Shock Wave

5

The bombs in the two pieces of heavy equipment went off first, in quick sequence, boom… boom. A few seconds later, the pipes went, the whole bunch fired with a single impulse from the car battery: BOOM .

Virgil heard the motel windows flex and rattle, but barely woke up; from his bed, it might have been a motel door slamming. Instead, he rolled over, facedown, and fell deeper into sleep.

The bombs were heard by most of the people awake at that hour, but because there was nobody in the equipment yard, and the yard was away from any main streets, and no businesses were really open yet, nobody knew quite where the blasts had come from, until they saw the dust.

There was no fire, but there was a lot of dirt in the air. A cop drove down the street toward the dust cloud, which had formed a mushroom, not quite certain of where he was going until he got there. When he got there, he was not quite certain of what he was seeing. There was still a lot of dust in the air, but the corrugated-iron equipment building was still standing, and looked fine.

Not until he walked down the length of chain-link fence to peer into the yard, and saw the pipe strewn around like jackstraws, did he understand what had happened-and even then, he didn’t realize that the two large pieces of heavy equipment had been turned into a pile of scrap, frames bent, engines dismounted, transmissions ruined. He did see that two windows had been blown out on the back of the building, and when he looked across a narrow street, more seemed to be missing from a sign-company building.

The deputy called back to the city station. The duty officer woke up the sheriff, who said he’d be along, and said to call Virgil. A minute later, the sheriff called back and told the duty officer to call Barlow, as well.

A phone doesn’t ring before six in the morning unless there’s trouble. Virgil woke, checked the clock, said, “Man…” and picked up the phone. The duty officer said, “We’ve got a bomb out at the city equipment yard. Blew up some pipe. Agent Barlow is on his way out.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody was out there.”

“How do you get there?” Virgil asked.

The duty officer gave him instructions, and he rolled out of bed, put on yesterday’s clothes, and then headed out. The morning was crisp, the sky was a flawless blue: a good day, not counting the bombing.

A bunch of patrol cars and a few civilian vehicles were lined up on the road beside the equipment yard when Virgil got there. He ID’d himself to the deputy standing by the entrance, then walked through the equipment building and out the back door, where he found the sheriff, Barlow, a couple of civilians, and two or three other deputies looking at the wreckage.

Virgil asked Barlow, “Anybody hurt?”

Barlow shook his head. One of the civilians, who apparently was with the public works department, said, “Our budget took a hit. I gotta look at our insurance. We’ll get most of the money back, but not all of it. He blew up our shovel and the pipelayer, along with the pipe. I don’t think the pipe can be saved; it’s all screwed up.”

Virgil stepped over to a pile of the blue pipe: some kind of plastic, he thought. Most of the pipes had been blown in half and had split lengthwise. Somebody said to his back, “I was outside and heard it. It sounded like an atom bomb.”

“At least he wasn’t going after people,” Ahlquist said.

Barlow said to Virgil, “This is something new, though. We’ve counted at least sixteen separate explosions, and there are probably more than that. They went off more or less simultaneously, so he was working a seriously complicated firing apparatus. He’s getting more sophisticated.”

“The practical effect is… what?” Virgil asked the civilian. “If you guys got insurance, he delays you for a week or two?”

“Longer than that. More like a couple of months,” the civilian said. “Even if we go with emergency bid procedures, there’s a lot of bureaucracy to go through. Then, we’ve got to get the stuff shipped in from Ohio, and we’ve got to retrain the operators on the new equipment… It’ll be a while.”

“But it won’t stop the building.”

The civilian shook his head. “No. Not unless everybody gets too scared to work. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting a little nervous, and so are the other guys.”

They stood around and talked about it for a while, and Barlow said that he was going to ask for another technician.

“How’s it going at the trailer?” Virgil asked. “Find anything?”

“Finding all kinds of things, just nothing that’ll get us to the bomber,” the ATF agent said. “Not so far, anyway. There supposedly was some kind of security system, but it either got torn apart in the explosion, or the bomber took it with him.”

