Shock Wave

22

Virgil drove down to city hall, found the city engineer, got a copy of the city plan, and worked through it. Wyatt’s property was a quarter mile south of the last street served by city sewer and water. Under the plan, before it was revised to make room for the PyeMart, Wyatt’s property would have been annexed within the next ten years, even under pessimistic growth-rate projections.

Next, Virgil figured out that a company called Xavier Homes had built the most recent subdivision in Butternut. Xavier Homes was headquartered in Minnetonka, which was on the western edge of the Twin Cities metro area. Virgil got through to the company president, whose name was Mark Douka.

He told Douka that he was investigating the Butternut bombings, and said, “I need to know what you’d pay for untouched farmland with city water and sewer, outside of Butternut.”

“There isn’t any more of that, at the moment,” Douka said. “Right now, I wouldn’t pay nearly as much as five years ago.”

“I’m trying to figure out what some land might be worth in, say, ten years.”

“In ten years… assuming that the economy has recovered… well, you know, there are a lot of contingencies…”

“On average,” Virgil said, his patience beginning to wear.

“I can tell you’re getting impatient, but it’s complicated. Everything depends on what we’ve got to do to the property, what the market is at the time, and, you know, what we can get it for. I can tell you this last subdivision out there, we paid about twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars an acre. I wouldn’t pay that now. In ten years, I might pay twice that, but then, maybe not-it all depends.”

“Just going on what you did last time, twenty-two-five,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. But I don’t want to hear that in court, because it’s a kinda bullshit number,” Douka said. “I’ll tell you what, with what the Fed’s doing right now, it’s possible that ten years from now, I’d pay seventy-five thousand dollars an acre, and the Chinese will be using dollar bills for Kleenex.”

“For Kleenex?”

“Or worse. They might be buying it on rolls.”

“On rolls?”

“You know-toilet paper. Everything is up in the air,” Douka said. “We paid twenty-two-five, but I got no idea what it’ll be ten years from now. No idea.”

“But whatever it is, it’d be worth more than raw farmland.”

“I sure hope so,” Douka said. “But with what the Fed’s doing, we may need the corn. You know, to eat.”

But Wyatt would have looked at that last subdivision, Virgil thought when he’d gotten off the phone, and most likely, he would have known that Xavier had paid $22,500. So a hundred and sixty acres, at that price, would be worth… three and a half million dollars? Could that be right? He found a piece of scrap paper, got a pencil out, and did the math: Three million six. As farmland, it was worth. .. more math… $480,000.

Virgil got on the phone to Barlow and told him about the subdivision. “When the city changed direction, Wyatt took a three-million-dollar haircut.”

“Holy shit.”

“Exactly. This is the first motive that feels real to me,” Virgil said. “Without this, he’s cold, stony broke. I’ve been told that his wife is taking him to the cleaners’.”

“I’ll tell you something else,” Barlow said. “Think about the bombs out at the city equipment yard. We thought it was just another shot at trying to stop the PyeMart site. But it was more than that. If the city had even started to lay that pipeline, if they’d even put part of it in the ground, it wouldn’t make any difference what happened with PyeMart. Even if PyeMart went down, the pipeline would still be there, and that’s probably where the city would put the growth. They wouldn’t rip up a brand-new pipeline and build another one south, just because PyeMart was gone.”

“Jeez, Jim-you’re smarter than you look,” Virgil said.

“I keep telling people that, but they don’t believe me,” Barlow said. “So what’s next?”

“I’m going to pile up as much as I can on Wyatt. Then, I’m thinking-what if you went to a federal judge and asked for a sneak-and-peek?”

“They don’t like ’em, judges don’t,” Barlow said. “But in this case, I think we’d have a good chance. It’s like drugs-if we raid him and miss, we won’t have another chance.”

“So let’s think about that,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna pile up as much stuff as I can, but we’ve got to move. Why don’t you make a reservation to see a judge late this afternoon, and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.”

Virgil went back to the courthouse, and with the help of the county clerk, who was sworn to secrecy, found that Wyatt had bought the property eight years before for $240,000 and taken out a mortgage for $180,000. So he’d only put $60,000 of his own money into it-and had been hoping to take out sixty times that much.

