Shock Wave

  “Sorta like I said it. Tell him that I came over, was impatient with you, then said I was wasting my time anyway. Say that I apologized, and confessed that somebody else was first on the list. That we had a tip, and we might know where the bomb stuff was.”

  “Man, that sounds . . .”

  “Well, hell, I don’t know. Make something up,” Virgil said. “You’re the big brain. But that’s the idea I want to get across. That we’ve got something. Not that he’s a target, just that he was on the list, and that we’ve got something.”

  Haden took a gulp of coffee, swallowed, looked at his watch, and said, “I gotta run. I’ll think of something. I’ll call you when I’ve done it.”

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Virgil called Shrake: “Still sitting there? Any movement?”

  “Not a thing,” Shrake said. “On the other hand, I have learned that I’m probably turning my hips too soon, in my drive, which is why I slice. I need to shift my weight to my left before I start turning my hips. That gives me a natural inside-to-outside swing, which I’ve always needed.”

  “I’m pleased you’ve had this learning experience,” Virgil said. “Listen, we’re going round-the-clock on Wyatt. I’m giving him a push. And I want two guys on him, so I’m going to try to borrow a guy from the sheriff. You guys do what you have to, then get some sleep. I’ll pick him up in a few minutes. I’ll want you guys around midnight, to do the overnight.”

  When he’d worked a timetable with Shrake, he called Ahlquist: “I need one of your guys to sit with me. I’m staking out Wyatt.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Right now. You know my truck, and I know Wyatt’s car. I’m going to spot it in the parking lot up at the college and I’ll be at the other end of the lot.”

  “Get somebody there soon as I can,” Ahlquist said. “You need any sandwiches or anything? Coffee?”

  “I’ll get some Diet Coke on the way over, but a couple of sandwiches would be great.”

  VIRGIL PICKED UP a half-dozen Diet Cokes, stuck them with some ice in his cooler, and drove out to the college. He spotted Wyatt’s Prius, and took up a spot as far away as he could get and still see the front entrance and Wyatt’s car.

  A half hour after he’d settled in, there was a knock on the passenger-side door, and he saw Deputy O’Hara looking in at him. She was carrying a white paper bag.

  “Ah, for Christ’s sakes,” he muttered. Ahlquist’s idea of a joke. He popped the door, and she climbed in, handed him the bag, and said, “Here’s your sandwich, sir. Anything else I can possibly get you?”

  “I’m good,” Virgil said. “Where’s your uniform?”

  She was wearing a pale blue blouse and khaki slacks. “I thought this would be less obvious. But I brought my gun.”

  “That’s good. Don’t shoot anybody unless I tell you to,” Virgil said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “No sarcasm, either.” She said nothing, but smiled, and Virgil dug into the bag and said, “You got me an anchovy sandwich, right?”

  She shuddered. “I never heard of such a thing. They’re chicken salad on caraway rye. There are two of them.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Deputy O’Hara: that’s one of my favorite sandwiches in the United States.”

  “I’m happy for you. You owe me seven dollars.”

  He paid her, unwrapped a sandwich—damn good sandwich, too—and said, around a mouthful of chicken salad, “All right. Here’s what we’re trying to do.”

  He spent a couple minutes explaining, and she said, “So if he takes the bait, we might follow him right out to where he’s got, like, twenty pounds of high explosive, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’s already killed three people, attacked a cop and one of the richest people in the world, and injured or scared the crap out of a bunch of other people. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, I don’t want to seem obstreperous, or anything, but . . . you do have a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you get it out? And check it? Where I can see you do it? I don’t mind going in on something like this, but I don’t want to have to look after your ass, as well as mine.”

  Virgil said, “Let me finish the sandwich. I’ve got a gun. Really.”

  HE GOT A CALL from Haden: “I feel like Judas, but I did it. He was interested.”

  Virgil said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

  Deputy O’Hara asked, “You gonna eat that other sandwich?”