“Huh. If he took it with him, he’d have had to spend some time inside.”

Barlow nodded. “Be pretty bold. And you’d have to ask, why? If you’re sneaking around with a big goddamned bomb under your arm, it’s not like you’d be more noticeable if you wore a mask. So why not wear a mask?”

“You think there might have been something else that was identifiable?”

“Could be,” Barlow said. “Maybe something about his size, like he’s really fat, or maybe he’s got a disability, a limp or a missing arm, or maybe he’s six-eight or something. But if we don’t find that camera, and we haven’t found anything like it, then we sort of wonder why.”

“How about a camera mount?”

“Should be one, can’t find it,” Barlow said. “We were hoping the video was cycled out to the Internet, but it wasn’t that sophisticated. It apparently was fed through a wire to a digital server, which cycled every twenty-four hours. The recorder might still be there, somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet. Now we got this one to work…”

Virgil looked around at the mess, shook his head. “Good luck with that.”

Barlow gestured toward the metal building, and they stepped away from the group looking at the blown shovel. Barlow said, quietly, “Listen… I spent some time talking to the sheriff last night, and he says you’re pretty much the BCA’s golden boy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no connections with the locals. I can do all the technical stuff, but nobody’s gonna sit around and eat macaroni and cheese with me and tell me what’s what. So I gotta lean on you.”

“I can work with that,” Virgil said. “If you could get me what you find…”

“You’ll know in ten minutes,” Barlow said.

“Good. I’ve already got some people I need to talk to-I’m going to do that now.”

“Keep me up,” Barlow said. “The trailer bomb was a big break, though that sounds awful, with the dead guy and all. If the bomber had kept trying up in Michigan, we’d have never figured out where he was from. Hell, an hour after the bomb went off, we were ankledeep in Homeland Security and FBI guys. They wanted to investigate every Arab in the state, and there are something like a half million of them. This is a little more manageable.”

Virgil nodded. “Yeah. Not a hell of a lot of Arabs around here. Maybe a few, but a lot more Latinos.”

“I’ll tell you something else, Virgil. These guys do one or two bombs, and it gives them a serious sense of importance,” Barlow said. “We see it when we catch them and debrief them. They’re usually people who feel like they should be important, but they aren’t. When the bomb goes off, they get all kinds of attention, and they’re all kinds of important… and they don’t want to quit. It’s like cocaine: the high goes away after a while, and they want another hit.”

“You’re telling me he’s going to do it again,” Virgil said.

“He made a whole batch of bombs for this attack. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got another one tonight. Something else: he’s got enough material to blow up a building. If he decides to go big, he could turn the city hall into a pile of brick dust.”

“That’s not good,” Virgil said.

They exchanged cell-phone numbers, and e-mails, and then Virgil headed back downtown to the motel.

Virgil had heard of the ticking-time-bomb theory of building up stress in the movies-Bruce Willis rushing around New York to keep the schools from blowing up-but this was ridiculous. Now he had a ticking time bomb, and the biggest expert around said that more were on the way.

At the motel, he got cleaned up, put on clean clothes, and headed to Bunson’s, the restaurant.

At Bunson’s, the hostess said, “I’ll buy that shirt if you want to sell it.”

Virgil was wearing his most conservative musical T-shirt, a vintage Rolling Stones “Tongue” that he’d found on America’s Fence. “I’m sorry, I have an emotional attachment to it,” Virgil told her. “I was wearing it when my third wife told me she wanted a divorce.”

“Oh, well, in that case…” She smiled, and led him back to a booth overlooking the lake.

He had the sweet-butter pancakes with bacon and maple syrup; at eight-thirty, which was still way too early, he called Davenport at home. “I hope this is a goddamn emergency,” Davenport said, when he picked up the phone.

“The guy just set off at least sixteen bombs at once, and wrecked God-only-knows how much stuff,” Virgil said. “I’m told it was like an atomic bomb going off.”

