Shock Wave

6

Virgil had heard bomb-like devices explode in the past. In the army’s Officer Candidate School, he’d thrown four hand grenades at a wooden post, while standing inside a concrete trench, and later watched from behind a thick Plexiglas screen while other members of his training unit threw more. He’d also had the opportunity to pop off a few rounds from an M203 grenade launcher.

When the bomb went off-it was somewhere close by, and behind him-he had no doubt what it was. He turned and saw people running along a street two blocks away, got in his truck, and went that way, in a hurry.

The first thing he saw when he turned the corner was a wrecked white stretch limo, half of it a smoking ruin. The limo was sitting sideways in the street, and a man in what looked like a doorman’s uniform was crawling away from it on his hands and knees.

Virgil got as close as he could, outside the blast zone, parked, and ran over to the limo and looked inside. It was empty; finding it empty was like having a boulder lifted off his chest. The man in the dark uniform had reached the curb, and he rolled over and sat down, his hands covering his ears.

Virgil hurried over to him-there were sirens now, and they were coming his way-squatted and asked the man, “You the driver?”

“Look what they done to my car,” the man moaned.

“Where’s Pye and his assistant?”

“Down at the AmericInn. I was just going to get them,” the driver said. He was looking at the car. “No way that can be fixed.”

Virgil looked at the car: the bomb, he thought, had been in the vehicle’s small trunk, and had blown off most of the back third of it. The middle third was still there, but was a shambles, with all the glass blown out, the seats uprooted and thrown against the back of the driver’s compartment. Anyone seated behind the driver would have been killed, or badly injured.

“I think you’re right,” Virgil said. “Hope you got insurance.”

“That was my baby,” the driver said.

“You’ll get another one,” Virgil said. “It coulda been a hell of a lot worse.”

The driver said, “Yeah, and you know how? Oh my God, I stopped down the street, two blocks back, to let the kids go by on a field trip. Little kids from the elementary school, looked like they were going to the library. If that’d gone off… there must’ve been fifteen of them.”

A thin young man in a dress shirt and a necktie ran up, stopped a few steps away, peered at them over a weedy mustache, whipped out a camera and took a picture of the driver and Virgil sitting together, with the wrecked limo in the background. “I’m with the Clarion Call,” he said, running the last few steps up. “Harvey, what’d you think when the bomb went off?”

“Hey, you’re walking all over the goddamned crime scene,” Virgil said. “Back off.”

“Who the hell are you?” the reporter asked.

“With the BCA,” Virgil said.

“Ah, Flowers. Have you made any progress?”

A deputy came running up, glanced in the car, then said to the reporter, “Larry, get the fuck outa here.”

The reporter backed away, brought the camera out again. The deputy asked Virgil and the driver if they were hurt, and Virgil said, “I just got here-I’m with the BCA.”

The cop was impressed: “Boy, you got here in a hurry, huh?” He stood up as another car came up and shouted, “Block off the street. Route the traffic around. Keep those people away from here.”

Virgil took a break from the driver to call Barlow. “You hear the bomb go?”

“What?”

Virgil told him about it, and Barlow said, “Have them freeze the site. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Virgil passed the word to the first deputy, then a fire truck arrived, and another one, and an ambulance, and two or three more cop cars. The whole area smelled of burned tar and leaking oil-there didn’t seem to be any gasoline. Virgil went back to the driver, who said his name was Harvey Greene. Greene kept the limo at his house. “I park it right beside the house.”

“Are you the only white limo in town?”

“I’m the only white limo in the county,” Greene said. “Some more come in for the prom and so on, but I’m the only one that’s right here.”

“How hard would it have been to get in your trunk?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t think it was in my trunk,” Greene said.

“You don’t? It looks to me like-”

Greene shook his head. “Number one, nobody touches my car that I don’t know about it. If I’m not in it, it’s locked. If he’d jimmied my trunk, I would have heard. I park that baby right outside my bedroom. Number two, when I go out, the first thing I do is, I walk around the car with a spray bottle and a rag, and wipe it down. There was no sign anybody had been in the trunk.”

“If he had a key-”

“There’re two keys. One’s still in the ignition, and one’s in the console. I saw it this morning: I always check to make sure I’ve got the spare, so I don’t hang nobody up if I do something stupid and lose the one in my pocket. Whoever it is, he had to put the bomb in last night: I didn’t know but yesterday afternoon that Mr. Pye was coming in.”

The red-haired woman deputy, O’Hara, walked around the car, looking at it, then ambled over to Virgil and Greene and put her hand on Greene’s knee: “You okay, Harvey?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“So what do you think?” Virgil asked. “How’d this happen?”

“I think somebody snuck up to my house with a bomb and some duct tape, and taped it to the rear axle, or something else down there. I never look under the car. Maybe I should,” Greene said.

Virgil patted him on the back. “You’re a pretty smart guy, Harvey. I think you’re probably right. We’ll see what the feds have to say about it.”

Virgil stood up and O’Hara said, “The bomber knows his way around. Harvey lives out on the edge of town, and there’s not much out there. If he was seen, people out there will remember.”

“Makes me think he probably wasn’t seen.”

