“Was the camera big or small?”
“Oh, you know, it was like the cameras you see in stores,” Sullivan said. “Not very big. It was round, white, had some LEDs in it.”
“Was it in a place where the guy would see it right away?” Virgil asked. “Or was it out of sight?”
“It was up in a corner over Gil’s desk, where it could see the door. It didn’t jump right out at you, but if you looked around, you wouldn’t have any trouble finding it… But after you found it, it’d take a while to find the recorder. That was in a cabinet on the floor, and it was locked shut.”
“But he found it.”
“I guess. The ATF guys say it wasn’t there.”
“I wonder if he’d been inside the trailer? You know, at some earlier date?” Virgil asked.
“Mm, there were guys in and out-city inspectors and stuff-but it wasn’t really a place to hang out. It was too small. Mostly a place where you had some power, and you could get out of the dirt and noise and make phone calls and run your laptop.”
“Is this going someplace?” Sullivan’s wife asked.
“I don’t know,” Virgil said.
Sullivan said, “Well, if you want to look at the whole video setup, there’s a new trailer on-site, brought up from one of our construction centers in Omaha. Donny Clark, he’s my replacement, he’ll be out there, he could show you.”
“Don Clark… good luck to him, and God bless him,” Sullivan’s wife said.
Virgil drove out to the construction site and found Don Clark sitting in the new trailer, working on a laptop. A burly blond man with a curly blond mustache, he was as tall as Virgil but twice as wide. He took Virgil down the length of the new construction trailer and popped open a cabinet door. “There it is,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
The server was an aluminum box with a couple of switches and an LCD panel. Virgil picked it up: four to six pounds, he thought. The camera was mostly plastic, and maybe weighed two pounds.
He left Clark and repeated his walk across the construction site and down through the brush and weeds to the river. The most obvious path came out at one of the pools where Peck had been fishing; nobody fishing at the moment. He got right down by the black water, startled a green heron out of a tangle of weeds, probably a nest. Couldn’t see anything.
Thought about it.
Cameron Smith had said that there was a bridge to the west, and not too far. Virgil followed the riverside trail, a dusty rut off a gravel county road. There were two more pools between the first one he’d visited and the bridge. He stood on the bridge looking into the water, then got on his cell phone and called Ahlquist.
“You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn’t come up?”
“Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There’s a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they’ve got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”
“How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.
“Go to Butternut Scuba-they’re open every day. What’re you up to?”
“Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”
“What?”
“Talk to you later,” Virgil said.
17
Butternut Scuba was a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.
When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank-I’m back here.”
Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”
“That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”
Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he’d gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the habits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice In-Fisherman article out of that, but he hadn’t had a tank on since the summer before.
“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said Gretchen.
“Actually, I need some divers. I’m a cop and I’d like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”
“You don’t look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.
“Well, I am, Virgil Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
“Okay, I’ve read about you,” she said. “We do dives for the police… Somebody drown?”
Virgil shook his head: “We’re not looking for a body. We’re looking for some electronic equipment.”
“Uh, will we get paid?”
“We can work something out,” Virgil said. “It’s the state, so it might take a while to get the check.”
A short, square, red-haired man with a red British RAF mustache came through the door, looked at Gretchen, then at Virgil, and Virgil said, “Hey, Frank.”
The deal was done in five minutes, and Frank called a guy named Retrief and told him to bring his gear up to the PyeMart site, and make it quick. Thinking that he might rent some equipment and go in the water, Virgil dug out his certification card, and Frank asked him how many dives he had in. Virgil said, “Maybe a hundred… maybe. Haven’t been down for a while.”
Frank said, “We’d spend more time making sure you’re okay, than it’d be worth. You get down there, and you can’t see more than about two feet. Blind diving’s a whole new thing. It’s easy to get tangled up in shit.”
That made sense to Virgil, since visibility was one of the reasons he quit diving in Minnesota; so he helped Gretchen and Frank load their gear in the back of Frank’s truck, and they followed him out to the PyeMart site, and then back along the track to the river, Virgil plowing down the weeds in his government truck.
When they got to the river, Virgil found that a second truck had fallen in behind Frank’s: Retrief, a balding man with tattoos on his neck, and an Australian accent. To Gretchen: “Workin’ for the jacks now, izit?”
“They’re paying us,” she said.
“That makes for a change,” he said. To Virgil: “Howya doin’?”
Virgil said, “You sound like you’re from New Jersey.”
They wanted to know more about the bombings, and about Erikson, and Frank said, “You get this guy, you oughta string him up by his balls.”
“Right on that,” Retrief said, and Gretchen said, “But what if Erikson did it?”