“Ah, jeez. Tell me.”

Virgil filled him in, and when he was done, Davenport asked, “You got media?”

“We had media, and now we’re gonna get a lot more,” Virgil said. “This thing is really blowing up, if you’ll excuse the rapier-like wit.”

“So talk to the sheriff, have a press conference, emphasize that you’re making progress, that you expect arrests. That you’ve got some kind of forensic evidence. Say that because of the interstate aspect, the killer can be tried in federal court and get the death penalty. Give the bomber a reason to hunker down, to be careful, to think about it. Try to buy some time.”

“A pageant. Good idea,” Virgil said. “The sheriff likes the whole television routine. I’ll get him to organize it.”

“I never had much to do with bombers, but this Barlow sounds like he knows what he’s talking about-and it sounds like a lot of the other freaks we’ve seen. They like it. You better catch this guy, Virgil.”

“I’ll catch him. I just can’t guarantee that the city hall will still be standing up,” Virgil said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

Virgil called Ahlquist- the sheriff was still out at the equipment yard-and told him about Davenport’s idea for a press conference. Ahlquist jumped on the idea and said he’d set it up. “I’ve been working on the rest of your list, all morning. I’ll give it to you at the press conference,” Ahlquist said. “Or you can stop by anytime.”

“It’s a mess out there, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, yeah. Is it gonna get worse?”

“Barlow thinks so,” Virgil said.

Virgil dug out the list of contacts that Ahlquist had given him the night before. Ahlquist had suggested that he talk first to Edwin Kline, one of the three city councilmen who voted against PyeMart, and a pharmacist. Ahlquist said that Kline had been on the city council for twenty years, and had been mayor for twelve, and knew all the personalities. “Since he’s a pill-pusher, people talk to him, like they would a doctor. He knows what’s going on in their heads.”

Virgil found Kline in his drugstore on Main Street, introduced himself, waited for two minutes until he’d finished rolling some pills for a single customer, and then followed him to a backroom office.

Kline was an older, balding man in his late fifties or early sixties, with glittering rimless glasses and a soft oval face. He wore a white jacket like a doctor, and pointed Virgil into a wooden swivel chair that might have been taken from a nineteenth-century newspaper office, while he sat on a similar chair behind his desk.

“There’s some pretty damn mad people in town, and I know all of them-heck, I’m one of them-but I don’t know which one is crazy enough to do this,” he said.

“I don’t know exactly how to ask this,” Virgil said, “or where the ethics come in… but of all those angry people, do you know which ones might be using anti-psychotics? Or who should be?”

“Mmm.” Long hesitation. “You know, it probably would be unethical to give you that information, though I don’t doubt you could get a subpoena. Just between you, me, and the doorpost, I’d tell you if I thought one of them was the bomber. But the people I know of, who are getting that kind of medication, are not really involved in this whole thing. I suppose they could be picking up some reflected anger… If you want to come back this afternoon, and if you don’t let on where you got it, I could get together a list.”

“If you’d prefer, I could get Sheriff Ahlquist to give you a subpoena, just to cover your butt, if there were any questions,” Virgil said.

“That might be best-but I’ll get started on the list,” Kline said. “You ought to go out to Walmart and check with them, too. They roll a lot more pills than I do, now.”

Virgil asked him who he’d have been most worried about, of the angry people. Kline thought for a moment, then said, “Well, there are about three of them. And goddamnit, now, I have to live in this town, so this has to be between you and me.”

“That’s fine,” Virgil said. “Nobody needs to know where the names came from.”

Kline slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, and said, “I can’t have people seeing me smoking. I only smoke a couple a day… Come on this way.” He led Virgil out of the office, through a stockroom, up an internal stair to the roof, where four chairs, an umbrella, and a two-foot-tall office refrigerator were sitting on a deck.

