Shock Wave

19

John Haden was a tall, slender, pale man with glasses and a mop of brown hair; he wore a T-shirt with a hand-painted yoga warrior pose, simple black and white, which Virgil envied the moment he saw it, and jeans and flip-flops.

He lived in a modest brick house with a neatly kept yard, and pulled open the door and peered nearsightedly at Virgil, and said, “You look like a stoner.”

“A flaw in your Vedic perception,” Virgil said; his first wife had been a yoga practitioner. “I am, in fact, a cop.”

Haden liked that and swung the door back, and said, “Well, bring your cop ass inside. You want a beer?”

“Sure. But no more than two.”

“We can sit out on the patio,” Haden said. He got a couple of Dos Equis from the refrigerator, popped the tops, and handed one cold sweaty bottle to Virgil.

On the way out to the patio, he said, “So why do you think I’m the bomber?”

“I don’t. Not the bomber, anyway. But, as Henry’s business partner, you might have had reason to get rid of him. Either because the business was doing badly, or doing well. Either way. You might be copycatting the real bomber.”

“Your theory’s basically screwed-the business wasn’t doing much of anything,” Haden said. He took a webbed chair, pointed Virgil at another one, and said, “I don’t want you to think I’m taking this thing lightly. I just don’t really know what to say. Henry was a heck of a nice guy. Smart, happy, good marriage-he enjoyed his job. I freaked out when I heard. I was amazed. I went over there, but his wife was in the Cities.”

“She’s back now.”

“She was in the Cities, anyway. So, I canceled my summer school class, and I’ve just been wandering around the house wondering what the fuck? Why?”

“Found some bomb stuff in the garage,” Virgil said. “The feds think he might be the bomber.”

Haden waved the thought away: “That’s absurd. If you knew Henry, you’d know how absurd it was. Somebody planted it there, which means, it has to be somebody who knows Henry.” Then, “Oh, wait-that’s why you’re here. You’re checking out his friends.”

“That, too,” Virgil said. He took a hit on the beer, which tasted good in the hot afternoon, looked around the small backyard, and said, “You’re a marigold enthusiast.”

“They keep moles out of your yard,” Haden said.

“You got moles?” Virgil asked.

“No, because I plant marigolds.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Virgil said. “I got moles.”

Virgil said, “I was told you’ve been divorced three times.”

“That’s true,” Haden said.

“Do you still think about the exes?”

“All the time. Especially when I’m not in a relationship,” Haden said. “The thing about three exes is, there are always some good memories.”

“True,” Virgil said. He thought of Janey, and her ass.

“You’d know?” Haden asked.

“Yeah, I got three down myself,” Virgil said. “I’ve given it up for the time being. I’ve got a girlfriend, but I think she’s about to break it off with me.”

“You want her to go?” Haden asked.

Virgil considered. He hadn’t actually thought about it that way. Finally, he said, “Maybe.”

“Ah. So you’ve maneuvered her into breaking it off with you, so you won’t have to deal with the guilt,” Haden said.

“That’s a facile bit of pseudo-psychology,” Virgil said.

“Facile. A subtle word for a cop. One bit of advice. If she breaks it off with you, don’t sleep with her again for at least a year.”

“A year?”

“Okay, six months.”

“Is that your practice?”

“No, I won’t sleep with them for at least three weeks, but then, I think I have a more resilient personality than you. You look like a kinder soul than I am.”

They sat and bullshitted for a while, then Haden got a second beer for each of them, and Virgil passed over the list of names, and told him how he’d acquired it. He scanned the list and said, “There I am. .. Probably my department chairman. Somebody told him once that I smoke dope.”

“He’s a non-smoker?”

“Oh, yeah… Weird for a college professor, huh? So let me see if I get this right. You made this list with no real mathematical or statistical basis. It’s a back-of-the-envelope guess by a bunch of hosers who are getting even with enemies, and may have a few good ideas as well.”

