Barlow scratched his head and said, “Yeah. Should be. Probably feeding off a pump at the well, through here, and then to another bathroom upstairs. With a branch off to the tub down here.”
“Nothing feeding the tub. I looked.”
“Huh,” Barlow said. “The mystery of the missing pipe. I’ll tell you, those holes are about the right size.”
“But where’s he working it?” Virgil asked. “There’s nothing here.”
“Been down the basement?”
“Not yet. I’m not sure there is one.”
They found a basement door, but there were no steps going down. “No steps, no power,” Barlow said. “That’s not a workshop, that’s a hole in the ground.”
“What the hell is the guy doing?” Virgil asked. He was lying on the floor, shining the flash down into the basement. He could see nothing but rock wall and dirt and more spiderwebs.
Going back through the rotten old house, Barlow borrowed the flash and carefully climbed a few steps toward the second floor, but stopped short when one of the steps started to give. “Nothing up here but dust and bat shit,” he said.
Outside again, they pounded the plywood window back in place. “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “That pipe was probably the right size… but you can get that pipe anywhere, just about. Any old house. They may have taken it out to sell it.”
“Yeah. But it’d be a coincidence.”
“I gotta think about it,” Virgil said, as they bounced back down the hill in the truck. “I can keep my two BCA guys, at least for a couple of days. If I can find a way to push Wyatt into going out to his workshop.”
“Push him?”
“Yeah. Give him a reason to worry about us. Get him out to where he works, to close it down, or bury it or whatever. Gotta think about it.”
23
Virgil did his best thinking in two places: in the shower, and in a boat. His boat, unfortunately, had been blown up, and he’d already had a shower. He wound up driving over to the PyeMart site, drove across it to the far side, got out his fly-fishing gear, including a pair of chest waders, and carried it through the brush down to the Butternut.
He spent an hour working down through the river’s shallows, casting down into the deeper pools from the upstream side, teasing the banks with a dry fly. He got a hit in the first two minutes, missed the fish.
And that was about it. The trout weren’t in the mood, but that really didn’t make a difference-it was the activity that counted, feeling his way down the cool, quiet stream. Forty-five minutes out, he came to a conclusion, sat on the bank and dug out his cell phone. He found John Haden’s phone number in his cell phone’s history, and called him.
Haden picked up on the fourth ring: “Virgil?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I need to talk to you about something… something I want you to do, that you might not want to do. But, it’s necessary. So, where you at?”
“You don’t need the ‘at’ at the end of that sentence,” Haden said. “If you’d asked, ‘Where are you?’ that would have been fine.”
“I’m colloquial,” Virgil said. “Can we get together? Now?”
“I’ve got a class in… forty-eight minutes. I sometimes run down to Starbucks about now, for a shot of caffeine.”
“Have you ever seen Wyatt there?”
“No, I never have,” Haden said.
“I’ll see you in fifteen minutes,” Virgil said.
He made another call on his way out-he called Shrake and said, “Don’t leave Wyatt. I got something working”-and made it to Starbucks in exactly fifteen minutes. Haden wasn’t there, and Virgil got his hot chocolate, got a table, opened his laptop and signed on. He found a note from Lee Coakley in his in-box; it said: I guess we’re done. I’m really sorry about that. I was thinking about it before I went to bed and all morning. I don’t think I want to talk to you again for a while. I mean, quite a while.-Lee
He thought, Well, shit. He had seen it coming, but hadn’t wanted it… although a voice in the back of his head added, Not yet. He needed time, he thought, to revise his entire philosophical approach to women…
Damnit: bummed him out.
“You look like somebody ran over your pet skunk.”
Virgil looked up and saw Deputy O’Hara peering down at him, a cup of coffee in her hand. He said, “What, no doughnut?”
“The doughnuts here suck,” she said. “If you want a good doughnut, you gotta go down to Bernie Anderson’s.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll write that on a piece of paper, when I get one,” he said.
“My, my,” she said, “you really are in an uproar. Well, if there’s anything I can do for you, hesitate to call.”
“I will,” he said, and she left. He watched her go past the window. Left in something of a huff, he thought. What, she maybe thought he was going to buy her that doughnut? Goddamn women.
He was almost finished with his hot chocolate, wondering if he’d been stood up, when Haden came through the door, in a hurry. “I’m running late,” he said, dropping his briefcase by Virgil’s foot. “Watch this, will you?”
He was back in four minutes with what Virgil thought might be a venti, if that was the extra-large. He pulled out a chair and sat down, asked, “All right: you want me to betray my old pal Bill Wyatt, in some way, is that right?”
“That’s not the word I would have chosen, but yeah,” Virgil said. “I don’t really want you to betray him, I want you to give him a little push so that if he’s the bomber, he’ll betray himself.”
Haden regarded him over the top of his coffee, for just a moment, and then said, “Huh. That sounds like a nice little piece of sophistry, but I’m listening.”
“I’ve found some things that make me think Wyatt is my guy. But: I need to get him to wherever he keeps his bomb-making stuff. I need to lay a hint on him that we’re coming. That we’ve got something.”
“Like what?”
“I’d like you to bump into him, and ask him if he knows about my list. Tell him that you’re on it, and that he’s on it, too. That somebody named both of you. Ask him if he knows who,” Virgil said. “Tell him that I came over and talked to you, but I backed off, and something I said suggested that I was going for a search warrant for somebody. That I knew something. Ask him if I’d talked to him yet.”
“I could bump into him, but I don’t know exactly how I could bring all that up, without sounding… phony,” Haden said.
“Sorta like I said it. Tell him that I came over, was impatient with you, then said I was wasting my time anyway. Say that I apologized, and confessed that somebody else was first on the list. That we had a tip, and we might know where the bomb stuff was.”
“Man, that sounds…”
“Well, hell, I don’t know. Make something up,” Virgil said. “You’re the big brain. But that’s the idea I want to get across. That we’ve got something. Not that he’s a target, just that he was on the list, and that we’ve got something.”
Haden took a gulp of coffee, swallowed, looked at his watch, and said, “I gotta run. I’ll think of something. I’ll call you when I’ve done it.”
When he was gone, Virgil called Shrake: “Still sitting there? Any movement?”
“Not a thing,” Shrake said. “On the other hand, I have learned that I’m probably turning my hips too soon, in my drive, which is why I slice. I need to shift my weight to my left before I start turning my hips. That gives me a natural inside-to-outside swing, which I’ve always needed.”
“I’m pleased you’ve had this learning experience,” Virgil said. “Listen, we’re going round-the-clock on Wyatt.
