Shock Wave (39 page)

WYATT FINALLY WALKED OUT
of the college building an hour after his last class ended. Virgil worried a bit that he'd snuck out some other exit, and walked somewhere, but there was nothing to do about that.

Wyatt stood blinking in the sunlight for a moment, looking around the lot, then spotted his car and walked over to it, jingling his keys. He was carrying a big leather academic briefcase, which he put on the passenger seat, then walked back around the car to get in the driver's side.

“He was being pretty careful with that suitcase,” O'Hara said.

Virgil said, “Huh,” and when Wyatt was moving, pulled out behind him.

 

 

THEY TOOK HIM
to a supermarket, took him home, took him to tae kwon do, took him to a movie, alone. Virgil followed him in, at a distance, and caught him as he was settling in for
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Virgil watched the movie from the back row, occasionally texting O'Hara to keep her current. He left ten minutes before the end, no longer caring what happened.

“Like it?” O'Hara asked. “The movie?”

“No,” Virgil said.

 

 

WYATT CAME BACK OUT
ten minutes later, drove to the Applebee's, spent an hour there, sitting at the bar, talking with people. He looked like a regular. They took him home at ten o'clock; he put the car in the garage.

He hadn't moved at midnight, when Jenkins and Shrake took it.

O'Hara lived in a modest clapboard house not unlike Virgil's: “I will pick you up at fifteen minutes to eight tomorrow,” Virgil said, when he dropped her. “Be ready.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and saluted.

And Virgil thought, as he drove away, that Lee Coakley hadn't called. She must've meant what she said: didn't want to talk.

 

 

THOR WAS WORKING
in the office as he went through, and called, “Hey . . . looks like Mr. Shepard is going away, huh?”

“I wouldn't count on it,” Virgil said.

“Everybody's heard that he was arrested, and that he ratted out everybody else,” Thor said.

“Yeah, but first he's got to recover, and then there'll be negotiations,” Virgil said. “So . . . how's everything going with the hot Mrs. Shepard?”

Thor's eyelids lowered a quarter inch. “She took the pizza,” he said.

 

 

VIRGIL WENT STRAIGHT TO BED,
with both his alarms set, and a wakeup call. He lay awake for a while, thinking about how God played with people's lives, and thinking that Coakley might call yet. It was still not past eleven o'clock on the West Coast. He was still waiting when he went to sleep.

He woke at seven-fifteen, cleaned up in a hurry, got O'Hara, who was standing in her front yard, waiting, and made it to a McDonald's drive-through, got Egg McMuffins with sausage for both of them, a coffee for her and a Diet Coke for himself, and made it to Wyatt's at exactly eight o'clock. Working in a town where almost nowhere was more than a mile from anywhere else, and there was almost no real traffic, had its benefits.

Shrake and Jenkins had nothing to report.

“We'll do this one more night, if we have to, and then you guys can go back to the Cities tomorrow morning.”

“We won't be going to bed until this afternoon, so if anything comes up, call us,” Jenkins said.

Virgil said he would, and he and O'Hara settled in with their McDonald's bag, to watch.

Virgil was reading a Michael Connelly novel on his iPad when O'Hara poked him and said, “Garage door.”

Virgil shut down the iPad and watched as Wyatt backed his Prius out of the garage. He drove to the same McDonald's where Virgil and O'Hara had gone, rolled through the same drive-through, then headed south through town. “He's going out to his farm,” Virgil said.

But he didn't. He went to Home Depot. O'Hara said that as far as she knew, Wyatt didn't know her, so Virgil sent her inside to see what he was doing. She came back out ten minutes later and said, “He's in the checkout line. I couldn't get close enough to see what he was getting, but it was in the ‘fasteners' section. Window latches, or something.”

“Wonder if you could use them in a bomb, you know, to detonate one?”

“Don't know,” she said. And, “Speaking of bombs, I can still taste that Egg McMuffin. Wish I hadn't got the sausage.”

Wyatt came out a minute later, and again, turned south. “Toward the farm,” Virgil said again.

This time, he
was
going to the farm, taking the turn on the county road toward the track up the hill. Virgil pulled over onto the side of the highway, past the county road, and said, “I'm going.”

“I'm coming.”

“Gotta run,” he said. “There's nothing in the house, so he's probably got the stuff ditched outside.”

 

 

THEY RAN ACROSS THE HIGHWAY,
across the roadside ditch, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and jogged into the cornfield. They were coming at the house from the side, and couldn't see anything below the exterior windowsills . . . which meant that Wyatt couldn't see them, at least until they got higher on the slope. Halfway up, Virgil could see the top of Wyatt's car, and said, “We gotta get lower.”

They continued running, bent over, up the hill; another hundred yards and Virgil waved O'Hara down, and to a stop. Standing slowly, he looked over the top of the corn, and immediately saw Wyatt walking up to the front of the old farmhouse. He appeared to be empty-handed. Virgil said, quietly, “He's going inside. We couldn't find anything in there. . . .”

“If we get right under the house, we could hear what he's doing,” O'Hara said.

“Let's get a little closer, anyway,” Virgil said. Now they were virtually crawling, as fast as they could. Another fifty yards, and they stopped, and both popped up their heads. Wyatt had unlocked the front door. There was no porch, so he had to boost himself inside.

Virgil sat down and got his cell phone and called Shrake: “We might have something going. You guys head south on 71. About six blocks out of town . . .”

He pushed to his knees, watching the house, as he gave directions to Shrake, O'Hara beside him.

 

 

THE SHOCK WAVE,
when the house exploded, nearly knocked them down.

W
HEN THE HOUSE WENT,
it wasn't at all like watching a slow-mo, where the building bulges, and then flies apart, or sags, and falls into a heap. The house went like an oversized firecracker:
BOOM!
And it was gone.

