Shock Wave

16

The next morning, quote, the shit hit the fan, unquote. Virgil had expected that there might be some reaction, but he hadn’t expected the intensity of it. The phone rang the first time a few minutes after seven o’clock, and the Star Tribune reporter Ruffe Ignace asked, “Why are you asleep? I’m not. I just had a fourteenyear-old assistant city editor snatch my ass out of bed because you did some kind of cockamamy survey. What the hell are you doing, Virgil?”

Virgil told him in a few brief sentences, and Ignace said, “That would almost make sense, if we didn’t have a Constitution.”

“What part of the Constitution does this violate?” Virgil asked.

“It must violate some part,” Ignace said. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia later.”

“Call me back when you find the violation,” Virgil said. “Right now, I’m going back to bed.”

“Not for long. They got morning news cycles on TV, and they are gonna be on you like Holy on the Pope. The shit has hit the fan.”

“You think?”

“Of course I think. I’m about to call up the governor and ask him what the hell you’re doing,” Ignace said. “You know, with the Constitution and all.”

“Can we go off the record for a moment?” Virgil asked.

“Just for a minute.”

“Good. Fuck you, Ruffe. I’m going back to bed.”

The Sheriff called eight minutes later and said, “Virgil? Man, you gotta get up. The shit has hit the fan. They’re saying we’re running a witch hunt.”

“Earl, could we go off the record for a minute?”

When Virgil got down to the courthouse, there were three TV vans in the parking lot. He went in a side entrance, through the jail, and down to Ahlquist’s office. Ahlquist said, “We’ve got a lot to talk about, but let me say, the goddamn Fox reporter is not believable.”

“Why?”

“Because everything jiggles,” he said, astonished by the thought. “ Everything. I’m afraid to go on with her, because I’d forget how to speak in English. To say nothing of having a boner like a hammer handle.”

“You gotta model yourself on me, Earl,” Virgil said. “Mind like moon. Mind like water.”

“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like more hippie shit, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the Fox reporter.”

“I’ll handle it,” Virgil said.

The news people were stacked up in the open lobby. Virgil went out, trailed by Ahlquist, and stood on the second step of a stairway and asked for everybody’s attention. He introduced himself, and a bunch of lights clicked on, and a triangle of on-camera reporters moved to the front. At the very tip of the spearhead was the Fox reporter, whom Virgil had seen on television, but had not experienced in person.

As Ahlquist had said, she jiggled even when she was standing still. She had a flawless, pale complexion with just a hint of rose in her cheeks, and green eyes, and real blond hair. She got along with just a touch of lipstick. She did not, Virgil thought, appear to be from this planet.

She asked the first question, and her teeth were perfectly regular, and a brilliant white, and her voice a husky paean to sex: “Agent Flowers, isn’t this questionnaire a violation of the Constitution?”

Virgil wanted to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” but, for a few seconds, he forgot how to speak English.

His pause was taken for either guilt or stupidity, or she was simply familiar with the reaction, and she enlarged on her question: “The American Constitution?”

Virgil leaned toward her and said, “I’m glad you specified ‘American.’ No, it’s not. I’d suggest you read that document. Nowhere does it mention either surveys or questionnaires.”

“You don’t have to get snippy about it,” she said.

A guy from public radio, edging into the camera’s line of sight, and maybe going for a little frottage on the Fox reporter, along with the validation of TV time, asked, “But aren’t you essentially establishing a state-sponsored witch hunt?”

“No. I looked up ‘witch hunt’ in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, before I came over here,” Virgil said. “I believe I’m quoting verbatim when I say that a witch hunt is defined as, one, a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft, and two, the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views. Are you suggesting that we are doing one of those things?”

“Not exactly,” he conceded.

“Not at all,” Virgil said. “All we’re doing is surveying responsible citizens to see if they have any ideas who might have been involved in murdering two people, injuring two more, and barely missing several more. The surveys can’t be made public because they are anonymous, and it wouldn’t be ethical to make anonymous accusations public; and since a number of people refused to participate, by not returning letters, even we don’t know whether a particular individual participated or not. We won’t be making public the names of any of those mentioned in the survey.”