Virgil looked at Wyatt’s property taxes and found references to two structures on the property. If he were living in an apartment, as Haden thought, he might very likely not be making the bombs there. Landlords sometimes sneak into apartments, to make sure everything is being taken care of; a smart guy like a professor would have thought of that.

He had to take a look at the property. He had the county clerk xerox the plat maps, and she added a copy of an aerial photo from the engineering department.

Before he left, he called Butternut Technical College and asked if it would be possible to reach Professor Wyatt’s office. The woman who answered said she could try his extension, but he was scheduled to be in class at that hour.

Excellent.

On his way out of town, Virgil called the BCA researcher, asked her to check Wyatt against the National Crime Information Center and to check his driver’s license. He didn’t know where Wyatt lived, and asked her to see if she could figure that out; and to make that the priority.

Virgil made it out to Wyatt’s property in ten minutes. To his eye, it seemed like good land, a rolling hillside rising slowly away from both the north-south highway and an east-west farm road. The field was covered with growing corn, not yet as high as an elephant’s eye, but getting there. Virgil turned down the farm road and found an overgrown track leading up toward a crumbling old farmhouse.

He couldn’t see anybody up at the house, and since Wyatt was teaching, Virgil turned onto the track and took it up the hill to the house.

The house sat at the very crest of the hill, and was in the process of disintegrating. The windows had been covered with sheets of plywood, and the porch had been entirely ripped away. The front door, which stood three feet off the ground, was locked with a padlock on a new steel hasp. Next to the door was a large sign that said: DANGER: NO TRESPASSING. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Next to that, a hand-lettered sign said: All metals have been removed from this property, and all collectibles. If you enter this property, you will be prosecuted for burglary.

Virgil got out of the truck and walked around the house-the corn came to within ten feet of the sides of the house, and within twenty feet of the back. There was a hump in the backyard, the remnants of an old shed, or something, Virgil thought. The windows were boarded all the way around, but it would be easy enough to pull a board off. Virgil thought, Root cellar, but could find no sign of one. If there had been one, it was out in the field somewhere.

From the top of the hill, Virgil could see most of the hundred and sixty acres, which closed on the south side by a wood lot, with Highway 71 on the west, another cornfield on the east, and the farm road on the north. There wasn’t a tree on the property, as far as he could tell: and he wondered if that was good or bad, for development.

Butternut Falls, the southernmost subdivision, was right there, a few hundred yards north of the road.

Wyatt must have been able to taste the money.

On the way out of the property, he called Sandy, the BCA researcher, and asked her if she’d come up with an address. “He shows two addresses, one for his home, but he also gets utility bills at four-twenty-one Grange Street, apartment A.”

“Thank you.”

Apartment A was not exactly an apartment-it was the end unit in a town house complex, three stories tall, a two-car garage on the bottom floor, and a door. Hoping that Wyatt was still teaching, he walked up and knocked on the door, and took a long look at the lock. It was solid, a Schlage. They’d need a landlord to open it, if they got the sneak-and-peek.

Barlow called. He’d made an appointment with a federal judge, Thomas Shaver, in Minneapolis, and with an assistant federal attorney, who’d handle the details of the warrant. Virgil gave Barlow all the information he had. “We don’t have a lot of specific information on him, but we have two things: he is one of the few people who could have gotten into the Pinnacle, and he has more than enough motive,” Virgil said. “He’s been living here for years, so he also has the detailed background to plant these other bombs: the bomb on the limo had to be local work. And, if we get it, we need to get warrants for both places-his apartment, and the farmhouse out on his property.”

Barlow nodded. “I think we’ll get them. What are you going to do?”

“I want to see him. I’ve got a couple of guys in town, working the city council aspect of this thing. I’m gonna get them, and stake him out. See where he goes. I can provide a stakeout on him, when we go into his place.”

“I should be back by six o’clock,” Barlow said. “I don’t think we’ll have time to do it today.”

