John Sandford - Shock Wave

“So he needs money?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, who knows? Maybe he’s got family money or something. But he doesn’t look like it.”

“I can get at that,” Virgil said. “I can get to his tax records. Some of them, anyway, but it might take a while.”

“I gotta say, I hope it’s not him. I hope it’s some shitkicker out in the countryside, worried about his trout,” Haden said. “Bill’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole. Know what I mean?”

After dinner, Virgil drove back to the motel and lay in bed, thinking about Wyatt. He wished he could see him: thought about how he might make that happen. On the other hand, he didn’t want to get caught at it, not before he made his move. The whole case was too tentative, too soft. His biggest fear was that the killing of Erikson was the bomber’s sign-off, and that after that attack, he hauled all the remaining Pelex and blasting caps down to the Butternut and threw them in.

He was thinking about that, when Lee Coakley called from Hollywood, or wherever she was. They had a long and twisting conversation, some bits of which would pop back into his mind over the next couple of weeks, things like, “Things are getting more complicated,” and “I think we have to calm things down for a while, give ourselves time to think.”

Virgil had heard all those words before, and grew snappish, and she was offended, and they wound up snarling at each other, and signed off, angry on both sides.

Virgil thought: Next time I see her… maybe it’ll be okay if only I see her. Maybe I should take some time and fly out there…

His thoughts ping-ponged back and forth between Lee Coakley and the case against Wyatt. Before she called, he’d worried that Wyatt might be cleaning up after himself. If he did, Virgil could build only a weak case: that Wyatt could have flown into the Pinnacle, if he had balls the size of cantaloupes; he needed the money, so maybe he was going to get it this way…

He really needed some piece of hard evidence-some piece of a bomb. Almost anything would do. Even then, a defense attorney would give him a hard time, by putting Erikson on trial…

He woke up in the middle of the night, still worrying about it. He wanted to nail down the money angle: that’s what he needed. And he thought of 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

When he got up in the morning, he was still tired. He called Davenport, got the okay to use Sandy the researcher, called her, and asked her to look at Wyatt’s tax records. “I need to know what he’s got, where his money comes from, and where it goes, if that shows up. I need to know what businesses he owns, if there are any, what stock he has. I need to know how far in hock he is: take a look at his credit records.”

“Get back to you in half an hour,” she said. “None of this is really a problem. You could probably do it yourself.”

“Except that it would take me two weeks to figure out how to do it,” Virgil said. “ Then I could do it in half an hour.”

“So you want a call, or e-mail?”

“Both. Call me, tell me about it, then send me the backup notes.”

Virgil took twenty minutes cleaning up, got dressed, and headed down to Bunson’s. Barlow was there, with two of his techs, and Virgil waved at them but took another table.

He’d been there for two minutes when Sandy called back.

“The guy is very boring,” she said. “He and his wife have three regular sources of income-”

“I thought he was divorced,” Virgil said.

“Filed a joint return two months ago,” Sandy said. “He may be getting divorced, but it hasn’t gone through. Nothing in the Kandiyohi court records about a divorce.”

“Okay. So… three regular sources of income.”

“Yeah. He gets paid sixty-six thousand dollars a year as a professor at a technical college there,” she said.

“Butternut Technical College,” Virgil said.

“Right. His wife is a real estate agent, and last year she made a little over sixteen thousand.”

“Hmm. Not a red-hot agent, in other words.”

“Well, she’s out in the countryside and the market was really crappy last year.”

“All right. What’s the third?” Virgil asked.

“He pays taxes on a small farm and rents it out. He gets eighty dollars an acre for a hundred sixty acres. That’s a little less than thirteen grand. But then, he pays a couple thousand in property taxes. And, he owns a house, looks like there’s still a mortgage, and that’s another couple thousand in taxes. You want addresses?”

“That’s it? That’s all he’s got?”

“That’s pretty good for the town of Butternut. Probably puts him in the top five percent of family incomes.”

“Shoot,” Virgil said. “Where’s the farm? It’s not west of town, is it? Just outside of town, and just south of the highway?”

“No, it’s pretty much south of town. I looked on a plat map-hang on, let me get it up again.” She went away for a minute, then said, “Yeah, it’s south of town.”

“On the Butternut River?”

“No, no, he’s a half mile from the Butternut. He does abut Highway 71, which has to be worth something.”

“Yeah. Eighty dollars an acre,” Virgil said. “So, e-mail me what you got.”

“Two minutes,” she said.

Barlow came over. “You’re being standoffish this morning?”

“Had some bureaucratic stuff to do,” Virgil said. “I’m done now. You want company?”

“Sure. Come on over,” Barlow said. “How’re you doing with your alternate suspect?”

“Not as well as I’d hoped,” Virgil said, following him back to his table. He nodded at the two technicians, and a minute later his French toast arrived.

“The thing that pisses me off is that I can’t get a solid handle on anything,” Virgil said.

“Welcome to the bomb squad,” one of the techs said. “Half the time, we don’t catch anybody. It took twenty years to catch the Unabomber, and he killed three people and injured twenty-three. And the FBI didn’t actually catch him-he was turned in by his family.”

“Boy, I’m glad you said that,” Virgil said. “That makes my morning.”

The sheriff did make Virgil’s morning. Virgil showed him the documents from Sandy, and Ahlquist said, “Come on down to the engineer’s office.”

Virgil followed him down to the county engineer, where they rolled out some plat maps and found Wyatt’s property. Ahlquist tapped the map and said, “You know what? You’ll have to check with the city, to make sure I’m right, but I am right.”

“What?”

“The city development plan had the city growing south along Highway 71,” Ahlquist said. “You can’t put a development in without getting city approval-even outside the city limits. The idea is, the state and the county want orderly development, and they don’t want a big sprawling development built on septic systems. They require sewer systems, with linkups to the city sewage treatment plants. So, the city was supposed to grow south. Toward Wyatt’s land. Then PyeMart came in, and the city council changed the plan to push the water and sewer system out Highway 12, out west. With that line in, the next development would be west, instead of south.”

“How much would that be worth?”

Ahlquist shrugged. “Maybe my old lady could tell me-but farmland is around three thousand an acre, the last I heard. I gotta think the land under a housing development is several times that much. If you’ll excuse the language, when the city changed directions, old Wyatt took it in the ass.”

“Oh, yes,” Virgil said, a light in his eyes. “That feels so good .”

Virgil drove down to city hall, found the city engineer, got a copy of the city plan, and worked through it. Wyatt’s property was a quarter mile south of the last street served by city sewer and water. Under the plan, before it was revised to make room for the PyeMart, Wyatt’s property would have been annexed within the next ten years, even under pessimistic growth-rate projections.