The public radio guy: “But somehow… it feels like a witch hunt.”

“That’s because we’ll be looking at people against whom we have no evidence at all,” Virgil said. “But, if you’ll excuse me for making the point, that’s what a detective always does, in any kind of complicated case. You go around and ask people who they think did it, whatever it was. Often, just walk up and down the street, knocking on doors. This is just like that, except that we have to move faster. This bomber is now turning out a bomb a day. Another thing: a witch hunt operates on fear and emotion and rumor. We have to have definitive proof before we can accuse somebody. We’re not going to indict somebody on somebody else’s say-so. We need to find explosives, blasting caps, bomb parts, and motive. We’re asking people where we should look. In a small city like this, where most people know most other people, we have hopes that we’ll pinpoint some good suspects.”

They went on for a while, and Virgil outlined what he thought about the bomber, and the TV people finally went away, apparently satisfied. Back in Ahlquist’s office, the sheriff said, “You see? She never stopped jiggling.” And, he added, “You’re goldarned near as good on TV as I am.”

Virgil got Ahlquist to assign him an assistant, Dick Pruess, and between them, they began running the list of names through the National Crime Information Center. Lyle McLachlan, the leading candidate in the survey, had thirty NCIC returns, varying from resisting arrest without violence at the bottom end, to felony theft and aggravated assault at the high end. He was thirty-eight, and had spent fourteen years in prison.

“Not him,” Pruess said. “Be nice if it was, but the guy can barely make a sandwich. He could never figure this out.”

They had seven more hits among the twenty names they checked, fewer than Virgil expected, given that all those named were, in the mind of some sober citizen, capable of multiple murder.

Ahlquist came by and looked at the list, and the hits, and said, “The problem I see with most of the hits is that they involve guys right at the bottom of things-they’ve hardly got a stake in the town, so why would they do something as weird as attack a PyeMart? If anything, these guys would want to take revenge on the town, not defend it.”

Of the two people with direct ties to Butternut Tech, one came back clean, the other had a drunk driving conviction. The first one had served in the army, and Virgil called a BCA researcher and asked her to get in touch with the army and see if he’d had any training in explosives.

They were still looking for returns when Davenport called and said, “Your press conference made all the news shows. You looked pretty straight, with that black-on-black coat and shirt.”

“Pain in the ass,” Virgil said.

“I’ve got a bet for you-and I’ll take either side,” Davenport said. “Do you think only one, or both, of the major papers will use the phrase ‘witch hunt’ in an editorial tomorrow?”

“Both,” Virgil said.

“Damnit, I was hoping you’d pick ‘one.’ ”

“I can’t help it, Lucas. I’m doing the best I can,” Virgil said.

“I know it, but everybody’s watching now. It’d be best if you wrapped this up in the next couple of days.”

“Did Ruffe call the governor and ask him about the Constitution?”

“Everybody called the governor,” Davenport said. “I think this is what us liberals call ‘a teaching moment.’ ”

Good Thunder called: “I took down Pat Shepard this morning, early, because he had a summer school class. He freaked. He cried. You know what? This isn’t going to be any fun.”

“It never is, when you go after people who think of themselves as honest, upright citizens,” Virgil said. “Because down in their heart, they feel the guilt.”

“And because he’s going to lose both his wife and his job.”

“Yeah, it is brutal,” Virgil said.

“I’m waiting for you to do the ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.’ ”

“Be a long wait,” Virgil said. “Will he flip?”

“Yeah, I think so. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as his wife suggested he’d be,” Good Thunder said. “In fact, I’m a little worried. I don’t want to find him at the end of a rope, or with his head in the oven.”

“Where is he?” Virgil asked.

“Last time I saw him, he was with his lawyer. I’ve told him that he’ll be arrested, but I haven’t arrested him yet. I’ve laid out the deal. They’re talking, and if he’s not crazy, he’ll go for it. We’re going to need the wire, and the monitoring gear.”