“I agree. Tomorrow morning would be the first good shot at it,” Virgil said. “When you get the warrant, call me-I’ll track down his landlord, get a key for his place.”

He foundJenkins and Shrake at the Holiday Inn, in separate rooms, reading separate golf magazines, got them together in the lounge. They said they’d been the front men on the three arrests, leading a group of sheriff’s deputies. They’d seized all of the accused city councilmen’s financial records, and their computers, and the same with the mayor.

“It looks like your pal-whoever it was-who suggested the deal would have something to do with golf carts was on the mark,” Shrake said. “The first thing they found on Gore’s computer was a sale of two hundred golf carts to a Sonocast Corp., which happens to be a supply subsidiary of PyeMart.”

“Excellent. Is Gore still in jail?” Virgil asked. “Or out?”

“She’s out. All of them are. They’ve got too much political clout to stay in. Gore paid cash, the other two put up their houses as bond.”

“You gonna get the PyeMart guy?”

“Don’t know,” Jenkins said. “It looks like the way it worked, PyeMart bought the golf carts from Gore, who spread the profit around

… keeping most of it for herself. That’s what this Good Thunder told us. She took a quick look at the tax records, and she seems like a pretty smart chick.”

“But there’s no law against buying golf carts,” Shrake said. “If Gore doesn’t crack, and give us exactly the quid pro quo, we might not get him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Virgil said. “You’d need a retarded jury not to convict.”

“What’s your point?” Jenkins asked.

Virgil told them about Wyatt, about how the paraglider revelation had worked out.

Shrake said, “So I solved two cases in one day.”

“That’d be one interpretation,” Virgil said. “But now, we actually got to work. We’ve got to keep an eye on this guy. I want to pick him up now, put him to bed, get him up tomorrow, take him to work.”

“We can do that, if we can take along the golf magazines,” Shrake said.

Wyatt, Virgil thought, should either be home, or arriving home soon. He gave the other two Wyatt’s address, and they agreed to stay in touch by cell phone. Virgil let them cruise the house first: Shrake called back to say there were no lights in the windows. “We found a place we can park a block away, by a ball diamond, not too conspicuous, and still see his place. We’ll sit for a bit. There’s a game about to start.”

Virgil took the break to stop at a McDonald’s and get a cheeseburger and fries. He was still there, reading the paper, when Barlow called: “We got the warrant. The judge thought we were a little weak on details, but he gave us six days. He says if we can’t do better in six days, he won’t give us an extension, and we’ll have to give a copy to Wyatt.”

“That’s good. That should be plenty of time,” Virgil said.

“You watching him?”

“Trying to. He hasn’t shown up at home yet, but I’ve got two guys watching his place.”

“Hope he hasn’t flown the coop. You get a key?”

“No. I got sidetracked on this surveillance thing. Would you have time?”

Barlow agreed to run down the landlord and get a key. Virgil would call him in the morning, as soon as Wyatt was at the college, where he was scheduled to teach back-to-back classes.

Jenkins called five minutes later and said, “He’s home.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes-take your place,” Virgil said. “Pull out when you see me coming.”

He drove to Wyatt’s-there was a car in the driveway, an older Prius-and then continued up the block, and when Shrake pulled away from the curb at the ball diamond, Virgil took his place. There was a game going on, town ball, fast-pitch, and Virgil was looking down at the diamond from the parking place.

He half-watched the game, half-watched Wyatt’s place, and at the same time, dug his camera out of the bag in the backseat. He used a Nikon D3, with a 70-200 lens and a 2x Nikon teleconverter. When put together, the rig was heavy and long, but also reasonably sharp, and good in low light.

He still had plenty of light, and he settled in to wait.

One of the ball teams, Robert’s Bar and Grill, had a damn good pitcher; he was mowing down the other team, which was surviving less on pitching than on its fielding. In the two innings Virgil watched, Robert’s had runners in both innings, while the other team never did get a man to first.

He was interested enough in the game that he almost missed Wyatt. He came out of the apartment carrying an oversized gym bag. A tall thin man, he was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, and moved like an athlete. He looked like the figure in the construction-site trailer videos. Virgil propped the barrel of the camera on the edge of the passenger-side window, and ran off a half-dozen shots as he walked around the car, threw the bag inside, then got in.

