Shock Wave

21

Virgil and Barlow arranged to meet at the Starbucks. Virgil got a grande hot chocolate, no-fat milk, no foam, no whipped cream, and Barlow got a venti latte with an extra shot. As they took a corner table, Virgil said, “Remind me not to stand next to you if you’re handling a bomb. That much caffeine, you gotta be shakin’ like a hundred-dollar belly dancer.”

“At least I’m not drinking like a little girl,” Barlow said. “So tell me about this new guy.”

Virgil told Barlow about what little he had on Wyatt. He concluded by saying, “He makes me a lot happier than Erikson, at least, to start with. Erikson never looked quite right-you said so yourself. The means to get in the Pinnacle-that’s the key thing.”

“But Erikson had it, too.”

“He had it once, but he didn’t even have access to a paraglider anymore, as far as we know. And the last time out, he crashed: not a place you’d go back to, not without practice. Not to land on the top of a skyscraper in the middle of the night. Then, there’s that whole thing about his work schedule.”

Barlow held up his hands: “All right, all right. But I don’t think we can entirely back off him. We have to nail down what we’ve got, just in case.”

“I don’t want you to back off,” Virgil said. “I want you to keep pushing Erikson. I want a lot of cops around there. I want people talking.”

“You want it to look like we got him. That’s gonna be a little rough on Sarah Erikson,” Barlow said.

“Yes. Cruel, but not unusual,” Virgil said. “I want the guy looking the other way. All I got is this slender thread. I need to do some background work on him. See if I can turn the thread into a noose.”

“Into a moose?”

“A noose. NOOSE,” Virgil said.

“So what you’ve got is, he can fly a paraglider, and he’s a self-centered prick,” Barlow said, summarizing.

“Who knew Erikson, and who I suspect knew Erikson’s garage. They used to fly together.”

“Okay,” Barlow said.

“You sound like it’s nothing,” Virgil said.

“No, it’s something all right. Last week, I’d have jumped all over it. But now…”

“The other thing,” Virgil said, “is that Erikson doesn’t look much like the guy in the video.”

“Camo can be weird, it can hide a lot of stuff-that’s why they call it camo,” Barlow said. “But I’d be happy to hear that Wyatt looks more like the video. And whatever happened to your decision that PyeMart money is involved?”

“That comes next,” Virgil said. “I gotta go see Pye.”

He went to the AMERICINN, and Chapman came out of Pye’s room and said, “Willard’s not sure he should talk to you. The state attorney has issued a warrant for one of our employees. Willard’s a little worried about that, and really pissed off.”

Virgil said, “Let me stick my head in. It’s purely about the bomber.”

“Wait one,” she said, and went back into the room. A minute later, she reappeared and said, “All right. But he’s not going to talk about anything that has to do with this warrant, or any supposed bribes, or anything like that.”

“Deal,” Virgil said.

Virgil went inside and found Pye sitting on the motel floor, doing an overhead arm stretch. Pye said, “What?”

Virgil: “You do yoga?”

“Of course not,” Pye said. “I’m doing my stretches. Which I can do later.” He got to his feet and said, “What do you want?”

“I got a guy that I’m looking at, for the bomber. I want to see if he has any connection with PyeMart. So I just want you to call up one of your people, and see if there’s a William Wyatt connected to PyeMart in any way, shape, or form-or if your security people are aware of a William Wyatt.”

“You’re not saying we bribed him?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Virgil said. “I just want to know if you ever had a relationship with him, of any kind, that ended badly, and that might incline him to bomb you.”

“I can do that,” Pye said. “What else?”

“That’s it,” Virgil said. “How long will it take?”

“A while-until tomorrow, probably, if I keep people looking all night. That’s if you want ‘any way, shape, or form.’ ”

“I’ll take tomorrow morning,” Virgil said. “Do not talk to anybody else about this. I’ll call you.”

“We did not bribe anybody, nohow, no way,” Pye said.

“Glad to hear it,” Virgil said. “But I’m pretty sure the grand jury will want to know where Arnold Martin’s sailboat came from. And why two city councilmen tell a different story.”

“You don’t believe me?” Pye demanded.

Virgil scratched the back of his head and then said, “Well, Willard, personally, I like you all right. You got some color, and you’re a smart guy. But I gotta say… no. I don’t believe you. Have a nice day.”

Chapman followed Virgil outside, the metal door banging closed behind them. “Is this store dead?”

“Yeah, I think it probably is,” Virgil said. “Maybe you can donate those concrete pads to the city, as municipal tennis courts, or something. Take a tax write-off.”

A wrinkle appeared on her forehead. “You know, that’s not a bad idea…”

Virgil looked at his watch as he left the motel: still broad daylight, but the sun was getting low. He’d have Wyatt on the brain overnight.

Thought about it for a minute, then thought about John Haden, the other professor he’d spoken to, that morning. He looked at his cell-phone record, punched up Haden’s phone number, and got him.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Well, I’ve got a friend over, we’re just, uh, finishing talking. Give me fifteen minutes or a half hour? I got some black beans and pork chops I was gonna make for dinner, if you’re hungry.”

“See you then,” Virgil said.

