Shock Wave

  “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.”

  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 w
ho 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?”