Shock Wave

20

Virgil hooked into the sheriff’s wi-fi and downloaded the video-clip file, watched it once-a murky series of black-andwhite images of a man in camo moving around the inside of the trailer.

A note with the file said that the man was six feet, three and one-half inches tall, in his boots, the brand of which was unknown, but had approximately a one-and-one-half-inch heel; that the boots were size eleven, D width, one of the most common sizes for men; that he probably weighed between one hundred and seventy-five and one hundred and eighty-five-that is, was slender to average weight, but not fat or husky-and that the camo was Realtree. The man wore a mask commonly worn by bow hunters.

Virgil found Ahlquist talking to a couple deputies, and ran the video for them to see if they could pick out anything else. Ahlquist shook his head and said, “It’s Realtree, all right, but hell, half the bow hunters in the state wear it.”

“Yeah, I got some myself,” Virgil said.

“So did Erikson, but Erikson was maybe five-eleven,” Virgil said. “I asked when I found out the lab guys had saved the video.”

“So it’s definitely not him.”

“I wouldn’t say definitely,” Virgil said. “The problem with labs, they come up with exact answers. Sometimes, they’re wrong, and it really screws you up.”

They all nodded.

He called Barlow and told him about the video, and about the size problem, and Barlow said, “So we’re down to forty-sixty. I just don’t have anybody else, Virgil. What are you doing?”

“Still talking to people,” Virgil said. “Wandering around town.”

He called Pye, who said he was at the store site. Virgil told him to stay there, he was coming out. “You get the guy?” Pye asked.

“Not yet,” Virgil said. “But we’re closing in on him.”

Pye made a rude noise, and clicked off.

Pye was not particularly happy to see him. “I hear you’re making more accusations,” he said.

“It’s gone beyond that, Willard,” Virgil said. “We’re taking down the city council-there are state investigators in town, right now, making arrests. We’re probably going to bust your expediter guy, and I wouldn’t doubt that when that happens, the prosecutors will try to work up the chain.”

“There is no chain,” Pye said. Over his shoulder, to Chapman, he added, “Keep taking it down. Put in there, ‘Pye seemed unaffected by the rash accusations made by the hippie-looking cop.’ ”

“Whatever,” Virgil said. “But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. My focus is on this bomber. We got three dead now, and two hurt bad, and four or five scared shitless, who could be dead, except they got lucky… Chapman says that you’re a big goddamn financial and business expert. I need to know, how many ways are there to make or lose money when a PyeMart goes into a town?”

Pye stuck out his lower lip and said, “Everybody knows the ways-”

“No. You might, the rest of us don’t,” Virgil said. “We know that the oil-change place might go broke, and the pharmacy, and a bookstore and a clothing store. We know that some brick layers are going to get some jobs, and somebody’s going to pay the city to lay some pipe, and that means they’ve got to buy some pipe, and now they’ve got to buy a couple more pieces of heavy equipment… but I don’t think anybody’s going around blowing up Pye Pinnacle so they can sell another excavator. I’ve thought about the basic reasons people do this stuff, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably money, in some way that I can’t see. Since you’re the money guy, I thought you could.”

Pye took off his ball cap, scratched his head, and said, “Chapman has done some research. Bombers are usually either plain nuts-they just want to bomb something-or they’re political nuts. Like the Unabomber.”

Virgil shook his head. “This seems to be too focused for a political bombing campaign. They hit the Pinnacle, they hit the city equipment yard, they hit you, me, then Erikson… They didn’t blow up the equipment yard, or Erikson, for some ideological reason. They’re not Marxists or something.”

“Barlow thinks Erikson might be the guy,” Pye said. “Maybe.”

“I don’t believe he really thinks so,” Virgil said. “He’s grasping at straws. He’s hoping. And I don’t believe it. So: money.”

Pye walked off a way, looking at the concrete pads that would hold up the new store-a store that Virgil now believed would never be built. Chapman said, quietly, “He’s thinking.”

“I can see the steam coming off his forehead,” Virgil said.

A minute later, Pye wandered back. “I’ve got nothing specific for you, but I can give you some theory. Whether it’ll help, I don’t know.”