Virgil had nothing better to do, so he drove over to Haden’s and parked down the block. An older Subaru was sitting in Haden’s driveway, with the look of a visitor. Doorbellus interruptus, which he’d suffered on a number of occasions, just wasn’t polite. He closed his eyes and thought about Wyatt’s ride into the Pinnacle. It would have been thrilling, closing in on the building from above, those lights playing around the emerald glass. Wyatt would have had to find a place to dump his car, to take off, but given the Pinnacle’s location, that wouldn’t have been hard.

Finding the car again, in that sea of corn, might have been harder, but with a GPS…

Virgil got out his iPad, called up Google, and looked at a satellite photo of the area around the Pinnacle. To the south, on the other side of the interstate, a gravel road cut deep into the countryside, with only a few farmhouses around. Plenty of room for a takeoff, he thought.

Haden’s friend left his house a few minutes later, a friendlylooking blonde, but not exactly Virgil’s image of a woman that Haden would be chasing. He gave him credit for more taste than Virgil had been expecting; that is, she was something more than tits and ass. She did a U-turn and drove back past Virgil. He went back to the Google map for a couple more minutes, trying to figure the best takeoff spot, calculating distances.

True, there weren’t a lot of farmhouses, but if he’d taken off in the middle of the night, somebody should have heard him. On the YouTube videos he’d seen, the propellers were loud; louder than a lawn mower.

Of course, the sound might have been confused by trucks on the freeway. Huh.

He gave up-couldn’t tell enough without being on the ground-and pulled up to Haden’s house.

Haden was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, with flip-flops, his hair wet from a shower, and Virgil said, “I don’t want to hear about it. I’m so horny the light socket ain’t safe.”

“So your friend is out in Hollywood with those producer guys.. .”

They talked about women for a while, then Haden drained a can of black beans through a colander, stuck the beans in a plastic bowl with some microwave rice, set it aside, got some pork chops out of the refrigerator and led the way to the patio, where he had a gas grill.

“So what’s up?” Haden asked, as he fired up the grill.

“This is just between you and me,” Virgil said.

“Yup.”

“You know a guy named William Wyatt?”

“Yeah, Bill Wyatt,” Haden said. “Is he the bomber?”

“I’m asking myself that. What do you think?”

The pork chops were beginning to sizzle, and Haden moved them around a bit, then said, “He could be. He’s got a violent streak. He’s a serious tae-kwon-do guy, which is fine in itself, but he had a reputation for hurting people, which you’re not supposed to do.”

“I talked to a guy today who said he was self-centered and mean,” Virgil said.

“That’d be fair,” Haden said. “But it’s a big long step from there to blowing people up.”

“Yes, it is. But he has a couple other skills that would be useful.”

“Like what?”

“Like he flies powered paragliders,” Virgil said. “We could never figure out how he could have gotten into the building, because the security is so tight. But it is possible to get down from the roof without anybody seeing you. If he’d come in at night, he could have pulled it off.”

“Man, that’s like a movie,” Haden said. “I don’t know-that sounds pretty extreme.”

“Well, if you were going to pick out somebody to do something so extreme it’s scary, who else would you look at? At the college?”

Haden flipped the pork chops and then said, “Man, this is a little hard to get used to. I don’t know… Bill Wyatt? The last time I saw him, it was at a staff meeting about reducing paper use.”

Still, Virgil pressed, and Haden couldn’t think of anybody more likely, except that “There are a lot of guys out there, women, too, who don’t like PyeMart coming in. You know, rural lefties fighting the corporate culture, think globally, act locally, and all of that. I don’t think Bill would care about that one way or another. I don’t think it’s political at all.”

“I don’t think it’s about politics,” Virgil said. “I think it’s about money.”

“Money? He doesn’t have any money. He’s about the brokest guy around. He got divorced, and his wife got the house and I heard that she got half his pension. He’s renting some place.”

“So he needs money?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, who knows? Maybe he’s got family money or something. But he doesn’t look like it.”

“I can get at that,” Virgil said. “I can get to his tax records. Some of them, anyway, but it might take a while.”

“I gotta say, I hope it’s not him. I hope it’s some shitkicker out in the countryside, worried about his trout,” Haden said. “Bill’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole. Know what I mean?”

After dinner, Virgil drove back to the motel and lay in bed, thinking about Wyatt. He wished he could see him: thought about how he might make that happen. On the other hand, he didn’t want to get caught at it, not before he made his move. The whole case was too tentative, too soft. His biggest fear was that the killing of Erikson was the bomber’s sign-off, and that after that attack, he hauled all the remaining Pelex and blasting caps down to the Butternut and threw them in.

He was thinking about that, when Lee Coakley called from Hollywood, or wherever she was. They had a long and twisting conversation, some bits of which would pop back into his mind over the next couple of weeks, things like, “Things are getting more complicated,” and “I think we have to calm things down for a while, give ourselves time to think.”

Virgil had heard all those words before, and grew snappish, and she was offended, and they wound up snarling at each other, and signed off, angry on both sides.

