“So what does that tell you?” Marshall asked.
“That he didn’t see it coming. That he didn’t get a shot off. That the shooter wasn’t wounded by him,” Virgil said.
“I knew that,” Marshall said.
Virgil went to the second gun, repeated the sequence: same story-an unfired gun.
“Two guys, plus one shooter. Your story looks even better,” Virgil said. He pulled off the gloves. “You got any veterans’ monuments around here?”
“Every town, just about,” Marshall said.
“Start calling up the local cops-tell them to keep an eye out,” Virgil said. “The killer’s gonna dump the dead guy’s body on a monument somewhere.”
VIRGIL WALKED BACK up the parking lot, looking for surveillance cameras. Didn’t find any. Asked the patrolman at the pavilion. “Don’t think they’ve got any,” he said. “Probably should.”
“Doesn’t seem right,” Virgil said. “They’ve got them everywhere else.”
He looked around a little more, found nothing, and was walking back toward Marshall when the crime-scene van rolled by. The head guy gave Virgil the required ration of shit about messing with the scene, then shut up, because he’d worked Homicide and would have done the same thing Virgil had done.
“Good to get the name as soon as we can,” Virgil said. “We need to look at his place, make sure nobody’s turning it over.”
So they did the wallet first.
David Ross, thirty-two. Ross had a Virginia driver’s license, but also a checkbook with an address in St. Paul.
“I’m going down there. You get anything… call me. I don’t care how stupid it is,” Virgil said.
BACK DOWN the highway, flying through the night, talking to the duty guy at the BCA, vectored into Wigge’s house. Wigge lived in Highland Park, one of the nicer neighborhoods in town. The house was dark, but when Virgil walked toward the front door, two lights came on, spotlighting him on the driveway. He continued to the front door and knocked, and the instant he knocked, more lights came on inside.
Security systems. Serious security. Nobody came to the door.
The houses here were well spaced, with broad lawns. He looked left and right, saw a light come on in the back of the next house to the west. He walked that way, up the front walk, and knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. A voice inside: “Who is it?”
“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
The door popped open, on a chain. A worried woman looked through the crack between the door and the jamb, and Virgil held up his ID.
“Can you tell me, does John Wigge live with anyone? Wife? Girlfriend?”
“We don’t know him very well, but he lives alone,” the woman said. “Has something awful happened?”
“Why would something awful happen?”
A man’s face appeared at the crack: “Because you’re beating on doors at two o’clock in the morning?” A St. Paul patrol car glided to a stop at the curb, and the man added, half apologetically, “We called 911.”
Virgil said, “That’s okay-I needed to talk to them.”
He walked out to the curb, holding up his ID, called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.”
A St. Paul sergeant came around the car and said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers.”
“That you, Larry?”
LARRY WATERS knew Wigge. “He’s divorced. His old lady moved back to Milwaukee. I haven’t heard that he was going out. He gone for sure?”
“The odds are pretty good. A guy who was at the scene, and knows him, says he was shot. We’re missing the body, though,” Virgil said. “He had a rep.”
“Yeah, and he deserved it,” Waters said. “Now he’s got all these crazy gun-fucks coming in here, driving around in GMCs with blacked-out windows. He’s contracting guys from all over the country, for security for the convention. There are some serious badass killers coming in.”
“I talked to Davenport… You know Davenport?”
“Sure.”
“He says the security company, Paladin, is owned by Ralph Warren.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Between you and me, Warren ’s a bigger asshole than Wigge,” Waters said. “He went bust about three times before he tapped into the city money and started building subsidized buildings all over town… Probably as dirty as Wigge, but he was putting the money into the envelopes instead of taking it out.”
“Paying people off?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t any big secret. But it was subtle. He’d keep somebody in the public employee unions happy, and they’d talk to their friends on the city council, and things got done. He didn’t just drop a load on somebody’s desk. You weren’t gonna get him on a camera.”
Virgil talked to Waters for another couple of minutes, asked him to call some St. Paul guys to put some tape on Wigge’s house until a crime-scene unit could get there or they found Wigge, whichever came second. Waters said he would, and Virgil headed downtown to David Ross’s address.
ROSS LIVED IN an apartment that had once been a warehouse-another of Warren ’s projects. Virgil leaned on the mailbox buzzer for a minute, was surprised when a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Jean Prestel was a schoolteacher, and looked like a schoolteacher, with short dark hair showing a streak of white over her ears-short and slender and earnest, and not somebody Virgil would have put with the dead, thick-necked David Ross. She was wearing a cotton nightgown with tiny teddy bears and little pink crossed ribbons on the breast, and she clutched her hands to her chest and asked, wide-eyed, “Oh my God, what happened?”
She fell to pieces when Virgil told her, and he sat on the couch with her and she wept, said, “What am I going to do now?” and “We didn’t have any time” and “We were talking about getting married” and “Are you sure it was David?” and she showed him a photograph and he said that it was, and she rolled facedown on the couch and seemed to try to scratch through the seat cushions, weeping, weeping…
When he got her to the quiet, stunned stage, he asked about relatives, and she called her aunt, who said she’d come over. Her mother lived in Sioux Falls. And he asked her about Ross and what he’d been doing.
“He was working with John-I don’t know exactly what he was doing, just, getting ready for the convention, I guess. But he got up every day at six o’clock and he’d go over to John’s and pick him up, and he’d stay with him all day.”
“How long had he been doing that?”
“Only a couple of weeks, and John said it wouldn’t last very long, but that things were really intense now… and now David’s dead? That can’t be right…” And she was gone again.
VIRGIL WAITED until Prestel’s aunt arrived, then eased out of the apartment, leaving them with the misery.
He looked at his watch again: four-fifteen. Had to get some sleep.
Needed to talk to Ralph Warren, needed to track Ray Bunton. Needed sleep even more.
Talk to Warren in the morning, and start the hunt for Bunton, he thought.
He got an hour.
11
THE PHONE RANG.
Virgil was facedown on the bed: no coherent thought, just a lizard-like twitch. The phone didn’t quit. He finally crawled across the bed and flipped it open, noticing, before he did it, that it was 5:23. He’d been in bed for a little more than an hour.
The duty guy: “Man, Virgil, I hate to do this to you.”
Virgil groaned. “They found Wigge?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, the lemon in the mouth, the whole thing.”
“Where is he?” Virgil asked.
“You know up on Capitol Hill, the Vietnam veterans’ monument by the Veterans Service Building? Not the name wall, but the green statue?”
“Ahhh… jeez.” One of the best-known public spaces in the state, not ten minutes from where Virgil was lying.