Barlow nodded: “I’m buying that. I should have seen it.”
“So who is it?” Ahlquist asked.
“John Haden,” O’Hara blurted.
Ahlquist said, “Haden?”
Virgil nodded. “Yeah. John Haden.”
“HOW’D HE GET in the Pinnacle?” Barlow asked.
“He didn’t,” Virgil said. “He went to a FedEx in Grand Rapids and sent the bomb to Pye’s personal secretary. He sent it First Overnight, which means, delivery before eight-thirty A.M. And he sent it from Grand Rapids, which means there’d be no mistake.” Virgil turned to Barlow. “Remember that birthday pie splattered all over the place?”
Barlow said, “I do.”
“I suspect what happened is that Haden sent Pye’s secretary a birthday gift, maybe even wrapped in birthday paper, with a note from somebody like a board member. The note would have said something like: Stick this in the credenza, out of sight, so we can get it when the time comes. It’s a surprise. Be sure you don’t tell Willard.
“She did that,” Virgil said. “She would even have told us about it, except that she was killed.”
“How’d he know about the credenza, if he’d never been in there?” Ahlquist asked.
“How do you know about anything anymore?” Virgil asked. “The Internet. There’s a corporate report from last year, showing Pye and the board of directors gathered around the table in the boardroom, and the credenza is right there.”
“You’ve got a couple long stretches in there,” Good Thunder said. “It’s not evidence—it’s speculation. Can’t really go to trial with speculation.”
“It was speculation, but not anymore,” Virgil said. “We got the receipt from FedEx. He brought the package in Tuesday night, to the FedEx store in Grand Rapids, with early guaranteed delivery to Angela Brown. We have exact measurements—it was a little bigger than a standard shoe box—and we have the weight, about eight pounds. A hefty little thing. Probably felt valuable, to Brown.”
“You figured this out just on the basis of the birthday cake?” Barlow asked.
Virgil shook his head. “I’m not that smart. I figured out who did it, and then I started figuring out how he must have done it. He couldn’t get the box in himself, so how would he get it in? How would he get it placed right there?”
“How did you figure out it was Haden?”
“Because Haden steered us. Looking back, I can see it, but I couldn’t feel it at the time, because he’s smart. I wouldn’t have been able to see it later, either, just looking back. Except . . . a couple of nights ago, I called him up and said I wanted to come over and talk to him. He told me to hold off awhile, he wanted to get his girlfriend out of the house. Well, I was right there, so I parked in the street and waited for her to leave. She did and I went and talked to Haden.”
“The girlfriend’s important?” O’Hara asked.
“Yeah, she is,” Virgil said. “Because I saw her again, this morning. She came up to the farmhouse, to see where her husband got blown up. She’s Wyatt’s wife.”
“Son of a gun,” Ahlquist said.
Virgil ticked it off on his fingers: “Haden has exactly the same problem as Wyatt, and maybe worse. He’s been divorced three times, he’s living in a little teeny house because his ex-wives have carved him up, he’s got no money, and he’s a bit of a Romeo. He knew about the land, either from Wyatt or his wife, and figured out how valuable it would be. He also knew Mrs. Wyatt would inherit, if Bill Wyatt got killed before the divorce went through. He’s already nailing her—”
“That’s an offensive phrase,” O’Hara said.
“I kinda don’t think what he was doing was love,” Virgil said. “He was nailin’ her.”
O’Hara said, “So he tipped off Wyatt that we might be watching him, or searching him . . .”
“Just like I asked him to. He probably told him that he’d seen us out at the farmhouse, or some such thing. We won’t find out now,” Virgil said.
“And then he goes out there and sets the bomb,” Barlow said.
“Not knowing we’d already been through the place and didn’t find a bomb,” Virgil said. “He didn’t know that we were watching Wyatt around the clock—that we’d know that Wyatt couldn’t have placed it himself.”
Virgil held up his hand again, ticking off his fingers: “Haden had motive, he figured out a way to get a bomb inside the Pinnacle, he knew the inside of the Erikson garage, he knew that if he could keep Mrs. Wyatt rolling, she’d inherit.”
