“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.”
Virgil was tired of taking photos of body parts, but there wasn’t anyone else to do it, and for what it might somehow be worth, he kept at it, as more and more body parts were found. Wyatt’s head was eventually found, only seventy feet from the house, under a piece of the roof. There were no features remaining: nothing but a bloody skull.
Virgil thought, F8 and be there, and took the shot.
“Must’ve gone straight up,” Jenkins said. “Like a baseball.”
“Another cop said like a basketball,” Virgil said. He turned away from the mess, sick at heart. “Doesn’t look like any kind of sport, at all.”
A patrol car arrived, in a two-car set with a civilian car, a Toyota Corolla, and a woman got out of the Corolla and looked up the hill.
Ahlquist said, “Mrs. Wyatt. It’s Jennifer, I think. I better get down there to meet her.” He turned to a deputy: “I want tarps or something over all the body remains. There’s nothing for her to identify, and I don’t want her to see the scraps.” When the deputy seemed to hesitate, Ahlquist snapped, “Get going! Get going! ”
Barlow came up and said, “We’ll have to do DNA. Just to make sure.”
O’Hara was getting testy: “I told you: he didn’t have time to get out.”
Barlow shook his head. “Time is strange, after something like that. You think it was two seconds, but you were almost killed. Things speed up under those conditions. If it were ten seconds-”
“Then where did the body come from?” O’Hara demanded.
“That’s something we’d have to determine,” Barlow said. O’Hara said, “Oh, bullshit,” and Barlow put up his hands. “I think it’s ninetynine percent you’re right. But, we check.”
Virgil walked around with his camera, shaking his head, and O’Hara asked, “Are you all right?”
“No,” he said.
Ahlquist and Jennifer Wyatt walked around the house, talking, and Wyatt began to cry, and Ahlquist put an arm around her shoulders. Virgil watched. Barlow came up and said, “Her house and his apartment are both crime scenes. I’m talking to my ADA to make sure we don’t need search warrants, and if we do, to get them. We’re going down and taking her house apart.”
“I’ll come along, too,” O’Hara said.
“Ah, you can go on home,” Virgil said. “Get cleaned up. You’re sorta a mess.”
“Nope. I’m going,” she said. “Either I ride with you or I’ll ride with somebody else.”
“Better go with somebody else,” he said. She stalked off and Virgil looked at the weeping Mrs. Wyatt, and told Shrake and Jenkins, “You guys hang tight. I gotta get out of here and get something to eat.”
“To eat,” Shrake said, doubtfully.
“Yeah. Food,” Virgil said.
He told Barlow that he was going, and that he would e-mail all the photos that evening; and he walked down to his truck.
Bunson’s was almost empty. He got the French toast-it was still more or less morning-and told the waitress to keep bringing the Diet Cokes, and he sat and worked it through.
One thing didn’t fit, and he couldn’t make it fit. He closed his eyes and took himself back to the Pye Pinnacle visit. Thought about all the explanations, about the dead and wounded, about the boardroom explosion, about the ludicrous sight of the birthday pies smeared all over the ceiling…
He thought about how Pye had a “sanctum sanctorum” where he worked out his problems, and where not even the cleaning lady was welcome. Not that the cleaning lady would have been there, early on a Monday morning.
So here was a question: Why didn’t the bomber, coming down from above, put the bomb in Pye’s office? If he’d used some kind of mousetrap trigger, and stuck the bomb in the desk leg hole, he would have gotten Pye. Why would he do something so uncertain as to stick the bomb in the credenza? In the credenza, any number of things could have led to its discovery.
He thought about it, and thought about it, and eventually came up with an answer, in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Once you’ve eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever was left had to be the answer.
What was left was simple enough, Virgil thought. It should, he thought, have been apparent to anyone with half a brain.
Even with half a brain, Virgil thought he was probably correct.
He made a phone call to St. Paul, to Sandy, the researcher, told her what he wanted, and asked her to make some phone calls.
He finished the french toast, and the waitress came over, a young girl with dark hair and big black eyes, and smiled at him and said, “You’re Virgil Flowers.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Your two friends said I should ask you why you’re called ‘that fuckin’ Flowers.’”
“They said you should ask because they’re assholes,” Virgil said.
She was taken aback, a stricken look on her face, and Virgil touched her arm as she turned away and said, “Wait, look… I’m sorry. I was up at that bomb this morning, and I’m still a little shook up. That’s why I’m sitting here stuffing my face.”
She put her hand to her face and said, “Oh, jeez…” and, “You’ve got stuff all in your hair, is that from…”
“Yeah, it is. And really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk,” he said. “They call me that because… well, because I’m so good with women.”
Now she ventured a tiny smile, and said, “That’s what I thought,” and she left him.
Virgil got an address for Wyatt’s house from the sheriff’s dispatcher, went that way, and found Barlow’s truck outside, and a couple sheriff’s cars. Barlow was inside, with O’Hara and two other deputies. He’d found some bow-