Virgil thought: Next time I see her… maybe it’ll be okay if only I see her. Maybe I should take some time and fly out there…

His thoughts ping-ponged back and forth between Lee Coakley and the case against Wyatt. Before she called, he’d worried that Wyatt might be cleaning up after himself. If he did, Virgil could build only a weak case: that Wyatt could have flown into the Pinnacle, if he had balls the size of cantaloupes; he needed the money, so maybe he was going to get it this way…

He really needed some piece of hard evidence-some piece of a bomb. Almost anything would do. Even then, a defense attorney would give him a hard time, by putting Erikson on trial…

He woke up in the middle of the night, still worrying about it. He wanted to nail down the money angle: that’s what he needed. And he thought of 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

When he got up in the morning, he was still tired. He called Davenport, got the okay to use Sandy the researcher, called her, and asked her to look at Wyatt’s tax records. “I need to know what he’s got, where his money comes from, and where it goes, if that shows up. I need to know what businesses he owns, if there are any, what stock he has. I need to know how far in hock he is: take a look at his credit records.”

“Get back to you in half an hour,” she said. “None of this is really a problem. You could probably do it yourself.”

“Except that it would take me two weeks to figure out how to do it,” Virgil said. “ Then I could do it in half an hour.”

“So you want a call, or e-mail?”

“Both. Call me, tell me about it, then send me the backup notes.”

Virgil took twenty minutes cleaning up, got dressed, and headed down to Bunson’s. Barlow was there, with two of his techs, and Virgil waved at them but took another table.

He’d been there for two minutes when Sandy called back.

“The guy is very boring,” she said. “He and his wife have three regular sources of income-”

“I thought he was divorced,” Virgil said.

“Filed a joint return two months ago,” Sandy said. “He may be getting divorced, but it hasn’t gone through. Nothing in the Kandiyohi court records about a divorce.”

“Okay. So… three regular sources of income.”

“Yeah. He gets paid sixty-six thousand dollars a year as a professor at a technical college there,” she said.

“Butternut Technical College,” Virgil said.

“Right. His wife is a real estate agent, and last year she made a little over sixteen thousand.”

“Hmm. Not a red-hot agent, in other words.”

“Well, she’s out in the countryside and the market was really crappy last year.”

“All right. What’s the third?” Virgil asked.

“He pays taxes on a small farm and rents it out. He gets eighty dollars an acre for a hundred sixty acres. That’s a little less than thirteen grand. But then, he pays a couple thousand in property taxes. And, he owns a house, looks like there’s still a mortgage, and that’s another couple thousand in taxes. You want addresses?”

“That’s it? That’s all he’s got?”

“That’s pretty good for the town of Butternut. Probably puts him in the top five percent of family incomes.”

“Shoot,” Virgil said. “Where’s the farm? It’s not west of town, is it? Just outside of town, and just south of the highway?”

“No, it’s pretty much south of town. I looked on a plat map-hang on, let me get it up again.” She went away for a minute, then said, “Yeah, it’s south of town.”

“On the Butternut River?”

“No, no, he’s a half mile from the Butternut. He does abut Highway 71, which has to be worth something.”

“Yeah. Eighty dollars an acre,” Virgil said. “So, e-mail me what you got.”

“Two minutes,” she said.

Barlow came over. “You’re being standoffish this morning?”

“Had some bureaucratic stuff to do,” Virgil said. “I’m done now. You want company?”

“Sure. Come on over,” Barlow said. “How’re you doing with your alternate suspect?”

“Not as well as I’d hoped,” Virgil said, following him back to his table. He nodded at the two technicians, and a minute later his French toast arrived.

“The thing that pisses me off is that I can’t get a solid handle on anything,” Virgil said.

“Welcome to the bomb squad,” one of the techs said. “Half the time, we don’t catch anybody. It took twenty years to catch the Unabomber, and he killed three people and injured twenty-three. And the FBI didn’t actually catch him-he was turned in by his family.”

“Boy, I’m glad you said that,” Virgil said. “That makes my morning.”

The sheriff did make Virgil’s morning. Virgil showed him the documents from Sandy, and Ahlquist said, “Come on down to the engineer’s office.”

Virgil followed him down to the county engineer, where they rolled out some plat maps and found Wyatt’s property. Ahlquist tapped the map and said, “You know what? You’ll have to check with the city, to make sure I’m right, but I am right.”

“What?”

“The city development plan had the city growing south along Highway 71,” Ahlquist said. “You can’t put a development in without getting city approval-even outside the city limits. The idea is, the state and the county want orderly development, and they don’t want a big sprawling development built on septic systems. They require sewer systems, with linkups to the city sewage treatment plants. So, the city was supposed to grow south. Toward Wyatt’s land. Then PyeMart came in, and the city council changed the plan to push the water and sewer system out Highway 12, out west. With that line in, the next development would be west, instead of south.”

“How much would that be worth?”

Ahlquist shrugged. “Maybe my old lady could tell me-but farmland is around three thousand an acre, the last I heard. I gotta think the land under a housing development is several times that much. If you’ll excuse the language, when the city changed directions, old Wyatt took it in the ass.”

“Oh, yes,” Virgil said, a light in his eyes. “That feels so good .”