Virgil pushed O'Hara flat, covered his head with his hands, and covered her head with his right arm and elbow. She tried to push away so she could look up and he shouted, “No, no, cover your head, cover your head.”

She looked at him like he was crazy, and then the first chunk of plank landed a few feet away, and then the heavy thunk of masonry, maybe a piece of the old brick chimney, and then all kinds of trash, small pieces of wood and dirt and stone and shingles and concrete, some of it no bigger across than a little fingernail, but some of it the size of a bathtub.

She caught on and curled up, covering her head, and the debris kept coming down for what seemed like a full minute, and may have been. Virgil heard several large pieces land, stuff that could have killed them.

Then it all went silent, and O'Hara stirred and did a push-up, and said, “Oh my God,” just like a Valley girl.

They both got to their knees. Other than the foundation, there was no sign of the house from where they were. The superstructure had vanished. Wyatt's champagne-colored Prius was still sitting there, but it had no windows.

Virgil stood up and walked toward the house, while O'Hara started screaming into her cell phone. A minute later, Virgil's cell phone rang, and he absently took it out of his pocket, said, “Yeah?”

“This is Shrake. There's been a hell of an explosion. That wasn't you, was it?”

“Yeah. Wyatt just left for the moon,” Virgil said. “Where are you?”

“Five minutes away. Jenkins says he can see the dust cloud. We're coming.”

Virgil clicked off, heard O'Hara talking to Ahlquist, and then she clicked off and caught up with him. They passed the car, which had been turned probably thirty degrees sideways. The near side had been torn to pieces by shrapnel from the house. Where the house had been, there was nothing but a hole in the ground.

Virgil thought, almost idly,
No more spiderwebs . . .

“Was it an accident?” O'Hara asked. “Or did he do it on purpose? Maybe he figured you had him. . . .”

There were sirens everywhere and the first patrol car blew past the subdivision at the bottom of the hill, coming fast. Virgil was aware that the car looked hazy—that everything looked hazy—and he realized that he was walking through an enormous cloud of dust, which was still raining down on them. O'Hara's red hair was turning gray with the dirt, and he was sure his was, too.

He took her by the elbow and said, “Come on, we've got to get out of the dust.”

She resisted. “What about Wyatt?”

“Elvis has left the building,” Virgil said. “Or maybe, the building has left Elvis. And we're breathing in all kinds of bad shit, maybe including little pieces of asbestos, or glass fibers, if the place had insulation. We've got to get out of the cloud. Cover your mouth and nose with your shirt.”

Using their shirts as masks, they walked down the track to the county road; the patrol car turned into the track, and Virgil waved them off. The car stopped, and they walked down to it, and Virgil said, “Pop the back door, let us in. Keep your window up.”

They got in the back, and Virgil told the deputy about the dust, and then about Wyatt.

The deputy asked O'Hara, “So you guys think he's dead?”

“I think he was vaporized,” O'Hara said. “I think he somehow touched off everything he had left. It was like . . . it was like the movies they showed us in Iraq. It was like an IED.”

Virgil asked the deputy to take him back to his truck. As they rode over, he called Shrake and said, “Wait a bit before you try to go up the hill. That dust cloud may be toxic. I'm parked on the highway. I'll meet you there.”

 

 

SHRAKE AND JENKINS ARRIVED
two minutes later, and more patrol cars came along, and were waved off, and then a fire truck. Rubberneckers were piling up on the highway, and Virgil sent a couple of the cops to keep them moving. Then Ahlquist came in, and a moment later, Barlow. They stood on the shoulder of the road, watching the dissipating dust cloud, and Barlow said, “If it took out a whole house, that was probably the rest of it.”

“That's what I said,” O'Hara told him.

Ahlquist asked, “No chance that he got out? That he set off a timer thing, then went out the far side and ran out through the corn to the other side?”

Virgil said, “No.”

Shrake said, “You sound pretty sure of that.”

“I am,” Virgil said.

“Suicide by cop,” Barlow said. “He knew you were coming, and took the easy way out.”

“I think we can go up there,” Virgil said. The cloud was thinning, under a light westerly breeze.

They drove up the hill in a long caravan, with the fire truck trailing behind. They found a hole, but no sign of Wyatt.

“If it killed him, his head should be around here somewhere,” Barlow said, and Virgil remembered what the deputy had said the first night he was in town. O'Hara remembered it, too, and looked at Virgil and nodded.

“Then we need to get some people together to walk the field,” Virgil said. “We had bricks coming down eighty yards out, so if we . . . you know, his head shouldn't have gone much further than that.”

Barlow looked at him, but nodded.

Ahlquist pointed at a deputy and told him to get some cops and start walking the field. Barlow walked over and looked in the hole, the former cellar. He shook his head. “Damn good thing we didn't go down that basement. The thing must have been unstable—or maybe it was set to blow if anyone found it.”

Virgil: “You think the bomb was in the basement?”

Barlow nodded. “I know it was. If it had been upstairs, the floor would have been blown into the basement. But the explosion was below the floor, and everything went straight up. That's why the basement's so clean. The whole building, including the floor, went
out
.”

He added, “You two were lucky. You were down below the shrapnel line and partly sheltered by that foundation. About nine thousand pounds of shrapnel blew right over your heads.”

“And you think that was the whole stash of Pelex,” Ahlquist said.

“Just about had to be, to do this kind of damage,” Barlow said. He looked around and shook his head. “I need to get pictures of this. This is something we don't see very often.”

 

 

THE COPS WERE WALKING
the field, slowly, looking behind every cornstalk. Virgil got his Nikon and a short zoom, and walked around the blast zone, documenting the effects of the explosion at Barlow's direction—and Barlow wanted three shots of everything, at slightly different exposures.

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.”