Shock Wave

shirt.”
    Using their shirts as masks, they walked down the track to the county road; the patrol car turned into the track, and Virgil waved them off. The car stopped, and they walked down to it, and Virgil said, “Pop the back door, let us in. Keep your window up.”
    They got in the back, and Virgil told the deputy about the dust, and then about Wyatt.
    The deputy asked O’Hara, “So you guys think he’s dead?”
    “I think he was vaporized,” O’Hara said. “I think he somehow touched off everything he had left. It was like . . . it was like the movies they showed us in Iraq. It was like an IED.”
    Virgil asked the deputy to take him back to his truck. As they rode over, he called Shrake and said, “Wait a bit before you try to go up the hill. That dust cloud may be toxic. I’m parked on the highway. I’ll meet you there.”
     
     
    SHRAKE AND JENKINS ARRIVED two minutes later, and more patrol cars came along, and were waved off, and then a fire truck. Rubberneckers were piling up on the highway, and Virgil sent a couple of the cops to keep them moving. Then Ahlquist came in, and a moment later, Barlow. They stood on the shoulder of the road, watching the dissipating dust cloud, and Barlow said, “If it took out a whole house, that was probably the rest of it.”
    “That’s what I said,” O’Hara told him.
    Ahlquist asked, “No chance that he got out? That he set off a timer thing, then went out the far side and ran out through the corn to the other side?”
    Virgil said, “No.”
    Shrake said, “You sound pretty sure of that.”
    “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