Hussein or terrorists or any of that, but I don’t want to hear a guy bragging about killing them. About smoking them. I’m sorry, I just don’t want to hear it. They’re people, not paper targets.”
“He does that?”
“If you know him for more than fifteen seconds, he does,” Paulson said.
A guy who brags about killing. A guy who was in the army, and flew paragliders; a guy with some balls.
Virgil went out to the truck and called Barlow. “Got some pretty interesting stuff, dude. I got another suspect for you.”
“Better than forty-sixty?”
“Oh, yeah,” Virgil said. “I’m saying seventy-thirty.”
“Gonna get your ass kissed?” Barlow suddenly sounded happy.
“Could happen,” Virgil said. “Yes, it could.”
21
Virgil and Barlow arranged to meet at the Starbucks. Virgil got a grande hot chocolate, no-fat milk, no foam, no whipped cream, and Barlow got a venti latte with an extra shot. As they took a corner table, Virgil said, “Remind me not to stand next to you if you’re handling a bomb. That much caffeine, you gotta be shakin’ like a hundred- dollar belly dancer.”
“At least I’m not drinking like a little girl,” Barlow said. “So tell me about this new guy.”
Virgil told Barlow about what little he had on Wyatt. He concluded by saying, “He makes me a lot happier than Erikson, at least, to start with. Erikson never looked quite right-you said so yourself. The means to get in the Pinnacle-that’s the key thing.”
“But Erikson had it, too.”
“He had it once, but he didn’t even have access to a paraglider anymore, as far as we know. And the last time out, he crashed: not a place you’d go back to, not without practice. Not to land on the top of a skyscraper in the middle of the night. Then, there’s that whole thing about his work schedule.”
Barlow held up his hands: “All right, all right. But I don’t think we can entirely back off him. We have to nail down what we’ve got, just in case.”
“I don’t want you to back off,” Virgil said. “I want you to keep pushing Erikson. I want a lot of cops around there. I want people talking.”
“You want it to look like we got him. That’s gonna be a little rough on Sarah Erikson,” Barlow said.
“Yes. Cruel, but not unusual,” Virgil said. “I want the guy looking the other way. All I got is this slender thread. I need to do some background work on him. See if I can turn the thread into a noose.”
“Into a moose?”
“A noose. NOOSE,” Virgil said.
“So what you’ve got is, he can fly a paraglider, and he’s a self-centered prick,” Barlow said, summarizing.
“Who knew Erikson, and who I suspect knew Erikson’s garage. They used to fly together.”
“Okay,” Barlow said.
“You sound like it’s nothing,” Virgil said.
“No, it’s something all right. Last week, I’d have jumped all over it. But now…”
“The other thing,” Virgil said, “is that Erikson doesn’t look much like the guy in the video.”
“Camo can be weird, it can hide a lot of stuff-that’s why they call it camo,” Barlow said. “But I’d be happy to hear that Wyatt looks more like the video. And whatever happened to your decision that PyeMart money is involved?”
“That comes next,” Virgil said. “I gotta go see Pye.”
He went to the AMERICINN, and Chapman came out of Pye’s room and said, “Willard’s not sure he should talk to you. The state attorney has issued a warrant for one of our employees. Willard’s a little worried about that, and really pissed off.”
Virgil said, “Let me stick my head in. It’s purely about the bomber.”
“Wait one,” she said, and went back into the room. A minute later, she reappeared and said, “All right. But he’s not going to talk about anything that has to do with this warrant, or any supposed bribes, or anything like that.”
“Deal,” Virgil said.
Virgil went inside and found Pye sitting on the motel floor, doing an overhead arm stretch. Pye said, “What?”
Virgil: “You do yoga?”
“Of course not,” Pye said. “I’m doing my stretches. Which I can do later.” He got to his feet and said, “What do you want?”
“I got a guy that I’m looking at, for the bomber. I want to see if he has any connection with PyeMart. So I just want you to call up one of your people, and see if there’s a William Wyatt connected to PyeMart in any way, shape, or form-or if your security people are aware of a William Wyatt.”
“You’re not saying we bribed him?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Virgil said. “I just want to know if you ever had a relationship with him, of any kind, that ended badly, and that might incline him to bomb you.”
“I can do that,” Pye said. “What else?”
“That’s it,” Virgil said. “How long will it take?”
“A while-until tomorrow, probably, if I keep people looking all night. That’s if you want ‘any way, shape, or form.’ ”
“I’ll take tomorrow morning,” Virgil said. “Do not talk to anybody else about this. I’ll call you.”
“We did not bribe anybody, nohow, no way,” Pye said.
“Glad to hear it,” Virgil said. “But I’m pretty sure the grand jury will want to know where Arnold Martin’s sailboat came from. And why two city councilmen tell a different story.”
“You don’t believe me?” Pye demanded.
Virgil scratched the back of his head and then said, “Well, Willard, personally, I like you all right. You got some color, and you’re a smart guy. But I gotta say… no. I don’t believe you. Have a nice day.”
Chapman followed Virgil outside, the metal door banging closed behind them. “Is this store dead?”
“Yeah, I think it probably is,” Virgil said. “Maybe you can donate those concrete pads to the city, as municipal tennis courts, or something. Take a tax write-off.”
A wrinkle appeared on her forehead. “You know, that’s not a bad idea…”
Virgil looked at his watch as he left the motel: still broad daylight, but the sun was getting low. He’d have Wyatt on the brain overnight.
Thought about it for a minute, then thought about John Haden, the other professor he’d spoken to, that morning. He looked at his cell-phone record, punched up Haden’s phone number, and got him.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Well, I’ve got a friend over, we’re just, uh, finishing talking. Give me fifteen minutes or a half hour? I got some black beans and pork chops I was gonna make for dinner, if you’re hungry.”
“See you then,” Virgil said.
Virgil had nothing better to do, so he drove over to Haden’s and parked down the block. An older Subaru was sitting in Haden’s driveway, with the look of a visitor. Doorbellus interruptus, which he’d suffered on a number of occasions, just wasn’t polite. He closed his eyes and thought about Wyatt’s ride into the Pinnacle. It would have been thrilling, closing in on the building from above, those lights playing around the emerald glass. Wyatt would have had to find a place to dump his car, to take off, but given the Pinnacle’s location, that wouldn’t have been hard.
Finding the car again, in that sea of corn, might have been harder, but with a GPS…
Virgil got out his iPad, called up Google, and looked at a satellite photo of the area around the Pinnacle. To the south, on the other side of the interstate, a gravel road cut deep into the countryside, with only a few