Good Thunder said, “I wonder if he plans to kill Mrs. Wyatt?”
“Why not?” Virgil said. “He’d get to keep it all, if he did that.”
“Totally fuckin’ psycho,” O’Hara said.
Ahlquist said, “You know what I’ve told you about that language . . .”
“Sorry, Sheriff.” O’Hara hitched up her gun belt. “He almost blew me up. I’m gonna bust his ass.”
VIRGIL SAID, “NOT YET. There was no video at FedEx. We’re sending a photo over for the night clerk to look at—we do have her signature—and maybe she’ll recognize him. I kinda think not, though. I doubt that he’d go in without some kind of disguise. A beard and glasses, whatever. He couldn’t have counted on Brown getting killed, so he had to believe she’d be around to tell us about the birthday package.”
They all mulled that over, and then Ahlquist said, “I expect you got a plan.”
“I do,” Virgil said. “It’s not the brightest one in the land, so I’m looking for suggestions.”
Good Thunder said, “I got a trivial question, if you don’t mind. How’d you know he sent it FedEx?”
Virgil shrugged: “Would you trust a bomb to a company called ‘Oops’?”
VIRGIL HAD SAID HIS PLAN was half-assed, and they all agreed it was: another sneak-and-peek federal warrant.
“I’m worried about it,” Barlow said. “I can get the warrant, but if this guy is so smart . . . he may see us coming. There’s no perfect way to get in and out of a place, if the guy’s set up some telltales.”
“What’s that?” O’Hara asked.
Barlow said, “Little things that get disturbed. Stick hairs across your dresser drawers, with a little spit. If they’re gone, somebody was there. Not something you’d notice, just searching the place.”
“I got nothing else right now,” Virgil said.
“We could think about it some more, but I agree with Virgil that we ought to get a warrant going,” Ahlquist said. “We don’t have to use it, if we think of something better. If we don’t, we can at least get a look around. How about one of those bomb-sniffer things. Don’t you have some sniffer things that tell you if explosive has been around?”
“Yeah, but it can be defeated. It’s possible—and if he’s that smart, probably likely—that he worked with the explosive somewhere besides his house,” Barlow said. “Of course, if he didn’t wash his clothes after he worked with it . . . we could have a shot.”
“So let’s get the warrant going,” Ahlquist said.
“I’d like to get somebody to make an announcement that we’ve confirmed that Wyatt was the bomber. Make a show over at his house,” Virgil said. He looked at the sheriff. “Earl?”
“Then announce tomorrow that I was lying?”
“That you were deliberately setting up the real bomber,” Virgil said.
“I do like TV,” Ahlquist said.
O’HARA SAID, “You know, with all due respect to Virgil, I’ve got a better idea about how to get Haden than a bullshit sneak-and-peek warrant.”
She explained, and when she finished, Virgil said, “Okay. That’s Plan B.”
26
HADEN HAD SEEN VIRGIL’S TRUCK too many times, so Virgil and O’Hara squeezed into O’Hara’s Mini Cooper and parked it outside a house that had a For Sale sign in the front yard, a full block over from Haden’s house. Virgil brought along a pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars, and they took turns watching Haden’s house; and watched a woman across the
street and two houses down who wore little in the way of clothing as she vacuumed the carpeting on the other side of her living room picture window; and watched a small spotted dog that walked up and down a gutter, apparently lost.
“I gotta do something about that dog, if we don’t do anything else,” O’Hara said.
Virgil said, “I think I can see a collar and probably a tag . . . maybe it’s just an outside dog. It’s not big enough to bite anybody.”
“I see you’re watching Miz White Trash again,” O’Hara said after a moment.
“I’m trying to figure out whether she’s breaking any laws. I mean, she’s apparently in her own home.”
“I read about a case like this—it apparently depends on her intent. If her intent is to distract an officer of the law, or anybody else, by deliberately displaying her flesh, then she is breaking the law against indecent exposure. If she has no intent to expose herself, but the exposure is inadvertent, sporadic, or unintended, then she is not breaking the law.”