The water in the stream was cold, and the three divers pulled wet suits over swimming suits, doing a quick change in their trucks, then slung on tanks, masks, BCDs, and swim fins, and waded down the muddy banks to the end of the first pool.
While they were changing, Virgil dug his Nikon out of the truck, with a medium zoom, and started shooting. “How cold?” he called.
“Freezing,” Retrief muttered.
“Not too bad,” said Gretchen.
In waist-deep water, the divers popped in their mouthpieces and went down; Virgil could track them by watching for bubbles as they moved slowly upstream, turned, and then swept back downstream, and then up, back down, and up one more time. At the end of it, they popped up, and Frank called, “Nothing here. How far to the next one?”
“Hundred yards or so,” Virgil called b
ack.
“Best ride in the truck,” Frank said. They all piled in the back of Frank’s Chevy, and Virgil bumped through the weeds west along the bank to the next pool.
The second pool was longer and narrower than the first, and looked deeper and murky and even nasty. Virgil thought of snakes, which was another reason he didn’t dive much in the Midwest; not that there were poisonous snakes, just that murky water made him think of them. The second pool went just like the first one, for ten minutes. On the first downward sweep, though, the bubbles stopped for a full minute, coalescing in one spot, then all three of them popped to the surface.
Gretchen pulled her mouthpiece and called, “Got them,” and held up a camera, just like the one Virgil had seen in the second trailer; Virgil took three quick shots of her holding it up, and then shot the others, as the two men did one-armed sidestrokes to shore, towing a black metal box with wires dangling off the back.
And Virgil laughed out loud with the sheer pleasure of being right. He shouted down, “That’s it, guys. Beer for everybody.”
“You’re a good man, Virgie,” Retrief called back, and Frank said, “The paper’s gonna eat this up. I love this shit.”
“Better’n pulling out a body,” Gretchen said. She climbed the bank, dripping river water, straining against the weight of her equipment, and handed the camera to Virgil.
They all drove back to the scuba shop, where the divers took turns taking showers and rinsing down their equipment, including the camera and the console. When they were done, they walked down the street to Mitchell’s, a bar, carrying the recorder and camera. Virgil ordered beer, and when it came, called Barlow.
“Hey, I got that camera and the recorder from the first trailer,” he said.
“You got what?”
“The camera and recorder from that first trailer, the one that was blown up.”
After a moment of silence, Barlow asked, “Where’d you get them?”
Barlow got there in ten minutes, ordered a Coke, looked at the still-damp electronic gear. Virgil explained it all, and the grinning divers chipped in their bit, about finding the stuff in the murk-Frank had first found the recorder, and then a minute later, Gretchen found the camera-and finally Barlow asked Virgil, “How in the hell did you ever think of that?”
“I was just thinking about this guy stumbling around out there in the dark, carrying all this crap, and whatever tools he had to break into the trailer, and I thought, Why would he take them home? Why not just get rid of it? Where would he get rid of it? He was walking right by this river, and he was apparently familiar with the area, with these deep pools…”
Barlow shook his head. “Dumb luck, that’s what it was.”
“Ever notice how dumb luck seems to follow smart people around?” Retrief asked.
“Where you’re gonna need the luck is, the recorder,” Gretchen said. “It’s been underwater for days.”
“It’s a hard drive, and most of them are sealed units,” Virgil said. “I think we’re eighty percent for recovering the images. I’m more worried that he bashed it around than about the water. If he physically screwed up the disk, it’ll be harder to get at the pictures.” He looked at the case on the table. “It looks okay. He didn’t hit it with a hammer or anything.”
“How long before we know?” Barlow asked.
“I’ll get it back to St. Paul today,” Virgil said. “They’ll pull the unit, and take a look. If it’s not broken, we’ll have images this afternoon. Or tonight.”
“That’s something,” Barlow said. “That really is.”
“What happened with Sarah Erikson?” Virgil asked Barlow.
“She’s back,” Barlow said. “She’s pretty messed up, says her husband would never do anything like that. Wouldn’t know a bomb from his elbow, is what she says. She says she’ll come down and talk to us this afternoon. I’ll call you.”
“I gotta go talk to the paper,” Frank said. “We oughta get a picture. I think they fired their only real photographer.”
Gretchen demurred: “I don’t think I want this bomb guy to know I was involved. I live alone.”
Frank said, “Mmmm… you could move in with me.”
“No, I couldn’t,” she said. She looked at Virgil and lowered her eyelids.
Retrief said, “Fuck ’im, if he can’t take a joke. You gonna be in the picture, Frank?”
“I guess.”
“Then it’s you, me, and Virgie,” Retrief said.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Barlow said to Virgil.
“I want him to know; I want him to feel me coming,” Virgil said. “I want to shake him up. At the moment, I got nothing else.”
