Shock Wave vf-5

by John Sandford

  “We want to protect against the possibility of a trauma-induced seizure, or stroke,” a doctor told Virgil.

  Sullivan’s confusion seemed to be diminishing, the doc said, but at times he flashed back to the moment after the explosion, when he wiped the gore from his face and eyes and saw Kingsley’s head on the ground, and saw the dead man’s eyes open and looking at him.

  “A pure psychological thing, but real enough,” the doc said. “It should get better over time, but he’ll never escape it completely. The effects will always be there, the changes in his life and career and prospects.”

  “Could those be better, instead of worse?” Virgil asked.

  The doc grinned and said, “Nobody ever asked me that. Okay, they could be better, but how would you know? Say he goes on to be a millionaire, and he thinks, If I hadn’t been blown up, I’d be a billionaire. So what do you say about that?”

  Virgil shrugged. “You say, ‘Well, that’s life. Suck it up, cowboy.’ ”

  “That’s why you’re not getting paid two hundred dollars an hour, like me,” the doc said.

  Sullivan was propped up on a couple of pillows, and except for what looked like a wind-burned face, seemed okay. A handsome young woman sat on a chair to one side, flipping through an Elle magazine, while a guy in a suit had his butt propped against a windowsill, taking notes on a yellow pad inside a leather folder.

  When Virgil came in and introduced himself, the woman said, “He’s been really good. He still has a ringing in his ears, but I think he’ll be just fine.”

  And the man said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t know anything of the sort, Mary, and you have to stop telling people that.”

  Virgil understood that the man with the folder was a lawyer and the woman was Sullivan’s wife. Virgil turned to the injured man and said, “I don’t really, uh, want to question your condition, Mr. Sullivan. I’m more interested in what happened before the explosion. People you may have seen around the site…”

  The lawyer said, “No matter who he may or may not have seen around the site, I don’t think we can say he really had any responsibility-”

  Virgil said, “Look, I’m here to interview Mr. Sullivan. He is not suspected of a crime and I’m not investigating him. He’s a witness and he has no right of silence. So, I’m happy enough to let you sit there, but if you interrupt, I’ll have to ask you to leave. Okay?”

  The lawyer said four or five hundred words, which Virgil waved off. “Fine, fine. But if you interrupt, I’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for interfering with a police officer, even though doing that would be a pain in the ass, and handcuff you out in the hallway until I’m done here, and then we’ll both go down to the jail. Okay? Just shut up, and let me do my job.”

  The woman said, “I don’t think you can talk to a lawyer like that.”

  “Of course I can,” Virgil said. “I just did. Now, Mr. Sullivan.. .”

  Sullivan had one thing.

  He couldn’t remember the explosion, though he could remember seeing Kingsley’s head. He didn’t see anything suspicious around the work site, except the one thing.

  “The one thing was, there was a guy who was watching us through binoculars. We all saw him, once or twice. We joked about it. He was off behind the site, between the site and the river. I only actually saw him once. He was pretty far away, and I saw more movement than I did his body. He was wearing camo, I think, which seemed weird to me, because I don’t think there are any hunting seasons going on. It made me wonder if he’d been watching us regular-like. The way I saw him was that it was in the evening, and the sun was going down to the northwest, and he was south of us, and I saw the flash off the binocular lenses. I saw the flash two different days, but the second day, I never saw the man, just a flash from down in the bush.”

  “Down in the bush,” Virgil said. “He was below you?”

  “Yeah. There’s heavy brush back there, but the land generally falls away from the store, toward the river,” Sullivan said. “That’s why these people think the parking lot will drain into the Butternut, because the land falls away. We’ve got retention systems and everything else and I was telling-”

  Suddenly his eyes went wide, the blood drained from his face, and he turned his face to the woman and groaned, “Mary, my God…”

  The woman dropped the magazine and stood and then bent over him and said, “It’s okay, Mike, you’re just fine, Mike.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, his eyes are looking right at me but they’re all white, looking right at me…”

  The flashback lasted only a few seconds, but there was no question of its reality: Sullivan appeared to be slipping into shock, and Virgil sent the lawyer to find a doctor.

  “I don’t think we should talk about this anymore,” Sullivan’s wife said.

  Virgil nodded: “I think you’re right.”

  Back outside, Virgil thought about what Sullivan had said, and decided to go look in the brush behind the PyeMart site. Maybe he’d find a matchbook from the cafe where the bomber hung out.

  Or not.

  7

  Before driving out to the PyeMart site, Virgil stopped at the scene of the limo bombing. The twisted vehicle was still in the middle of the street, and Barlow was working on it with one of the ATF technicians. Virgil ducked under the crime-scene tape and asked Barlow, “Anything?”

  “The usual. Did find pieces of the pipe, that galvanized plumbing stuff, but finding a fingerprint…” He shook his head.

  “A pipe dream,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah.”