O’Hara nodded. “Why’d he blow up those pipes? That won’t stop anything.”

“If you come up with an answer, let me know,” Virgil said.

Barlow arrived, looked at the car, and agreed that Greene was probably right-the bomb had been under the car, rather than in the trunk. If anyone had been sitting in the rearmost seat, he would have vaporized.

Barlow had left one of the crime-scene techs at the construction trailer, while the other one worked the city maintenance yard. When the sheriff arrived, he asked for, and got, two deputies to guard the bombed-out trailer, and ordered that tech into town to work the limo.

To Greene, he said, “As soon as I’ve got this place settled down, we’ll go over to your house and take a look at where you parked the car. That’ll be another crime-scene site. Is there anybody out there now? Your wife…?”

“Not married anymore,” Greene said. He added, “And now, I’m unemployed.”

The perimeter of the bomb scene had turned into a circus: a hundred people had gathered to watch and more were coming in. There was a pizza place across the street, and slices were beginning to circulate. Then Pye showed up with his assistant, and when Barlow saw them arguing with a deputy, he said to Virgil, “You handle Pye better than I do. Be a good guy, and go over and talk to him.”

Virgil walked over and said to the deputy, “Let them through, will you? My responsibility.”

Pye came through and said, curtly, “Thank you. And thank the good Lord that I wasn’t in that car. That would have really screwed up my whole happy hour.”

Virgil told him what he knew, which wasn’t much. “Barlow can probably tell you about a detonator, but you can see… they were trying to kill you, man.”

“No kidding.” Pye raked his lower lip with his upper teeth a few times, looking thoughtfully out at the blast zone, then said to his assistant, “Pye spoke to Flowers for a minute, getting the lay of the land, then resolved to hunt down this monster no matter what it took.”

She took it down in shorthand, and Virgil asked, “Are you writing a book?”

“I take down everything Mr. Pye says,” the woman answered.

“Is that possible?” Virgil asked.

“Barely,” she said.

“She damned well better get it all,” Pye said. “I pay her enough.”

“Barely,” she said.

When Barlow saw that Pye had calmed down, he came over, nodded, and said, “No sign of the detonator, but the guy’s getting more sophisticated. He must’ve used a mercury switch, or a roll ball, or maybe even an accelerometer of some kind. Something that would set it off with movement. Not a mousetrap or a timer.”

“Could you track it?” Pye asked.

Barlow shook his head: “It’s pretty common stuff. The thing is, you could take a mercury switch out of a fifty-year-old thermostat, wire it up on a pipe bomb, and when the car hits a big enough bump, the mercury gets thrown up on the contacts and boom!”

Virgil said, “That would assume that the guy knew that Mr. Pye would be in Greene’s limo today, which he couldn’t have known before yesterday afternoon at the earliest. He had to manufacture the bomb and get it in place before dawn. So he had what, less than twelve hours? And, he had to know where Greene lives, and how to approach the car.”

“Local guy for sure,” Barlow said. “A smart guy, with good intel.”

“Maybe there’s more than one,” Pye suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.”

Pye said to his assistant, “Put in your notebook that I said that. The grape-nuts thing.”

Pye wanted a closer look at the car, and Barlow said, “I’ll take you over there, but I’d rather your assistant didn’t come along. I’ll talk to you as a courtesy, but I don’t want anything written down. It’ll wind up in court, with me being cross-examined because I used the wrong adjective or something.”

Pye agreed, and they walked over to the car, and the woman said to Virgil, “You are a tall drink of water.”

“You’re pretty much of an ice cream cone your own self,” Virgil said. “What’re you doing working for Pye?”

“Oh, I do it for the money,” she said. “It’s not uninteresting.”

“Huh. I notice you say ‘uninteresting,’ rather than ‘disinteresting,’ ” Virgil said.

“That’s because I have at least an eighth-grade education,” she said. “And Willard pays me for my grammar.”

“I wouldn’t do it for a million bucks a year,” Virgil said.

“Neither would I,” she said.

Virgil: “Are you serious?”

“Yes. I’m selling him three years of my life,” she said. “He pays me one-point-two, which is about point-seven-two per year, after state and federal, plus all expenses. For that, I follow him around everywhere, take down everything he says, verbatim, and provide him with both the original text and a polished narrative. In another year, I’ll have a bundle tucked away. Then I’ll write a tell-all book about him, and make another bundle.”

“I guess it’s a plan, though I’m not sure that many people would read a tell-all book about a short fat guy,” Virgil said.

“How about a short fat guy with thirty-two billion dollars?”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “I personally wouldn’t buy it.”

“Since you’re not going to buy my book, why don’t you buy me a margarita tonight?”

“Who should I ask for?”

“Marie Chapman. Room one-nineteen at the AmericInn.” She got off around seven o’clock, right after Pye finished dinner, she said. “Give me until eight.”

“Are your eyes green or brown?” Virgil asked.

“Depends on my body temperature,” she said. “As I get hotter, they turn greener.”