“So give,” Virgil said.

Pye said that there were three ways money would move in a situation like PyeMart. Some of it was quite direct and positive: people getting paid for building the store, people who would have jobs at the store, taxes that would come out of the store, profits made by the store.

There were direct and negative movements as well: money lost by people who couldn’t compete with the stores. That money could be in the form of lost profits, or lost jobs.

“Or lost lives,” Virgil said. “People who lose good jobs in towns like these don’t get them back. Not in town,” Virgil said. “They have to leave. Their whole life is changed.”

“That, too,” Pye conceded. “But it’s just the way of the world.”

“What’s the third way?” Virgil asked.

“That’s the hardest to see, and maybe that’s where you should look, since you’re not finding it in the obvious places,” Pye said. “What it is, is lost opportunity. Somebody saw an opportunity out there, and was counting on it, and somehow the store upset that.”

“Like what?” Virgil asked.

“Okay. Say a guy had an idea for a little computer store. Nothing like that in town. So he saves his money, and maybe starts trying to arrange a loan. Then he finds out a PyeMart’s coming in, and he finds out that we have a pretty strong line of computers. All of a sudden, this guy’s bidness plan makes no sense. He can’t get the loan, either. This idea was going to make him rich, and in his head, he was already sailing a yacht on the ocean and hanging out with Tiger Woods. Then somebody took it away from him. Snatched it right away. No actual money moved-no currency, no dollar bills-but potential money moved.”

“You can’t see potential money,” Virgil said.

“But it’s real,” Pye said, shaking a fat finger at him. “It’s the thing that drives this whole country. People thinking about money, and how to get it. There are people out there who break their hearts over money. It happens every day. The shrinks talk about sex, and cops talk about drugs, and liberals talk about fundamentalist religion, and the right-wingers talk about creeping socialism, but what people think of, most of the time, is money. When I was the horniest I ever was, and I was a horny rascal, I didn’t think about sex for more’n an hour a day, and I’d spend sixteen hours thinking about money.”

“But that means that the motive might not have any… exterior

… at all,” Virgil said. “It’s just something in some guy’s head.”

Pye shrugged: “That’s true. But that doesn’t make it unimportant.”

“Not a hell of a lot of help, Willard,” Virgil said.

“It might be, if you ever come up with a good suspect,” Pye said. “Once you get a name, start analyzing his history, talking to his friends and neighbors, there’s a good chance you’ll find his… dream.”

“Which you stepped on,” Virgil said.

Pye shrugged again, waved his hand at the raw dirt and the concrete pads: “This is my dream. Why shouldn’t I have my dream?”

Virgil had a few answers to that, but didn’t feel like tangling with Pye right at the moment. So he said good-bye to Pye and Chapman, and headed back to his truck. Halfway into downtown, he took a call from Jenkins, the BCA investigator.

“All done. We’re going over to a place called Bunson’s. You know where it is?”

“I can find it,” Virgil said, which he could, having eaten almost all of his meals there. “You get both Martin and Gore?”

“Yeah. Gore put up a fight, but we clubbed her to her knees, cuffed her. I don’t know how she got those bruises on her face; probably a domestic squabble.”

“You’re joking,” Virgil said.

“Of course I am,” Jenkins said. “I only said that because you’d be worried that I wasn’t.”

“I’ll see you at Bunson’s,” Virgil said.

Jenkins and Shrake were partners of long standing, both big men who dressed in sharp suits that looked like they might have fallen off a truck in Little Italy, and were referred to as “the thugs” around the BCA. They were often used for hard takedowns; they were fairly easygoing, when not actually involved in a fight.

Virgil found them talking over beers at Bunson’s, took a chair, ordered a beer of his own, and asked how it had gone.

“Routine, but you know-you feel a little bad,” Shrake said. “They were both crying and pleading. It’s not like busting some asshole who knows the rules.”

“I didn’t feel that bad,” Jenkins said.

“That’s because you’re cruel, and you enjoy the spectacle of other human beings in pain,” Shrake said. “I’m not that way.”

Jenkins said, “Mmm. This beer is kinda skunky.”

