Shock Wave

copy to Wyatt.”
    “That’s good. That should be plenty of time,” Virgil said.
    “You watching him?”
    “Trying to. He hasn’t shown up at home yet, but I’ve got two guys watching his place.”
    “Hope he hasn’t flown the coop. You get a key?”
    “No. I got sidetracked on this surveillance thing. Would you have time?”
    Barlow agreed to run down the landlord and get a key. Virgil would call him in the morning, as soon as Wyatt was at the college, where he was scheduled to teach back-to-back classes.
     
     
    JENKINS CALLED FIVE MINUTES LATER and said, “He’s home.”
    “I’ll be there in ten minutes—take your place,” Virgil said. “Pull out when you see me coming.”
    He drove to Wyatt’s—there was a car in the driveway, an older Prius—and then continued up the block, and when Shrake pulled away from the curb at the ball diamond, Virgil took his place. There was a game going on, town ball, fast-pitch, and Virgil was looking down at the diamond from the parking place.
    He half-watched the game, half-watched Wyatt’s place, and at the same time, dug his camera out of the bag in the backseat. He used a Nikon D3, with a 70-200 lens and a 2x Nikon teleconverter. When put together, the rig was heavy and long, but also reasonably sharp, and good in low light.
    He still had plenty of light, and he settled in to wait.
    One of the ball teams, Robert’s Bar and Grill, had a damn good pitcher; he was mowing down the other team, which was surviving less on pitching than on its fielding. In the two innings Virgil watched, Robert’s had runners in both innings, while the other team never did get a man to first.
    He was interested enough in the game that he almost missed Wyatt. He came out of the apartment carrying an oversized gym bag. A tall thin man, he was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, and moved like an athlete. He looked like the figure in the construction-site trailer videos. Virgil propped the barrel of the camera on the edge of the passenger-side window, and ran off a half-dozen shots as he walked around the car, threw the bag inside, then got in.
    Following him wasn’t a problem: Wyatt drove out to the highway, turned toward downtown, pulled into a strip mall, got his gym bag, and walked into a tae-kwon-do studio. Virgil called Shrake and made arrangements to switch off.
    The lesson had to last at least an hour, Virgil thought, so he took the time to load the photos into his laptop. When Shrake arrived, Virgil climbed into the backseat of Shrake’s Cadillac and passed the laptop across the seat. “Portraits,” he said.
    The other two looked at the photos for a minute, then Shrake said, “Got him. Want us to stay with him overnight?”
    “Ah . . . yeah.”
    “Shoot. Okay, are you in? Make it more tolerable,” Jenkins said.
    “I’m in. I’ll take the middle shift.” The middle shift was the bad one—four hours in the middle of the night.

    SHRAKE TOOK THE FIRST WATCH, following Wyatt from the tae kwon do studio to a supermarket, and then back to his house. He waited there until midnight, when Virgil took it. Virgil sat for four hours, until four o’clock. Jenkins arrived right at four, and Virgil went back to the Holiday Inn and crashed. Shrake, who’d gotten a full night’s sleep, took it at eight o’clock, and at nine-thirty, called Virgil and said, “It looks like he’s getting ready to move.”
    Virgil brushed his teeth and called Barlow: “He’s moving. Heading up to the college, we think.”
    “I talked to the landlord,” Barlow said. “Got a key, and scared the shit out of him. He won’t tell anyone.”
    “I’ll be at your hotel in five minutes. We can ride over in my truck—we don’t want a caravan.”
     
     
    VIRGIL PICKED UP BARLOW and one of his techs, whose name was Doug Mason, and they headed over to Wyatt’s. “Doug knows computers,” Barlow said.
    “Excellent,” Virgil said. They didn’t have much to say on the way over, and halfway there, Shrake called to say that Wyatt had just walked into the college carrying his briefcase.
    Wyatt lived on a working street, mostly younger families, and at ten-fifteen, the street was deserted. They climbed out, three men in jackets and slacks—Virgil was wearing a dress shirt and dark slacks, so he wouldn’t hit a neighbor’s inquiring eye quite so hard. Barlow had the key, and they walked up to the door and in. Just inside was a small square mudroom, with a stairway leading up, and a