Shock Wave

“I’m not that way.”
    Jenkins said, “Mmm. This beer is kinda skunky.”
    Shrake said to Virgil, “So walk us through this case. Lucas said you’d flown in some private luxury jet over to Michigan.”
    Virgil took them through it, and when he was done, Shrake said, “So let me get this straight: you can’t get anybody into this Pinnacle, but you think someone could have gotten down from the roof.”
    “But you can’t get on the roof,” Virgil said. “I even found a guy who’s a glider pilot, and he says you’d need at least three hundred yards to land a glider up there.... I asked about parachutes, but then you’d need a pilot who’s an accomplice.”
    Shrake unwrapped his index finger from his beer bottle, pointed it at Virgil and said, “So I guess it’s a safe bet that you never heard of motorized paragliders.”
    Virgil said, “Uh . . .”
    Jenkins said to his partner, “No more beer.”
     
     
    SHRAKE SAID, “I SAW A WI-FI label on the door, wonder if it’s real.” He groped around in his bag, pulled out a battered white MacBook, got online with Google, poked a few keys, called up a YouTube video, and turned the computer around so it faced Virgil.
    YouTube was running a Cadillac ad, followed by a four-minute video in which a guy drove into a parking lot and unpacked what looked like a parachute, laying it on the concrete. He then pulled on a backpack motor, with a small propeller in a metal cage, hooked himself to the parachute, and fired up the motor.
    The airstream from the propeller inflated the chute, and the guy took a few steps across the concrete pad and was in the air. He flew a few hundred feet in a circle, did a short running landing, killed the engine, put the backpack motor in the back of his truck, folded up the chute, packed it away, then threw it in his truck . . . and did it all in four minutes and ten seconds.
    “Holy shit,” Virgil said. “How did you know about this?”
    “I have wide interests,” Shrake said. “Also, insomnia.”
    Virgil spent another five minutes on Google, looking up paragliders, then gulped the rest of his beer and said, “I gotta go,” and he was gone. Outside, he got on the phone to Barlow: “Are you still at Erikson’s?”
    “Just left.”
    “Is Mrs. Erikson there?”
    “Was two minutes ago.”
    “Head back there. Keep her there. I’ve got a question,” Virgil said. “You might want to be there when I ask it.”
     
     
    BARLOW WAS STANDING on the front porch of the Erikson home, talking to Sarah Erikson, when Virgil arrived. Virgil said, “Mrs. Erikson, your husband has a propeller on the wall of his garage. What did that come from?”
    Her forehead furrowed: “He used to fly, a kind of ultralight thing. But he did something stupid and went up when it was too windy for him and he crashed. He broke his ankle, and got some burns on his back, from the engine exhaust pipe, and was lucky to get away with that. The propeller broke and the engine was wrecked. He quit flying, and put the propeller on the wall to remind himself not to do it anymore.”
    “Was his glider . . . did it have solid wings, or was it one of those paraglider things, like a parachute?”
    “He did both, ultralights and the paragliders,” she said. “It was his paraglider that he crashed. Why are you asking all of this stuff?”
    “Trying to work through some possibilities,” Virgil said. “Did he fly out of an airport? Or just off the street? Or what?”
    “Out of Jim Paulson’s Soaring Center, out on 17,” she said.
    “Thanks,” Virgil said. To Barlow: “Walk me back to my truck.”
    Barlow tagged along behind and asked, voice low, “What’s that about? Paragliders?”
    “Erikson flew paragliders. I just did some research on them. People have flown them to fifteen, sixteen thousand feet,” Virgil said. “You can land on a spot a few feet across, and you could get one in the back of a station wagon, no problem. They’re like a parachute with a motor, except they go up as well as down.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Barlow said. “Why didn’t we know about these things?”
    “ ’Cause they’re weird, and not a lot of people fly them,” Virgil said. “But they’re also cheap. You can get up in the air for a few thousand bucks, don’t need a license.”
    Barlow looked back at the house: “So it was Erikson.”
    “I’m going out to this soaring center—try to nail it down,” Virgil said.
     
     
    PAULSON’S SOARING CENTER was almost