John Sandford - Shock Wave

Virgil brushed his teeth and called Barlow: “He’s moving. Heading up to the college, we think.”

“I talked to the landlord,” Barlow said. “Got a key, and scared the shit out of him. He won’t tell anyone.”

“I’ll be at your hotel in five minutes. We can ride over in my truck-we don’t want a caravan.”

Virgil picked up Barlow and one of his techs, whose name was Doug Mason, and they headed over to Wyatt’s. “Doug knows computers,” Barlow said.

“Excellent,” Virgil said. They didn’t have much to say on the way over, and halfway there, Shrake called to say that Wyatt had just walked into the college carrying his briefcase.

Wyatt lived on a working street, mostly younger families, and at ten-fifteen, the street was deserted. They climbed out, three men in jackets and slacks-Virgil was wearing a dress shirt and dark slacks, so he wouldn’t hit a neighbor’s inquiring eye quite so hard. Barlow had the key, and they walked up to the door and in. Just inside was a small square mudroom, with a stairway leading up, and a door to the left, leading into the garage.

They took the stairs, quickly, clearing the place: the second and third floors were probably eight hundred square feet each, and smelled of fresh-brewed coffee. The second floor had a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom that Wyatt was using as an office. The third floor had two larger bedrooms, a storage space with a low, slanted ceiling, a good-sized bathroom, and several closets. The place was cluttered with paper-books, magazines, newspapers. Virgil knew and recognized the symptoms: in the downdraft of a divorce, lonely guys often didn’t have much to do, and so hung out in bookstores and newsstands, and acquired paper; and also hung out in bagel joints and movie matinees.

Mason went straight to the office and said, “I’m on the computer.”

Barlow said, “I want to run down and look at the garage.”

“I’ll start upstairs,” Virgil said.

He went through the bedroom in a hurry, but took care not to mess it up. He checked the closets, and a few boxes inside the closets, and found more symptoms of divorce. Wyatt had moved out of his house, but hadn’t taken any junk with him. Hadn’t taken his stuff. He’d simply packed up some clothes, a couple of spare tae kwon do uniforms-including a spare black belt-and had gotten out.

Virgil cleared the bedroom, bathroom, four closets, and the storage area in fifteen minutes. Back downstairs, he found Barlow in the office with Mason. Mason was sitting in the computer chair, his fingers laced over his stomach, watching a screen full of moving numbers. “Anything?”

“Not right off the top-but there’s a lot of stuff in here, so I hooked up my own drive, and I’m mirroring his,” Mason said. “I can look at it later.”

“You know what the guy’s got for tools?” Barlow asked. “A bicycle pump and a pair of needle-nose pliers. That’s it.”

“He’s gotta have more than that-any normal guy does,” Mason said.

“But he’s getting a divorce. He might have a garage full of stuff at the other house,” Virgil said. “Every time I got thrown out, my wives kept the tools. Women like to have tools around.”

“Wives?” Mason asked.

“Or maybe there’s something out at the farmhouse,” Virgil said.

“Gotta be something, if he’s our guy. He’s not putting those things together with his bare fingers.”

Barlow had been in the process of going through a file cabinet, and Virgil started working through the rest of the house. Five minutes later, Barlow came out with a file in his hands. “The divorce is stalled out right now, over visiting rights with the children, and some money issues. The next court appointment is in August.”

Five minutes after that, Virgil realized that they weren’t going to find anything in the house: the house had been sterilized. Wyatt was smart: he’d anticipated the chance of a search. An hour later, he was proven right.

“The guy doesn’t even look at porn,” Mason grumbled. He’d been working through Wyatt’s online history. “You hardly ever run into an asshole who doesn’t even look at it.”

They left empty-handed, as far as they knew-Mason still had to finish going through the computer files. Barlow said, “Doesn’t prove anything. Guy would be an idiot to work in his own house, especially if he thinks he might bring somebody home with him. He’s got a place where he does it, and he keeps it there.”

“The farmhouse,” Virgil said.

“Somewhere,” Barlow said.

It was another quiet day out in the cornfield, nothing moving but a couple of crows that flapped overhead as they were arriving. Virgil had told them how the house was laid out, and Barlow had brought along a crowbar. They checked all four sides of the house, picked out the window with the shabbiest-looking plywood covering, and pried the board loose. Virgil backed his truck up next to the wall, took a flashlight with him, and climbed through the window from the trunk’s bumper.

The interior of the house was dim and smelled like dried weeds, or corn leaves. The floors were wood, and creaked underfoot. A stairway led up; two of the stair treads were broken, and there was a patina of dust on the others.

He went through a doorway into the back, getting a face full of spiderweb as he went through the door.

Barlow called, “Anything?”

Virgil was standing in a bathroom, in thin light seeping through the cracks around the doors and window openings. All the faucets and handles were missing from a sink basin and toilet, and there was nothing but a hole in the floor where a tub had once been. He stooped and shone his light into the hole, then up toward the ceiling. He called back, “Come in here a minute.”

He heard Barlow clamber through the window, and called, “Back here.”

Barlow stepped up beside him and looked in the door. “What am I looking at?”

“Nothing,” Virgil said.

“Nothing?”

“Yeah. Look at the holes in the ceiling. Shouldn’t there be some kind of pipe feeding down to the toilet?”

Barlow scratched his head and said, “Yeah. Should be. Probably feeding off a pump at the well, through here, and then to another bathroom upstairs. With a branch off to the tub down here.”

“Nothing feeding the tub. I looked.”

“Huh,” Barlow said. “The mystery of the missing pipe. I’ll tell you, those holes are about the right size.”

“But where’s he working it?” Virgil asked. “There’s nothing here.”

“Been down the basement?”

“Not yet. I’m not sure there is one.”

They found a basement door, but there were no steps going down. “No steps, no power,” Barlow said. “That’s not a workshop, that’s a hole in the ground.”

“What the hell is the guy doing?” Virgil asked. He was lying on the floor, shining the flash down into the basement. He could see nothing but rock wall and dirt and more spiderwebs.

Going back through the rotten old house, Barlow borrowed the flash and carefully climbed a few steps toward the second floor, but stopped short when one of the steps started to give. “Nothing up here but dust and bat shit,” he said.

Outside again, they pounded the plywood window back in place. “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “That pipe was probably the right size… but you can get that pipe anywhere, just about. Any old house. They may have taken it out to sell it.”

“Yeah. But it’d be a coincidence.”

“I gotta think about it,” Virgil said, as they bounced back down the hill in the truck. “I can keep my two BCA guys, at least for a couple of days. If I can find a way to push Wyatt into going out to his workshop.”

“Push him?”

“Yeah. Give him a reason to worry about us. Get him out to where he works, to close it down, or bury it or whatever. Gotta think about it.”