“I’ll talk to Davenport,” Virgil said.

“Boy, that survey thing… the shit really hit the fan, huh? Pardon my French.”

Virgil and good thunder were talking about who they’d go after first, if Shepard cooperated, to see if they could triangulate on the mayor, when Ahlquist ran in the door and blurted, “We’ve got another one, another bomb.”

Virgil said into the phone, “Shirley, I gotta go. Earl says we’ve got another bomb.”

“Talk to you later,” she said. “Be careful.”

Ahlquist was in a hurry. “Follow me out of the lot. You got lights?”

“Yeah.”

They trotted out of the courthouse and into the parking lot, and Virgil saw a TV truck moving fast. The TV already knew. “Okay, stick close, we’re going west and south,” Ahlquist said.

“What’s the deal?”

“Something different-could even be a break,” Ahlquist said. “The bomb blew in a guy’s garage. Henry Erikson. Big trout guy, one of the loudmouths. Not a bad guy, but pretty hard-core. Car salesman out at the Chevy dealer.”

“I’ll follow you,” Virgil said, and jogged to the truck.

They got across town in a hurry, but never did catch the TV truck, which, when they arrived, was already unloading behind a couple of wooden barricades that said “Butternut Public Works.” Ahlquist didn’t slow much for the barricades, just put two wheels of his truck up on the curb and went around, and Virgil did the same. The Erikson house was a long half-block down from the barricades, where three deputies, including O’Hara, were standing in the yard talking, and looking into a wrecked garage, with a twisted SUV sitting inside. Two fire trucks were parked in the street, but there was no fire.

A scent of explosive and shattered pine and drywall lingered in the air, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He and Ahlquist headed across the lawn.

O’Hara said, as they came up, “We got a situation here. Henry was hurt bad. He could die. It looks like the bomb was under his car seat, and blew when he sat down.”

“No fire?”

“No fire, the scene is still pretty much intact,” O’Hara said.

Ahlquist: “When was this?”

“Fifteen minutes ago,” O’Hara said, looking at her watch. “The first guys were mostly interested in getting Henry out of here, getting the ambulance, but one of them…” She turned, looking for the right deputy, spotted him and yelled, “Hey, Jim. Jimmy. Come over here.”

The deputy was a young, fleshy guy wearing mirrored sunglasses, with a white sidewall haircut, and he hurried over.

O’Hara said, “Tell them what you saw in there.”

The deputy said, “Erikson was a mess, he was lying on the ground by the wall over there. We did what we could, got the ambulance going. Don’t think he’s going to make it, though, looked like both legs are gone, looked like his balls… looked like stuff blew up into his stomach…”

“Anyway,” O’Hara said, prompting him.

“Anyway, when he was gone, I was looking around the mess in there, and noticed over there by his workbench, it’s all blown up, but there’s a pipe over there. It looks like the pipes that were used in the bombs.”

Ahlquist: “You mean… from the bomb? Or another pipe?”

“It looks like an unused pipe from these bombs. I saw the piece of pipe that the feds had, and it looks like the same pipe.”

“Let’s see it,” Virgil said, and, as they stepped toward the wrecked garage, “Did you touch it?”

“Absolutely not. We knew you’d want prints or DNA. As soon as I saw it, I cleared everybody away.”

Virgil nodded. “You did good.”

The Deputy took them into the garage, close to the front fender of the wrecked truck, and pointed out the pipe: it was lying against one wall of a cabinet, where the cabinet intersected with a workbench. A trashed table saw was overturned on the other side of the bench, along with a toolbox and a bunch of tools. The place smelled of blood-a lot of blood, a nasty, cutting odor, like sticking your head in the beef case at a butcher shop.

The pipe looked right.

The deputy said, “We’re trying to find his wife, but a neighbor said she’s in the Cities, buying some fabric. She’s a decorator. We haven’t been able to get in touch.”

Ahlquist said, “Speaking of the feds, here they are.”

