John Sandford - Shock Wave

Next, Virgil figured out that a company called Xavier Homes had built the most recent subdivision in Butternut. Xavier Homes was headquartered in Minnetonka, which was on the western edge of the Twin Cities metro area. Virgil got through to the company president, whose name was Mark Douka.

He told Douka that he was investigating the Butternut bombings, and said, “I need to know what you’d pay for untouched farmland with city water and sewer, outside of Butternut.”

“There isn’t any more of that, at the moment,” Douka said. “Right now, I wouldn’t pay nearly as much as five years ago.”

“I’m trying to figure out what some land might be worth in, say, ten years.”

“In ten years… assuming that the economy has recovered… well, you know, there are a lot of contingencies…”

“On average,” Virgil said, his patience beginning to wear.

“I can tell you’re getting impatient, but it’s complicated. Everything depends on what we’ve got to do to the property, what the market is at the time, and, you know, what we can get it for. I can tell you this last subdivision out there, we paid about twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars an acre. I wouldn’t pay that now. In ten years, I might pay twice that, but then, maybe not-it all depends.”

“Just going on what you did last time, twenty-two-five,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. But I don’t want to hear that in court, because it’s a kinda bullshit number,” Douka said. “I’ll tell you what, with what the Fed’s doing right now, it’s possible that ten years from now, I’d pay seventy-five thousand dollars an acre, and the Chinese will be using dollar bills for Kleenex.”

“For Kleenex?”

“Or worse. They might be buying it on rolls.”

“On rolls?”

“You know-toilet paper. Everything is up in the air,” Douka said. “We paid twenty-two-five, but I got no idea what it’ll be ten years from now. No idea.”

“But whatever it is, it’d be worth more than raw farmland.”

“I sure hope so,” Douka said. “But with what the Fed’s doing, we may need the corn. You know, to eat.”

But Wyatt would have looked at that last subdivision, Virgil thought when he’d gotten off the phone, and most likely, he would have known that Xavier had paid $22,500. So a hundred and sixty acres, at that price, would be worth… three and a half million dollars? Could that be right? He found a piece of scrap paper, got a pencil out, and did the math: Three million six. As farmland, it was worth. .. more math… $480,000.

Virgil got on the phone to Barlow and told him about the subdivision. “When the city changed direction, Wyatt took a three-million-dollar haircut.”

“Holy shit.”

“Exactly. This is the first motive that feels real to me,” Virgil said. “Without this, he’s cold, stony broke. I’ve been told that his wife is taking him to the cleaners’.”

“I’ll tell you something else,” Barlow said. “Think about the bombs out at the city equipment yard. We thought it was just another shot at trying to stop the PyeMart site. But it was more than that. If the city had even started to lay that pipeline, if they’d even put part of it in the ground, it wouldn’t make any difference what happened with PyeMart. Even if PyeMart went down, the pipeline would still be there, and that’s probably where the city would put the growth. They wouldn’t rip up a brand-new pipeline and build another one south, just because PyeMart was gone.”

“Jeez, Jim-you’re smarter than you look,” Virgil said.

“I keep telling people that, but they don’t believe me,” Barlow said. “So what’s next?”

“I’m going to pile up as much as I can on Wyatt. Then, I’m thinking-what if you went to a federal judge and asked for a sneak-and-peek?”

“They don’t like ’em, judges don’t,” Barlow said. “But in this case, I think we’d have a good chance. It’s like drugs-if we raid him and miss, we won’t have another chance.”

“So let’s think about that,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna pile up as much stuff as I can, but we’ve got to move. Why don’t you make a reservation to see a judge late this afternoon, and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.”

Virgil went back to the courthouse, and with the help of the county clerk, who was sworn to secrecy, found that Wyatt had bought the property eight years before for $240,000 and taken out a mortgage for $180,000. So he’d only put $60,000 of his own money into it-and had been hoping to take out sixty times that much.

Virgil looked at Wyatt’s property taxes and found references to two structures on the property. If he were living in an apartment, as Haden thought, he might very likely not be making the bombs there. Landlords sometimes sneak into apartments, to make sure everything is being taken care of; a smart guy like a professor would have thought of that.

He had to take a look at the property. He had the county clerk xerox the plat maps, and she added a copy of an aerial photo from the engineering department.

Before he left, he called Butternut Technical College and asked if it would be possible to reach Professor Wyatt’s office. The woman who answered said she could try his extension, but he was scheduled to be in class at that hour.

Excellent.

On his way out of town, Virgil called the BCA researcher, asked her to check Wyatt against the National Crime Information Center and to check his driver’s license. He didn’t know where Wyatt lived, and asked her to see if she could figure that out; and to make that the priority.

Virgil made it out to Wyatt’s property in ten minutes. To his eye, it seemed like good land, a rolling hillside rising slowly away from both the north-south highway and an east-west farm road. The field was covered with growing corn, not yet as high as an elephant’s eye, but getting there. Virgil turned down the farm road and found an overgrown track leading up toward a crumbling old farmhouse.

He couldn’t see anybody up at the house, and since Wyatt was teaching, Virgil turned onto the track and took it up the hill to the house.

The house sat at the very crest of the hill, and was in the process of disintegrating. The windows had been covered with sheets of plywood, and the porch had been entirely ripped away. The front door, which stood three feet off the ground, was locked with a padlock on a new steel hasp. Next to the door was a large sign that said: DANGER: NO TRESPASSING. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Next to that, a hand-lettered sign said: All metals have been removed from this property, and all collectibles. If you enter this property, you will be prosecuted for burglary.

Virgil got out of the truck and walked around the house-the corn came to within ten feet of the sides of the house, and within twenty feet of the back. There was a hump in the backyard, the remnants of an old shed, or something, Virgil thought. The windows were boarded all the way around, but it would be easy enough to pull a board off. Virgil thought, Root cellar, but could find no sign of one. If there had been one, it was out in the field somewhere.

From the top of the hill, Virgil could see most of the hundred and sixty acres, which closed on the south side by a wood lot, with Highway 71 on the west, another cornfield on the east, and the farm road on the north. There wasn’t a tree on the property, as far as he could tell: and he wondered if that was good or bad, for development.

Butternut Falls, the southernmost subdivision, was right there, a few hundred yards north of the road.

Wyatt must have been able to taste the money.

On the way out of the property, he called Sandy, the BCA researcher, and asked her if she’d come up with an address. “He shows two addresses, one for his home, but he also gets utility bills at four-twenty-one Grange Street, apartment A.”