  “You can have it, for three-fifty,” Virgil said.

  “I only want a half.”

  “Then one-seventy-five.”

  DEPUTY O’HARA, it turned out, was an art freak, and on her weekends off, worked as a docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She also worked an off-duty second job at the local mall, an hour before and after closing time. “Those are the high shoplift times; and then, I make sure everybody gets out of the place with their money.”

  “Are you doing this because you really need the money? Or is it simple greed?” Virgil said.

  “Every penny of my off-duty work, except what I need for taxes, goes in my travel fund,” she said. “Then every fall, I take off for Europe. I go to museums.”

  Virgil said, “Hmm.”

  “What? You’re against culture?”

  “No. I was thinking that’s a great way to go through life,” Virgil said.

  She looked at him suspiciously: “But not something you’d do.”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “But I could probably be talked into it.”

  SHRAKE CALLED: “ANYTHING?”

  “We’re watching his car, but haven’t seen him yet,” Virgil said. “You okay for midnight?”

  “Yeah, I talked to Jenkins. We’re all set. You by yourself?”

  “I got a deputy with me,” Virgil said.

  “See you at midnight.”

  O’Hara said, “I gotta call my night job, tell them I can’t make it.”

  “If he goes back home, I could probably drop you,” Virgil said.

  “No, I’d rather have the overtime. Earl said overtime is okay, as long as it’s not too much.”

  “Good of him,” Virgil said.

  WYATT FINALLY WALKED OUT of the college building an hour after his last class ended. Virgil worried a bit that he’d snuck out some other exit, and walked somewhere, but there was nothing to do about that.

  Wyatt stood blinking in the sunlight for a moment, looking around the lot, then spotted his car and walked over to it, jingling his keys. He was carrying a big leather academic briefcase, which he put on the passenger seat, then walked back around the car to get in the driver’s side.

  “He was being pretty careful with that suitcase,” O’Hara said.

  Virgil said, “Huh,” and when Wyatt was moving, pulled out behind him.

  THEY TOOK HIM to a supermarket, took him home, took him to tae kwon do, took him to a movie, alone. Virgil followed him in, at a distance, and caught him as he was settling in for Pirates of the Caribbean . Virgil watched the movie from the back row, occasionally texting O’Hara to keep her current. He left ten minutes before the end, no longer caring what happened.

  “Like it?” O’Hara asked. “The movie?”

  “No,” Virgil said.

  WYATT CAME BACK OUT ten minutes later, drove to the Applebee’s, spent an hour there, sitting at the bar, talking with people. He looked like a regular. They took him home at ten o’clock; he put the car in the garage.

  He hadn’t moved at midnight, when Jenkins and Shrake took it.

  O’Hara lived in a modest clapboard house not unlike Virgil’s: “I will pick you up at fifteen minutes to eight tomorrow,” Virgil said, when he dropped her. “Be ready.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and saluted.

  And Virgil thought, as he drove away, that Lee Coakley hadn’t called. She must’ve meant what she said: didn’t want to talk.

  THOR WAS WORKING in the office as he went through, and called, ?
??Hey . . . looks like Mr. Shepard is going away, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Virgil said.

  “Everybody’s heard that he was arrested, and that he ratted out everybody else,” Thor said.

  “Yeah, but first he’s got to recover, and then there’ll be negotiations,” Virgil said. “So . . . how’s everything going with the hot Mrs. Shepard?”

  Thor’s eyelids lowered a quarter inch. “She took the pizza,” he said.

  VIRGIL WENT STRAIGHT TO BED, with both his alarms set, and a wakeup call. He lay awake for a while, thinking about how God played with people’s lives, and thinking that Coakley might call yet. It was still not past eleven o’clock on the West Coast. He was still waiting when he went to sleep.

  He woke at seven-fifteen, cleaned up in a hurry, got O’Hara, who was standing in her front yard, waiting, and made it to a McDonald’s drive-through, got Egg McMuffins with sausage for both of them, a coffee for her and a Diet Coke for himself, and made it to Wyatt’s at exactly eight o’clock. Working in a town where almost nowhere was more than a mile from anywhere else, and there was almost no real traffic, had its benefits.

