“That’s it? That’s all he’s got?”
“That’s pretty good for the town of Butternut. Probably puts him in the top five percent of family incomes.”
“Shoot,” Virgil said. “Where’s the farm? It’s not west of town, is it? Just outside of town, and just south of the highway?”
“No, it’s pretty much south of town. I looked on a plat map-hang on, let me get it up again.” She went away for a minute, then said, “Yeah, it’s south of town.”
“On the Butternut River?”
“No, no, he’s a half mile from the Butternut. He does abut Highway 71, which has to be worth something.”
“Yeah. Eighty dollars an acre,” Virgil said. “So, e-mail me what you got.”
“Two minutes,” she said.
Barlow came over. “You’re being standoffish this morning?”
“Had some bureaucratic stuff to do,” Virgil said. “I’m done now. You want company?”
“Sure. Come on over,” Barlow said. “How’re you doing with your alternate suspect?”
“Not as well as I’d hoped,” Virgil said, following him back to his table. He nodded at the two technicians, and a minute later his French toast arrived.
“The thing that pisses me off is that I can’t get a solid handle on anything,” Virgil said.
“Welcome to the bomb squad,” one of the techs said. “Half the time, we don’t catch anybody. It took twenty years to catch the Unabomber, and he killed three people and injured twenty-three. And the FBI didn’t actually catch him-he was turned in by his family.”
“Boy, I’m glad you said that,” Virgil said. “That makes my morning.”
The sheriff did make Virgil’s morning. Virgil showed him the documents from Sandy, and Ahlquist said, “Come on down to the engineer’s office.”
Virgil followed him down to the county engineer, where they rolled out some plat maps and found Wyatt’s property. Ahlquist tapped the map and said, “You know what? You’ll have to check with the city, to make sure I’m right, but I am right.”
“What?”
“The city development plan had the city growing south along Highway 71,” Ahlquist said. “You can’t put a development in without getting city approval-even outside the city limits. The idea is, the state and the county want orderly development, and they don’t want a big sprawling development built on septic systems. They require sewer systems, with linkups to the city sewage treatment plants. So, the city was supposed to grow south. Toward Wyatt’s land. Then PyeMart came in, and the city council changed the plan to push the water and sewer system out Highway 12, out west. With that line in, the next development would be west, instead of south.”
“How much would that be worth?”
Ahlquist shrugged. “Maybe my old lady could tell me-but farmland is around three thousand an acre, the last I heard. I gotta think the land under a housing development is several times that much. If you’ll excuse the language, when the city changed directions, old Wyatt took it in the ass.”
“Oh, yes,” Virgil said, a light in his eyes. “That feels so good .”
22
Virgil drove down to city hall, found the city engineer, got a copy of the city plan, and worked through it. Wyatt’s property was a quarter mile south of the last street served by city sewer and water. Under the plan, before it was revised to make room for the PyeMart, Wyatt’s property would have been annexed within the next ten years, even under pessimistic growth-rate projections.
Next, Virgil figured out that a company called Xavier Homes had built the most recent subdivision in Butternut. Xavier Homes was headquartered in Minnetonka, which was on the western edge of the Twin Cities metro area. Virgil got through to the company president, whose name was Mark Douka.
He told Douka that he was investigating the Butternut bombings, and said, “I need to know what you’d pay for untouched farmland with city water and sewer, outside of Butternut.”
“There isn’t any more of that, at the moment,” Douka said. “Right now, I wouldn’t pay nearly as much as five years ago.”
“I’m trying to figure out what some land might be worth in, say, ten years.”
“In ten years… assuming that the economy has recovered… well, you know, there are a lot of contingencies…”
“On average,” Virgil said, his patience beginning to wear.
“I can tell you’re getting impatient, but it’s complicated. Everything depends on what we’ve got to do to the property, what the market is at the time, and, you know, what we can get it for. I can tell you this last subdivision out there, we paid about twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars an acre. I wouldn’t pay that now. In ten years, I might pay twice that, but then, maybe not-it all depends.”
“Just going on what you did last time, twenty-two-five,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. But I don’t want to hear that in court, because it’s a kinda bullshit number,” Douka said. “I’ll tell you what, with what the Fed’s doing right now, it’s possible that ten years from now, I’d pay seventy-five thousand dollars an acre, and the Chinese will be using dollar bills for Kleenex.”
“For Kleenex?”
“Or worse. They might be buying it on rolls.”
“On rolls?”
“You know-toilet paper. Everything is up in the air,” Douka said. “We paid twenty-two-five, but I got no idea what it’ll be ten years from now. No idea.”
“But whatever it is, it’d be worth more than raw farmland.”
“I sure hope so,” Douka said. “But with what the Fed’s doing, we may need the corn. You know, to eat.”
But Wyatt would have looked at that last subdivision, Virgil thought when he’d gotten off the phone, and most likely, he would have known that Xavier had paid $22,500. So a hundred and sixty acres, at that price, would be worth… three and a half million dollars? Could that be right? He found a piece of scrap paper, got a pencil out, and did the math: Three million six. As farmland, it was worth. .. more math… $480,000.
Virgil got on the phone to Barlow and told him about the subdivision. “When the city changed direction, Wyatt took a three-million-dollar haircut.”
“Holy shit.”
“Exactly. This is the first motive that feels real to me,” Virgil said. “Without this, he’s cold, stony broke. I’ve been told that his wife is taking him to the cleaners’.”
“I’ll tell you something else,” Barlow said. “Think about the bombs out at the city equipment yard. We thought it was just another shot at trying to stop the PyeMart site. But it was more than that. If the city had even started to lay that pipeline, if they’d even put part of it in the ground, it wouldn’t make any difference what happened with PyeMart. Even if PyeMart went down, the pipeline would still be there, and that’s probably where the city would put the growth. They wouldn’t rip up a brand-new pipeline and build another one south, just because PyeMart was gone.”
“Jeez, Jim-you’re smarter than you look,” Virgil said.
“I keep telling people that, but they don’t believe me,” Barlow said. “So what’s next?”
“I’m going to pile up as much as I can on Wyatt. Then, I’m thinking-what if you went to a federal judge and asked for a sneak-and-peek?”
“They don’t like ’em, judges don’t,” Barlow said. “But in this case, I think we’d have a good chance. It’s like drugs-if we raid him and miss, we won’t have another chance.”
“So let’s think about that,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna pile up as much stuff as I can, but we’ve got to move. Why don’t you make a reservation to see a judge late this afternoon, and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.”
Virgil went back to the courthouse, and with the help of the county clerk, who was sworn to secrecy, found that Wyatt had bought the property eight years before for $240,000 and taken out a mortgage for $180,000. So he’d