“Gonna have to do more observation to determine intent,” Virgil said. But he was joking; the woman actually didn’t have that much going for her, in his opinion, and O’Hara knew it.
Haden first appeared outside his home a few minutes before ten o’clock. He looked in his mailbox, then up and down the street, as if expecting the mailman, then went back inside.
“So he’s up,” O’Hara said.
Ten minutes later, the mailman showed up, delivering Haden’s street. Haden met him at the door, took the mail, went back inside. Three or four minutes later, his garage door went up, and Haden backed into the street.
Virgil went to his cell phone: “He’s out, and he’s headed your way.”
“We’re set,” Shrake said. “Hold on . . .” Then: “Okay, he just went past. Looks like he’s going downtown. We’re on him.”
Virgil called Barlow: “He’s moving. Headed downtown.”
“We’re still hovering out here. . . .”
SHRAKE CALLED: “He’s at the Wells Fargo drive-through. Jenkins will take him from here, I’m going to fall off.”
O’Hara said to Virgil, “That was probably his paycheck in the mail.”
“He’s going to be late for class, if he doesn’t hurry,” Virgil said.
Shrake called again. “Jenkins is on him, he looks like he’s headed over to the school.”
Jenkins, a few minutes later: “He’s inside the school. He was hurrying.”
Virgil called Barlow: “He’s at the school. Let’s go.”
VIRGIL AND O’HARA ARRIVED FIRST. As had been the case with the other divorced suspect, William Wyatt, Haden was a renter. Virgil had gotten a key from the home’s owner, and had silenced the owner with threats of life imprisonment (“accessory after the fact to four murders”) if he talked to anyone about it.
They parked in the street, walked up to Haden’s door, and went inside. Once in, Virgil walked around to the garage and opened the door. Barlow and two techs arrived a minute later, drove into the garage, and Virgil dropped the door again.
They did a quick walk-through, found a small shop in the basement, with the bodies of three gorgeous electric guitars hanging from the rafters.
“That’s great work,” one of the techs said. “This guy knows what he’s doing, guitar-wise.”
“He’s got everything he needs to make the bombs,” the other tech said. “If he’s the guy, this is where he made the bombs.”
They had a wheeled cart full of electronic equipment, which they’d brought into the kitchen from the garage. Now, they went back up the steps, picked it up, and carried it down the stairs. “Tell you something in five minutes,” Barlow said.
While the techs ran some preliminary tests, Virgil and O’Hara cruised the main floor. Haden was a neat man. Virgil pointed out that he’d vacuumed two of the rugs in a way that left the short nap standing upright, “So that when we walk on it, we leave footprints.”
“We’ll re-vacuum before we leave,” she said. “Of course, we’ll be clothed.”
THEY TOOK TEN MINUTES working from his bedroom outward, and found nothing that would point to him as a bomber; not that it was all uninteresting. They found a box that once contained a gross of ribbed, lubricated condoms, with maybe thirty left; and two vibrators, including one with a wicked hook on it. In a storage closet, they found a PSE X-Force Vendetta bow with a five-pin sight and a Ripcord fall-away arrow rest, and a batch of high-end carbon-fiber arrows, five of them set up with Slick Trick magnum four-bladed arrowheads.
In a backpack hanging in the same storage closet as the bow, they found a range of deer-hunting gear. Two bottles of scent-killing detergent sat on a shelf.
“Now,” Virgil said, in his best pedantic tone, “what’s wrong with this whole scene?”
“I dunno,” O’Hara said. “I woulda got a Solocam, myself, but that PSE’s a pretty good bow.”
“What’s wrong, my red-haired friend, is that he’s got all this scent killer, but where’s the camo he’s gonna spray it on, or wash it with?”
“There is no camo,” she said.
“Because he got rid of it, because he read in the paper that we found that video recorder,” Virgil said. “There are no bow hunters without camo. Most of them wear it when it’s anything less than ninety degrees, just to prove that they’re bow hunters. His mistake was, instead of just throwing away the old stuff, he should have also bought some new camo pattern that wasn’t Realtree, run it through the washer a few times, then hung it up here. That would counter what was seen on the video.”