Kline took a chair, lit up, blew a lungful of smoke, and said, “First up would be Ernie Stanton. Ernie’s a redneck, a hard worker. Doesn’t show it, but he’s smart. He started out with nothing, and now he owns two fast oil-change places. Ernie’s Oil. He got hurt when Walmart came in. They’ve got that Lube Express thing. But Ernie’s faster and just as cheap, so he got hurt, but he hung on. I don’t think he’ll get past PyeMart. He’s a guy with a temper, he’s a hunter, he’s got guns and all that, and he’s spent thirty years scratching his way up. Done a lot of roughneck work-might know about dynamite. He’s gonna lose his livelihood. He’s gonna lose it all.”

Virgil made a note of the name. Kline had two others, both businesspeople. Don Banning, who ran a clothing store selling work clothes; he’d also been hurt by Walmart, but he’d moved to somewhat higher-end stuff, brand names that Walmart didn’t carry. “As I understand it, PyeMart carries the same brands he does. He won’t be able to match the prices,” Kline said.

The least likely one, in Kline’s opinion, was a woman named Beth Robertson, who ran the Book Nook. “She says she’s gone. She’s gonna try to make it through Christmas-PyeMart won’t open until spring-but then she’s getting out. But she’s crazy mad about it. The bookstore is her life. She swings back and forth between this cold acceptance, planning to sell out, and this red-hot screaming anger. It’s like watching somebody who just found out they got terminal cancer. The thing is, she’s mad enough, but I don’t think she could work a hammer, much less make a bomb. She’s the kind who doesn’t understand how a nut and bolt go together.”

“Any more?” Virgil asked.

“Well, there’s me,” Kline said. “I’m done. I’m gonna retire, sell out the store while I can still get some money for it. Got a good location, maybe somebody’ll think of something they can do here.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Virgil said.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Kline said. “I can’t match the big boys when it comes to peddling pills, and I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. People already pay too much for medicine. And, my kids are gone, they’re not interested in the store, and I’ve got some money. I think my wife and I might move up to the Cities. Buy a condo, go to some plays, that kind of thing. Be useless old farts for a while. Then die.”

Virgil said, “As a city councilman… you might have noticed that there were some unusual vote changes on the PyeMart zoning.”

Kline snorted, and smoke came out of his nose. “No kidding? Where’d you hear that?”

“You know… around.”

“Those boys got bought, is what happened,” Kline said. “Three of them, anyway. The fourth one, he thinks PyeMart’s a good idea: jobs for kids and low prices. They didn’t have to buy him. Those other three, Pat Shepard, Arnold Martin, Burt Block… well, they’re not exactly friends of mine, but I’ve known them for a long time. And I’ve got to say, they’d take the money. That’s my bottom line on them. They’d take the money. I doubt that you could prove it.”

“I’m gonna have to talk to them,” Virgil said. “They could be targets.”

“You haven’t asked about the mayor. Geraldine.”

“What about her?”

“Geraldine was probably the bag man on the whole deal. Bag woman. She’s the one who talked the others into it. She is the personification of greed,” Kline said. “As mayor, she had a veto, and then it would have taken five votes to override her. But that’s not what happened.”

“She buy a new house?” Virgil asked.

“No, nothing like that. She’s not dumb. I can tell you what I suspect-my theory. Her husband has a seasonal business, renting out golf carts, and selling some.”

“That’s not an everyday business,” Virgil said.

“Well, it’s not uncommon, either,” Kline said. “Probably a couple of them in every big city, the cart rental businesses. You get these golf courses, they have weekend tournaments, and they don’t have enough carts of their own-so, they rent from Dave Gore. He pretty much services a tournament every weekend, is the way I hear it. It’s a legitimate business.”

“So what’s your theory?” Virgil asked.

