John Sandford - Shock Wave

“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.

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.”