Shock Wave

and I’m not investigating him. He’s a witness and he has no right of silence. So, I’m happy enough to let you sit there, but if you interrupt, I’ll have to ask you to leave. Okay?”
    The lawyer said four or five hundred words, which Virgil waved off. “Fine, fine. But if you interrupt, I’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for interfering with a police officer, even though doing that would be a pain in the ass, and handcuff you out in the hallway until I’m done here, and then we’ll both go down to the jail. Okay? Just shut up, and let me do my job.”
    The woman said, “I don’t think you can talk to a lawyer like that.”
    “Of course I can,” Virgil said. “I just did. Now, Mr. Sullivan . . .”
    Sullivan had one thing.
    He couldn’t remember the explosion, though he could remember seeing Kingsley’s head. He didn’t see anything suspicious around the work site, except the one thing.
    “The one thing was, there was a guy who was watching us through binoculars. We all saw him, once or twice. We joked about it. He was off behind the site, between the site and the river. I only actually saw him once. He was pretty far away, and I saw more movement than I did his body. He was wearing camo, I think, which seemed weird to me, because I don’t think there are any hunting seasons going on. It made me wonder if he’d been watching us regular-like. The way I saw him was that it was in the evening, and the sun was going down to the northwest, and he was south of us, and I saw the flash off the binocular lenses. I saw the flash two different days, but the second day, I never saw the man, just a flash from down in the bush.”
    “Down in the bush,” Virgil said. “He was below you?”
    “Yeah. There’s heavy brush back there, but the land generally falls away from the store, toward the river,” Sullivan said. “That’s why these people think the parking lot will drain into the Butternut, because the land falls away. We’ve got retention systems and everything else and I was telling—”
    Suddenly his eyes went wide, the blood drained from his face, and he turned his face to the woman and groaned, “Mary, my God . . .”
    The woman dropped the magazine and stood and then bent over him and said, “It’s okay, Mike, you’re just fine, Mike.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ, his eyes are looking right at me but they’re all white, looking right at me . . .”
     
     
    THE FLASHBACK LASTED only a few seconds, but there was no question of its reality: Sullivan appeared to be slipping into shock, and Virgil sent the lawyer to find a doctor.
    “I don’t think we should talk about this anymore,” Sullivan’s wife said.
    Virgil nodded: “I think you’re right.”
    Back outside, Virgil thought about what Sullivan had said, and decided to go look in the brush behind the PyeMart site. Maybe he’d find a matchbook from the café where the bomber hung out.
    Or not.

7
    B EFORE DRIVING OUT to the PyeMart site, Virgil stopped at the scene of the limo bombing. The twisted vehicle was still in the middle of the street, and Barlow was working on it with one of the ATF technicians. Virgil ducked under the crime-scene tape and asked Barlow, “Anything?”
    “The usual. Did find pieces of the pipe, that galvanized plumbing stuff, but finding a fingerprint . . .” He shook his head.
    “A pipe dream,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah.”
    Virgil filled him in on his morning, and Barlow said that Sullivan’s symptoms weren’t unusual. “People see other people shot to death, and it affects them, but not the way a nearby bomb does. The Israelis have all kinds of studies on it—there’s actually a physical impact, from the shock wave, and then the psychological aftereffects. Any of it can kill you. Bombing victims have an elevated rate of suicide . . . they can’t deal with it, a bomb.”
    Willard Pye and his assistant were still on the scene, and Pye came over and asked Virgil for a minute of his time. They stepped away from Barlow, who went back to work, digging out the inside of the limousine, scrap by scrap.
    Pye said, “I’ve decided to stick around for a couple more days, but I’ve had my assistant researching you, and what she found out, it’s pretty interesting. You might be my guy.”
    “Mr. Pye—”
    Pye made a shushing hand gesture and said, “Just listen for a minute. I’m gonna stay out here and watch them work this. In the meantime, my jet airplane is sitting out there at