“I believe you,” O’Hara said. “I also believe that if you made that argument in court, the judge would hit you on the head with her gavel.”
THEY HEARD BARLOW running up the stairs. They stepped out to look, and Barlow said, “Okay. He’s the guy. We’ve got molecules of Pelex in the basement. But . . .”
“I hate that. I hate when people say ‘but,’ ” Virgil said.
Barlow ran on: “But . . . what he did was he scrubbed up the whole basement with some kind of strong chemical cleaners. You can still see the marks on the floor. We don’t have anything physical except our test, which is good, but a defense chemist could make the argument that all we’re picking up is some chemical signature of something used in the cleaners.”
“Is that possible?” Virgil asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Barlow said. “I don’t believe it, in this case, but we don’t know what cleaners he used. We need to check that now.”
“Do we have enough to bust him?”
Barlow stroked his mustache a few times and then said, “It’d be marginal. Just the fact that he scrubbed up the basement in a rental house would tell you something. We did get that Pelex signature. If we had an aggressive prosecutor . . . and then, whatever Mrs. Wyatt could tell us, if she’d tell us anything.”
“All right. We’re about done up here and we didn’t find much to help. Just another negative,” Virgil said. He told Barlow about the missing camo.
“What does it all mean?” O’Hara asked.
“It means we may have to go to my Plan B,” Virgil said.
“Your plan B?” Hands on her hips. “Wait a minute, buster . . .”
27
JOHN HADEN FOUND HIMSELF in something of a trap. Not a legal trap, but a relationship trap. Sally Wyatt had come over and had thrown her . . . psyche . . . at him, after she’d come back from the scene of her husband’s death. She’d been overcome with remorse, both at his death and about her relationship with Haden.
She still loved him, she said, but this death changed everything: she needed space to think, she needed time to grieve, she needed to be alone with her children. She needed help. He calmed her down, as much as he could, he let her weep, he gave her the name a grief counselor he’d heard about from another instructor whose wife had died.
“She’s supposed to be really good, and as I understand it, she really did help Jeremy get through his wife’s death,” he’d told her
, sitting beside her on the couch, one hand on her shoulder. “You think you have to go through it on your own, but you don’t. It helps to have somebody who understands the fault lines of family tragedy.”
As soon as she was out the door, he said aloud, “Jesus Christ, this is gonna be a pain in the ass.”
The trap part of the relationship was . . . he needed to keep her close, but he wouldn’t want Flowers to see them together. Actually, he didn’t want anyone to see them together, at least for a while, and that wasn’t easy, in a small city like Butternut Falls. So he needed her close for strategic reasons—their potential marriage—but at the same time, for tactical reasons, he now needed a little distance. At least until Flowers got out of town.
He got Flowers’s cell phone number off his own cell phone and called him.
“Virg: you never called to tell me what happened out there,” he complained. “Was Bill the guy? We’re hearing that up at the school.”
“We’re about ninety-eight percent and climbing,” Flowers said. “The thing we don’t know is, was it an accident, or was it on purpose? There’s no question that most of the remaining Pelex must’ve been touched off. There’re pieces of that farmhouse in fuckin’ Farmington. And probably far-off Faribault.”
“To say nothing of freakin’ Fairmont,” Haden said. “Well, you know what? I’m still not sure. So when you get to a hundred percent, let me know.”
“I’ll do that,” Flowers said. “You could buy me another beer or two.”
“You’re on,” Haden said.
WHEN HE GOT OFF the phone, Haden got a half-full bottle of red wine from the fridge, popped the vacuum cork, and carried the bottle over to the couch, where he could think.
This whole thing would have to be carefully handled. He’d made Sally fall in love with him—that wasn’t difficult. She’d needed somebody, in the biggest emotional crisis of her life, and there he was. He’d been funny, and sensitive, and sexy, had listened thoughtfully to her complaints about Wyatt, and to her intellectual and political positions.