  Shrake and Jenkins had nothing to report.

  “We’ll do this one more night, if we have to, and then you guys can go back to the Cities tomorrow morning.”

  “We won’t be going to bed until this afternoon, so if anything comes up, call us,” Jenkins said.

  Virgil said he would, and he and O’Hara settled in with their McDonald’s bag, to watch.

  Virgil was reading a Michael Connelly novel on his iPad when O’Hara poked him and said, “Garage door.”

  Virgil shut down the iPad and watched as Wyatt backed his Prius out of the garage. He drove to the same McDonald’s where Virgil and O’Hara had gone, rolled through the same drive-through, then headed south through town. “He’s going out to his farm,” Virgil said.

  But he didn’t. He went to Home Depot. O’Hara said that as far as she knew, Wyatt didn’t know her, so Virgil sent her inside to see what he was doing. She came back out ten minutes later and said, “He’s in the checkout line. I couldn’t get close enough to see what he was getting, but it was in the ‘fasteners’ section. Window latches, or something.”

  “Wonder if you could use them in a bomb, you know, to detonate one?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. And, “Speaking of bombs, I can still taste that Egg McMuffin. Wish I hadn’t got the sausage.”

  Wyatt came out a minute later, and again, turned south. “Toward the farm,” Virgil said again.

  This time, he was going to the farm, taking the turn on the county road toward the track up the hill. Virgil pulled over onto the side of the highway, past the county road, and said, “I’m going.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Gotta run,” he said. “There’s nothing in the house, so he’s probably got the stuff ditched outside.”

  THEY RAN ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, across the roadside ditch, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and jogged into the cornfield. They were coming at the house from the side, and couldn’t see anything below the exterior windowsills . . . which meant that Wyatt couldn’t see them, at least until they got higher on the slope. Halfway up, Virgil could see the top of Wyatt’s car, and said, “We gotta get lower.”

  They continued running, bent over, up the hill; another hundred yards and Virgil waved O’Hara down, and to a stop. Standing slowly, he looked over the top of the corn, and immediately saw Wyatt walking up to the front of the old farmhouse. He appeared to be empty-handed. Virgil said, quietly, “He’s going inside. We couldn’t find anything in there. . . .”

  “If we get right under the house, we could hear what he’s doing,” O’Hara said.

  “Let’s get a little closer, anyway,” Virgil said. Now they were virtually crawling, as fast as they could. Another fifty yards, and they stopped, and both popped up their heads. Wyatt had unlocked the front door. There was no porch, so he had to boost himself inside.

  Virgil sat down and got his cell phone and called Shrake: “We might have something going. You guys head south on 71. About six blocks out of town . . .”

  He pushed to his knees, watching the house, as he gave directions to Shrake, O’Hara beside him.

  THE SHOCK WAVE, when the house exploded, nearly knocked them down.

  24

  WHEN THE HOUSE WENT, it wasn’t at all like watching a slow-mo, where the building bulges, and then flies apart, or sags, and falls into a heap. The house went like an oversized firecracker: BOOM! And it was gone.

  Virgil pushed O’Hara flat, covered his head with his hands, and covered her head with his right arm and elbow. She tried to push away so she could look up and he shouted, “No, no, cover your head, cover your head.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy, and then the first chunk of plank landed a few feet away, and then the heavy thunk of masonry, maybe a piece of the old brick chimney, and then all kinds of trash, small pieces of wood and dirt and stone and shingles and concrete, some of it no bigger across than a little fingernail, but some of it the size of a bathtub.

  She caught on and curled up, covering her head, and the debris kept coming down for what seemed like a full minute, and may have been. Virgil heard several large pieces land, stuff that could have killed them.

  Then it all went silent, and O’Hara stirred and did a push-up, and said, “Oh my God,” just like a Valley girl.

