Shock Wave

18

Virgil got to him first.

Shepard was lying flat on his back, his eyes open and focused, and he was making the growling sound, his breaths short and harsh. His arms lay down his sides, and the gun was a few inches from his right hand. Virgil pushed it out of reach, heard Good Thunder shouting into a cell phone, calling for an ambulance. People were shouting on the street around him, and Wills was telling them to stand back, as Virgil pulled open Shepard’s shirt, saw the wound just to the right of his breastbone, a small hole through which bright red, frothy blood was seeping.

Virgil looked around, for something soft and plastic, didn’t see anything, shouted at Wills, “Keep them away,” jogged back to his truck, got a trash bag out of a seat-back pocket, ran back to Shepard. Good Thunder was kneeling over him, saying, “Ambulance on the way, Pat. Ambulance is coming…” Virgil elbowed her aside, ripped a square of plastic out of the bag, and slapped it across the bullet hole and pressed it down.

The audio gear had been tucked under Shepard’s belt line, and Virgil pulled it loose, and then ripped off the tape that held the microphone to his chest.

Shepard made another growling, coughing sound, and the first of the deputies arrived. Wills organized them to push back the rubberneckers. The ambulance was there a minute later, probably five or six minutes after the shooting, which was great time; the paramedics put oxygen on Shepard, moved him onto a gurney, and they were gone.

Virgil walked back to his truck and gave the audio gear to Thompson, got some Handi Wipes and washed the blood off his hands as he went back across the street. Good Thunder asked, “What do you think?”

Virgil shook his head. “Hard to tell with a gunshot. Depends on what it hit. If it hit a major artery, he’ll die, and in the middle of your chest, that’s easy to do. If he didn’t, he could be walking around tomorrow. Bullet didn’t go through…”

He went to the pistol and knelt next to it: the frame was big, longbarreled, a Smith amp; Wesson, as he’d thought, but in. 22 caliber. A practice gun for the bigger calibers.

“I’ll let the deputies pick that up,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s a. 22. He’d have to be fairly unlucky to die.”

“I wonder if he wanted to?” Good Thunder said. “You’d think he would have shot himself in the head.”

“I’m not a shrink, but a shrink once told me that suicidal people will sometimes try to kill themselves in a way which isn’t disfiguring,” Virgil said. “They want to look good.”

Wills, the County attorney, was walking around in circles, talking into a cell phone. When he got off he came over and said, “I want to take Block as soon as we can get him alone. People are going to be talking about this all over town. We need to bust him, get him to the courthouse, get him with an attorney, and make a deal about Geraldine and the guy from PyeMart.”

Good Thunder nodded. “I agree.”

“I’ll leave you guys to that,” Virgil said. “That’s attorney stuff.”

Virgil was bummed: they’d taken an obviously distraught man, who’d said several times that his life was over, and they’d pushed him too hard.

Virgil hauled the others back to the courthouse, where they had a quick conference with Ahlquist, who agreed to send a couple of deputies to pick up Block. “He was looking out his office window, and saw me, so he might have figured out that something’s going on,” Wills said. “When the docs find that wire on Shepard, the word’s going to get out even faster.”

“Nah, I took it off him,” Virgil said. “But people were all over the place, some of them saw me take it off. I think we have to assume that Block will know something’s up.”

“Might make him more interested in a deal,” Wills said. He said to the sheriff, “Earl, you gotta move now.”

Ahlquist left to get the deputies moving, and Wills said, “Wasn’t that just the damnedest thing? Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

Virgil had thought Wills was a jerk; and he might still be, but at the moment, he was pretty human, and he’d been cool enough at the scene of the shooting. People, Virgil thought, were hardly ever just one thing: only a jerk, only a good guy.

As she left, Good Thunder asked Virgil what he was going to do.

“I’ve got to talk to Sarah Erikson-that’s the main thing,” he said. “There are a couple of questions we need answered in a hurry.”

When Ahlquist came back, Virgil told him that he needed to talk to Sarah Erikson: “When are we going to do that?”

“We left it indefinite,” he said.

“Do you know where she is?” Virgil asked.

“Last I heard, she was at her house. Want me to check?”

“If you could.”