Shrake said to Virgil, “So walk us through this case. Lucas said you’d flown in some private luxury jet over to Michigan.”

Virgil took them through it, and when he was done, Shrake said, “So let me get this straight: you can’t get anybody into this Pinnacle, but you think someone could have gotten down from the roof.”

“But you can’t get on the roof,” Virgil said. “I even found a guy who’s a glider pilot, and he says you’d need at least three hundred yards to land a glider up there… I asked about parachutes, but then you’d need a pilot who’s an accomplice.”

Shrake unwrapped his index finger from his beer bottle, pointed it at Virgil and said, “So I guess it’s a safe bet that you never heard of motorized paragliders.”

Virgil said, “Uh…”

Jenkins said to his partner, “No more beer.”

Shrake said, “I saw a wi-fi label on the door, wonder if it’s real.” He groped around in his bag, pulled out a battered white MacBook, got online with Google, poked a few keys, called up a YouTube video, and turned the computer around so it faced Virgil.

YouTube was running a Cadillac ad, followed by a four-minute video in which a guy drove into a parking lot and unpacked what looked like a parachute, laying it on the concrete. He then pulled on a backpack motor, with a small propeller in a metal cage, hooked himself to the parachute, and fired up the motor.

The airstream from the propeller inflated the chute, and the guy took a few steps across the concrete pad and was in the air. He flew a few hundred feet in a circle, did a short running landing, killed the engine, put the backpack motor in the back of his truck, folded up the chute, packed it away, then threw it in his truck… and did it all in four minutes and ten seconds.

“Holy shit,” Virgil said. “How did you know about this?”

“I have wide interests,” Shrake said. “Also, insomnia.”

Virgil spent another five minutes on Google, looking up paragliders, then gulped the rest of his beer and said, “I gotta go,” and he was gone. Outside, he got on the phone to Barlow: “Are you still at Erikson’s?”

“Just left.”

“Is Mrs. Erikson there?”

“Was two minutes ago.”

“Head back there. Keep her there. I’ve got a question,” Virgil said. “You might want to be there when I ask it.”

Barlow was standing on the front porch of the Erikson home, talking to Sarah Erikson, when Virgil arrived. Virgil said, “Mrs. Erikson, your husband has a propeller on the wall of his garage. What did that come from?”

Her forehead furrowed: “He used to fly, a kind of ultralight thing. But he did something stupid and went up when it was too windy for him and he crashed. He broke his ankle, and got some burns on his back, from the engine exhaust pipe, and was lucky to get away with that. The propeller broke and the engine was wrecked. He quit flying, and put the propeller on the wall to remind himself not to do it anymore.”

“Was his glider… did it have solid wings, or was it one of those paraglider things, like a parachute?”

“He did both, ultralights and the paragliders,” she said. “It was his paraglider that he crashed. Why are you asking all of this stuff?”

“Trying to work through some possibilities,” Virgil said. “Did he fly out of an airport? Or just off the street? Or what?”

“Out of Jim Paulson’s Soaring Center, out on 17,” she said.

“Thanks,” Virgil said. To Barlow: “Walk me back to my truck.”

Barlow tagged along behind and asked, voice low, “What’s that about? Paragliders?”

“Erikson flew paragliders. I just did some research on them. People have flown them to fifteen, sixteen thousand feet,” Virgil said. “You can land on a spot a few feet across, and you could get one in the back of a station wagon, no problem. They’re like a parachute with a motor, except they go up as well as down.”

“Jesus Christ,” Barlow said. “Why didn’t we know about these things?”

“ ’Cause they’re weird, and not a lot of people fly them,” Virgil said. “But they’re also cheap. You can get up in the air for a few thousand bucks, don’t need a license.”

Barlow looked back at the house: “So it was Erikson.”

“I’m going out to this soaring center-try to nail it down,” Virgil said.

Paulson’s soaring center was almost invisible from the highway, down a gravel track past a cornfield, the track marked only by an unlit metal sign. Virgil found the track on his second pass, went four hundred yards in, and discovered a narrow tarmac airstrip that ran parallel to the highway.