  They both got to their knees. Other than the foundation, there was no sign of the house from where they were. The superstructure had vanished. Wyatt’s champagne-colored Prius was still sitting there, but it had no windows.

  Virgil stood up and walked toward the house, while O’Hara started screaming into her cell phone. A minute later, Virgil’s cell phone rang, and he absently took it out of his pocket, said, “Yeah?”

  “This is Shrake. There’s been a hell of an explosion. That wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Yeah. Wyatt just left for the moon,” Virgil said. “Where are you?”

  “Five minutes away. Jenkins says he can see the dust cloud. We’re coming.”

  Virgil clicked off, heard O’Hara talking to Ahlquist, and then she clicked off and caught up with him. They passed the car, which had been turned probably thirty degrees sideways. The near side had been torn to pieces by shrapnel from the house. Where the house had been, there was nothing but a hole in the ground.

  Virgil thought, almost idly, No more spiderwebs . . .

  “Was it an accident?” O’Hara asked. “Or did he do it on purpose? Maybe he figured you had him. . . .”

  There were sirens everywhere and the first patrol car blew past the subdivision at the bottom of the hill, coming fast. Virgil was aware that the car looked hazy—that everything looked hazy—and he realized that he was walking through an enormous cloud of dust, which was still raining down on them. O’Hara’s red hair was turning gray with the dirt, and he was sure his was, too.

  He took her by the elbow and said, “Come on, we’ve got to get out of the dust.”

  She resisted. “What about Wyatt?”

  “Elvis has left the building,” Virgil said. “Or maybe, the building has left Elvis. And we’re breathing in all kinds of bad shit, maybe including little pieces of asbestos, or glass fibers, if the place had insulation. We’ve got to get out of the cloud. Cover your mouth and nose with your shirt.”

  Using their shirts as masks, they walked down the track to the county road; the patrol car turned into the track, and Virgil waved them off. The car stopped, and they walked down to it, and Virgil said, “Pop the back door, let us in. Keep your window up.”

  They got in the back, and Virgil told the deputy about the dust, and then about Wyatt.

  The deputy asked O’Hara, “So you guys think he’s dead?”

  “I think he was vaporized,” O’Hara said. “I think he somehow touched off everything he had left. It was like . . . it was like the movies they showed us in Iraq. It was like an IED.”


  Virgil asked the deputy to take him back to his truck. As they rode over, he called Shrake and said, “Wait a bit before you try to go up the hill. That dust cloud may be toxic. I’m parked on the highway. I’ll meet you there.”

  SHRAKE AND JENKINS ARRIVED two minutes later, and more patrol cars came along, and were waved off, and then a fire truck. Rubberneckers were piling up on the highway, and Virgil sent a couple of the cops to keep them moving. Then Ahlquist came in, and a moment later, Barlow. They stood on the shoulder of the road, watching the dissipating dust cloud, and Barlow said, “If it took out a whole house, that was probably the rest of it.”

  “That’s what I said,” O’Hara told him.

  Ahlquist asked, “No chance that he got out? That he set off a timer thing, then went out the far side and ran out through the corn to the other side?”

  Virgil said, “No.”

  Shrake said, “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “I am,” Virgil said.

  “Suicide by cop,” Barlow said. “He knew you were coming, and took the easy way out.”

  “I think we can go up there,” Virgil said. The cloud was thinning, under a light westerly breeze.

  They drove up the hill in a long caravan, with the fire truck trailing behind. They found a hole, but no sign of Wyatt.

  “If it killed him, his head should be around here somewhere,” Barlow said, and Virgil remembered what the deputy had said the first night he was in town. O’Hara remembered it, too, and looked at Virgil and nodded.

  “Then we need to get some people together to walk the field,” Virgil said. “We had bricks coming down eighty yards out, so if we . . . you know, his head shouldn’t have gone much further than that.”

  Barlow looked at him, but nodded.