Ahlquist called one of the deputies still at the bombed house, who said that Sarah Erikson was in the house, along with her mother, a brother, and a couple of friends. Virgil said good-bye to Ahlquist, asked him to call when Block had been busted.

“No point in calling you,” Ahlquist said. “Unless he ran for it, it’s any minute.”

A deputy came in, looking for Ahlquist, and said, “Hey, Sheriff, Randy called from the hospital, they’re taking Shepard into the operating room, but the docs say he’s likely to make it.”

Virgil left for Erikson’s, and on the way, took a call from Willard Pye.

“There’s a rumor going around that you’re investigating my bidness,” Pye said.

“Can’t talk about rumors,” Virgil said. “So, how’re you doing, otherwise?”

“Cut the crap, Virgil,” Pye said. “You think something was going on between my boy and this fella that shot himself?”

“Can’t talk about stuff like that, Willard. I’m here basically to catch the bomber,” Virgil said. “That’s my number one priority, and I’m on the way to talk to Erikson’s wife, right now.”

“I’ll take your evasions as a ‘yes,’ you are investigating PyeMart. Goddamnit, Virgil, we’re clean as a spinster’s skirt on this thing. I just talked to my boy who handled this whole issue-”

“Willard, I can’t talk,” Virgil said. “It’s not proper, and anyway, I gotta go. I’m coming up on Erikson’s.” He clicked off.

Word, he thought, was getting around. If Block didn’t crumble, they could have a problem getting to the mayor and Arnold Martin on Shepard’s testimony alone. And if the mayor didn’t crumble, they’d never get to the PyeMart expediter.

Virgil got on the phone to Ahlquist: “Could you get one of your smartest guys and put him in his private car and have him tag Willard Pye around? I’d be interested if he gets together with Geraldine Gore.”

“I can do that,” Ahlquist said. “I’ll call Pye and give him some bullshit, find out where he’s at.”

“Thanks. Talk to you later, Earl.”

The FEDs were taking the Erikson house apart. Virgil stopped to talk with Barlow, who said that things were just about where they were at when Virgil left. Barlow asked, “Were you around when this Shepard guy shot himself?”

“Across the street,” Virgil said. “Everybody in town knows about it, huh?”

“Well, I know about it, and nobody talks to me, much,” Barlow said.

Sarah Erikson was a brown-haired woman with a long nose and deep brown, almost black eyes, rimmed with red, where she’d been crying; she was dressed in a beige blouse and dark brown slacks and practical shoes, and sat alone in an easy chair, with her brother, her mother, and three female friends arrayed on the couch and a couple of chairs brought from the kitchen.

Her brother, whose name was Ron Mueller, told Virgil that his sister wasn’t in very good shape to talk to the police.

“I know that, but I need to talk to her anyway. There are some seriously urgent questions that just won’t wait.”

“We already told the police and the sheriff how ridiculous this whole idea is, that Henry is the bomber. He’s a good guy, he’s always around home, he doesn’t go sneaking off-”

“He’s got that workshop, and there was a half-made bomb,” Virgil said.

“The bomber planted it,” Mueller said. “Plain as the nose on your face.”

“I’m wiling to buy that-that’s why I need to talk to Sarah,” Virgil said. “Because if he’s innocent, there are a whole bunch of other questions that come up, and we need to get them answered. So: I need to talk to her. Now.”

“Be right back,” Mueller said.

Virgil was just inside the door; Mueller went over to Sarah and spoke to her quietly, and nodded, and she nodded, and Mueller turned back to Virgil and waved him over. One of the women got up and gave Virgil her chair and said, “I’ll get another one.”

Virgil sat and said, “Mrs. Erikson, I know you’re not in good shape to answer questions, but I do need some answers. You say your husband isn’t the bomber? Okay-but then, who is? You know him, whether you know it or not.”

That got her attention. She’d looked hazy-eyed when he sat down, but now her gaze sharpened up and she frowned.

“What?”

“If your husband is innocent, then the bomb was planted on him. It had to be planted by somebody who knew your husband had a workshop, knew which vehicle was his, knew he could get into your garage-or did you leave the door open last night? Could it have been random, the first open garage the guy saw?”

“No, no, the garage wasn’t open last night. Henry had a lot of tools, he kept the door down.”

