Heat Lightning Read Free Page A

that late, he thought, ninety-five miles an hour east out of St. Paul, on an empty I-94, his grille lights flashing red and blue, hair wet from a shower, but feeling tacky in yesterday’s T-shirt, underwear, and jeans. Thumbed his cell, ramped up the exit onto I-694, got the operations duty guy, got a phone number for the Stillwater chief of police, punched it in, got the guy at the scene.
    “Mattson,” the chief said.
    “Hey—Virgil Flowers, BCA. I’m getting there fast as I can. I’m on 694 coming up to 36. You shut down the scene?”
    “Yeah, we shut off the whole block,” Mattson said. “No TV yet, but there probably will be. People are coming out of their houses.”
    “Was the guy on the ground, or do you have some kind of display?”
    “He’s sitting up, leaning back against one of these memorial slab-things,” Mattson said. “We put a construction screen around him so there won’t be any photos. I guess Davenport probably told you about the lemon.”
    “Yeah, he did,” Virgil said. “Who found him?”
    “One of our guys. Sanderson—victim’s name is Bobby Sanderson— went out to walk the dog and didn’t come back,” Mattson said. “His old lady got worried and called in and we rolled a car around his route. Not like he was hidden or anything. He was right there, in the lights. Something going on with his old lady, though. She’s got a story you need to listen to.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. “You think she had a hand in it?”
    “No, no. I’m sure she didn’t,” Mattson said. “She’s a pretty messed-up ol’ gal. But something was going on with Sanderson. He might’ve known the killer.”
    “Be there in ten minutes,” Virgil said. “You’re up on the hill, by the old courthouse?”
    “Right there. We got coffee coming.”
     
 
VIRGIL WAS MEDIUM-TALL and lanky, mid-thirties, weathered, with blond hair worn on his shoulders, too long for a cop. He’d once sported an earring, but after two weeks decided that he looked like an asshole and got rid of it.
    He’d been a high school jock, and played university-level baseball for a couple of years. When he didn’t show up for the third year, the coaches hadn’t beaten his door down. Good on defense, with a strong arm from third base, he just couldn’t see a college-level fastball, and was hitting .190 at the end of his second season.
    He’d also picked up on the fact that the slender, brown-haired, big-boobed literature students, the ones who turned his crank, didn’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, didn’t know Mike Schmidt from Willie Mays, but could tell you anything you wanted to know about Jean-Paul Sartre or those other French guys. Derrida. Foucault. Whatever.
    Virgil drifted through college, changing majors a couple of times, and wound up with a degree in ecological science. The demand for ecologists wasn’t that great when he got out of school, so he volunteered for Army Officer Candidate School. He’d been thinking infantry, but the army made him an MP. Got in some fights, but never shot at anyone.
    Back in civilian life, there still wasn’t much demand for ecologists, so he hooked up with the St. Paul cops. After a few years of that, he moved along to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, pulled in by Lucas Davenport, a political appointee and the BCA’s semi-official wild hair. When he came over, Davenport had told him that they’d put him on the hard stuff. And they did.
     
 
VIRGILWAS A WRITER in his spare time; or, on occasion, got his reporting done by taking a few hours of undertime.
    A lifelong outdoorsman, he wrote for a variety of hook-and-bullet magazines, enough that he was becoming a regular at some of them and was making a name. He told people it was for the extra money, but he loved seeing his byline on a story, his credit line on a photograph—and he loved it when somebody came up at a sports show and asked, “Are you the Virgil Flowers who wrote that musky article in Gray’s ?”
    He