Barlow was hurrying up the driveway, O’Hara at his elbow. Inside the garage, Virgil pointed, wordlessly, and Barlow moved up to the pipe, peering at it, and then into it, and said, “There’s something in there. I think we might have another bomb. Better get everybody out of here until we can have a tech look at it.”

Virgil asked, “Is this the guy?”

“I’d be willing to bet that the pipe is right,” Barlow said, as they backed away. “This kind of thing happens, too, especially with new guys. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They screw something up, and boom. ”

O’Hara stepped away to take a cell phone call, and Barlow said, “The guy’s got a lot of tools.”

Virgil nodded. The garage was double-deep, three cars wide. The back half had been set up as a workshop, with storage cabinets in the corner and a long stretch of Peg-Board on the back wall. There were a half-dozen old Snap-on tool calendars on one wall-collector’s items, now-photos of cars, an airplane propeller with one end broken off, a bunch of blocks of wood, most with oil on them, a half-dozen cases of empty beer bottles along one wall.

The back wall was taken up with mechanics and woodworking tools, the side wall with garden implements. Most of the tools still hung on the Peg-Board, though some had been knocked to the floor.

“The question is,” Barlow said, “with this kind of setup, why’d he go to the college to cut that pipe? He could have cut it all right here.”

“Good question,” Virgil said. “But Jesus, talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

“I hate gift horses,” Barlow said. “Half the time, they wind up biting you on the ass.”

O’Hara came back: “Erikson died. Never even got him on the operating table.”

“Ah, man,” Virgil said.

Then Barlow said, “Hey…” He stepped down the length of the garage and pointed to the floor. He was pointing at a thin silver cylinder a couple of inches long, with two wires coming out the bottom-it looked like a stick man with thin legs. “We got a blasting cap.”

“Okay,” Virgil said.

They looked at it for a moment and Barlow half-tiptoed around the rest of the garage, looking at the debris, and under it, and then Virgil asked, “How many bombers are married?”

“I don’t know,” Barlow said. “Some of them. Most of them, not-that’s what I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

“I always had the idea that they were like crazy loners, working in their basements.”

“Not always.”

“I really don’t like this,” Virgil said. “The guy’s been so smart, and then he blows himself up?”

“You hardly ever meet any longtime bombers who aren’t missing a few chunks, a couple fingers,” Barlow said. “They fool around with the explosive. Sometimes they blow themselves up.”

“With Pelex?”

“Not so much with Pelex,” Barlow admitted. “Pelex is really pretty safe, you don’t even have to be especially careful with it. But if you’d already rigged it as a bomb, with a sensitive switch…”

One of the ATF techs came up carrying a tool chest, and Barlow pointed him at the pipe. “Take a look in there with your flashlight. Don’t touch it. But is it a bomb? Is it wired?”

The tech took a heavy LED flash from his box and stepped over to the pipe, bent over it, and shone the flash down the interior. Then he stepped away: “Better get Tim over here, with his gear.”

“It’s a bomb?” Virgil asked.

“It looks like it’s stuffed with Pelex. I don’t see any wiring, but I can’t see in the bottom end-it could be booby-trapped.”

Barlow moved everybody away from the garage, then asked Virgil, “Is Erikson’s name on your list? In your survey?”

“No, he’s not,” Virgil said. “But I can’t tell you what that means. Is he in your bomber database?”

“Give me two minutes on that,” he said.

“I’ll get to the NCIC,” Virgil said. He walked to his truck, sat in the driver’s seat, and called Davenport, told him what had happened. Davenport tracked down their researcher, who found Erikson’s driver’s license, and used the birth date to check his records with the National Crime Information Center.

Davenport came back and said, “She says he’s clean.”

“Goddamnit. This complicates things,” Virgil said. “We’ve got two TV trucks here now, and they’re going to start saying that we might have gotten the bomber. Maybe we did, but I don’t believe it yet.”

“What about your survey?” Davenport asked. “You started pushing the list yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll do that now.”

Barlow came back. “He’s not in our database.”

“Nothing with the NCIC,” Virgil said.