Virgil considered again, then nodded: “I think that’s fair.”

Haden handed the list back, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Thought about it. Then, “I’d say there’s a better than even chance that he’s on the list. You can probably strike several people off right away.”

“We have.”

Haden nodded. “From what I know about the bombs, I have no alibis, except that I couldn’t have done the one in Michigan, if it was, in fact, a simple time bomb, as the newspaper said. I have a lady friend who’ll tell you that, since I spent that night pounding her like a jackhammer. During the day, I was doing finals.”

“I’ll check, if I need to,” Virgil said. “Give her my name. I’m not fooling around about this, John.”

“I know that. I looked you up on the Net while you were on the way over,” Haden said. Then he said, “I’ve been toying with the possibility that Henry was simply killed at random, but I don’t think so. There’s something in Henry’s killing that’s important to the bomber, and it’s not just that Henry was somebody to frame. You gotta go pull Sarah apart. She must know what it is, even if she doesn’t know that she knows.”

“Mmmm.” Virgil closed his eyes. “Nice out here. I need a patio.”

“I’m serious. You know what Sherlock Holmes used to say.”

“Sherlock Holmes actually didn’t say anything,” Virgil said. “He’s a fictional character, invented by Theodore Roosevelt, or some other Boy Scout just like him.”

“He said, and I quote, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

“I knew that,” Virgil said. “I’m a professional detective.”

“But you might be outsmarting yourself. Go back to the fundamentals of detecting. If there is such a thing. Another beer? I’ve only got two left, and it seems a shame just to leave them sitting there by themselves.”

Go back to fundamentals, Virgil thought, when he finally left.

Shoe leather. Compile facts. Throw out whatever was impossible.. .

Whatever. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where to start walking, and while he had a lot of facts, they were mostly irrelevant. What about motive? The fundamentals would say that murder is committed because of greed and sex, to which Virgil added craziness, druginduced or otherwise.

There was craziness here, but also a method: it wasn’t the kind of compulsive, uncontrolled murder that’s done by what psychiatrists referred to as nut jobs. This was craziness on a mission, and the mission probably involved greed or sex.

But not trout.

Virgil realized that he’d psychologically eliminated about half the people nominated for the bombings: the trout fishermen.

Trout fishermen, he thought, were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn’t even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.

As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you’d lose your fuckin’ lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.

Anyhoo… the trout fishermen were out.

Which made him feel better.

Sex and greed.

He’d made some progress, fueled by three beers.

Back at the county courthouse, he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they’ve got Block upstairs, and they’re squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”

“Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.

“Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he’s on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he’s got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn’t cooperate, he was going for twenty years. Twenty years. You can kill somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies’ can, and she said he’s serious… So, I wanted you to know.”

“Okay.”

“Now what’s this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.

“The bomber’s blowing stuff up because of greed or sex-I’ve eliminated trout-and I don’t see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it’s greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”

“The guy isn’t here,” Ahlquist said. “He’s long gone. Last I heard, he’s down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”

“We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye-maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”

“Did somebody say that? The money thing?”

“Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”

“Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I’ll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block’s balls.”

Virgil decided he had to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”

Virgil went in and lay on the couch, his feet up on one arm. Lot of stuff going on. Had to think about it. After five minutes, he hadn’t thought of anything, so he called Davenport and told him what was going on. Davenport summarized it: “So you cleaned up the town, but you don’t have the bomber.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do. I gotta go.”

“Why’d he try to kill me? That’s what I want to know. If he’d killed me, he would have gotten a whole storm of cops in here.”

“Maybe he was making a point of some kind, about resistance,” Davenport said. “Or maybe he wanted a whole storm of cops in there.”

NO HELP THERE.

He was still on the couch when the governor called. “Hey, Virgil, I talked to State Farm, and you’re good to go. You haul the boat to the State Farm place up there, and they’ll resell what they can-scrap, I guess-and you get a check for the boat and motor and a thousand in personal property.”

