John Sandford: Shock Wave

“So let’s get the warrant going,” Ahlquist said.

“I’d like to get somebody to make an announcement that we’ve confirmed that Wyatt was the bomber. Make a show over at his house,” Virgil said. He looked at the sheriff. “Earl?”

“Then announce tomorrow that I was lying?”

“That you were deliberately setting up the real bomber,” Virgil said.

“I do like TV,” Ahlquist said.

O’Hara said, “You know, with all due respect to Virgil, I’ve got a better idea about how to get Haden than a bullshit sneak-and-peek warrant.”

She explained, and when she finished, Virgil said, “Okay. That’s Plan B.”

Haden had seen Virgil’s truck too many times, so Virgil and O’Hara squeezed into O’Hara’s Mini Cooper and parked it outside a house that had a For Sale sign in the front yard, a full block over from Haden’s house. Virgil brought along a pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars, and they took turns watching Haden’s house; and watched a woman across the street and two houses down who wore little in the way of clothing as she vacuumed the carpeting on the other side of her living room picture window; and watched a small spotted dog that walked up and down a gutter, apparently lost.

“I gotta do something about that dog, if we don’t do anything else,” O’Hara said.

Virgil said, “I think I can see a collar and probably a tag… maybe it’s just an outside dog. It’s not big enough to bite anybody.”

“I see you’re watching Miz White Trash again,” O’Hara said after a moment.

“I’m trying to figure out whether she’s breaking any laws. I mean, she’s apparently in her own home.”

“I read about a case like this-it apparently depends on her intent. If her intent is to distract an officer of the law, or anybody else, by deliberately displaying her flesh, then she is breaking the law against indecent exposure. If she has no intent to expose herself, but the exposure is inadvertent, sporadic, or unintended, then she is not breaking the law.”

“Gonna have to do more observation to determine intent,” Virgil said. But he was joking; the woman actually didn’t have that much going for her, in his opinion, and O’Hara knew it.

Haden first appeared outside his home a few minutes before ten o’clock. He looked in his mailbox, then up and down the street, as if expecting the mailman, then went back inside.

“So he’s up,” O’Hara said.

Ten minutes later, the mailman showed up, delivering Haden’s street. Haden met him at the door, took the mail, went back inside. Three or four minutes later, his garage door went up, and Haden backed into the street.

Virgil went to his cell phone: “He’s out, and he’s headed your way.”

“We’re set,” Shrake said. “Hold on…” Then: “Okay, he just went past. Looks like he’s going downtown. We’re on him.”

Virgil called Barlow: “He’s moving. Headed downtown.”

“We’re still hovering out here…”

Shrake called: “He’s at the Wells Fargo drive-through. Jenkins will take him from here, I’m going to fall off.”

O’Hara said to Virgil, “That was probably his paycheck in the mail.”

“He’s going to be late for class, if he doesn’t hurry,” Virgil said.

Shrake called again. “Jenkins is on him, he looks like he’s headed over to the school.”

Jenkins, a few minutes later: “He’s inside the school. He was hurrying.”

Virgil called Barlow: “He’s at the school. Let’s go.”

Virgil and O’Hara arrived first. As had been the case with the other divorced suspect, William Wyatt, Haden was a renter. Virgil had gotten a key from the home’s owner, and had silenced the owner with threats of life imprisonment (“accessory after the fact to four murders”) if he talked to anyone about it.

They parked in the street, walked up to Haden’s door, and went inside. Once in, Virgil walked around to the garage and opened the door. Barlow and two techs arrived a minute later, drove into the garage, and Virgil dropped the door again.

They did a quick walk-through, found a small shop in the basement, with the bodies of three gorgeous electric guitars hanging from the rafters.

“That’s great work,” one of the techs said. “This guy knows what he’s doing, guitar-wise.”

“He’s got everything he needs to make the bombs,” the other tech said. “If he’s the guy, this is where he made the bombs.”

They had a wheeled cart full of electronic equipment, which they’d brought into the kitchen from the garage. Now, they went back up the steps, picked it up, and carried it down the stairs. “Tell you something in five minutes,” Barlow said.

While the techs ran some preliminary tests, Virgil and O’Hara cruised the main floor. Haden was a neat man. Virgil pointed out that he’d vacuumed two of the rugs in a way that left the short nap standing upright, “So that when we walk on it, we leave footprints.”

“We’ll re-vacuum before we leave,” she said. “Of course, we’ll be clothed.”

They took ten minutes working from his bedroom outward, and found nothing that would point to him as a bomber; not that it was all uninteresting. They found a box that once contained a gross of ribbed, lubricated condoms, with maybe thirty left; and two vibrators, including one with a wicked hook on it. In a storage closet, they found a PSE X-Force Vendetta bow with a five-pin sight and a Ripcord fall-away arrow rest, and a batch of high-end carbon-fiber arrows, five of them set up with Slick Trick magnum four-bladed arrowheads.

In a backpack hanging in the same storage closet as the bow, they found a range of deer-hunting gear. Two bottles of scent-killing detergent sat on a shelf.

“Now,” Virgil said, in his best pedantic tone, “what’s wrong with this whole scene?”

“I dunno,” O’Hara said. “I woulda got a Solocam, myself, but that PSE’s a pretty good bow.”

“What’s wrong, my red-haired friend, is that he’s got all this scent killer, but where’s the camo he’s gonna spray it on, or wash it with?”

“There is no camo,” she said.

“Because he got rid of it, because he read in the paper that we found that video recorder,” Virgil said. “There are no bow hunters without camo. Most of them wear it when it’s anything less than ninety degrees, just to prove that they’re bow hunters. His mistake was, instead of just throwing away the old stuff, he should have also bought some new camo pattern that wasn’t Realtree, run it through the washer a few times, then hung it up here. That would counter what was seen on the video.”

“I believe you,” O’Hara said. “I also believe that if you made that argument in court, the judge would hit you on the head with her gavel.”

They heard Barlow running up the stairs. They stepped out to look, and Barlow said, “Okay. He’s the guy. We’ve got molecules of Pelex in the basement. But…”

“I hate that. I hate when people say ‘but,’ ” Virgil said.

Barlow ran on: “But… what he did was he scrubbed up the whole basement with some kind of strong chemical cleaners. You can still see the marks on the floor. We don’t have anything physical except our test, which is good, but a defense chemist could make the argument that all we’re picking up is some chemical signature of something used in the cleaners.”

“Is that possible?” Virgil asked.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Barlow said. “I don’t believe it, in this case, but we don’t know what cleaners he used. We need to check that now.”

“Do we have enough to bust him?”

Barlow stroked his mustache a few times and then said, “It’d be marginal. Just the fact that he scrubbed up the basement in a rental house would tell you something. We did get that Pelex signature. If we had an aggressive prosecutor… and then, whatever Mrs. Wyatt could tell us, if she’d tell us anything.”