“Then how’d the bomber get in?”

Erikson stared at him for a second, then looked over her shoulder, toward the kitchen, and said, “Well, uh, the garage door was down, but we mostly don’t lock the access door on the side. That’s behind the fence and so it’s open, most of the time.”

“Who’d know that?”

“Well… I guess maybe a lot of people would. I mean, we have backyard parties, barbeques, people coming and going. They’d know what was in the garage.”

“Could they count on that door being unlocked?” Virgil asked.

“Sometimes it’s locked,” she said. “Most of the time, it isn’t.”

“You ever have a key go missing?”

“No, not that I know of,” Erikson said. “But all our locks open with one key, and we’ve had a lot of those keys. I suppose somebody could have stolen one.”

Virgil thought it over, and shook his head. “It can’t just be the availability of a key. There has to be something… Is he involved in the PyeMart situation in any way?”

“No, except that he was against it,” Erikson said. “He thought the Butternut was such a great resource. He grew up back there, his family had a farm. He used to float down it on rafts, and then he got a canoe-”

“So he didn’t sell any of that land to PyeMart? Or his family?”

“No, they were way down to the south of there. They don’t own the land anymore, anyway. His folks sold it years ago.”

Virgil chewed that over for a moment, but couldn’t see how it would go anywhere. Maybe the bomber had simply seen the size of the workshop, and chose him because it would make bomb production look more credible? Maybe.

Before he left the sheriff’s office, he’d written down the names of the people who’d shown up more than once on his survey, plus the two who worked at the college. The kitchen was empty, and he said, “Mrs. Erikson, I’d like you to step into the kitchen with me for a moment. I want to show you something privately.”

She looked around at her friends for a moment, then shrugged and stood and led the way into the kitchen. At the far end, at a breakfast nook, Virgil quietly explained his survey, then said, “I want you to look at this list. How many of the people do you know?”

She took the list, scanned it, blinked a couple of times, then stepped back to the kitchen counter and took a pencil out of a cup, put the list on a magazine and the magazine on the countertop, and started checking them off. “I’ll put one check by the people I just know, and two checks by the ones who might know our house a little.”

“There are some?”

She bent over the list. “Three. There are three.”

“Do any of them seem to be the kind…”

She stared at the list for a long time, and then said, “I never liked Bill Barber. He’s a jerk and he’s angry, and I think he was once mixed up in some kind of assault.”

“Doesn’t have a record,” Virgil said.

“His uncle was on the police force, before it became part of the sheriff’s department. He might have hushed it up. Or maybe he was a juvenile or something. It was quite a while ago.”

Virgil had brought an annotated master list with him, and checked Barber’s name: he’d been mentioned four times. Interesting. “Why would Barber have been here?”

“Because he lives down the block. He bought a couple of cars from Henry, though that’s not a big deal: a lot of people have bought cars from Henry.”

“Is his house like this one?”

“Mmm, a little. They were all built by the same contractor,” she said.

“Okay. Okay… what about the other two?” Virgil asked.

“John Haden. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, he’s a nice enough man. I mean, Henry used to play guitar in a band. He was good. John used to build guitars, just as a hobby, electric guitars, and Henry got interested, and he started building some. They sort of got into it together. Henry was really good at the woodwork, and cutting the hollows in the back for the electronics, that kind of stuff. John did all the hand-finish work and the paint. They could sell the guitars for a thousand dollars each. They had a waiting list.”

Virgil was interested: Haden was one of the two men who worked at Butternut Tech. “How many? In a year?”

“Ten, maybe? Sometimes a couple more or less.”

“So Haden would have a reason to want to keep your husband alive, if anything.”

“Oh, sure. They were friends.”

“He works at the college, right?”

“Yeah. Math. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, though. Maybe because he’s a little odd. Kinda geeky, you know. Once you get to know him, he seems really nice. He likes cats, we’ve got cats.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Virgil said. He liked cats himself. “When you say geeky, do you mean ineffectual? Or is he one of those, you know, more-manic geeks? Some of them have really strong beliefs.”

“Oh, not like that. He has an off-the-wall sense of humor. Maybe you could ask one of his ex-wives.”