A yellow metal building sat at one end of the strip, and a few yards down the landing strip, a phone pole held up a windsock. In the back, a long metal shed, open on one side, covered a half-dozen brightly colored gliders. Three men were hand-towing a brilliant red glider off the landing strip. They looked toward Virgil as he got out of the truck, and then continued on toward the shed.

Virgil saw somebody moving inside the yellow building, went to the door, which had a Welcome sign in the window, and went in. A gray-haired guy was sitting behind a counter and said, “Hey, what can I do for you?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the BCA.”

Virgil asked him-the guy was Paulson-about Erikson.

“Yeah, he used to fly out of here, he and some other guys had an ultralight, but one of them broke it up,” Paulson said. “Then Henry started flying paragliders until he cracked that up.”

Virgil got the story on Erikson and his gliding; was told that Erikson had been “okay” as a flier. “It ain’t rocket science,” Paulson said.

Virgil told him why he was asking: the possibility that Erikson was the bomber, and the possibility that he’d flown it onto the top of the Pye Pinnacle.

Paulson nodded. “Yeah, you could do that. In fact, there’s a rich guy out in Los Angeles, he flies from his house out in Malibu into some hotel in Beverly Hills, lands on the roof, and walks from there to work. The neighbors are all pissed off about it, because of the engine noise.”

He claimed that power paragliding was “safe as houses, if you know what you’re doing.”

“But that’s what you would say, since you run a gliding center,” Virgil said. “I mean, I know about two guys flying gliders: Erikson, who cracked up, and quit, and his former partner, who you just told me about, who cracked up and didn’t quit.”

“Neither one was hurt bad,” Paulson said. “I’m not saying you can’t kill yourself. You can. If you treat it with respect, it’s safer than driving a car… Well, maybe.”

Virgil pulled out his survey list. “Look at this,” he said. “Is there anybody else on this list who flies these things? The powered paraglider?”

Paulson bent over the counter, then took out a pencil, wet it with his tongue, and dragged it down the face of the list. “Oh, yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Bill Wyatt.”

He touched the wet tip of his pencil on the name, and made a dot. He went the rest of the way down the list and said, “He’s about it.”

Virgil felt a buzz way down in the testicles: Wyatt was the other teacher at Butternut Tech. “He flew a paraglider?”

“Still does. Not so much lately, haven’t seen him for a couple of months, I guess. Good flier-way out of Henry’s class. He’s got some balls. He was in Iraq One, back whenever that was, reign of King George the First.”

“He teaches up at the college, right?”

“Yeah… history or something.”

“Good guy?” Virgil asked.

Paulson said, with a grin, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

They talked about Wyatt for a couple of minutes. Paulson said he had no knowledge that Wyatt might be a bomber, or crazy, or anything in particular, but he was an angry, arrogant, self-centered prick. Most of the pilots around the place, Paulson said, didn’t like him.

Virgil brought the conversation back to Erikson, and finally asked Paulson not to talk about the interview. “Could be a little dangerous. And unfair. We don’t know that either of these guys has the least involvement. But if one of them does, then, and you ask about it, well, he’s not a guy you want looking at you.”

Paulson said, “We gotta be talking about Bill, right? Because Henry’s dead as a doornail. And I’ll tell you, I don’t see any way that Henry’s the bomber. No way at all.”

“How about Wyatt?”

“Well…” Paulson looked out his narrow window, and shook his head. “You know, I got no truck with Saddam Hussein or terrorists or any of that, but I don’t want to hear a guy bragging about killing them. About smoking them. I’m sorry, I just don’t want to hear it. They’re people, not paper targets.”

“He does that?”

“If you know him for more than fifteen seconds, he does,” Paulson said.

A guy who brags about killing. A guy who was in the army, and flew paragliders; a guy with some balls.

Virgil went out to the truck and called Barlow. “Got some pretty interesting stuff, dude. I got another suspect for you.”

“Better than forty-sixty?”

“Oh, yeah,” Virgil said. “I’m saying seventy-thirty.”

“Gonna get your ass kissed?” Barlow suddenly sounded happy.

“Could happen,” Virgil said. “Yes, it could.”