  Virgil filled him in on his morning, and Barlow said that Sullivan’s symptoms weren’t unusual. “People see other people shot to death, and it affects them, but not the way a nearby bomb does. The Israelis have all kinds of studies on it-there’s actually a physical impact, from the shock wave, and then the psychological aftereffects. Any of it can kill you. Bombing victims have an elevated rate of suicide… they can’t deal with it, a bomb.”

  Willard Pye and his assistant were still on the scene, and Pye came over and asked Virgil for a minute of his time. They stepped away from Barlow, who went back to work, digging out the inside of the limousine, scrap by scrap.

  Pye said, “I’ve decided to stick around for a couple more days, but I’ve had my assistant researching you, and what she found out, it’s pretty interesting. You might be my guy.”

  “Mr. Pye-”

  Pye made a shushing hand gesture and said, “Just listen for a minute. I’m gonna stay out here and watch them work this. In the meantime, my jet airplane is sitting out there at the airport, doing nothing, for a couple thousand dollars a day. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in flying back to Grand Rapids, to take a look at the Pinnacle. See if you can figure out how this butthead got inside, for one thing. Maybe you’ll learn something. Barlow’s a smart guy, but he’s not somebody who can… put himself in a criminal’s place, so to speak.”

  Virgil said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea, if I come up dry here. But I’ve got more stuff to do here.”

  “We’re two hours from the airport at Grand Rapids. When you finish up tonight-you can’t be working it much after dark-you could get on the plane, have a nice little meal, a couple of beers, check out the building, bed down in the Pinnacle’s guest quarters, good as any hotel, get up early and be back here for breakfast.”

  “How many people are going in and out of the building?” Virgil asked.

  “A lot,” Pye admitted. “There’s right around twenty-five hundred employees, and we have another big administrative site over in Grand Rapids, and those people are coming and going all the time. But we have security. We have a card check at the door, we have cameras, we have guards all over the first couple of floors.”

  “Did the feds go through the photography?”

  “Yeah, they had a couple of guys working it, but it didn’t come to anything.”

  “Let me think about it,” Virgil said.

  “You
got the plane if you want it,” Pye said. “I hope you take it.”

  Virgil went out to the PyeMart site and found two deputies sitting on the same two folding chairs, and a patrol car, but no crime-scene technician. The senior cop told Virgil, “The one guy is helping Barlow at the car-bombing scene, and the other went out to the limo driver’s house, to see if there’s anything around where the car was parked. So, we’re just sitting here.”

  “Nice day for it, anyway,” Virgil said. And it was. He went back to his truck, put on hiking boots, got a hat and his Nikon, and headed across the construction pad. Given the location of the trailer, and with the binocular flash coming from the southeast, the watcher, whoever he was, must have been in a fairly narrow piece of real estate to the left of the main building pad.

  Virgil walked to the edge of the construction site-nobody working, construction had been halted until the ATF gave the go-ahead-and plunged into the brush. He hadn’t gone far, quartering back and forth through the scrub, before he found a game trail that led away to the south. Fifty yards south, a gopher mound that overlapped the trail showed the edge of a human footprint. Virgil stepped carefully around it, then took a photo, using a dollar bill for scale, and moved on south.

  He’d looked at the site on a Google satellite photo: a loop of the Butternut cut a channel in the rising land to a point that the Google measuring tape said was about six hundred and fifty yards from the highway, and directly south of the PyeMart site. The game trail went that way, and Virgil followed it, looking for more prints. He found a couple of indentations, but nothing that would help identify a shoe.

  He’d been walking for fifteen minutes or so, brush and weeds up higher than his head, following the game trail, slowly, when he broke into an open grassy slope that went down to the Butternut.

  The river-creek-wasn’t much more than thirty or forty feet wide at that point, and shallow, with riffles showing where the water was running over stone. Both above and below the riffles, broad pools cut into the banks. A hundred yards upstream, a man in a weirdlooking white suit, broad-brimmed white hat, and waders was working deeper water with a fly-casting rod. Virgil went that way, and when he’d covered about half the ground, the man snapped the rod up, and Virgil saw that he had a fish on the line, and stopped to watch.

  The man’s rod was long and slender and caramel-colored, and he played the fish with great delicacy. At some point, Virgil realized that the rod was made of bamboo-something you didn’t see much of-and the pale gold fishing line was probably silk.

  The man brought in the trout, landing it with a small net that he unclipped from an equipment belt. He looked around, as if for witnesses, spotted Virgil, and held up the trout-it was perhaps a foot long, not a bad fish, for a trout, in the Butternut-and then slipped it back in the water.

  Virgil continued toward him, and the man clambered out of the water and said, “Be nice if the water were about ten degrees warmer. Nice for me, if not the trout.”

  Virgil said, “That was a nice little fish. I’ll have to bring my rod down.”

  “I haven’t seen you around,” the man said. “Are you working over at the PyeMart?”

  “Sort of,” Virgil said. “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m looking for this bomber.”

  “Good luck with that,” the fisherman said.

  As they were talking, Virgil was looking the guy over. He was tall and thin and large-nosed, his face weathered from sun exposure, like a golfer… or a fisherman. He was perhaps forty-five. Virgil had never seen a fishing outfit like the man was wearing: not quite white, more of a muslin color, and fitted like a suit coat, with lapels, and matching pleated pants.