“Ah, jeez, Governor. Thanks, I guess. There’s nothing criminal in this, is there?”

“Criminal? This is the least criminal thing I’ve done this week,” the governor said. “The second-least-criminal thing I’ve done is, I talked to an old buddy up at East Coast Marine in Stillwater. He’s got a Ranger, there, a beauty, used, but not hard, owned by some rich guy who went out about once a year… Anyway, your check exactly matches the asking price, including sales tax. You gotta go look at it.”

“A Ranger?” Virgil’s mouth started to water. “Jeez, Governor, I don’t know-”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the governor said. “Everything’s totally on the up-and-up. Well, as much on the up-and-up as these things get. Anyway, I gotta go violate somebody’s civil rights. Talk to you later. It’s Andy at East Coast Marine. He’s making out the papers right now.”

“Well… thanks,” he said, but he was thinking, Holy shit, a Ranger. He had the urge to drop the entire bomb case and get the hell over to Stillwater before Andy died…

“So Davenport said you’d been out to Michigan, to the Pinnacle. I didn’t hear about that. What’s going on there?”

Virgil explained the problem of planting the bomb, and his thoughts, and the governor said, “Any way he could climb it? Or come down? Parachute, maybe?”

Virgil thought back to the conversation he’d had with the guys at the Pye Pinnacle and said, “Someone would’ve seen a plane, or heard it at least. I thought maybe a helicopter, but you couldn’t land one there without someone noticing. A hang glider, maybe, but the Pinnacle’s the tallest thing out there. There’d be nowhere to launch it from.”

The governor rang off, and Virgil closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch. The word “glider” floated through his mind, and he thought, Hey, wait a minute. Did somebody say something about Peck flying a glider? The guy at Butternut Tech. Huh. Could you land a glider on top of a building?

He didn’t know anyone else who could answer that question, so he called Peck.

“Hey, George-could you land a glider on top of a building?”

After a moment of silence, Peck said, “A glider? Somebody told you I used to fly gliders?”

“Yeah, somebody did, but I’ll be damned if I can remember who. So, could you?”

“Well, not me, personally, because I’d be too chicken. But I guess if you had a big enough roof, without any obstructions, you could.”

“How big a roof?”

“Maybe… three hundred yards at the absolute minimum. But that would be scary as hell, even with perfect wind and good visibility. The problem is, you’d have to come in high enough to make sure you got on the roof-you don’t want to crash into the side of the building. Then you’d have to stop before you got to the far parapet, because if you didn’t, and hit it, you’d either get squashed like an eggshell hitting a wall, or if the parapet was low enough, it’d trip the glider and you’d go right over the edge and drop like a stone. Or both.”

“You had me at three hundred yards,” Virgil said. “The roof of the Pye Pinnacle is probably fifty yards across. Maybe less. It’s got all kinds of pipes and chimneys and air-conditioning ducts up there.”

“No way you’re gonna land a glider on that. That’s just not going to work.”

And Virgil thought, Hey, wait a minute. What’d Davenport just say? Maybe the bomber wanted a whole storm of cops to come in? Why would he want that?

Virgil closed his eyes and thought about it, and came up with exactly one answer: the bomber wanted a bigger, wider investigation. Why would he want that? Because a bigger, wider investigation would probably get into the question of whether the city council was bribed, and if it had been, then… PyeMart was gone.

So maybe there was a good reason to try to kill him-nothing personal, not anger or revenge or because Virgil was a threat, but an effort to get as many cops as possible into town.

The guy might be nuts, but there was a logic buried in his craziness.

So why did he go after Pye first? Why weren’t there any warnings? Maybe because he was worried about heightened security around Pye, if he set the first one off in Butternut. So he went after Pye first-after the whole board of directors, but had failed. If he’d succeeded, what would he have done then?

Issued a warning, perhaps: quit building the PyeMart, or else.