Neighbors were starting to gather on the lawns adjacent to Erikson’s house, and Virgil left Barlow and walked over to two women. “You guys friends with the Eriksons?”

“Is he really the bomber?” one woman asked.

“Well, a bomb went off, but we really don’t know anything yet,” Virgil said.

“Is he going to make it?” the second woman asked.

Virgil shook his head: “No.”

“Oh, God, poor Sarah,” the first woman said.

“That’s his wife?”

“Yes. No children, thank God. I can’t believe he’s the bomber.”

“Why not?” Virgil asked.

“Well, because… he’s a car salesman kind of guy, he’s always running around yelling and waving his arms, but he’s a nice man. I can’t believe he’d bomb people.”

“Not exactly a loner, like you hear about,” said the second one. “He was always talking to everybody, sort of bs-ing around the neighborhood. He’d fix lawn mowers-everybody’s lawn mowers. Bring him a broken lawn mower, he’d get it running like new.”

“Thanks.” Virgil shook his head and walked back to Barlow and the tech, who were standing behind the wrecked car, looking at the backseat. Virgil asked them, “Did you guys see any other bomb-making stuff in the garage? More pipe, switches, blasting caps…”

“Just the pipe and the blasting cap,” Barlow said.

The tech said, “But it’s the same kind of blasting cap that was stolen from the quarry.”

“Yeah? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They had a case, Virgil thought, as he watched the two ATF men prowl the perimeter of the explosion. Erikson apparently had the motive-the pollution of the trout stream-and he had the mechanical skills, judging from his garage workshop.

But it was all very pat. One bomb went off. One bomb remained in evidence, and one blasting cap. No more pipe, no more explosive, no more blasting caps. Just enough to hang him, without much diminishing the bomber’s stockpile of explosive… if the bomber was indeed somebody else.

One thing I can check, Virgil thought. He found Ahlquist and said, “Where’s the Chevy dealer?”

The Chevy dealer was five minutes away, on Highway 71: Virgil went that way, in a hurry, pulled into the lot and dumped the truck in a visitor’s space. Inside, he showed his ID to the receptionist and asked to see the manager: “Is this about Henry?” she asked.

“Yes it is.”

“Is he… all right?” She knew the answer to that: Virgil could see it in her eyes.

“No,” he said.

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “C’mon, let’s find Ron, he was calling the hospital.”

The manager saw them coming through the window in his office, hung up, looking at Virgil, said, “Are you with the police?”

“Yeah.”

“Is Henry okay?”

Virgil shook his head. “No, he’s not.”

“Ah, boy. This is fuckin’ nuts. No way-”

“I need to look at a calendar or a time card or something. I need to know if Henry was working two weeks ago Tuesday.”

“He works Tuesdays through Saturdays, off Sundays and Mondays. He hasn’t, hadn’t, taken any extra days off lately. I can look at my schedule…”

“Please look,” Virgil said.

The manager turned to a computer screen and brought up a schedule, shook his head, and said, “I show him working eleven to seven on that Tuesday.”

“And on Wednesday?”

“Same.”

The bomb at the Pinnacle had gone off at nine A.M. on Wednesday, and the ATF didn’t think it could have been planted any more than twenty-four hours earlier. If that was true, Erikson couldn’t have planted the bomb before work, because he wouldn’t have had time to get back. He could have theoretically flown to Michigan after work… but then, how’d he get a bomb on the plane? Have to be a private plane. But a private plane would be obvious, there’d be lots of records, and a smart guy wouldn’t do that.

No, it just didn’t work. He’d have the researcher check, but it didn’t work.

Erikson could, of course, have an accomplice in Grand Rapids, who planted the bomb on a Tuesday because that would give Erikson an alibi…

But Virgil didn’t like the feel of that, either.

The manager broke into his chain of thought. “Does Sarah know?”

Virgil went back to the bombed garage thinking that Erikson was more likely a victim than a bomber. If that were correct, then the obvious question was, Why?

Why Erikson, and not somebody else? There were at least two good reasons why somebody might be bombed.

