John Sandford - Shock Wave

“That, too,” Pye conceded. “But it’s just the way of the world.”

“What’s the third way?” Virgil asked.

“That’s the hardest to see, and maybe that’s where you should look, since you’re not finding it in the obvious places,” Pye said. “What it is, is lost opportunity. Somebody saw an opportunity out there, and was counting on it, and somehow the store upset that.”

“Like what?” Virgil asked.

“Okay. Say a guy had an idea for a little computer store. Nothing like that in town. So he saves his money, and maybe starts trying to arrange a loan. Then he finds out a PyeMart’s coming in, and he finds out that we have a pretty strong line of computers. All of a sudden, this guy’s bidness plan makes no sense. He can’t get the loan, either. This idea was going to make him rich, and in his head, he was already sailing a yacht on the ocean and hanging out with Tiger Woods. Then somebody took it away from him. Snatched it right away. No actual money moved-no currency, no dollar bills-but potential money moved.”

“You can’t see potential money,” Virgil said.

“But it’s real,” Pye said, shaking a fat finger at him. “It’s the thing that drives this whole country. People thinking about money, and how to get it. There are people out there who break their hearts over money. It happens every day. The shrinks talk about sex, and cops talk about drugs, and liberals talk about fundamentalist religion, and the right-wingers talk about creeping socialism, but what people think of, most of the time, is money. When I was the horniest I ever was, and I was a horny rascal, I didn’t think about sex for more’n an hour a day, and I’d spend sixteen hours thinking about money.”

“But that means that the motive might not have any… exterior

… at all,” Virgil said. “It’s just something in some guy’s head.”

Pye shrugged: “That’s true. But that doesn’t make it unimportant.”

“Not a hell of a lot of help, Willard,” Virgil said.

“It might be, if you ever come up with a good suspect,” Pye said. “Once you get a name, start analyzing his history, talking to his friends and neighbors, there’s a good chance you’ll find his… dream.”

“Which you stepped on,” Virgil said.

Pye shrugged again, waved his hand at the raw dirt and the concrete pads: “This is my dream. Why shouldn’t I have my dream?”

Virgil had a few answers to that, but didn’t feel like tangling with Pye right at the moment. So he said good-bye to Pye and Chapman, and headed back to his truck. Halfway into downtown, he took a call from Jenkins, the BCA investigator.

“All done. We’re going over to a place called Bunson’s. You know where it is?”

“I can find it,” Virgil said, which he could, having eaten almost all of his meals there. “You get both Martin and Gore?”

“Yeah. Gore put up a fight, but we clubbed her to her knees, cuffed her. I don’t know how she got those bruises on her face; probably a domestic squabble.”

“You’re joking,” Virgil said.

“Of course I am,” Jenkins said. “I only said that because you’d be worried that I wasn’t.”

“I’ll see you at Bunson’s,” Virgil said.

Jenkins and Shrake were partners of long standing, both big men who dressed in sharp suits that looked like they might have fallen off a truck in Little Italy, and were referred to as “the thugs” around the BCA. They were often used for hard takedowns; they were fairly easygoing, when not actually involved in a fight.

Virgil found them talking over beers at Bunson’s, took a chair, ordered a beer of his own, and asked how it had gone.

“Routine, but you know-you feel a little bad,” Shrake said. “They were both crying and pleading. It’s not like busting some asshole who knows the rules.”

“I didn’t feel that bad,” Jenkins said.

“That’s because you’re cruel, and you enjoy the spectacle of other human beings in pain,” Shrake said. “I’m not that way.”

Jenkins said, “Mmm. This beer is kinda skunky.”

Shrake said to Virgil, “So walk us through this case. Lucas said you’d flown in some private luxury jet over to Michigan.”

Virgil took them through it, and when he was done, Shrake said, “So let me get this straight: you can’t get anybody into this Pinnacle, but you think someone could have gotten down from the roof.”

“But you can’t get on the roof,” Virgil said. “I even found a guy who’s a glider pilot, and he says you’d need at least three hundred yards to land a glider up there… I asked about parachutes, but then you’d need a pilot who’s an accomplice.”

Shrake unwrapped his index finger from his beer bottle, pointed it at Virgil and said, “So I guess it’s a safe bet that you never heard of motorized paragliders.”

Virgil said, “Uh…”

Jenkins said to his partner, “No more beer.”

Shrake said, “I saw a wi-fi label on the door, wonder if it’s real.” He groped around in his bag, pulled out a battered white MacBook, got online with Google, poked a few keys, called up a YouTube video, and turned the computer around so it faced Virgil.

YouTube was running a Cadillac ad, followed by a four-minute video in which a guy drove into a parking lot and unpacked what looked like a parachute, laying it on the concrete. He then pulled on a backpack motor, with a small propeller in a metal cage, hooked himself to the parachute, and fired up the motor.

The airstream from the propeller inflated the chute, and the guy took a few steps across the concrete pad and was in the air. He flew a few hundred feet in a circle, did a short running landing, killed the engine, put the backpack motor in the back of his truck, folded up the chute, packed it away, then threw it in his truck… and did it all in four minutes and ten seconds.

“Holy shit,” Virgil said. “How did you know about this?”

“I have wide interests,” Shrake said. “Also, insomnia.”

Virgil spent another five minutes on Google, looking up paragliders, then gulped the rest of his beer and said, “I gotta go,” and he was gone. Outside, he got on the phone to Barlow: “Are you still at Erikson’s?”

“Just left.”

“Is Mrs. Erikson there?”

“Was two minutes ago.”

“Head back there. Keep her there. I’ve got a question,” Virgil said. “You might want to be there when I ask it.”

Barlow was standing on the front porch of the Erikson home, talking to Sarah Erikson, when Virgil arrived. Virgil said, “Mrs. Erikson, your husband has a propeller on the wall of his garage. What did that come from?”

Her forehead furrowed: “He used to fly, a kind of ultralight thing. But he did something stupid and went up when it was too windy for him and he crashed. He broke his ankle, and got some burns on his back, from the engine exhaust pipe, and was lucky to get away with that. The propeller broke and the engine was wrecked. He quit flying, and put the propeller on the wall to remind himself not to do it anymore.”

“Was his glider… did it have solid wings, or was it one of those paraglider things, like a parachute?”

“He did both, ultralights and the paragliders,” she said. “It was his paraglider that he crashed. Why are you asking all of this stuff?”

“Trying to work through some possibilities,” Virgil said. “Did he fly out of an airport? Or just off the street? Or what?”

“Out of Jim Paulson’s Soaring Center, out on 17,” she said.

“Thanks,” Virgil said. To Barlow: “Walk me back to my truck.”

Barlow tagged along behind and asked, voice low, “What’s that about? Paragliders?”

“Erikson flew paragliders. I just did some research on them. People have flown them to fifteen, sixteen thousand feet,” Virgil said. “You can land on a spot a few feet across, and you could get one in the back of a station wagon, no problem. They’re like a parachute with a motor, except they go up as well as down.”