John Sandford: Shock Wave

“Ah, she’s out in LA, being a consultant,” Virgil said. “Having dinner with producers. Guys with suits like yours.”

“Sounds like the bloom has gone off the rose,” Davenport said.

“Maybe,” Virgil conceded.

“I can hear your heart breaking from here,” Davenport said. “Have a good time in Butternut.”

Virgil lived in a small white house in Mankato, two bedrooms, one and a half baths, not far from the state university. He traveled a lot, and so was almost always ready to go. He told the old lady who lived next door that he’d be leaving again, asked her to keep an eye on the place, and gave her a six-pack of Leinie’s for her trouble. He packed a week’s clothes into his travel bag, mostly T-shirts and jeans, put a cased shotgun on the floor of his 4Runner, along with a couple boxes of 00 shells, and stuck his pistol in a custom gun safe under the passenger seat, along with two spare magazines and a box of 9-millimeter.

A quick Google check said that Butternut Falls would be two hours away. He printed out a map of the town, and while it was printing, turned the air-conditioning off, checked the doors to make sure they were locked, and turned on the alarm system. On the way out, he thought, with his last look, that the house looked lonely; too quiet, with dust motes floating in the sunlight over the kitchen sink. Nothing to disturb them. He needed… what? A wife? Kids? More insurance policies? Maybe a dog?

When the truck was loaded and the house secure, Virgil pulled out of the driveway into the street, reversed, and backed up in front of his boat, which had been parked on the other side of the driveway. His fishing gear was already aboard. But then, it was always aboard. After a quick look at the tires, he hitched up the trailer, folded up the trailer jack, and took off.

He got fifty feet, pulled over, jogged back to the garage, opened a locker, took out a pile of fly-fishing gear, including a vest, chest waders, rod case, and tackle box, and carried them back to the truck.

Better to have a fly rod and not need it, than to need a fly rod and not have it. He climbed back in the truck and took off again.

Packing up and getting out of town took an hour, just as he had told Davenport it would. The sun was still high in the sky, and he’d be in Butternut well before sundown, he thought. The longest day of the year was just around the corner, and those days, in Minnesota, were long.

And he thought a little about the sheriff out in LA, Lee Coakley. She was still warm enough on the telephone, but she’d been infected by show business. She’d gone out as a consultant on a made-for-TV movie, based on one of her cases, and had been asked to consult on another. And then another. Women cops were hot in the movies and on TV, and there was work to be had. Her kids liked it out there, the whole surfer thing. Just yesterday, she’d had lunch in Malibu…

Once you’d seen Malibu, would you come back to Minnesota? To the Butternut Falls of the world? To Butternut cops?

“Ah, poop,” Virgil said out loud, his heart cracked, if not yet broken.

Virgil took U.S. 14 out of town, back through North Mankato and past the 5B, resisting the temptation to stop and see if Johnson Johnson was still alive. He went through the town of New Ulm, which once was-and maybe still was-the most ethnically homogeneous town in the nation, being 99 percent German; then took State 15 north to U.S. 212, and 212 west past Buffalo Lake, Hector, Bird Island, and Olivia, then U.S. 71 north into Butternut Falls.

Butternut was built at the point where the Butternut River, formerly Butternut Creek, ran into a big depression and filled it up, to form the southernmost lake in a chain that stretched off to the north. Butternut’s lake was called Dance Lake, after a man named Frederick Dance, who ran the first railroad depot in town, back in the 1800s.

The railroad was still big in town, and included a switching yard. The tracks ran parallel to U.S. 12, which ran through the town east to west, crossing U.S. 71 right downtown. Butternut, with about eighteen thousand people, was the county seat of Kandiyohi County, which was pronounced Candy-Oh-Hi.

Virgil knew some of that-and would get the rest out of Google-because he had, at one time or another, been in and out of most of the county seats in the state, also because he’d played Legion ball against the Butternut Woodpeckers, more commonly referred to, outside Butternut, and sometimes inside, as the wooden peckers.

Virgil drove into Butternut at half past six o’clock in the evening, in full daylight, and checked into the Holiday Inn. He got directions out to the PyeMart site from a notably insouciant desk clerk, a blond kid, and drove west on U.S. 12 to the edge of town. He passed what looked like an industrial area on the south side of the highway, crossed the Butternut River-a small, cold stream no more than fifty feet wide where it ran into the lake on the north side of the highway- then past a transmission shop. After the transmission shop, there were fields, corn, beans, oats, and alfalfa.

Most people, he thought, didn’t know that alfalfa was a word of Arabic derivation…

He was beginning to think that he’d missed the PyeMart site when he rolled over a low hill and saw the plot of raw earth on the south side of the highway, along with some concrete pilings sticking out of the ground. When he got closer, he saw the pilings were on the edges and down the middle of two huge concrete pads.

Everything else, including the soon-to-be parking lot, was raw dirt. A couple of bulldozers were parked at one edge of the site, and to the left, as he went in, he saw the construction trailer. There was a ring of yellow crime-scene tape around it, tied to rebar poles stuck upright in the dirt, to make a fence. Two sheriff’s deputies, one of each sex, sat on metal chairs just outside the tape, in the sun, and watched Virgil’s truck bouncing across the site.

Trailers on the plains are sometimes called “tornado bait,” and this one looked like it’d taken a direct hit. Virgil had seen a lot of tornado damage and several trailer fires; one thing he realized before he’d gotten out of the truck was that as hard as this trailer had been hit, there’d been no fire. In another minute, he was picking out the difference between a bomb blast and a tornado hit.

A tornado would shred a trailer, twisting it like an empty beer can in the hands of a redneck. This trailer looked like a full beer can that had been left outside in a blizzard to freeze: everything about it looked swollen. A door had been mostly blown off and was hanging from a twisted hinge.

He climbed out of the truck and walked up to the trailer, and as he did that, the female deputy, who wore sergeant’s stripes, asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Well, right here,” Virgil said. He was still in the pink T-shirt and jeans, although he’d traded his sandals for cowboy boots. He had a sport coat in the car, but the day was too warm to put it on. “I’m Virgil Flowers, with the BCA, up here to arrest your bomber.”

Both deputies frowned, as though they suspected they were being put on. “You got an ID?” the woman asked. She was a redhead, with freckles, and a narrow, almost-cute diastema between her two front teeth. One eyelid twitched every few seconds, as though she were over-caffeinated.

“I do, in my truck, if you want to see it,” Virgil said. “Though to tell you the truth, I thought I was so famous I didn’t need it.”

“It was a Virgil Flowers killed those Vietnamese up north,” the male deputy said.

“I didn’t kill anybody, but I was there,” Virgil said. “The sheriff around? I thought this place would be crawling with feds.”

“There’re two crime-scene guys in the trailer,” the female deputy said, poking a thumb back over her shoulder. “The rest of them are at the courthouse-they should be back out here any minute. The chief left us out here to keep an eye on things. I should have been off three hours ago.”