John Sandford: Shock Wave

“It was,” Barlow said. “Easy to read, if you know what you’re looking for.”

“I believe you,” Virgil said. “And Wyatt had no time to get to the basement. O’Hara knows it, and I know it. He wasn’t in there more than two or three seconds, tops, when the place blew. And there were no basement steps. Getting down in that hole would have been tricky. Also, when we went in the house, I lay down on that floor and looked down the basement, and there were all kinds of spiderwebs down there. Nobody had been in the basement for a long time.

“What I think is, the bomber went down there, rigged his bomb, and then set some kind of trap that blew when you stepped on a board, or hit a trigger string, or something. There’s an item here: Wyatt’s head was found right in the backyard, under a piece of the roof. So, it went almost straight up. He was standing on top of the bomb when it blew.”

Barlow nodded: “I’m buying that. I should have seen it.”

“So who is it?” Ahlquist asked.

“John Haden,” O’Hara blurted.

Ahlquist said, “Haden?”

Virgil nodded. “Yeah. John Haden.”

“How’d he get in the Pinnacle?” Barlow asked.

“He didn’t,” Virgil said. “He went to a FedEx in Grand Rapids and sent the bomb to Pye’s personal secretary. He sent it First Overnight, which means, delivery before eight-thirty A.M. And he sent it from Grand Rapids, which means there’d be no mistake.” Virgil turned to Barlow. “Remember that birthday pie splattered all over the place?”

Barlow said, “I do.”

“I suspect what happened is that Haden sent Pye’s secretary a birthday gift, maybe even wrapped in birthday paper, with a note from somebody like a board member. The note would have said something like: Stick this in the credenza, out of sight, so we can get it when the time comes. It’s a surprise. Be sure you don’t tell Willard.

“She did that,” Virgil said. “She would even have told us about it, except that she was killed.”

“How’d he know about the credenza, if he’d never been in there?” Ahlquist asked.

“How do you know about anything anymore?” Virgil asked. “The Internet. There’s a corporate report from last year, showing Pye and the board of directors gathered around the table in the boardroom, and the credenza is right there.”

“You’ve got a couple long stretches in there,” Good Thunder said. “It’s not evidence-it’s speculation. Can’t really go to trial with speculation.”

“It was speculation, but not anymore,” Virgil said. “We got the receipt from FedEx. He brought the package in Tuesday night, to the FedEx store in Grand Rapids, with early guaranteed delivery to Angela Brown. We have exact measurements-it was a little bigger than a standard shoe box-and we have the weight, about eight pounds. A hefty little thing. Probably felt valuable, to Brown.”

“You figured this out just on the basis of the birthday cake?” Barlow asked.

Virgil shook his head. “I’m not that smart. I figured out who did it, and then I started figuring out how he must have done it. He couldn’t get the box in himself, so how would he get it in? How would he get it placed right there?”

“How did you figure out it was Haden?”

“Because Haden steered us. Looking back, I can see it, but I couldn’t feel it at the time, because he’s smart. I wouldn’t have been able to see it later, either, just looking back. Except… a couple of nights ago, I called him up and said I wanted to come over and talk to him. He told me to hold off awhile, he wanted to get his girlfriend out of the house. Well, I was right there, so I parked in the street and waited for her to leave. She did and I went and talked to Haden.”

“The girlfriend’s important?” O’Hara asked.

“Yeah, she is,” Virgil said. “Because I saw her again, this morning. She came up to the farmhouse, to see where her husband got blown up. She’s Wyatt’s wife.”

“Son of a gun,” Ahlquist said.

Virgil ticked it off on his fingers: “Haden has exactly the same problem as Wyatt, and maybe worse. He’s been divorced three times, he’s living in a little teeny house because his ex-wives have carved him up, he’s got no money, and he’s a bit of a Romeo. He knew about the land, either from Wyatt or his wife, and figured out how valuable it would be. He also knew Mrs. Wyatt would inherit, if Bill Wyatt got killed before the divorce went through. He’s already nailing her-”

“That’s an offensive phrase,” O’Hara said.

“I kinda don’t think what he was doing was love,” Virgil said. “He was nailin’ her.”

O’Hara said, “So he tipped off Wyatt that we might be watching him, or searching him…”

“Just like I asked him to. He probably told him that he’d seen us out at the farmhouse, or some such thing. We won’t find out now,” Virgil said.

“And then he goes out there and sets the bomb,” Barlow said.

“Not knowing we’d already been through the place and didn’t find a bomb,” Virgil said. “He didn’t know that we were watching Wyatt around the clock-that we’d know that Wyatt couldn’t have placed it himself.”

Virgil held up his hand again, ticking off his fingers: “Haden had motive, he figured out a way to get a bomb inside the Pinnacle, he knew the inside of the Erikson garage, he knew that if he could keep Mrs. Wyatt rolling, she’d inherit.”

Good Thunder said, “I wonder if he plans to kill Mrs. Wyatt?”

“Why not?” Virgil said. “He’d get to keep it all, if he did that.”

“Totally fuckin’ psycho,” O’Hara said.

Ahlquist said, “You know what I’ve told you about that language. ..”

“Sorry, Sheriff.” O’Hara hitched up her gun belt. “He almost blew me up. I’m gonna bust his ass.”

Virgil said, “Not yet. There was no video at FedEx. We’re sending a photo over for the night clerk to look at-we do have her signature-and maybe she’ll recognize him. I kinda think not, though. I doubt that he’d go in without some kind of disguise. A beard and glasses, whatever. He couldn’t have counted on Brown getting killed, so he had to believe she’d be around to tell us about the birthday package.”

They all mulled that over, and then Ahlquist said, “I expect you got a plan.”

“I do,” Virgil said. “It’s not the brightest one in the land, so I’m looking for suggestions.”

Good Thunder said, “I got a trivial question, if you don’t mind. How’d you know he sent it FedEx?”

Virgil shrugged: “Would you trust a bomb to a company called ‘Oops’?”

Virgil had said his plan was half-assed, and they all agreed it was: another sneak-and-peek federal warrant.

“I’m worried about it,” Barlow said. “I can get the warrant, but if this guy is so smart… he may see us coming. There’s no perfect way to get in and out of a place, if the guy’s set up some telltales.”

“What’s that?” O’Hara asked.

Barlow said, “Little things that get disturbed. Stick hairs across your dresser drawers, with a little spit. If they’re gone, somebody was there. Not something you’d notice, just searching the place.”

“I got nothing else right now,” Virgil said.

“We could think about it some more, but I agree with Virgil that we ought to get a warrant going,” Ahlquist said. “We don’t have to use it, if we think of something better. If we don’t, we can at least get a look around. How about one of those bomb-sniffer things. Don’t you have some sniffer things that tell you if explosive has been around?”

“Yeah, but it can be defeated. It’s possible-and if he’s that smart, probably likely-that he worked with the explosive somewhere besides his house,” Barlow said. “Of course, if he didn’t wash his clothes after he worked with it… we could have a shot.”