“More than one?” Virgil asked. “He has trouble with relationships?”

“I think he’s been married and divorced three times, hard as that is to believe,” she said. “Who in their right mind would make that kind of mistake three times? Anyway, Henry said that even though he’s geeky, women like him. Heck, I guess I like him.”

“Okay.” He looked at the checks on her list. “What about this Gordon Wilson?”

“Gordy… he’s another car salesman, he works over at the Ford dealer. He’s been in and out of this house, off and on, sometimes he and Henry would be working deals. I don’t know him that well, really. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, either.”

Virgil looked at the master list: Wilson had been named three times.

“You don’t know this William Wyatt?” Wyatt was the other teacher.

“I’ve heard the name. It’s a small town, in some ways.”

“But you know Dick Gates? You gave him one check.” Gates was another name with four checks after it, like Barber.

“I don’t think he’s ever been to the house, but we both know him, knew him. He’s a police officer, you know, a wildlife officer. He patrols the lakes in the summer.”

They went through the rest of the list; and when he asked her, she looked thoughtfully at the list and said, “I’m just guessing.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” Virgil said. “I’ll take it purely as a guess.”

“And it makes me feel kind of crappy… but if I had to pick one, I guess I’d pick Dick Gates. Henry didn’t like him, and he didn’t like Henry. Henry liked to fish, and it seemed like every time he went out, and Gates was out, he would pull Henry over and check to see what he’d caught, and how many. After fifteen times, you’d think he’d know Henry was an ethical fisherman, who usually didn’t keep anything.” The tears started again, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “But he just kept doing it. Because I think he liked the power. It got so, if Gates’s boat wasn’t at the dock, Henry’d just go up the Butternut and fish. Gates didn’t go up the river. Too easy to get stuck, and then, nobody would help him out.”

Virgil considered that. He knew lots of cops who liked the power-and that, he thought, was probably why Gates was on the list four times. If he didn’t like the power, he might well have never been on it at all. Not that he was excusing him, just because he was a cop …

“Did Henry ever say anything to you about seeing something odd, up the river? Somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or acted weird?”

She shook her head. “He had a lot of Butternut stories, but nothing like that. But, you know, if it was just a little odd, he might not have mentioned it.”

They talked for a while longer, then Virgil thanked her and excused himself, and went out to the garage and watched the ATF crime-scene guys for a few minutes, and finally asked Barlow, “You still think he’s the guy?”

“I’m saying sixty percent, and slowly dropping. We could be down to fifty-fifty by this evening. The thing is, we found all the bomb stuff at once-and then nothing else. It was right out in the open. And we don’t find any of the small stuff you’d expect-more detonators, more batteries, a bunch of clocks or old thermostats… Didn’t find any rolls of wire. We did find some really odd-looking electronics, but we can’t put them with any bomb-making techniques.”

“He made electric guitars as a hobby,” Virgil said.

“Okay. I’ll mark that down,” Barlow said. “The other thing is, I can think of good reasons he could be the bomber and at the same time, we’d only find one pipe, and one blasting cap.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like, he was limiting his exposure. He was planning to do two more bombs, and he kept the other stuff off-site to limit the possibility of detection.”

“Good thought, Jim,” Virgil said, not believing it.

“So anyway, I haven’t talked to Mrs. Erikson yet. I want to know exactly what to ask her, when I get to her,” Barlow said. “I want her to have an attorney.”

“Sure,” Virgil said. “Keep digging. And call me.”

The math professor interested him: not only because he’d been named on the list, but because he’d be a really bright guy, and he was a little odd, both of which the bomber apparently was, and because he might have some idea of how valid the survey might be.

Virgil looked at his watch, wondered how Shepard was doing-nothing he could do about that-wondered if Block had been arrested, then got on his phone and called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to find out where John Haden lived, and what his phone number was.

He had the information in five minutes, called Haden, and was surprised when Haden promptly picked up: a good sign.

“I’ve got some questions for you,” Virgil said, after introducing himself. “I wonder if I might stop by?”

“You think I’m the bomber?”

“I have no idea who the bomber is,” Virgil said. “I mostly want to talk to you about a survey I took.”

“Well, come on over. You can tell me about what happened with Henry.”