Shock Wave

and Virgil dropped the door again.
    They did a quick walk-through, found a small shop in the basement, with the bodies of three gorgeous electric guitars hanging from the rafters.
    “That’s great work,” one of the techs said. “This guy knows what he’s doing, guitar-wise.”
    “He’s got everything he needs to make the bombs,” the other tech said. “If he’s the guy, this is where he made the bombs.”
    They had a wheeled cart full of electronic equipment, which they’d brought into the kitchen from the garage. Now, they went back up the steps, picked it up, and carried it down the stairs. “Tell you something in five minutes,” Barlow said.
    While the techs ran some preliminary tests, Virgil and O’Hara cruised the main floor. Haden was a neat man. Virgil pointed out that he’d vacuumed two of the rugs in a way that left the short nap standing upright, “So that when we walk on it, we leave footprints.”
    “We’ll re-vacuum before we leave,” she said. “Of course, we’ll be clothed.”
     
     
    THEY TOOK TEN MINUTES working from his bedroom outward, and found nothing that would point to him as a bomber; not that it was all uninteresting. They found a box that once contained a gross of ribbed, lubricated condoms, with maybe thirty left; and two vibrators, including one with a wicked hook on it. In a storage closet, they found a PSE X-Force Vendetta bow with a five-pin sight and a Ripcord fall-away arrow rest, and a batch of high-end carbon-fiber arrows, five of them set up with Slick Trick magnum four-bladed arrowheads.
    In a backpack hanging in the same storage closet as the bow, they found a range of deer-hunting gear. Two bottles of scent-killing detergent sat on a shelf.
    “Now,” Virgil said, in his best pedantic tone, “what’s wrong with this whole scene?”
    “I dunno,” O’Hara said. “I woulda got a Solocam, myself, but that PSE’s a pretty good bow.”
    “What’s wrong, my red-haired friend, is that he’s got all this scent killer, but where’s the camo he’s gonna spray it on, or wash it with?”
    “There is no camo,” she said.
    “Because he got rid of it, because he read in the paper that we found that video recorder,” Virgil said. “There are no bow hunters without camo. Most of them wear it when it’s anything less than ninety degrees, just to prove that they’re bow hunters. His mistake was, instead of just throwing away the old stuff, he should have also bought some new camo pattern that wasn’t Realtree, run it through the washer a few times, then hung it up here. That would counter what was seen on the video.”
    “I believe you,” O’Hara said. “I also believe that if you made that argument in court, the judge would hit you on the head with her gavel.”
     
     
    THEY HEARD BARLOW running up the stairs. They stepped out to look, and Barlow said, “Okay. He’s the guy. We’ve got molecules of Pelex in the basement. But . . .”
    “I hate that. I hate when people say ‘but,’ ” Virgil said.
    Barlow ran on: “But . . . what he did was he scrubbed up the whole basement with some kind of strong chemical cleaners. You can still see the marks on the floor. We don’t have anything physical except our test, which is good, but a defense chemist could make the argument that all we’re picking up is some chemical signature of something used in the cleaners.”
    “Is that possible?” Virgil asked.
    “Unfortunately, yes,” Barlow said. “I don’t believe it, in this case, but we don’t know what cleaners he used. We need to check that now.”
    “Do we have enough to bust him?”
    Barlow stroked his mustache a few times and then said, “It’d be marginal. Just the fact that he scrubbed up the basement in a rental house would tell you something. We did get that Pelex signature. If we had an aggressive prosecutor . . . and then, whatever Mrs. Wyatt could tell us, if she’d tell us anything.”
    “All right. We’re about done up here and we didn’t find much to help. Just another negative,” Virgil said. He told Barlow about the missing camo.
    “What does it all mean?” O’Hara asked.
    “It means we may have to go to my Plan B,” Virgil said.
    “ Your plan B?” Hands on her hips. “Wait a minute, buster . . .”

27
    J OHN HADEN FOUND HIMSELF in something of a trap. Not a legal trap, but a relationship trap. Sally Wyatt had come over and had thrown her . . . psyche . . . at him, after she’d come back from the scene of her