Shock Wave (28 page)

“You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn't come up?”

“Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There's a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they've got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”

“How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.

“Go to Butternut Scuba—they're open every day. What're you up to?”

“Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”

“What?”

“Talk to you later,” Virgil said.

B
UTTERNUT SCUBA WAS
a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn't been him.

When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank—I'm back here.”

Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I'm not Frank.”

“That's for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”

Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He'd used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he'd gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the habits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice
In-Fisherman
article out of that, but he hadn't had a tank on since the summer before.

“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said
Gretchen
.

“Actually, I need some divers. I'm a cop and I'd like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”

“You don't look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.

“Well, I am, Virgil Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“Okay, I've read about you,” she said. “We do dives for the police.... Somebody drown?”

Virgil shook his head: “We're not looking for a body. We're looking for some electronic equipment.”

“Uh, will we get paid?”

“We can work something out,” Virgil said. “It's the state, so it might take a while to get the check.”

A short, square, red-haired man with a red British RAF mustache came through the door, looked at Gretchen, then at Virgil, and Virgil said, “Hey, Frank.”

 

 

THE DEAL WAS DONE
in five minutes, and Frank called a guy named Retrief and told him to bring his gear up to the PyeMart site, and make it quick. Thinking that he might rent some equipment and go in the water, Virgil dug out his certification card, and Frank asked him how many dives he had in. Virgil said, “Maybe a hundred . . . maybe. Haven't been down for a while.”

Frank said, “We'd spend more time making sure you're okay, than it'd be worth. You get down there, and you can't see more than about two feet. Blind diving's a whole new thing. It's easy to get tangled up in shit.”

That made sense to Virgil, since visibility was one of the reasons he quit diving in Minnesota; so he helped Gretchen and Frank load their gear in the back of Frank's truck, and they followed him out to the PyeMart site, and then back along the track to the river, Virgil plowing down the weeds in his government truck.

When they got to the river, Virgil found that a second truck had fallen in behind Frank's: Retrief, a balding man with tattoos on his neck, and an Australian accent. To Gretchen: “Workin' for the jacks now, izit?”

“They're paying us,” she said.

“That makes for a change,” he said. To Virgil: “Howya doin'?”

Virgil said, “You sound like you're from New Jersey.”

They wanted to know more about the bombings, and about Erikson, and Frank said, “You get this guy, you oughta string him up by his balls.”

“Right on that,” Retrief said, and Gretchen said, “But what if Erikson did it?”

 

 

THE WATER IN THE STREAM
was cold, and the three divers pulled wet suits over swimming suits, doing a quick change in their trucks, then slung on tanks, masks, BCDs, and swim fins, and waded down the muddy banks to the end of the first pool.

While they were changing, Virgil dug his Nikon out of the truck, with a medium zoom, and started shooting. “How cold?” he called.

“Freezing,” Retrief muttered.

“Not too bad,” said Gretchen.

In waist-deep water, the divers popped in their mouthpieces and went down; Virgil could track them by watching for bubbles as they moved slowly upstream, turned, and then swept back downstream, and then up, back down, and up one more time. At the end of it, they popped up, and Frank called, “Nothing here. How far to the next one?”

“Hundred yards or so,” Virgil called back.

“Best ride in the truck,” Frank said. They all piled in the back of Frank's Chevy, and Virgil bumped through the weeds west along the bank to the next pool.

 

 

THE SECOND POOL WAS LONGER
and narrower than the first, and looked deeper and murky and even nasty. Virgil thought of snakes, which was another reason he didn't dive much in the Midwest; not that there were poisonous snakes, just that murky water made him think of them. The second pool went just like the first one, for ten minutes. On the first downward sweep, though, the bubbles stopped for a full minute, coalescing in one spot, then all three of them popped to the surface.

Gretchen pulled her mouthpiece and called, “Got them,” and held up a camera, just like the one Virgil had seen in the second trailer; Virgil took three quick shots of her holding it up, and then shot the others, as the two men did one-armed sidestrokes to shore, towing a black metal box with wires dangling off the back.

And Virgil laughed out loud with the sheer pleasure of being right. He shouted down, “That's it, guys. Beer for everybody.”

“You're a good man, Virgie,” Retrief called back, and Frank said, “The paper's gonna eat this up. I love this shit.”

“Better'n pulling out a body,” Gretchen said. She climbed the bank, dripping river water, straining against the weight of her equipment, and handed the camera to Virgil.

 

 

THEY ALL DROVE BACK
to the scuba shop, where the divers took turns taking showers and rinsing down their equipment, including the camera and the console. When they were done, they walked down the street to Mitchell's, a bar, carrying the recorder and camera. Virgil ordered beer, and when it came, called Barlow.