  The man said, “What? You’ve never seen a nineteenth-century fly-fishing outfit?”

  “Uh, no,” Virgil said. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Not a lot of us traditionalists around,” the man said. “But a few.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Mmm. I’ve overstayed, I’m afraid.”

  Virgil said, “Listen, have you seen a guy in camo hanging around here? A local guy? Maybe carrying a pair of binoculars?”

  “Camouflage? No, no, I haven’t, but then, I don’t usually fish this low,” the man said. “I’m usually upstream, but things weren’t going so well up there, so I persisted, and here I am.”

  “You know anybody who fishes down here?”

  “I do,” the man said. “Cameron Smith. He likes these two pools, and two more down below. There’s an old mill dam, fallen down now, but there’s still a good deep pool behind it. He’s more of a wetfly man. I’m dry.”

  “Cameron Smith… he’s in town here?”

  “Yes. He’s the president of the Cold Stream Fishers, which is a local fly-fishing club. I’m also a member.”

  “The club members pretty pissed about the PyeMart?”

  “Shouldn’t they be? I’ll tell you what, this river is one of the western outposts of the trout in Minnesota. Everything south and west of here is too warm and too muddy. Too many farms, too much plowing, too much fertilizer. There’s a river fifteen miles south of here. In the middle of the summer it gets an algae bloom you could almost walk across, from the fertilizer runoff. Looks like a goddamned golf fairway. This creek is a jewel; it should have been a state park long ago. Nothing good can happen with this PyeMart. Nothing. Maybe nothing terrible will happen, but then, maybe something terrible will happen. That’s the way we look at it. There’s no upside, but there could be a huge downside. There are damn few things worth blowing up people for, but this creek might be one of them.”

  “But you wouldn’t do that,” Virgil said.

  “Of course not. I’d be chicken, for one thing. For another, I’m not that certain of the moralities involved. We do know one thing about the world, though, and that’s that we’ve got way too many people, and way too few trout. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ We’re not talking about trout qua trout, but trout as a symbol of everything that’s good for the environment.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”

  As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.

  “You think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.

  Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”

  “Tell me,” Virgil said.

  “Market research.”

  “Market research?”

  “Do an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your friends and tell you confidentially who is most likely to be the bomber. You set up some rules: tell people they aren’t to name old enemies, or people of color or other victims of prejudice. Then give them the clues you have, so far, tell them to think really hard: Who is he? If you put this in the paper, you’d have five thousand replies by tonight. You go through the replies, and you’d find probably ten suspects, coming up over and over. One of them will be the bomber.”

  “You think?”

  “I’d bet you a thousand American dollars,” Peck said. He finished putting the last fly in a fly case, put it in another pocket.

  “You got a thousand dollars?” Virgil asked.

  “I do.”

  Virgil said, “I like the concept, but
it’d be pretty unorthodox. My boss would have a hernia.”

  Peck said, “Because he’s stuck in the past.” He nodded to Virgil and said, “Don’t fall in,” and went on his way, back upstream.

  Virgil went downstream, for a quarter mile, then back up, ambling along the bank, looking for anything, not finding much. The riverbanks saw quite a bit of foot traffic, Virgil thought, judging from the beaten-down brush. He got back to the spot where he’d met Peck, and continued upstream after him, but never saw him again.

  Fifty yards above the place where they’d talked, he saw another trail cutting into the brush toward the PyeMart, and he followed it. Toward the end of it, fifteen yards from the edge of the raw earth of the construction zone, he found a nest beaten down in the weeds-a spot were somebody, or something, had spent some time. It could have been a deer bed, he thought, although it might be a little short for that, and he’d seen none of the liver-colored deer poop he would have expected around a bedding area.

  On the other hand, even if it wasn’t a deer bed, there wasn’t anything about it that would point toward a particular human being. He walked along the edge of the construction line, back to the point where he’d first stepped into the brush, but saw nothing else that looked like a bed, or a nest.

  If somebody were still watching the PyeMart, would he be coming back? Might it be worthwhile to ask the sheriff to have a deputy camp out here for a while? Get a sleeping bag and a book or two, and simply lie back in the weeds and see who came along?

  He’d think about that.

  He’d also think about market research; and about the man who suggested profiling. Wouldn’t market research just be a mass profiling? Didn’t the FBI believe in profiling, even if the ATF didn’t?

  In the meantime, he had people to interview.

  Ernie Stanton was working in his office behind Ernie’s Oil #1-the office was one of the modest, prefab brick-and-corrugated-metal buildings that could be thrown up in a couple of weeks, and that dotted the back streets of small working towns. His secretary, with a plaque that said “Office Manager,” sat next to the door, a delicate, slightly fleshy prairie flower with honey-blond hair and pink cheeks. Stanton, a squarish man with deep lines cutting his wind-burned face on either side of his prominent nose, sat at a desk in the back. Virgil introduced himself and Stanton said, “I wondered when you’d be around, me being the town radical and all.”