said that Chester might have had some contact with the CIA.”
    Utecht’s eyebrows went up, and she said, “You know, I wouldn’t doubt it. We used to joke about him being a spy. We even asked him once, and he joked about it—but when he was joking about it, his eyes didn’t look funny, if you know what I mean.”
    “I do.”
    “Chester was all over that area when he was young, after World War Two—Hong Kong, North Vietnam, South