“I’ve heard of Da Nang, but I don’t know about it,” Virgil said.

“ Da Nang? Big base in Vietnam. Port city. So we flew in, and Utecht, the old man, picked me up at the airport, and what I did was, I drove a lowboy. There were thirty fuckin’ D9 Cats sitting there and all kinds of other shit… You know what a D9 is?”

“No.”

“Biggest fuckin’ Cat there was, at the time,” Bunton said. He dropped his cigarette on the street, stepped on it, shook another out of the pack. “Maybe still are. They used them to clear out forest. Go through a bunch of fuckin’ trees like grease through a goose. Anyway, there was thirty of them at Da Nang, and they were just sitting there, waiting for the NVA. So here we are, with this lowboy and a bunch of heavy equipment guys to get the tractors going and to run them-that was the other guys. I’d haul them out to the harbor, and they’d lift them onto the ship with this big fuckin’ crane. One of the guys told me that they were headed for Indonesia, they had some oil fields going there… I mean, some of these dozers were like fuckin’ new.”

“All the guys who’ve been killed were on this trip?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. Anyway, what happened was, I dropped off the last load at the port, wasn’t just these Cats, it was all kinds of shit. Everything they could get moving. After I brought in the last load, they even picked up the fuckin’ lowboy and took that on board. Then Chester -”

“Utecht. Chester Utecht, the old guy.”

“Yeah, that one,” Bunton said.

“Okay…”

“He’s dead now. Died about a year ago, in Hong Kong, is what Wigge told me,” Bunton said. He had to think a minute, to get back to the thread of the story. “Anyway, Chester pulls up in this old fucked-up Microbus, and as soon as the lowboy was off the ground, going on the ship, we took off to get the other guys. This was about forty-five minutes each way, from the port to the equipment yard. Chester had airline tickets to get us out of there, spread over a couple of days, and two of the guys were going with the ship.

“So we got back to the yard, and what do we find? I’ll tell you-these dumb fucks were all about nine-tenths loaded and they’d set this house on fire… And they were fuckin’ arguing with each other… I mean like, they were freakin’ out about this house, and screaming at each other, and they had these M16s. Chester said, ‘Fuck it, we’re going,’ and we went. Me and another guy, who I think was Utecht, the younger one, the kid, but this is so fuckin’ long ago…”

“Okay…”

“Me ’n’ Utecht, we flew out of there, to Hong Kong, and then back to Minneapolis, through Alaska. Wigge went with the ship, I think, because I didn’t see him again, and somebody else went with him. Sanderson, I saw a year or so later. I asked him what happened with the house, and he said some chick got killed-that somebody started yelling at them from the house, I don’t why, and one of the guys got pissed. He was already drunk, and somebody started shooting, and one of these guys went into the house with an M16 and shot the place all up and maybe some chick got shot and I guess some old man got shot. Maybe some other people.”

Virgil said, “Ray-you’re telling me some people got murdered?”

“Yeah… maybe,” Bunton said. He shrugged. “Who knows? The fuckin’ place was going up in smoke. Thousands of people got killed. Maybe… hell, maybe it was self-defense.”

“So why is this gonna get you killed?” Virgil asked. “What does Carl Knox have to do with it?”

“One of the guys was Carl Knox,” Bunton said. “When Utecht got killed, Sanderson called me up. He was freakin’ out. He said Utecht had got Jesus, and called him a couple of times, after Chester died, and said Utecht was talking about confessing the whole thing.”

“Ah, man,” Virgil said.

“So I’m thinking, Carl Knox-he’s not exactly the Mafia, but he knows some leg-breakers for sure. If he was the one who killed the chick, and he heard about Utecht, and if he needed a hit man, I bet he could find one. Get one out of Chicago. If he needed to kill someone in prison, he could get that done, too. If he did the shooting. I mean, if there was a bunch of guys who said he did murder… You see what I’m saying? He kills Utecht to shut him up, but then he starts thinking, these other guys will know why…”

“There’s this thing-the victims have lemons in their mouths,” Virgil said. “Even Wigge… but not his bodyguard.”

“Don’t know about that,” Bunton said. “But I believe it goes back to ’ Nam.”

“I’ve been told that when they executed guys in Vietnam, sometimes they’d stuff lemons in their mouths to keep them quiet,” Virgil said.

“Don’t know about that, either.” Bunton crushed his second cigarette and lit a third. “All I know is, I want to stay out of sight until I know where this is coming from. If it’s Knox. I want to stay out of jail, stay out of sight.”

Virgil counted them off on his fingers. “There was you, and Utecht, and Sanderson, and Wigge, and this old Utecht, Chester Utecht, and Knox… that’s it?”

“There was one more guy,” Bunton said. “Damned if I know his name.”

“When they tortured Wigge, maybe that’s what they were looking for,” Virgil suggested. “The last names. Your name and the other guy’s name.”

“So that’s good for you, huh?” Bunton asked. “Can’t be more than two more murders.”

BY THE TIME they got back to the jail, it was almost dark. Smith, the chief deputy, and Carter, the attorney, were playing gin rummy, and Carter had a stack of pennies by her hand. She looked up when they came in and asked, “What happened?”

“We need to call the Red Lake guys,” Virgil said. His cell phone rang, and he looked at it: Davenport. “I gotta take this,” he said. “You guys call Red Lake. I’m gonna run Ray out there.”

DAVENPORT SAID, “I’m on the ground in St. Paul. I’m told you’re chasing Bunton.”

“Got him,” Virgil said. “But I’m letting him go. This is the deal…”

He told Davenport the story, and when he was done, Davenport said, “I don’t know if we can hold up our end of the bargain.”

“Neither do I,” Virgil said. “But hell with it-let the lawyers work it out. That’s what they’re for. What’s happening down there?”

“Wall-to-wall screaming,” Davenport said. “Crazy accusations and finger-pointing. Complaints about competence, threats about budgets. Questions from the Secret Service.”

“So-the usual,” Virgil said.

Davenport laughed. “Yeah. Tell you the truth, I think everybody likes it-gives them something to do, and they can go on TV. But it’d be best if we could catch the guy like… tomorrow.”

“Well, if we can get to Knox,” Virgil said. “Bunton thinks Knox has a finger in it.”

“He’s wrong,” Davenport said. “I know Knox. Knox would never do anything like this. Not in a million years. I don’t doubt that he could make people go away, but if he’d done it, there wouldn’t have been a ripple. No lemons, no monuments-just gone.”

“Still gotta find him,” Virgil said.

“Get your ass back here. I’ll have Jenkins and Shrake chase him down, but I want you here to talk to him. What about this last guy?”

“Don’t know-maybe Knox will know.”

THE RES WAS DARK, clusters of houses scattered along narrow roads radiating out from the town of Red Lake. Ray steered Virgil to his mother’s house-“Her name is Reese now, so that won’t give me away.”

The two Indian cops were waiting in Reese’s yard, sitting on a concrete bench, drinking from cartons of orange juice. Virgil hadn’t been introduced when they were all down in the roadside ditch, and when they got out of the truck, Bunton pointed to the older one and said, “Louis Jarlait, who used to bang the brains out of my little sister, and Rudy Bunch, who’s going to kick your ass someday.”

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” Virgil said. Then to Jarlait: “Thanks for doing this.”