Heat Lightning Read Free Page B

loved pushing out on a stream, or a lake, at 5:30 on a cool summer morning with the sun on the horizon and the steam coming off the still water. He liked still-hunting for deer, ghosting through the woods with the snow falling down around him, shifting through the pines. . . .
    Virgil’s home base was in the south Minnesota town of Mankato, and he worked the counties generally south and west of the Twin Cities metro area, down to the Iowa line, out west to South Dakota. That had been changing, and Davenport had been pulling him into the metro area more often. Virgil had an astonishing clearance rate with the BCA, as he’d had with the St. Paul cops.
    Nobody, including Virgil, knew exactly how he did it, but it seemed to derive from a combination of hanging out on the corner, bullshit, rumor, skepticism, luck, and possibly prayer. Davenport liked it because it worked.
     
 
THIS CASE HAD BEGUN in the town of New Ulm, right in the heart of Virgil’s home territory, when a man named Chuck Utecht had turned up dead and mutilated at the foot of the local veterans’ monument. He had a lemon in his mouth and had been shot twice in the head with a .22-caliber pistol. The .22 was a target shooter’s piece, or a stone-cold killer’s. It was not the kind of gun that a man would keep for self-protection or as a carry weapon. That was interesting.
    Virgil had spent much of the two weeks going in and out of the Brown County Law Enforcement Center, working with the New Ulm cops and Brown County sheriff’s deputies, doing interviews, pushing the little bits of evidence around, looking for somebody who might hate Utecht enough to kill him. At the end of the two weeks, he’d been thinking about checking out the local food stores, to see who’d been buying lemons—at that point, he had zip. Nada. Nothing. Utecht had run a title company; who hates a title company?
    He’d talked to Utecht’s wife, Marilyn, three times, and even she didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about the man. His death had been more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, although, Virgil said to himself, that might be unfair. Marilyn may have been in the grip of some strong, hidden current of emotion that he simply hadn’t felt.
    Or not.
    Death had a strange effect on the left-behind people. Some found peace and a new life; some clutched the death to their breasts.
     
 
VIRGIL HAD KILLED a man the year before, and hadn’t quite gotten over it. He spoke with God about it some nights. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the killing might have made him a bit more sober than he had been, might have aged him a little.
    On the other hand, here he was, tearing through the night, wearing a Bif Naked T-shirt and cowboy boots, with a guilty, semi-chafed dick. He made the turn on 36 and ran it up to a hundred and five. Willie Nelson came up on the satellite radio with “Gravedigger,” one of Virgil’s top-five Willie songs of all time, and he started to rock with it, singing along, and not badly, burning up the highway toward the lights of Stillwater.
     
 
HE GOT OFF AT Osgood Avenue and headed north, past the cemetery, through the dark streets, through a stop sign, without hesitating, over a hump toward a barricade and all the lights of the cops beyond. At the barricade, he held up his ID and a cop came over and looked at it, said, “It’s a mess,” and let him through. He rolled down a slope, found a hole in the pile of cop cars, stuck the truck into it, and climbed out.
    There were cars from Washington County, Stillwater, Oak Park Heights, a fire truck, and even a cop car from Hudson, across the river in Wisconsin. No sign of the crime-scene van. Though it was coming up on four o’clock in the morning, local residents were clustering around the police barricades, chatting with the cops and each other, or standing on front lawns, looking down at the memorial. A number of them were carrying coffee cups, and when he got out of the truck, Virgil could smell coffee