Shock Wave

guess.”
    “Was the camera big or small?”
    “Oh, you know, it was like the cameras you see in stores,” Sullivan said. “Not very big. It was round, white, had some LEDs in it.”
    “Was it in a place where the guy would see it right away?” Virgil asked. “Or was it out of sight?”
    “It was up in a corner over Gil’s desk, where it could see the door. It didn’t jump right out at you, but if you looked around, you wouldn’t have any trouble finding it.... But after you found it, it’d take a while to find the recorder. That was in a cabinet on the floor, and it was locked shut.”
    “But he found it.”
    “I guess. The ATF guys say it wasn’t there.”
    “I wonder if he’d been inside the trailer? You know, at some earlier date?” Virgil asked.
    “Mm, there were guys in and out—city inspectors and stuff—but it wasn’t really a place to hang out. It was too small. Mostly a place where you had some power, and you could get out of the dirt and noise and make phone calls and run your laptop.”
    “Is this going someplace?” Sullivan’s wife asked.
    “I don’t know,” Virgil said.
    Sullivan said, “Well, if you want to look at the whole video setup, there’s a new trailer on-site, brought up from one of our construction centers in Omaha. Donny Clark, he’s my replacement, he’ll be out there, he could show you.”
    “Don Clark . . . good luck to him, and God bless him,” Sullivan’s wife said.
     
     
    VIRGIL DROVE OUT to the construction site and found Don Clark sitting in the new trailer, working on a laptop. A burly blond man with a curly blond mustache, he was as tall as Virgil but twice as wide. He took Virgil down the length of the new construction trailer and popped open a cabinet door. “There it is,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
    The server was an aluminum box with a couple of switches and an LCD panel. Virgil picked it up: four to six pounds, he thought. The camera was mostly plastic, and maybe weighed two pounds.
    He left Clark and repeated his walk across the construction site and down through the brush and weeds to the river. The most obvious path came out at one of the pools where Peck had been fishing; nobody fishing at the moment. He got right down by the black water, startled a green heron out of a tangle of weeds, probably a nest. Couldn’t see anything.
    Thought about it.
    Cameron Smith had said that there was a bridge to the west, and not too far. Virgil followed the riverside trail, a dusty rut off a gravel county road. There were two more pools between the first one he’d visited and the bridge. He stood on the bridge looking into the water, then got on his cell phone and called Ahlquist.
    “You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn’t come up?”
    “Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There’s a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they’ve got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”
    “How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.
    “Go to Butternut Scuba—they’re open every day. What’re you up to?”
    “Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”
    “What?”
    “Talk to you later,” Virgil said.

17
    B UTTERNUT SCUBA WAS a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.
    When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank—I’m back here.”
    Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”
    “That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”
    Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was