Shock Wave

window openings. All the faucets and handles were missing from a sink basin and toilet, and there was nothing but a hole in the floor where a tub had once been. He stooped and shone his light into the hole, then up toward the ceiling. He called back, “Come in here a minute.”
    He heard Barlow clamber through the window, and called, “Back here.”
    Barlow stepped up beside him and looked in the door. “What am I looking at?”
    “Nothing,” Virgil said.
    “Nothing?”
    “Yeah. Look at the holes in the ceiling. Shouldn’t there be some kind of pipe feeding down to the toilet?”
    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
    V IRGIL 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