Heat Lightning (6 page)

The blond man arguing with Bunton and Sanderson could be John Wigge, the third man named by Utecht. Or Wigge could be the man who hadn't gotten out of the car. That man, from the scout's angle, had never been more than a smear of white face in the back of the Jeep.

The scout hoped that Wigge was the man in the backseat. If he was, then the man on the sidewalk would be one of the unknowns, and that man had been driving the Jeep. If he could get the plate number, he might have one of the two missing names, he thought.

He let the license plate go for a moment and carefully snipped the face of the blond man from a half-dozen shots, brought them up one at a time, played with exposure and fill light, with brightness and contrast, with clarity, moving the sliders this way and that. When they were as good as they'd get, he added a bit of noise reduction and sharpening, and finally sent the pictures off to a diminutive Canon printer that pooped out photos like eggs out of an aluminum chicken.

When he was done, he collected the six four-by-sixes, spread them under the desk lamp, and inspected them. They'd never be accepted as passport photos, but they were good enough. When he saw this man again, he'd recognize him.

Hoped that the blond was one of the unknowns--but had the feeling that he was Wigge. Wigge had been a policeman, and the blond on the sidewalk had smelled of the police.

Back to the license plates. He went through each exposure with maximum care, and then, laughing quietly at his own obtuseness, realized that he didn't need to read all the numbers from one shot. First he'd had a problem with the simple photography, and now this. Getting old, scout?

He went back, found a leaf of light on one part of the plate, brought it up, played with the software sliders, got two and maybe three letters--he thought the third one was a Z, but it could have been a 2. Found another plate, more fiddling, confirmed the Z, got a 5 from the other side of the dash. Could have been an S, but that wouldn't fit with what he'd seen of Minnesota license-plate style. Three numbers, three letters.

More looks, more sliders, he needed two more letters . . . and got them, first a Y, and then a K, and with another shot, he confirmed the 5 and got a 7.

Couldn't get the last number: Had 5(?)7 YKZ, but also the make and color of the vehicle. Should be enough, because he also had a man who could get into the state automobile registration computer.

The scout picked up the phone, which he'd bought a week earlier at a Wal-Mart, and dialed the number.

A man's voice, quiet, cultured. "Yes." Nothing more.

"I have a license plate number. I need the name that goes with it."

"Give it to me." The scout read the number, and the man said, "Hold on."

A moment later, he was back. "The car is registered to a John Wigge."

"Ah."

"Good?"

"No. I'd hoped for another name. Is there a house number with this registration?"

"Of course."

The scout took the number, said, politely, "Thank you," and hung up.

Two names, then: Ray Bunton, John Wigge. Names they already had.

If he did not get more names from the two of them, then his mission would be done, and unsuccessful. He needed to spend some time with one of the men.

Spend some time with a knife . . .

Chapter
6

VIRGIL SAT back in the chair, feet up on Davenport's desk, and clicked.

Mead Sinclair never let any grass grow under his feet: Google dredged up stories about him that went back forty years before Google was invented.

Born in 1943, Sinclair had gone to South America as a high school senior, on a trip sponsored by a lefty educational foundation, to study the economic development of third-world countries. He later spent four years at Michigan, studying economics, then took a PhD at Harvard in economic history.

He'd apparently dodged the draft.

As an Ivy League grad student and later as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he'd taught summers during the 1960s and '70s at a variety of peace camps and academic conclaves. He'd also gone to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, ostensibly as a stringer for Ramparts magazine, a latter-day John Reed.

According to the Google reports, he'd been wounded in a B-52 strike while touring the southern part of North Vietnam, and, recovering in a Hanoi hospital, he had written a long story about the use of acupuncture in wound care. Back in the United States, he married a Vietnamese-American woman whom he met at a rally in Madison. Their daughter, Mai, was born in Madison.

Later, because of his connections in Hanoi, he served as a go-between to negotiate the return of the remains of U.S. servicemen killed during the war. He was mentioned in several articles about Vietnamese tourism, and did some work with a consortium of U.S. and Australian hoteliers who wanted to build a new Asian Gold Coast south of Hanoi.

He wrote the study on the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and published it in 1990. The study was attacked online by another academic, from the conservative Heritage Foundation, who dismissed it as an overreaction to Sinclair's wife's death from cancer in 1988.

In 2004, Sinclair had been ordered to leave Vietnam for supporting a dissident Vietnamese academic. After that, nothing but a lot of references to academic papers and disputes.

Interesting guy; and his name, together with the Agent Orange paper, rang a bell in Virgil's memory. He took a look at the paper that Grogan had given him, skipping through it. Kudzu, he thought after a while. This was the kudzu paper.

In an effort to recover from the effects of the defoliant, the Vietnamese had decided to try kudzu, as a fast-growing, hardy perennial. The plant was hardy, all right: in ten years, with no natural enemies, it was burying the country. The Viets had been fighting the kudzu ever since, and were losing. Shouldn't fuck with Mother Nature; or if you did, Virgil mused, you should do it in somebody else's country.

The paper had been assigned reading in his ecological sciences senior seminar. He remembered the arguments about it--the first time he realized that even scientists would throw science overboard when it conflicted with their politics.

Huh.

He looked online for a local phone number or address, checked with directory assistance, and finally called, "Carol?"

She stuck her head in. "Yeah?"

"I need to find a guy--moved here last year, I can't find anything on him."

"Gimme his stuff. I'll get it to Sandy, she'll find him." Sandy was a part-time staff researcher, part of Davenport's team.

SINCLAIR HAD LED a prominent but fairly opaque life. Virgil read a number of profiles and found out only that he'd been sandy-haired and slender in the eighties; and one article mentioned that he was a poker player. That was it, on the personal level. Everything else was politics and left-wing infighting.