“This could just be bs. But: I was up in the Cities two weeks ago, and stopped in a Goodwill store to drop off an old chest of drawers,” Kline said. “There’s a PyeMart right there, and as I was pulling out, here comes a PyeMart employee, driving across the parking lot in what looked like a brand-new golf cart.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s what I said: Hmm. Wikipedia says there are two thousand four hundred PyeMart stores in the U.S., and about one thousand one hundred in other countries. If you bought a new golf cart for only one store in ten, and bought them through Dave… that’d be a nice little chunk of change. Just about invisible. Not only that, if you’re PyeMart, you’d have the golf carts, and even a business write-off.”

“You got any proof?” Virgil asked.

“Proof? Hell, all I got is an idea, from driving past a PyeMart store.” Kline snubbed out his cigarette, and snapped it off the roof into the alley behind the store. “I gotta get back. Who knows, a customer might wander in.”

They stood up and Virgil looked across the top of the building, out onto the lake. A single sailboat cruised a few hundred feet off the waterfront, and Virgil asked, “That’s not, uh…” He dug in his memory, found the name. “… Arnold Martin, is it?”

Kline looked out at the sailboat and said, “Nope. I’d say Arnold’s boat is about half that big.”

Back downstairs, Virgil thanked Kline for his time, and Kline asked, “Was I any help?”

“Well, you know, the possibility of municipal corruption is always interesting, if you’re a cop,” Virgil said. “But it’s not the PyeMart supporters who are blowing stuff up. Not the crooks on the city council. I’ll probably go around and talk to some of these people you told me about.”

“Let me add a name to your list: Larry Butz. He’s one of the trout guys. He said publicly that we had to stop the PyeMart any way we could. This was in a city council meeting, and Geraldine jumped right on him and said something like, ‘You don’t mean that; we’re civilized people here.’ And Butz said, ‘I did mean it. We got to do anything we can.’ ”

“Good guy? Bad guy?”

“Not a bad guy. But I happen to know that he’s taken a pretty wide variety of anti-depression and anti-anxiety pills. He has some problems.”

“Thanks for that,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop by later and get the rest of the list.”

“Get me a subpoena and get one for Walmart, too,” Kline said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m a rat.”

Virgil’s next stop was at city hall, where he talked to Geraldine Gore, who had an office the size of the smallest legal bedroom. With just enough space for a desk, four file cabinets, two visitor chairs, and an American flag, she pointed him at one of the two chairs, but didn’t seem all that excited to see him.

Gore was a short woman, but wide, the kind who might have stopped a hockey puck without moving too much. She had stiff magenta hair over mousy brown eyebrows, and suspicious blue eyes.

She said, “I have to tell you, I have no idea what this is about.”

Virgil pushed his eyebrows up: “Well, it seems simple enough. You guys approved PyeMart, a lot of people think it’ll damage the town and its environment.”

“That’s nonsense,” she snapped.

“So what?”

She frowned: “What do you mean, so what? We had environmental impact statements, we had economic studies-”

Virgil interrupted what threatened to become a PowerPoint presentation. “I mean, it may be nonsense, what people think-but they think it anyway. One of them apparently is so mad about it that he’s killing people. As a potential target, I’d think you’d be pretty anxious to get this straightened out.”

“I’m not a target-”

“Tell that to the bomber,” Virgil said. “You’re the one single person who could have stopped the PyeMart, if you’d vetoed the city council’s approval of the zoning change. You didn’t. The feds think the bomber is probably already building his next bomb, and thinking about a target. Between you and me, they say that if he put all the explosive he’s got into one bomb, he could reduce the city hall to flinders.”

“Flinders?”

“You know. Bits and pieces.”

“That’s nonsense.” She looked around her office, suddenly nervous. “This building… this building…”

“Mrs. Gore, this Pelex explosive is used in quarries,” Virgil said. “It turns solid rock into gravel.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “The two people you should talk to are Ernie Stanton and Larry Butz. They are completely irrational about this. I can get you their addresses.”

“I’ve already got them,” Virgil said. “Who else?”

Virgil came away with four names that he hadn’t had before: eight names altogether; but she’d named all the people mentioned by Kline.

He’d decided to start with Stanton, and was walking down to his truck, when another bomb went off.