John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Jesus Christ,” Barlow said. “Why didn’t we know about these things?”

“ ’Cause they’re weird, and not a lot of people fly them,” Virgil said. “But they’re also cheap. You can get up in the air for a few thousand bucks, don’t need a license.”

Barlow looked back at the house: “So it was Erikson.”

“I’m going out to this soaring center-try to nail it down,” Virgil said.

Paulson’s soaring center was almost invisible from the highway, down a gravel track past a cornfield, the track marked only by an unlit metal sign. Virgil found the track on his second pass, went four hundred yards in, and discovered a narrow tarmac airstrip that ran parallel to the highway.

A yellow metal building sat at one end of the strip, and a few yards down the landing strip, a phone pole held up a windsock. In the back, a long metal shed, open on one side, covered a half-dozen brightly colored gliders. Three men were hand-towing a brilliant red glider off the landing strip. They looked toward Virgil as he got out of the truck, and then continued on toward the shed.

Virgil saw somebody moving inside the yellow building, went to the door, which had a Welcome sign in the window, and went in. A gray-haired guy was sitting behind a counter and said, “Hey, what can I do for you?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the BCA.”

Virgil asked him-the guy was Paulson-about Erikson.

“Yeah, he used to fly out of here, he and some other guys had an ultralight, but one of them broke it up,” Paulson said. “Then Henry started flying paragliders until he cracked that up.”

Virgil got the story on Erikson and his gliding; was told that Erikson had been “okay” as a flier. “It ain’t rocket science,” Paulson said.

Virgil told him why he was asking: the possibility that Erikson was the bomber, and the possibility that he’d flown it onto the top of the Pye Pinnacle.

Paulson nodded. “Yeah, you could do that. In fact, there’s a rich guy out in Los Angeles, he flies from his house out in Malibu into some hotel in Beverly Hills, lands on the roof, and walks from there to work. The neighbors are all pissed off about it, because of the engine noise.”

He claimed that power paragliding was “safe as houses, if you know what you’re doing.”

“But that’s what you would say, since you run a gliding center,” Virgil said. “I mean, I know about two guys flying gliders: Erikson, who cracked up, and quit, and his former partner, who you just told me about, who cracked up and didn’t quit.”

“Neither one was hurt bad,” Paulson said. “I’m not saying you can’t kill yourself. You can. If you treat it with respect, it’s safer than driving a car… Well, maybe.”

Virgil pulled out his survey list. “Look at this,” he said. “Is there anybody else on this list who flies these things? The powered paraglider?”

Paulson bent over the counter, then took out a pencil, wet it with his tongue, and dragged it down the face of the list. “Oh, yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Bill Wyatt.”

He touched the wet tip of his pencil on the name, and made a dot. He went the rest of the way down the list and said, “He’s about it.”

Virgil felt a buzz way down in the testicles: Wyatt was the other teacher at Butternut Tech. “He flew a paraglider?”

“Still does. Not so much lately, haven’t seen him for a couple of months, I guess. Good flier-way out of Henry’s class. He’s got some balls. He was in Iraq One, back whenever that was, reign of King George the First.”

“He teaches up at the college, right?”

“Yeah… history or something.”

“Good guy?” Virgil asked.

Paulson said, with a grin, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

They talked about Wyatt for a couple of minutes. Paulson said he had no knowledge that Wyatt might be a bomber, or crazy, or anything in particular, but he was an angry, arrogant, self-centered prick. Most of the pilots around the place, Paulson said, didn’t like him.

Virgil brought the conversation back to Erikson, and finally asked Paulson not to talk about the interview. “Could be a little dangerous. And unfair. We don’t know that either of these guys has the least involvement. But if one of them does, then, and you ask about it, well, he’s not a guy you want looking at you.”

Paulson said, “We gotta be talking about Bill, right? Because Henry’s dead as a doornail. And I’ll tell you, I don’t see any way that Henry’s the bomber. No way at all.”

“How about Wyatt?”

“Well…” Paulson looked out his narrow window, and shook his head. “You know, I got no truck with Saddam Hussein or terrorists or any of that, but I don’t want to hear a guy bragging about killing them. About smoking them. I’m sorry, I just don’t want to hear it. They’re people, not paper targets.”

“He does that?”

“If you know him for more than fifteen seconds, he does,” Paulson said.

A guy who brags about killing. A guy who was in the army, and flew paragliders; a guy with some balls.

Virgil went out to the truck and called Barlow. “Got some pretty interesting stuff, dude. I got another suspect for you.”

“Better than forty-sixty?”

“Oh, yeah,” Virgil said. “I’m saying seventy-thirty.”

“Gonna get your ass kissed?” Barlow suddenly sounded happy.

“Could happen,” Virgil said. “Yes, it could.”

Virgil and Barlow arranged to meet at the Starbucks. Virgil got a grande hot chocolate, no-fat milk, no foam, no whipped cream, and Barlow got a venti latte with an extra shot. As they took a corner table, Virgil said, “Remind me not to stand next to you if you’re handling a bomb. That much caffeine, you gotta be shakin’ like a hundred-dollar belly dancer.”

“At least I’m not drinking like a little girl,” Barlow said. “So tell me about this new guy.”

Virgil told Barlow about what little he had on Wyatt. He concluded by saying, “He makes me a lot happier than Erikson, at least, to start with. Erikson never looked quite right-you said so yourself. The means to get in the Pinnacle-that’s the key thing.”

“But Erikson had it, too.”

“He had it once, but he didn’t even have access to a paraglider anymore, as far as we know. And the last time out, he crashed: not a place you’d go back to, not without practice. Not to land on the top of a skyscraper in the middle of the night. Then, there’s that whole thing about his work schedule.”

Barlow held up his hands: “All right, all right. But I don’t think we can entirely back off him. We have to nail down what we’ve got, just in case.”

“I don’t want you to back off,” Virgil said. “I want you to keep pushing Erikson. I want a lot of cops around there. I want people talking.”

“You want it to look like we got him. That’s gonna be a little rough on Sarah Erikson,” Barlow said.

“Yes. Cruel, but not unusual,” Virgil said. “I want the guy looking the other way. All I got is this slender thread. I need to do some background work on him. See if I can turn the thread into a noose.”

“Into a moose?”

“A noose. NOOSE,” Virgil said.

“So what you’ve got is, he can fly a paraglider, and he’s a self-centered prick,” Barlow said, summarizing.

“Who knew Erikson, and who I suspect knew Erikson’s garage. They used to fly together.”

“Okay,” Barlow said.

“You sound like it’s nothing,” Virgil said.

“No, it’s something all right. Last week, I’d have jumped all over it. But now…”

“The other thing,” Virgil said, “is that Erikson doesn’t look much like the guy in the video.”

“Camo can be weird, it can hide a lot of stuff-that’s why they call it camo,” Barlow said. “But I’d be happy to hear that Wyatt looks more like the video. And whatever happened to your decision that PyeMart money is involved?”