“But you can’t get on the roof,” Virgil said. “I even found a guy who’s a glider pilot, and he says you’d need at least three hundred yards to land a glider up there… I asked about parachutes, but then you’d need a pilot who’s an accomplice.”
Shrake unwrapped his index finger from his beer bottle, pointed it at Virgil and said, “So I guess it’s a safe bet that you never heard of motorized paragliders.”
Virgil said, “Uh…”
Jenkins said to his partner, “No more beer.”
Shrake said, “I saw a wi-fi label on the door, wonder if it’s real.” He groped around in his bag, pulled out a battered white MacBook, got online with Google, poked a few keys, called up a YouTube video, and turned the computer around so it faced Virgil.
YouTube was running a Cadillac ad, followed by a four-minute video in which a guy drove into a parking lot and unpacked what looked like a parachute, laying it on the concrete. He then pulled on a backpack motor, with a small propeller in a metal cage, hooked himself to the parachute, and fired up the motor.
The airstream from the propeller inflated the chute, and the guy took a few steps across the concrete pad and was in the air. He flew a few hundred feet in a circle, did a short running landing, killed the engine, put the backpack motor in the back of his truck, folded up the chute, packed it away, then threw it in his truck… and did it all in four minutes and ten seconds.
“Holy shit,” Virgil said. “How did you know about this?”
“I have wide interests,” Shrake said. “Also, insomnia.”
Virgil spent another five minutes on Google, looking up paragliders, then gulped the rest of his beer and said, “I gotta go,” and he was gone. Outside, he got on the phone to Barlow: “Are you still at Erikson’s?”
“Just left.”
“Is Mrs. Erikson there?”
“Was two minutes ago.”
“Head back there. Keep her there. I’ve got a question,” Virgil said. “You might want to be there when I ask it.”
Barlow was standing on the front porch of the Erikson home, talking to Sarah Erikson, when Virgil arrived. Virgil said, “Mrs. Erikson, your husband has a propeller on the wall of his garage. What did that come from?”
Her forehead furrowed: “He used to fly, a kind of ultralight thing. But he did something stupid and went up when it was too windy for him and he crashed. He broke his ankle, and got some burns on his back, from the engine exhaust pipe, and was lucky to get away with that. The propeller broke and the engine was wrecked. He quit flying, and put the propeller on the wall to remind himself not to do it anymore.”
“Was his glider… did it have solid wings, or was it one of those paraglider things, like a parachute?”
“He did both, ultralights and the paragliders,” she said. “It was his paraglider that he crashed. Why are you asking all of this stuff?”
“Trying to work through some possibilities,” Virgil said. “Did he fly out of an airport? Or just off the street? Or what?”
“Out of Jim Paulson’s Soaring Center, out on 17,” she said.
“Thanks,” Virgil said. To Barlow: “Walk me back to my truck.”
Barlow tagged along behind and asked, voice low, “What’s that about? Paragliders?”
“Erikson flew paragliders. I just did some research on them. People have flown them to fifteen, sixteen thousand feet,” Virgil said. “You can land on a spot a few feet across, and you could get one in the back of a station wagon, no problem. They’re like a parachute with a motor, except they go up as well as down.”
“Jesus Christ,” Barlow said. “Why didn’t we know about these things?”
“ ’Cause they’re weird, and not a lot of people fly them,” Virgil said. “But they’re also cheap. You can get up in the air for a few thousand bucks, don’t need a license.”
Barlow looked back at the house: “So it was Erikson.”
“I’m going out to this soaring center-try to nail it down,” Virgil said.
Paulson’s soaring center was almost invisible from the highway, down a gravel track past a cornfield, the track marked only by an unlit metal sign. Virgil found the track on his second pass, went four hundred yards in, and discovered a narrow tarmac airstrip that ran parallel to the highway.
A yellow metal building sat at one end of the strip, and a few yards down the landing strip, a phone pole held up a windsock. In the back, a long metal shed, open on one side, covered a half-dozen brightly colored gliders. Three men were hand-towing a brilliant red glider off the landing strip. They looked toward Virgil as he got out of the truck, and then continued on toward the shed.
Virgil saw somebody moving inside the yellow building, went to the door, which had a Welcome sign in the window, and went in. A gray-haired guy was sitting behind a counter and said, “Hey, what can I do for you?”
“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the BCA.”
Virgil asked him-the guy was Paulson-about Erikson.
“Yeah, he used to fly out of here, he and some other guys had an ultralight, but one of them broke it up,” Paulson said. “Then Henry started flying paragliders until he cracked that up.”
Virgil got the story on Erikson and his gliding; was told that Erikson had been “okay” as a flier. “It ain’t rocket science,” Paulson said.
Virgil told him why he was asking: the possibility that Erikson was the bomber, and the possibility that he’d flown it onto the top of the Pye Pinnacle.
Paulson nodded. “Yeah, you could do that. In fact, there’s a rich guy out in Los Angeles, he flies from his house out in Malibu into some hotel in Beverly Hills, lands on the roof, and walks from there to work. The neighbors are all pissed off about it, because of the engine noise.”
He claimed that power paragliding was “safe as houses, if you know what you’re doing.”
“But that’s what you would say, since you run a gliding center,” Virgil said. “I mean, I know about two guys flying gliders: Erikson, who cracked up, and quit, and his former partner, who you just told me about, who cracked up and didn’t quit.”
“Neither one was hurt bad,” Paulson said. “I’m not saying you can’t kill yourself. You can. If you treat it with respect, it’s safer than driving a car… Well, maybe.”
Virgil pulled out his survey list. “Look at this,” he said. “Is there anybody else on this list who flies these things? The powered paraglider?”
Paulson bent over the counter, then took out a pencil, wet it with his tongue, and dragged it down the face of the list. “Oh, yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Bill Wyatt.”
He touched the wet tip of his pencil on the name, and made a dot. He went the rest of the way down the list and said, “He’s about it.”
Virgil felt a buzz way down in the testicles: Wyatt was the other teacher at Butternut Tech. “He flew a paraglider?”
“Still does. Not so much lately, haven’t seen him for a couple of months, I guess. Good flier-way out of Henry’s class. He’s got some balls. He was in Iraq One, back whenever that was, reign of King George the First.”
“He teaches up at the college, right?”
“Yeah… history or something.”
“Good guy?” Virgil asked.
Paulson said, with a grin, “I wouldn’t go that far.”
They talked about Wyatt for a couple of minutes. Paulson said he had no knowledge that Wyatt might be a bomber, or crazy, or anything in particular, but he was an angry, arrogant, self-centered prick. Most of the pilots around the place, Paulson said, didn’t like him.
Virgil brought the conversation back to Erikson, and finally asked Paulson not to talk about the interview. “Could be a little dangerous. And unfair. We don’t know that either of these guys has the least involvement. But if one of them does, then, and you ask about it, well, he’s not a guy you want looking at you.”
Paulson said, “We gotta be talking about Bill, right? Because Henry’s dead as a doornail. And I’ll tell you, I don’t see any way that Henry’s the bomber. No way at all.”
“How about Wyatt?”
“Well…” Paulson looked out his narrow window, and shook his head. “You know, I got no truck with Saddam