With Bunton, the opposite was true. Nothing on the Internet, not even his name. But in the state records . . .

Virgil first checked the criminal records, since Bunton was a biker and a tough guy. Got immediate hits: two thirty-day jail terms in Beltrami County in the late seventies, on assault and public drunkenness charges. Forty-five days in the Hennepin County Jail for drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest without violence, which is what cops charged you with when you'd done something to piss them off.

He'd been served a writ by an ex-wife to keep him away from her, and had protested that the wife was stealing and signing his veteran's disability checks. That meant that he'd suffered some kind of job-related injury in the military. Given his age, Virgil thought, it was possible that he'd been wounded in Vietnam. Northern Plains Indians were known for their willingness to volunteer for the toughest infantry jobs.

Bunton had been implicated, but not charged, in a fencing sting involving stolen car parts; had been arrested twice for simple assault; and had spent two weeks in the Ramsey County Jail on outstanding, unpaid traffic tickets. That had been four years earlier, and he'd stayed clear of the law since.

Getting old, Virgil thought. Probably still full of the piss, but not the vinegar.

Altogether, he knew exactly what Bunton would be like, but nothing about what he did for a living. It was possible, Virgil thought, that he didn't do anything.

CAROL STUCK HER head in. "Sandy got the Sinclair guy. Phone number and address."

"Excellent. Now I've got another guy I need to look for . . ."

He gave her the information on Bunton.

ON THE PHONE, Sinclair had a straight, clear teacher's voice, a classroom voice. He hadn't known about the Sanderson murder, he said, because he didn't watch much TV, and hadn't gotten into the habit of reading the local papers. "I get most of my news online," he said.

"But you knew Robert Sanderson," Virgil said.

"I knew who he was, but I didn't actually know him," he said. "We talked for a few minutes the other night, after the meeting . . . had a little debate about American actions in Vietnam."

"I'd like to come over and talk to you about the whole meeting," Virgil said.

"Come on over--but get something to eat first. We're just sitting down to lunch here, and I'm afraid there's not enough for three."

Sinclair gave Virgil a street address on Lincoln Avenue, one of the better parts of St. Paul, two or three miles west of the BCA office, up the hill from downtown. Having been disinvited from lunch, Virgil went to an I-94 diner and had a chicken potpie, with roughly a billion calories in chicken fat, which added flavor to the two pounds of salt included with the pie. He cut the salt with three Cokes, and left feeling like the Hindenburg.

SINCLAIR LIVED IN A liver-colored Victorian with a wide porch and--Virgil counted them, one-two-three-four--mailboxes. A condominium, then, or an apartment. He left the car under an elm, or, as a good ecological-sciences guy would say, a doomed elm, climbed the porch, and looked at the mailboxes. Sinclair was in apartment 1. The outer door was locked, but there were four doorbells next to a speaker disguised as a wooden eagle.

He pushed 1, and a moment later a female voice said, "Yes?" and Virgil said, "Virgil Flowers, BCA. I called Professor Sinclair an hour ago."

The door lock buzzed and Virgil let himself into the interior hallway. A sweeping stairway curved up to the left, protected by a walnut banister with gold-leaf accents. Top floor must be 3 and 4, Virgil thought. He stepped down the hall to his right, saw a 1 on a white door, and knocked.

The door was answered by a young Asian woman, tall and slender, with an oddly asymmetrical face and a chipped central incisor. Her forehead was flecked with three inch-long white scars, like knife cuts, halfway between her hairline and her right eyebrow. They almost looked like initiation scars, or tribal scars, Virgil thought, although everything he knew about tribal scars could be written on the back of a postage stamp.

"Dad's on the porch," the woman said. Nothing Asian about her accent. She sounded like she might have come from milking the local cow. "Come in."

Not pretty, he thought, but attractive. Tough upper lip; soft brown eyes.

On the way through the apartment, she chattered away, friendly, loose: "Virgil Flowers. I like that. Classical and corny at the same time--like way out in the country. Do all the cops here wear cowboy boots? They don't in Madison. . . . Did you ever go undercover as a singer or something? What does your shirt say? WWTDD? Is that a music group?"

"I can't talk about it, ma'am," Virgil said.

"Some kind of cop thing?"

The condo had a glassed-in back porch, looking out on a square of lawn, and Sinclair was out there, a lanky older man with still-blond hair, gray stubble on his chin. Women of a certain age would go for him in a big way, Virgil thought. He looked a little like the actor Richard Harris, in a loose white cotton dress shirt, the sleeves turned up, a gold tennis bracelet glittering from one wrist. He was sitting at a table, clicking at a laptop, with a glass of lemonade next to his hand.

When he saw them coming, he stood up and offered a soft, scholarly hand: "Mr. Flowers." He was six-three, Virgil thought, a couple inches taller than he was, with broad shoulders and a still-narrow waist.

"Mr. Sinclair," Virgil said. Virgil turned to the woman and said, "You never mentioned your name."

"Mai."

"Mai Sinclair?" Virgil asked.

"Yes. Not married. Unlucky in love, I guess," she said.

"Well, good," Virgil said. Sinclair was smiling at them, sat back in his chair, pointed Virgil to the other one.

"Do you handle homicides on a regular basis, Mr. Flowers?" he asked.

"Call me Virgil," Virgil said as he sat down and stretched out his legs. "Most of my homicides are pretty irregular. Damnedest thing. I'd give anything for a good old beer-bottle domestic. I sometimes get so confused, I don't know what to do next."

"Well . . . Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses," Sinclair said.

Virgil laughed and clapped his hands. "You looked that up before I got here. You didn't just pull that out. . . ."

Mai had lingered, and asked, looking between them, "What?"