But then, if the company didn’t do it, what would he do next?

Virgil thought about it, and decided that there wouldn’t have been a warning: he would have continued on to Butternut, and would have blown up the trailer even if he had been successful with the Pinnacle bomb.

The first bomb was an announcement of his seriousness; the second bomb was the beginning of the actual campaign.

The third bomb, at the equipment yard, would slow down the construction process, and make it more expensive.

The fourth one, another attack on Pye… keeping the pressure on.

Then the attack on Virgil, maybe to bring more pressure into town.

And finally, the bomb at Erikson’s.

He considered the list, and after a moment, focused on the bombing of the equipment yard. That one wasn’t quite right: he took a big risk, to do nothing more than slow down the process. In fact, he wouldn’t even slow down the construction or opening of the store-he’d just slow down the water and sewer connection by a couple of months. If done on schedule, the connection would have been made three or four months before the store was finished. Now, it’d only be two months.

So why would that have been important to him? Important enough to make a couple of dozen bombs, or however many it was?

Then, there was the bomb at Erikson’s. If he was fully rational, he had a reason for picking Erikson as the fall guy. He wasn’t just chosen at random. Why Erikson?

Hethought about Kline, the pharmacist he’d visited on his second day in town. He knew everything and everybody…

Virgil rolled off the couch and went out to his car and drove downtown. Ed Kline, said the girl behind the pharmacy cash register, was on break.

“Up on the roof?”

“You know about the roof? Let me call him.”

She took out her cell phone, made the call, mentioned Virgil’s name, then rang off and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”

“I do.”

Kline was sitting in a recliner, looking out at the lake, his feet up on a round metal lawn table, blowing smoke at the sky.

“You find him?” he asked Virgil.

“No. But I can refine the list. The bomber, I think, is working through some kind of logic. I think it most likely has to do with money. There also has to be a link with Henry Erikson, but I can’t see what it would be. And I think he’s probably on my list.”

“And…”

Virgil took the survey list out of his pocket. “So, I need you to look at my list and tell me who on the list would either make money, or save money, if PyeMart went down. I’ve already talked to a couple of the major possibilities, and sorta scratched them off. I really need an Erikson-money connection.”

Kline worked his way through the cigarette as he studied the list, and finally shook his head and handed it back to Virgil. “I don’t see it. I see the usual suspects, people who lose when PyeMart comes in. Nothing that involves Erikson.”

“Did Erikson ever serve on the city council? I mean, was he ever in a spot where he could have affected what happened with PyeMart?”

Again, Kline shook his head. “No. Never ran for anything, far as I know.”

“Sarah Erikson couldn’t point out any tight ties between Henry and anybody on the list.”

“I really didn’t know him well enough to suggest any connections,” Kline said.

They were sitting around, speculating, and Virgil took two calls, one after the other.

The first came from a BCA agent named Jenkins, who said, “Me’n Shrake are in town. We’re busting the mayor, and then some guy named Arnold.”

“God bless you,” Virgil said. “Are you staying at the AmericInn?”

“We are. See you for dinner?”

“If it’s not blown up.”

A moment later, he took another call, this one originating at the BCA office itself.

“Virgil? Gabriel Moss here. We loaded up your disk drives, and we got images.”

“How good?”

“The images are good enough, but you can’t see a face. He’s wearing a camo mask. We can tell you how tall he is, about what he weighs, and his shoe size, but there’s no face.”

“Can you send it to me?”

“Sure. I can e-mail it if you want. You’ll have it in five minutes.”

“And send me the numbers-height, weight, and all that.”

Virgil rang off and asked Kline, “Could you think about this? How many ways are there to squeeze money out of PyeMart? Out of the situation? There’s got to be something, and we’re just not seeing it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Kline said. “I think you’re probably right, but I suspect I’ll be awful damn surprised when you catch the guy. You might have to catch him before I can see where the money’d be coming from.”