First, the real bomber might be trying to hang a frame on somebody else, in preparing to end his own bombings. If he were ditching all of his Pelex, the blasting caps, the rest of the pipe, and so on, and if he did a complete and efficient cleanup of his workshop, then even if Virgil managed to identify him, a conviction would be tough: no physical evidence, plus another bomber candidate to point at.

Second, Erikson might have been killed because he knew something.

Which one?

Virgil stood outside the garage and watched the cops and the ATF people working. The ATF tech with bomb disposal experience had moved the pipe, from a distance, and nothing blew.

“How’d he do that?” Virgil asked.

“We’ve got all kinds of high-tech equipment with us, we just haven’t had to bring it out yet.”

“Like what? A robot?”

“A long string,” Barlow said. “He dropped it over the end of the pipe, then we all cleared out, and he pulled it over. So then we knew it wasn’t booby-trapped, and when we got a close look at it, we saw that it’d been packed with Pelex, but he hadn’t put in the blasting cap yet. We may be lucky: if it’s got a good fingerprint, or a little DNA in the Pelex…”

“Isn’t that a little weird, that he’d pack it without a blasting cap?” Virgil asked. “Wouldn’t you have to take the Pelex back out before you put the blasting cap in?”

“No, not necessarily… I mean, we don’t know if that’s all the Pelex he was planning to put in there,” Barlow said.

“Still seems weird to me,” Virgil said.

“We don’t know his working style yet, so we don’t know if it’s weird,” Barlow said. He sounded, Virgil thought, like a guy who really wanted Erikson to be the Man.

Virgil stood and looked at the garage for a long time, and another thought occurred: if Erikson was not the bomber, then the bomber knew how to get into his garage, in the night, and where the workbench was.

Virgil went to Ahlquist, who was talking to another one of the neighbors. “I want to talk to Erikson’s wife as soon as we find her,” Virgil said. “Give me a call?”

Ahlquist nodded. “She’s on the way, but she’ll be another hour yet.”

As Virgil was walking back to his truck, Pye showed up, with Marie Chapman. Virgil walked them across the police tape, and Pye asked, “Is this the guy? The bomber?”

“The ATF is leaning that way, and they could be right,” Virgil said. “I have some doubts.”

“Like what?”

“Like he couldn’t have put the bomb in the Pinnacle. He would have needed an accomplice to plant it. I don’t like the idea of two killers, linking up over that big of a space.”

Pye peered at the garage, grunted, and said, “You know what? Neither do I. I’m not kissing your ass at this point.”

Chapman wrote it all down, then said, “Mike Sullivan got out of the hospital. He’s back at the AmericInn, but I think he’s headed home to Wichita tomorrow morning, if you need to talk to him again.”

Virgil shook his head. “I can’t think of anything more. You guys gonna give up on the store?”

“Absolutely not,” Pye said. “We’ve already replaced him, and we’ve got another guy coming up to take Kingsley’s spot. Volunteers. I’m paying them triple time, forty hours a week. By the time the store’s up, they’ll have an extra year’s pay in their pockets.”

Barlow came over. “Mr. Pye. You want to take a look? This may be the guy…”

Virgil left the scene, headed back to the county courthouse. He was halfway back when he saw the AmericInn, and that tripped off a thought about Sullivan, and that tripped off an entirely new thought, about the security cameras at the construction trailer.

He swerved into the AmericInn parking lot, parked, identified himself to the desk clerk, got Sullivan’s room number. Sullivan’s wife answered the door and said, “Virgil. We heard something happened.”

“Another bomb.”

She shivered and said, “I’m glad we’re leaving. Was the man… ?”

“He was killed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to Mike, just for a second.”

She stepped back and let him in. Sullivan was lying on the bed, half asleep. When his wife called him, he dragged open his eyelids, saw Virgil, and asked, “Everybody okay?”

“No.” Virgil told the story again, then asked his question: “That recorder for the security camera at the trailer-how big was it?”

Sullivan held his hands eighteen inches apart. “I dunno… about like this. It looked like a stereo receiver, or a DVD player, I 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.