John Sandford - Shock Wave

“That comes next,” Virgil said. “I gotta go see Pye.”

He went to the AMERICINN, and Chapman came out of Pye’s room and said, “Willard’s not sure he should talk to you. The state attorney has issued a warrant for one of our employees. Willard’s a little worried about that, and really pissed off.”

Virgil said, “Let me stick my head in. It’s purely about the bomber.”

“Wait one,” she said, and went back into the room. A minute later, she reappeared and said, “All right. But he’s not going to talk about anything that has to do with this warrant, or any supposed bribes, or anything like that.”

“Deal,” Virgil said.

Virgil went inside and found Pye sitting on the motel floor, doing an overhead arm stretch. Pye said, “What?”

Virgil: “You do yoga?”

“Of course not,” Pye said. “I’m doing my stretches. Which I can do later.” He got to his feet and said, “What do you want?”

“I got a guy that I’m looking at, for the bomber. I want to see if he has any connection with PyeMart. So I just want you to call up one of your people, and see if there’s a William Wyatt connected to PyeMart in any way, shape, or form-or if your security people are aware of a William Wyatt.”

“You’re not saying we bribed him?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Virgil said. “I just want to know if you ever had a relationship with him, of any kind, that ended badly, and that might incline him to bomb you.”

“I can do that,” Pye said. “What else?”

“That’s it,” Virgil said. “How long will it take?”

“A while-until tomorrow, probably, if I keep people looking all night. That’s if you want ‘any way, shape, or form.’ ”

“I’ll take tomorrow morning,” Virgil said. “Do not talk to anybody else about this. I’ll call you.”

“We did not bribe anybody, nohow, no way,” Pye said.

“Glad to hear it,” Virgil said. “But I’m pretty sure the grand jury will want to know where Arnold Martin’s sailboat came from. And why two city councilmen tell a different story.”

“You don’t believe me?” Pye demanded.

Virgil scratched the back of his head and then said, “Well, Willard, personally, I like you all right. You got some color, and you’re a smart guy. But I gotta say… no. I don’t believe you. Have a nice day.”

Chapman followed Virgil outside, the metal door banging closed behind them. “Is this store dead?”

“Yeah, I think it probably is,” Virgil said. “Maybe you can donate those concrete pads to the city, as municipal tennis courts, or something. Take a tax write-off.”

A wrinkle appeared on her forehead. “You know, that’s not a bad idea…”

Virgil looked at his watch as he left the motel: still broad daylight, but the sun was getting low. He’d have Wyatt on the brain overnight.

Thought about it for a minute, then thought about John Haden, the other professor he’d spoken to, that morning. He looked at his cell-phone record, punched up Haden’s phone number, and got him.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Well, I’ve got a friend over, we’re just, uh, finishing talking. Give me fifteen minutes or a half hour? I got some black beans and pork chops I was gonna make for dinner, if you’re hungry.”

“See you then,” Virgil said.

Virgil had nothing better to do, so he drove over to Haden’s and parked down the block. An older Subaru was sitting in Haden’s driveway, with the look of a visitor. Doorbellus interruptus, which he’d suffered on a number of occasions, just wasn’t polite. He closed his eyes and thought about Wyatt’s ride into the Pinnacle. It would have been thrilling, closing in on the building from above, those lights playing around the emerald glass. Wyatt would have had to find a place to dump his car, to take off, but given the Pinnacle’s location, that wouldn’t have been hard.

Finding the car again, in that sea of corn, might have been harder, but with a GPS…

Virgil got out his iPad, called up Google, and looked at a satellite photo of the area around the Pinnacle. To the south, on the other side of the interstate, a gravel road cut deep into the countryside, with only a few farmhouses around. Plenty of room for a takeoff, he thought.

Haden’s friend left his house a few minutes later, a friendlylooking blonde, but not exactly Virgil’s image of a woman that Haden would be chasing. He gave him credit for more taste than Virgil had been expecting; that is, she was something more than tits and ass. She did a U-turn and drove back past Virgil. He went back to the Google map for a couple more minutes, trying to figure the best takeoff spot, calculating distances.

True, there weren’t a lot of farmhouses, but if he’d taken off in the middle of the night, somebody should have heard him. On the YouTube videos he’d seen, the propellers were loud; louder than a lawn mower.

Of course, the sound might have been confused by trucks on the freeway. Huh.

He gave up-couldn’t tell enough without being on the ground-and pulled up to Haden’s house.

Haden was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, with flip-flops, his hair wet from a shower, and Virgil said, “I don’t want to hear about it. I’m so horny the light socket ain’t safe.”

“So your friend is out in Hollywood with those producer guys.. .”

They talked about women for a while, then Haden drained a can of black beans through a colander, stuck the beans in a plastic bowl with some microwave rice, set it aside, got some pork chops out of the refrigerator and led the way to the patio, where he had a gas grill.

“So what’s up?” Haden asked, as he fired up the grill.

“This is just between you and me,” Virgil said.

“Yup.”

“You know a guy named William Wyatt?”

“Yeah, Bill Wyatt,” Haden said. “Is he the bomber?”

“I’m asking myself that. What do you think?”

The pork chops were beginning to sizzle, and Haden moved them around a bit, then said, “He could be. He’s got a violent streak. He’s a serious tae-kwon-do guy, which is fine in itself, but he had a reputation for hurting people, which you’re not supposed to do.”

“I talked to a guy today who said he was self-centered and mean,” Virgil said.

“That’d be fair,” Haden said. “But it’s a big long step from there to blowing people up.”

“Yes, it is. But he has a couple other skills that would be useful.”

“Like what?”

“Like he flies powered paragliders,” Virgil said. “We could never figure out how he could have gotten into the building, because the security is so tight. But it is possible to get down from the roof without anybody seeing you. If he’d come in at night, he could have pulled it off.”

“Man, that’s like a movie,” Haden said. “I don’t know-that sounds pretty extreme.”

“Well, if you were going to pick out somebody to do something so extreme it’s scary, who else would you look at? At the college?”

Haden flipped the pork chops and then said, “Man, this is a little hard to get used to. I don’t know… Bill Wyatt? The last time I saw him, it was at a staff meeting about reducing paper use.”

Still, Virgil pressed, and Haden couldn’t think of anybody more likely, except that “There are a lot of guys out there, women, too, who don’t like PyeMart coming in. You know, rural lefties fighting the corporate culture, think globally, act locally, and all of that. I don’t think Bill would care about that one way or another. I don’t think it’s political at all.”

“I don’t think it’s about politics,” Virgil said. “I think it’s about money.”

“Money? He doesn’t have any money. He’s about the brokest guy around. He got divorced, and his wife got the house and I heard that she got half his pension. He’s renting some place.”