Following him wasn’t a problem: Wyatt drove out to the highway, turned toward downtown, pulled into a strip mall, got his gym bag, and walked into a tae-kwon-do studio. Virgil called Shrake and made arrangements to switch off.

The lesson had to last at least an hour, Virgil thought, so he took the time to load the photos into his laptop. When Shrake arrived, Virgil climbed into the backseat of Shrake’s Cadillac and passed the laptop across the seat. “Portraits,” he said.

The other two looked at the photos for a minute, then Shrake said, “Got him. Want us to stay with him overnight?”

“Ah… yeah.”

“Shoot. Okay, are you in? Make it more tolerable,” Jenkins said.

“I’m in. I’ll take the middle shift.” The middle shift was the bad one-four hours in the middle of the night.

Shrake took the first watch, following Wyatt from the tae kwon do studio to a supermarket, and then back to his house. He waited there until midnight, when Virgil took it. Virgil sat for four hours, until four o’clock. Jenkins arrived right at four, and Virgil went back to the Holiday Inn and crashed. Shrake, who’d gotten a full night’s sleep, took it at eight o’clock, and at nine-thirty, called Virgil and said, “It looks like he’s getting ready to move.”

Virgil brushed his teeth and called Barlow: “He’s moving. Heading up to the college, we think.”

“I talked to the landlord,” Barlow said. “Got a key, and scared the shit out of him. He won’t tell anyone.”

“I’ll be at your hotel in five minutes. We can ride over in my truck-we don’t want a caravan.”

Virgil picked up Barlow and one of his techs, whose name was Doug Mason, and they headed over to Wyatt’s. “Doug knows computers,” Barlow said.

“Excellent,” Virgil said. They didn’t have much to say on the way over, and halfway there, Shrake called to say that Wyatt had just walked into the college carrying his briefcase.

Wyatt lived on a working street, mostly younger families, and at ten-fifteen, the street was deserted. They climbed out, three men in jackets and slacks-Virgil was wearing a dress shirt and dark slacks, so he wouldn’t hit a neighbor’s inquiring eye quite so hard. Barlow had the key, and they walked up to the door and in. Just inside was a small square mudroom, with a stairway leading up, and a door to the left, leading into the garage.

They took the stairs, quickly, clearing the place: the second and third floors were probably eight hundred square feet each, and smelled of fresh-brewed coffee. The second floor had a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom that Wyatt was using as an office. The third floor had two larger bedrooms, a storage space with a low, slanted ceiling, a good-sized bathroom, and several closets. The place was cluttered with paper-books, magazines, newspapers. Virgil knew and recognized the symptoms: in the downdraft of a divorce, lonely guys often didn’t have much to do, and so hung out in bookstores and newsstands, and acquired paper; and also hung out in bagel joints and movie matinees.

Mason went straight to the office and said, “I’m on the computer.”

Barlow said, “I want to run down and look at the garage.”

“I’ll start upstairs,” Virgil said.

He went through the bedroom in a hurry, but took care not to mess it up. He checked the closets, and a few boxes inside the closets, and found more symptoms of divorce. Wyatt had moved out of his house, but hadn’t taken any junk with him. Hadn’t taken his stuff. He’d simply packed up some clothes, a couple of spare tae kwon do uniforms-including a spare black belt-and had gotten out.

Virgil cleared the bedroom, bathroom, four closets, and the storage area in fifteen minutes. Back downstairs, he found Barlow in the office with Mason. Mason was sitting in the computer chair, his fingers laced over his stomach, watching a screen full of moving numbers. “Anything?”

“Not right off the top-but there’s a lot of stuff in here, so I hooked up my own drive, and I’m mirroring his,” Mason said. “I can look at it later.”

“You know what the guy’s got for tools?” Barlow asked. “A bicycle pump and a pair of needle-nose pliers. That’s it.”

“He’s gotta have more than that-any normal guy does,” Mason said.

