Shock Wave

the airport, doing nothing, for a couple thousand dollars a day. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in flying back to Grand Rapids, to take a look at the Pinnacle. See if you can figure out how this butthead got inside, for one thing. Maybe you’ll learn something. Barlow’s a smart guy, but he’s not somebody who can . . . put himself in a criminal’s place, so to speak.”
    Virgil said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea, if I come up dry here. But I’ve got more stuff to do here.”
    “We’re two hours from the airport at Grand Rapids. When you finish up tonight—you can’t be working it much after dark—you could get on the plane, have a nice little meal, a couple of beers, check out the building, bed down in the Pinnacle’s guest quarters, good as any hotel, get up early and be back here for breakfast.”
    “How many people are going in and out of the building?” Virgil asked.
    “A lot,” Pye admitted. “There’s right around twenty-five hundred employees, and we have another big administrative site over in Grand Rapids, and those people are coming and going all the time. But we have security. We have a card check at the door, we have cameras, we have guards all over the first couple of floors.”
    “Did the feds go through the photography?”
    “Yeah, they had a couple of guys working it, but it didn’t come to anything.”
    “Let me think about it,” Virgil said.
    “You got the plane if you want it,” Pye said. “I hope you take it.”
     
     
    VIRGIL WENT OUT to the PyeMart site and found two deputies sitting on the same two folding chairs, and a patrol car, but no crime-scene technician. The senior cop told Virgil, “The one guy is helping Barlow at the car-bombing scene, and the other went out to the limo driver’s house, to see if there’s anything around where the car was parked. So, we’re just sitting here.”
    “Nice day for it, anyway,” Virgil said. And it was. He went back to his truck, put on hiking boots, got a hat and his Nikon, and headed across the construction pad. Given the location of the trailer, and with the binocular flash coming from the southeast, the watcher, whoever he was, must have been in a fairly narrow piece of real estate to the left of the main building pad.
    Virgil walked to the edge of the construction site—nobody working, construction had been halted until the ATF gave the go-ahead—and plunged into the brush. He hadn’t gone far, quartering back and forth through the scrub, before he found a game trail that led away to the south. Fifty yards south, a gopher mound that overlapped the trail showed the edge of a human footprint. Virgil stepped carefully around it, then took a photo, using a dollar bill for scale, and moved on south.
    He’d looked at the site on a Google satellite photo: a loop of the Butternut cut a channel in the rising land to a point that the Google measuring tape said was about six hundred and fifty yards from the highway, and directly south of the PyeMart site. The game trail went that way, and Virgil followed it, looking for more prints. He found a couple of indentations, but nothing that would help identify a shoe.
    He’d been walking for fifteen minutes or so, brush and weeds up higher than his head, following the game trail, slowly, when he broke into an open grassy slope that went down to the Butternut.
    The river—creek—wasn’t much more than thirty or forty feet wide at that point, and shallow, with riffles showing where the water was running over stone. Both above and below the riffles, broad pools cut into the banks. A hundred yards upstream, a man in a weirdlooking white suit, broad-brimmed white hat, and waders was working deeper water with a fly-casting rod. Virgil went that way, and when he’d covered about half the ground, the man snapped the rod up, and Virgil saw that he had a fish on the line, and stopped to watch.
    The man’s rod was long and slender and caramel-colored, and he played the fish with great delicacy. At some point, Virgil realized that the rod was made of bamboo—something you didn’t see much of—and the pale gold fishing line was probably silk.
    The man brought in the trout, landing it with a small net that he unclipped from an equipment belt. He looked around, as if for witnesses, spotted Virgil, and held up the trout—it was perhaps a foot long, not a bad fish, for a trout, in the Butternut—and then slipped it back in the water.
    Virgil continued toward him, and the