“Hey, I got that camera and the recorder from the first trailer,” he said.

“You got what?”

“The camera and recorder from that first trailer, the one that was blown up.”

After a moment of silence, Barlow asked, “Where'd you get them?”

 

 

BARLOW GOT THERE
in ten minutes, ordered a Coke, looked at the still-damp electronic gear. Virgil explained it all, and the grinning divers chipped in their bit, about finding the stuff in the murk—Frank had first found the recorder, and then a minute later, Gretchen found the camera—and finally Barlow asked Virgil, “How in the hell did you ever think of that?”

“I was just thinking about this guy stumbling around out there in the dark, carrying all this crap, and whatever tools he had to break into the trailer, and I thought, Why would he take them home? Why not just get rid of it? Where would he get rid of it? He was walking right by this river, and he was apparently familiar with the area, with these deep pools. . . .”

Barlow shook his head. “Dumb luck, that's what it was.”

“Ever notice how dumb luck seems to follow smart people around?” Retrief asked.

“Where you're gonna need the luck is, the recorder,” Gretchen said. “It's been underwater for days.”

“It's a hard drive, and most of them are sealed units,” Virgil said. “I think we're eighty percent for recovering the images. I'm more worried that he bashed it around than about the water. If he physically screwed up the disk, it'll be harder to get at the pictures.” He looked at the case on the table. “It looks okay. He didn't hit it with a hammer or anything.”

“How long before we know?” Barlow asked.

“I'll get it back to St. Paul today,” Virgil said. “They'll pull the unit, and take a look. If it's not broken, we'll have images this afternoon. Or tonight.”

“That's something,” Barlow said. “That really is.”

 

 

“WHAT HAPPENED WITH SARAH ERIKSON?”
Virgil asked Barlow.

“She's back,” Barlow said. “She's pretty messed up, says her husband would never do anything like that. Wouldn't know a bomb from his elbow, is what she says. She says she'll come down and talk to us this afternoon. I'll call you.”

“I gotta go talk to the paper,” Frank said. “We oughta get a picture. I think they fired their only real photographer.”

Gretchen demurred: “I don't think I want this bomb guy to know I was involved. I live alone.”

Frank said, “Mmmm . . . you could move in with me.”

“No, I couldn't,” she said. She looked at Virgil and lowered her eyelids.

Retrief said, “Fuck 'im, if he can't take a joke. You gonna be in the picture, Frank?”

“I guess.”

“Then it's you, me, and Virgie,” Retrief said.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” Barlow said to Virgil.

“I want him to know; I want him to feel me coming,” Virgil said. “I want to shake him up. At the moment, I got nothing else.”

Virgil, Frank, and Retrief posed with the recovered camera and recorder, and Gretchen pushed the button on Frank's cell phone and when he saw the photo, Frank said, “That's a thousand dollars in advertising, right here.”

“Really? That calls for another round,” Retrief said to him. “You're buyin'.”

 

 

VIRGIL TOOK THE RECORDER
and camera back to the county courthouse and put them in a box, and Ahlquist dispatched a deputy to take them to the BCA labs in St. Paul. “Man-oh-man, this could be the break we needed. If his face is on that video, we got him.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Virgil said. “Where do I go to see Sarah Erikson?”

“She's coming in here. So's Barlow. We figured we'd kill all the birds with one stone.”

“We're birds?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Bad metaphor, Earl,” said Virgil.

“Tough titty. Go investigate your list.”

“Which Erikson isn't on,” Virgil said.

“Unfortunately,” Ahlquist said.

Virgil pushed himself out of his chair. “I better get investigating.”

“Somebody's got to do it,” Ahlquist said. “Nice job on that camera, Virgil.”

A FEW MORE LETTERS
had come back with lists of possible bombers. Virgil spent a half hour going through them, but nothing much had changed. Then Good Thunder called:

“We flipped Pat Shepard, and your guy from the BCA is here with the recording equipment. We're going to send Shepard to see Burt Block right away: we're starting to pile up people who know about this, and we need to move. We'd like you to come and help brief Shepard.” Block was the second of the three city councilmen bribed by PyeMart through Geraldine Gore.

“When do you want me?” Virgil asked.

“How fast can you get here?”

The county attorney's office was upstairs. Virgil looked at his watch: “About twenty-two seconds, if I take the stairs.”

“We'll leave the light on for you,” Good Thunder said.

 

 

PAT SHEPARD WAS
a middle-sized guy, tanned from the summer golf course, with a tight haircut; and he was pathetic and about the only person in the room who didn't feel sorry for him was the county attorney, a beefy man named Theodore Wills, who introduced himself as “Theodore.” Wills was openly ecstatic about Shepard's confession, and scornful of the man himself.