Heat Lightning

on a river for a while, maybe I could shake something loose.”
    “I’ll call him.”
    “What about Warren?” Virgil asked.
    “Rose Marie knows him,” Davenport said. “There’s a cocktail party this evening at the Town and Country Club, for the Republican arrangements committee. Warren’ll be there, because he does the security, Rose Marie’s gonna be there, the governor’s giving a welcome talk. We’ll get Warren in a corner and hammer down the rough edges.”
    “He’s pissed,” Virgil said.
    “Well—you get that way when the necrophilia cat gets out of the bag,” Davenport said. “If this goes public, he’d be in trouble. Can you see the headlines on CNN: ‘Necrophiliac Runs Republican Security’?”
    “How would that be a change?” Virgil asked.
    “Funny. I’m laughing myself sick,” Davenport said.
    Virgil: “Tell me this: why did he bring in the cops on the photos?”
    “Maybe he thought he was being set up—that Knox was out there with a gun.”
    “But Knox . . . never mind. I was gonna say, Knox isn’t the killer,” Virgil said. “ But Warren maybe believes that he is. I can’t seem to focus on that: and if Warren really believes that Knox is the killer—then Warren isn’t.”
    “You need some time on the water,” Davenport said. “Work it out.”
    DAVENPORT’S FRIEND called Virgil and said that he was standing on the sixth tee at Clifton Hollow golf course and that he wasn’t planning to be home soon. “If you walk around to the back of the house, the porch door will be open, and if you look up on the beam, you’ll see a nail with one of those pink plastic floats on it. That’s the boat key. Fold up the boat cover and leave it on the dock under the bungee cord. Lucas said you’d have your own fishing gear.”
    “Yeah. I’m heading down south of the Kinnickinnic, see if I can pick up some smallies,” Virgil said.
    “Throw a musky lure when you’re down there. There’s muskies in there; I’ve been trolling the whole river the last couple years. I’ve taken two forty-inches-plus just south of the Narrows, on the Wisconsin side around behind the hook, and I saw one that went maybe forty-eight.”
    “Thanks. I’ll leave a twenty for the gas, if that’s enough,” Virgil said.
    “That’s good—just stick it back up there with the key.”
     
 
DAVENPORT’S FRIEND lived in a rambling cedar-shake and stone house down a long single-lane road on a bluff above the St. Croix River. Virgil left the 4Runner in the driveway, walked around back, found the key, and carried three rods and his emergency tackle box down eighty steps to the beach and a dock. The boat had a dried-on foam line that suggested it hadn’t been out for a while. He stripped off the canvas cover, snapped it under the bungee cord on the dock, dropped the motor, and fired it up.
    No problem. One minute later, he was a half mile down the river. Glanced at his watch: just three o’clock. He’d been up since five, but still, the day seemed like it was rolling on forever.
    The high Wisconsin bluffs on the St. Croix are such a dark green that in bright afternoon sunlight, they seem almost black. Virgil puttered through the Narrows, then hooked around behind the sandbars in back. With the sun hot on his shoulder blades, he set up a drift, faced into the east bank of the river, started dropping a lure a hand span from the bank, yanking it back in a quick retrieve.
    And he thought:
    Give me an anomaly that I can hang my hat on. There’s got to be one back there somewhere. Something that can’t be easily explained . . .
    He thought about Sinclair, and the two Vietnamese, Tai and Phem—but the fact was, Virgil had gone looking for clues at a place that dealt largely with veterans who’d had problems in Vietnam, where he’d encountered a man who’d spent his life dealing with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. What did he expect, Latvians?
    They were persons of interest, but at least temporarily opaque.
    He worked through the sequence from his first moments at Utecht’s death scene, through the drive out to look at Sanderson, to Wigge, to Bunton, to . . .
    Bunton. The thing about Bunton was, how did they find him? How did they find him that quickly? He could understand that somebody might find Carl Knox. With sufficient insight into how public records and computers worked, it was simply a matter of pounding paper . . . or electrons, or whatever it was that lived inside of computers.
    But Bunton was out