Virgil, Frank, and Retrief posed with the recovered camera and recorder, and Gretchen pushed the button on Frank’s cell phone and when he saw the photo, Frank said, “That’s a thousand dollars in advertising, right here.”
“Really? That calls for another round,” Retrief said to him. “You’re buyin’.”
Virgil took the recorder and camera back to the county courthouse and put them in a box, and Ahlquist dispatched a deputy to take them to the BCA labs in St. Paul. “Man-oh-man, this could be the break we needed. If his face is on that video, we got him.”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Virgil said. “Where do I go to see Sarah Erikson?”
“She’s coming in here. So’s Barlow. We figured we’d kill all the birds with one stone.”
“We’re birds?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Bad metaphor, Earl,” said Virgil.
“Tough titty. Go investigate your list.”
“Which Erikson isn’t on,” Virgil said.
“Unfortunately,” Ahlquist said.
Virgil pushed himself out of his chair. “I better get investigating.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Ahlquist said. “Nice job on that camera, Virgil.”
A few more letters had come back with lists of possible bombers. Virgil spent a half hour going through them, but nothing much had changed. Then Good Thunder called:
“We flipped Pat Shepard, and your guy from the BCA is here with the recording equipment. We’re going to send Shepard to see Burt Block right away: we’re starting to pile up people who know about this, and we need to move. We’d like you to come and help brief Shepard.” Block was the second of the three city councilmen bribed by PyeMart through Geraldine Gore.
“When do you want me?” Virgil asked.
“How fast can you get here?”
The county attorney’s office was upstairs. Virgil looked at his watch: “About twenty-two seconds, if I take the stairs.”
“We’ll leave the light on for you,” Good Thunder said.
Pat Shepard was a middle-sized guy, tanned from the summer golf course, with a tight haircut; and he was pathetic and about the only person in the room who didn’t feel sorry for him was the county attorney, a beefy man named Theodore Wills, who introduced himself as “Theodore.” Wills was openly ecstatic about Shepard’s confession, and scornful of the man himself.
Shepard, who’d been arrested, sat in his chair and wept, and Virgil had to look away. Good Thunder kept passing Shepard paper towels from a roll, which he pressed against his eyes. Shepard’s public defender kept saying, “C’mon, Pat, it’s gonna work out.”
A BCA technician, who’d brought the sound equipment, sat in a corner and read a new copy of Sail magazine.
“Wife gone, job gone, gonna lose everything. My life is over,” Shepard said.
“Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” Wills said, and Good Thunder’s eyes touched Virgil’s with a slight disgusted roll.
Bill Check, the public defender, said, “Jesus, Theodore, you wanna take it easy? You’re getting everything you wanted.”
But, Virgil thought, as he watched Shepard, Wills was essentially correct. The guy had been entrusted to take care of the town, the best he could, and he’d sold his vote on a critical issue. His confession ha
d been taken down by a court reporter, and had been signed and sealed. For his cooperation in bagging the rest of the gang, he’d get no jail time.
Wills said to Check, “No, I’m not getting everything I wanted. I wanted the sucker in jail for at least a year and Good Thunder talked me out of it. He’s the last one that’s getting a break like that. Everybody else goes down.”
Virgil leaned across to Shepard and said, “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You need to tighten up. If you can’t do this, if you blow this meeting with Burt Block, then the agreement won’t hold, and you will do time.”
“No, no,” said Check, the public defender. “There are no guarantees that this is gonna work…”
“But he has to make a good-faith effort, and if he goes in there fumbling around, and Block smells a rat, then the deal’s off,” Wills said.
Virgil reached over and patted Shepard on the shoulder. “Being upset is okay. If you show Block you’re upset, that’s fine, that’s what he’d expect. Upset’s okay, but you have to have your head under control. C’mon. Why don’t you and I take a walk and we’ll get you calmed down and talk about it.”
“Good idea,” Good Thunder said.
“I’m not so sure,” Check said. “Leaving him alone with a police officer…”
“I’m not taking testimony,” Virgil said. “I’m just trying to get him some fresh air.”
So Virgil and Shepard took a walk around the courthouse. Shepard looked around, at the sky and the sidewalks and at some kids walking down the other side of a street toward a Dairy Queen, and said, “Everything looks just like it did when I went to work yesterday and I was a happy guy. Today, everything’s gone.”
“You know what? It’s bad now, but three years from now, you’ll have another job, probably in another town. You’ll probably have a new wife, and it’ll all start over,” Virgil said. “I see this all the time. You’re basically not a bad guy, but you made one big god-awful mistake. You’ll pay for it, but then, you’ll be done. If you can hold yourself together, you won’t go to jail. That’s huge. Not going to jail… that’s a big deal. If you can hold together.”
Shock Wave vf-5 Page 19