Shock Wave

  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.”

  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, outsid
e 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 FOUND JENKINS 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?”