“But he’s getting a divorce. He might have a garage full of stuff at the other house,” Virgil said. “Every time I got thrown out, my wives kept the tools. Women like to have tools around.”

“Wives?” Mason asked.

“Or maybe there’s something out at the farmhouse,” Virgil said.

“Gotta be something, if he’s our guy. He’s not putting those things together with his bare fingers.”

Barlow had been in the process of going through a file cabinet, and Virgil started working through the rest of the house. Five minutes later, Barlow came out with a file in his hands. “The divorce is stalled out right now, over visiting rights with the children, and some money issues. The next court appointment is in August.”

Five minutes after that, Virgil realized that they weren’t going to find anything in the house: the house had been sterilized. Wyatt was smart: he’d anticipated the chance of a search. An hour later, he was proven right.

“The guy doesn’t even look at porn,” Mason grumbled. He’d been working through Wyatt’s online history. “You hardly ever run into an asshole who doesn’t even look at it.”

They left empty-handed, as far as they knew-Mason still had to finish going through the computer files. Barlow said, “Doesn’t prove anything. Guy would be an idiot to work in his own house, especially if he thinks he might bring somebody home with him. He’s got a place where he does it, and he keeps it there.”

“The farmhouse,” Virgil said.

“Somewhere,” Barlow said.

It was another quiet day out in the cornfield, nothing moving but a couple of crows that flapped overhead as they were arriving. Virgil had told them how the house was laid out, and Barlow had brought along a crowbar. They checked all four sides of the house, picked out the window with the shabbiest-looking plywood covering, and pried the board loose. Virgil backed his truck up next to the wall, took a flashlight with him, and climbed through the window from the trunk’s bumper.

The interior of the house was dim and smelled like dried weeds, or corn leaves. The floors were wood, and creaked underfoot. A stairway led up; two of the stair treads were broken, and there was a patina of dust on the others.

He went through a doorway into the back, getting a face full of spiderweb as he went through the door.

Barlow called, “Anything?”

Virgil was standing in a bathroom, in thin light seeping through the cracks around the doors and window openings. All the faucets and handles were missing from a sink basin and toilet, and there was nothing but a hole in the floor where a tub had once been. He stooped and shone his light into the hole, then up toward the ceiling. He called back, “Come in here a minute.”

He heard Barlow clamber through the window, and called, “Back here.”

Barlow stepped up beside him and looked in the door. “What am I looking at?”

“Nothing,” Virgil said.

“Nothing?”

“Yeah. Look at the holes in the ceiling. Shouldn’t there be some kind of pipe feeding down to the toilet?”

Barlow scratched his head and said, “Yeah. Should be. Probably feeding off a pump at the well, through here, and then to another bathroom upstairs. With a branch off to the tub down here.”

“Nothing feeding the tub. I looked.”

“Huh,” Barlow said. “The mystery of the missing pipe. I’ll tell you, those holes are about the right size.”

“But where’s he working it?” Virgil asked. “There’s nothing here.”

“Been down the basement?”

“Not yet. I’m not sure there is one.”

They found a basement door, but there were no steps going down. “No steps, no power,” Barlow said. “That’s not a workshop, that’s a hole in the ground.”

“What the hell is the guy doing?” Virgil asked. He was lying on the floor, shining the flash down into the basement. He could see nothing but rock wall and dirt and more spiderwebs.

Going back through the rotten old house, Barlow borrowed the flash and carefully climbed a few steps toward the second floor, but stopped short when one of the steps started to give. “Nothing up here but dust and bat shit,” he said.

Outside again, they pounded the plywood window back in place. “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “That pipe was probably the right size… but you can get that pipe anywhere, just about. Any old house. They may have taken it out to sell it.”

“Yeah. But it’d be a coincidence.”

“I gotta think about it,” Virgil said, as they bounced back down the hill in the truck. “I can keep my two BCA guys, at least for a couple of days. If I can find a way to push Wyatt into going out to his workshop.”

“Push him?”

“Yeah. Give him a reason to worry about us. Get him out to where he works, to close it down, or bury it or whatever. Gotta think about it.”