John Sandford - Shock Wave

They’d been at it for fifteen minutes when the cops found a piece of a human body, what looked like a hip joint. Virgil took a couple shots of it, and then, a minute later, the ragged remains of a foot.

“No question now,” Shrake said, his face grim.

“Never was a question,” O’Hara said. She’d been tagging Virgil and Barlow around the field. “He walked through that door and it was about a count of one… two… and boom. He didn’t have time to walk halfway through the house.”

Virgil was tired of taking photos of body parts, but there wasn’t anyone else to do it, and for what it might somehow be worth, he kept at it, as more and more body parts were found. Wyatt’s head was eventually found, only seventy feet from the house, under a piece of the roof. There were no features remaining: nothing but a bloody skull.

Virgil thought, F8 and be there, and took the shot.

“Must’ve gone straight up,” Jenkins said. “Like a baseball.”

“Another cop said like a basketball,” Virgil said. He turned away from the mess, sick at heart. “Doesn’t look like any kind of sport, at all.”

A patrol car arrived, in a two-car set with a civilian car, a Toyota Corolla, and a woman got out of the Corolla and looked up the hill.

Ahlquist said, “Mrs. Wyatt. It’s Jennifer, I think. I better get down there to meet her.” He turned to a deputy: “I want tarps or something over all the body remains. There’s nothing for her to identify, and I don’t want her to see the scraps.” When the deputy seemed to hesitate, Ahlquist snapped, “Get going! Get going! ”

Barlow came up and said, “We’ll have to do DNA. Just to make sure.”

O’Hara was getting testy: “I told you: he didn’t have time to get out.”

Barlow shook his head. “Time is strange, after something like that. You think it was two seconds, but you were almost killed. Things speed up under those conditions. If it were ten seconds-”

“Then where did the body come from?” O’Hara demanded.

“That’s something we’d have to determine,” Barlow said. O’Hara said, “Oh, bullshit,” and Barlow put up his hands. “I think it’s ninetynine percent you’re right. But, we check.”

Virgil walked around with his camera, shaking his head, and O’Hara asked, “Are you all right?”

“No,” he said.

Ahlquist and Jennifer Wyatt walked around the house, talking, and Wyatt began to cry, and Ahlquist put an arm around her shoulders. Virgil watched. Barlow came up and said, “Her house and his apartment are both crime scenes. I’m talking to my ADA to make sure we don’t need search warrants, and if we do, to get them. We’re going down and taking her house apart.”

“I’ll come along, too,” O’Hara said.

“Ah, you can go on home,” Virgil said. “Get cleaned up. You’re sorta a mess.”

“Nope. I’m going,” she said. “Either I ride with you or I’ll ride with somebody else.”

“Better go with somebody else,” he said. She stalked off and Virgil looked at the weeping Mrs. Wyatt, and told Shrake and Jenkins, “You guys hang tight. I gotta get out of here and get something to eat.”

“To eat,” Shrake said, doubtfully.

“Yeah. Food,” Virgil said.

He told Barlow that he was going, and that he would e-mail all the photos that evening; and he walked down to his truck.

Bunson’s was almost empty. He got the French toast-it was still more or less morning-and told the waitress to keep bringing the Diet Cokes, and he sat and worked it through.

One thing didn’t fit, and he couldn’t make it fit. He closed his eyes and took himself back to the Pye Pinnacle visit. Thought about all the explanations, about the dead and wounded, about the boardroom explosion, about the ludicrous sight of the birthday pies smeared all over the ceiling…

He thought about how Pye had a “sanctum sanctorum” where he worked out his problems, and where not even the cleaning lady was welcome. Not that the cleaning lady would have been there, early on a Monday morning.

So here was a question: Why didn’t the bomber, coming down from above, put the bomb in Pye’s office? If he’d used some kind of mousetrap trigger, and stuck the bomb in the desk leg hole, he would have gotten Pye. Why would he do something so uncertain as to stick the bomb in the credenza? In the credenza, any number of things could have led to its discovery.

He thought about it, and thought about it, and eventually came up with an answer, in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Once you’ve eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever was left had to be the answer.

What was left was simple enough, Virgil thought. It should, he thought, have been apparent to anyone with half a brain.

Even with half a brain, Virgil thought he was probably correct.

He made a phone call to St. Paul, to Sandy, the researcher, told her what he wanted, and asked her to make some phone calls.

He finished the french toast, and the waitress came over, a young girl with dark hair and big black eyes, and smiled at him and said, “You’re Virgil Flowers.’ ”

“Yes.”

“Your two friends said I should ask you why you’re called ‘that fuckin’ Flowers.’”

“They said you should ask because they’re assholes,” Virgil said.

She was taken aback, a stricken look on her face, and Virgil touched her arm as she turned away and said, “Wait, look… I’m sorry. I was up at that bomb this morning, and I’m still a little shook up. That’s why I’m sitting here stuffing my face.”

She put her hand to her face and said, “Oh, jeez…” and, “You’ve got stuff all in your hair, is that from…”

“Yeah, it is. And really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk,” he said. “They call me that because… well, because I’m so good with women.”

Now she ventured a tiny smile, and said, “That’s what I thought,” and she left him.

Virgil got an address for Wyatt’s house from the sheriff’s dispatcher, went that way, and found Barlow’s truck outside, and a couple sheriff’s cars. Barlow was inside, with O’Hara and two other deputies. He’d found some bow-hunting equipment and some camo, and showed it to Virgil.

“Not Realtree,” Virgil said.

“But he had some, and he could have had some more, someplace else.”

“Could have, but probably didn’t,” Virgil said.

“How do you know that?” O’Hara asked.

“Because he wasn’t the bomber. He was murdered.”

Barlow said, “Aw, man, don’t start this shit again. First Erikson, now Wyatt…”

“Erikson led to Wyatt,” Virgil said. “The bomber led us down the garden path. He wanted us to look hard at the first setup, so we’d buy the second one.”

O’Hara was curious. “You know who it is?”

“Yeah, but I need another piece of the puzzle. I should get it this afternoon. I want you both to get down on your hands and knees, praying that the call comes through.”

“Well, who is it?”

“I don’t want to slander anyone,” Virgil said. “Wait until the call comes through.”

They all got pissed at him, so he slouched out to his truck, drove out to the PyeMart site, intending to do some fishing. When he got there, he found Pye looking at the footings; Chapman was looking over his shoulder.

Pye saw him getting out of the truck and said, “Well, you fucked me. And, I still gotta kiss your ass, for nailing down this Wyatt guy.”

“Wyatt’s not the guy,” Virgil said.

Pye took a step back. “So, you fucked me, and then you fucked me again?”

“I didn’t think you used that kind of language, Willard,” Virgil said.

“I don’t, unless somebody really fucks me,” Pye said.