Davenport was there, with a former Minneapolis cop turned bar owner named Sloan, and his wife; and fellow BCA agent Del Capslock and his pregnant wife; and a spare, bespectacled woman named Elle, who was a nun and a childhood friend of Davenport’s; and Davenport’s ward, a teenager and soon-to-be-gorgeous young woman named Letty; and Davenport’s toddler, Sam.
Weather came over and pinched his cheeks and said, “It’s about time you got here, you hunk.”
He gave her a little squeeze and asked, “Why don’t you run away with me?”
“Then you wouldn’t have a job and I’d have to support you,” Weather said.
“Then he’d be dead and you wouldn’t have to support him,” Davenport said.
“Still, couple good days at a Motel 6 in Mankato… might be worth it,” Virgil said to her.
Davenport said, “Yeah, it would be. When you’re right, you’re right.”
Elle, the nun, amused, said, “You guys are so full of it.”
“The shrink speaks,” Del said. Elle was a psychologist.
“Give the poor boy a hamburger, Lucas, and then let’s hear his story,” Elle said to Davenport. She patted a chair next to her in the patio set. “Sit next to me, so I can ask questions.”
DEL HAD BEEN doing counterculture intelligence for the upcoming Republican convention, and had been out of the loop on Virgil’s investigation. All the others had read about the killings in the newspapers, but knew nothing else. Davenport told him to start at the beginning, with Utecht, and let it all out. Virgil did, all the details he could think of, ending with the conversation with Knox.
Then they wanted to see the pictures, and Virgil went out to the car to get them, and Davenport looked through them and handed them to Del and Sloan, and Elle got up to look, and Letty wanted to see, but Davenport snapped at her, “Get your nose out of there.”
“It’s not fair,” and she sat down and put on a pout; Weather patted her on the leg.
“If that’s actually Mr. Warren, then he is a very troubled man, with the kind of trouble you don’t cure yourself of,” Elle said. “If he did this, I would not be surprised to learn that he did similar things, here, over the years.”
“Really,” Virgil said. He put the pictures back in the envelope. “What would we be looking for?”
“If he’s a smart man… maybe dead prostitutes. Perhaps dead prostitutes in other cities. Bigger cities that he knows well, or that attract prostitutes, or an anonymous population of women. Brown women-Latinas, Filipinas, Malaysians, Vietnamese. Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”
“Tortured?” Virgil asked. He was thinking of Wigge.
She shook her head. “Not as such. Not coldly. Not calculated. He’d kill them in an excess of violence. Beat them. Strangle them. A violent show of dominance and sexuality.”
Virgil looked at Davenport. “ Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”
Davenport shook his head. “There’s so much background noise, we’d never sort them out.”
“DNA,” Sloan said. “If he’s raping them, they’ll have DNA in a DNA bank. Get some DNA from Warren, send it out there. Hell, circulate it everywhere.”
“YOU THINK Knox was really scared?” Del asked. Del knew Knox better than any of them.
“Not scared-careful,” Virgil said.
Del nodded. “That sounds like him. Where’d he get those guys?”
“One of them told me Chicago – Chicago came up a couple of times during the conversation,” Virgil said. “There was a woman there, fishing, who told me when I was leaving that they looked like hoodlums. I guess they sorta did.”
Del said to Davenport, “When we find him again, it’d be good to get some surveillance shots of these guys. If they’re heavy-duty, it might tell us where Knox’s connections go.”
“We can do that,” Davenport said. To Virgiclass="underline" “What kind of vibe did you get from him? From Knox? Does he know more than he’s telling us?”
“Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “The guys he had with him, they were definitely working. They were looking out for somebody. Knox thinks Warren ’s coming for him.”
“Maybe,” said Sloan’s wife, “Warren’s afraid not so much of… of… what happened back then, but what it’d tell you guys. That you’d get DNA from him, based on the pictures, and then something would pop up.”
Davenport said, “Hell of a thought.”
Sloan said, “ Warren has been walking along the edge for years-he’s got a full-time lawyer who does nothing but yell at city inspectors. Some of those places over on the riverfront, in Minneapolis, you could punch your fist through the walls.”
“That’s a long way from being a killer, though,” Davenport said.
“But he is a killer,” Virgil said. “We know that for sure. I got it from Ray, who knew there’d been killing, and I got it specifically from Knox, and I don’t think Knox was lying. That isn’t Knox in those pictures.”
ELLE SAID,“Virgil, I’m very interested in the older Utecht. Chester. Am I wrong to think that he’s actually the beginning of the sequence of deaths?”
“Well-that’d be one way to look at it,” Virgil said. He hadn’t looked at it that way. “I didn’t ask, but I get the impression that he was an old guy who died, you know, a while back. Like a year or so. Nobody ever said it wasn’t a natural death, so I assumed that it was.”
She had cool, level eyes. “The circumstances of his death-they would be interesting to know.”
“Yeah. Now that you mention it, they would. I’ll check. Anybody know what time it is in Hong Kong?”
“Early morning, I’d guess,” Davenport said.
“I’ll try to call somebody before I go to bed,” Virgil said. “The embassy maybe? There must be some kind of police liaison in the embassy.”
Elle said, “I have another… interest. This man Sinclair. If I understand you correctly, he would be almost exactly as old as the murder victims. And we know he was in Vietnam at that time, or around that time. Where was he when these murders took place in Vietnam?”
Virgil pulled on his lip, shook his head. “All right. That’s another thing I can check. I’m friendly with his daughter; maybe I can start with her.”
THEY WORKED through it, and Davenport asked, “How’d they get to Bunton? There’s a mystery for you. An Indian hitter? An Apache?”
“Geronimo returns,” Del said.
So they sat and ate hamburgers and hashed it all over, and drank some beer, and Virgil lay back in a wooden recliner, looking at the stars that peeked out from behind the shine of city lights, and Letty came over and perched on the end of the recliner and was very cute and tried to wheedle the photos from him. He told her that she was too young, and she went steaming off.
Davenport had been watching from the corner of his eye and gave Virgil the thumbs-up. Virgil stood up and stretched and said, “Think I’ll go call China,” which was something that he’d never done.
BACK AT the motel, he sprawled on the bed and started by calling the phone company to find out how he called Hong Kong, and whom to call.
What he needed, it turned out, was the American consulate. After some switching around, he was told that the man he needed to talk to had gone to lunch and would be back in an hour. Virgil asked the woman how hot it was there, because he had the impression that Hong Kong was a hot place, and she said that it was eighty-four, and Virgil said that Minneapolis had been ninety that day, and the woman didn’t have a comment about that, so Virgil said he’d call back in an hour.
He gave it an hour and a half, twelve-thirty in Minnesota, then talked to a man named Howard Hawn, who actually seemed interested in Virgil’s question, and explained that he spent quite a bit of time getting puke-covered American tourists out of the drunk tank. Hawn said that he had some contacts who would know about Utecht’s death, and he would find one and get a name back to Virgil.