They chatted for another two minutes, trying out movie lines on each other-“I’m outa here like a cool desert breeze,” she said, when Pye walked back toward them-and then Virgil wandered off into the crowd. He knew nothing about bombs, so standing around looking at a bent wheel didn’t seem likely to produce either a clue or a bomber. The crowd, he thought, might be a different story. There was some chance that the bomber might be there, checking out the results.

So he sidled through the rubberneckers, looking at faces, looking for signs of furtiveness, guilt, the wrong kind of excitement. A tall stout man with a shiny red face asked, “You Flowers?”

“I am,” Virgil said.

“Saw your name in the paper this morning. You got any ideas about who’s doing this?”

“Must be somebody who’s trying to stop the PyeMart,” Virgil said. “Either for financial reasons, or it’s somebody upset about the runoff into the river.”

“Or somebody who just hates Pye,” the man said. “He’s that little short fat fella, right?”

“That’s him.”

“He don’t look like twenty billion dollars to me,” the guy said.

“Thirty-two billion. I got it on good authority,” Virgil said.

A guy in a post office uniform said, “You could have fun with that kinda money. Go to Vegas.”

“Go to Vegas in your own jet airplane, and then buy it, the whole town,” the stout man said. “Hookers’n all.”

A woman in running shorts and a cut-off sweatshirt said, “It’s not just the runoff in the river. The river goes into the lake, and if you fouled up the lake… there goes the reason for the town.”

The stout man said, “They’re talking about a little gasoline, a little oil. Probably leak more gas and oil into the lake from the marinas than you’d ever get off that parking lot.”

“You’re not buying the pollution, huh?” Virgil asked.

The stout man shrugged. “I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no. I’m just saying, that parking lot is probably a half mile from the river. I don’t see how that could equal all the trucks backing down into the lake to dump off boats, and the boats starting up… I’m just sayin’.”

“He sure is a little fat guy,” the woman said, looking at Pye.

The stout man asked Virgil, “How do you know it’s not just somebody who follows him around, and tries to kill him? Tried in Michigan, set off the bomb here, sucked him in, and then went for him again this morning?”

“Well, for one thing, the explosive came from a quarry up around Cold Spring,” Virgil said.

The stout man’s eyebrows went up. “Okay, give me the pointy hat. I’ll go sit in the corner.”

“No, no. I think you asked an interesting question,” the woman said to the stout man. “It’s something to think about. Is the bomber person trying to stop this store? Or trying to stop Pye?”

“Bomber person,” Virgil said with a smile. “You think it might be a woman?”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve got a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue. I could go down in my workshop and build a bomb in about fifteen minutes, if I had the explosive.”

“Don’t let me catch you in a quarry,” Virgil said.

The stout man asked, “You take a close look at postal workers? They’re supposed to be crazier than an outhouse mouse.”

The mailman said, “That’s real funny.” And to Virgil: “What’s your profiler say about this guy? Age, socioeconomic status, all that?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked that,” Virgil said. “We’re trying to keep that a little close to the vest, for a while.”

“Why? The bomber knows who he is, so it won’t be anything new to him,” the mailman said. “If you put out a profile, maybe you’d get some ideas from the people who live here.”

“I’ll think about that,” Virgil said. He nodded at the three of them, and drifted away, looking at the crowd, and eventually made his way back through the crime-scene tape to Barlow.

“Listen,” Virgil said. “You got a profiler I could talk to? Somebody who could give me some idea of what I might be looking for? Age, socioeconomic status, and all that?”

Barlow shook his head. “We don’t do that so much. We found out most profiles are ninety percent bullshit. If you just look at what this guy’s done, and where he’s done it, you’ll get a better idea than anything you’ll get from some shrink.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Barlow said.

“Okay. Then I’m gonna take off, I got more people to talk to,” Virgil said. “Call me if you find anything.”

“Will do,” Barlow said.

Virgil stopped at a Superamerica, bought the Star Tribune, the Butternut Falls Clarion Call, and a Diet Coke, then sat in the convenience store parking lot and read the papers’ stories on the store bombing. Pye had announced a two-million-dollar gift to the dead man’s family, more money to the injured man, and reiterated his million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bomber. Virgil was identified as “one of the BCA’s top investigators.”

Virgil was uncertain how the reward would work. If he (Virgil) spoke to two hundred people in town, and from among that information fished out the strands of an identification, would all two hundred of them wind up suing Pye-or somebody-for a piece of the million-dollar action? Seemed like a truck load of trouble coming down the road.

But, that was Pye’s problem.

He tossed the papers over the seat and into the back, and took another hit on the Diet Coke. The Purdue engineer woman had given him an idea. The bomber should have a workshop of some kind, shouldn’t he?

He got on the phone to Barlow, and when the ATF man answered, he asked, “You find any pieces of the bomb casing? The pipe, or whatever?”

“Yeah, a few pieces from the trailer,” Barlow said. “It’s galvanized steel pipe, probably salvaged from an older house, used for interior plumbing. Same as was used in Michigan. Might have got it from a dump. Hell, sometimes it’s used for outdoor railings… used to be all over the place.”

“Did you ever find a piece of a cut end?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, we did. We found both ends in Michigan,” Barlow said. “We’re not talking about it, because if we find the guy, we can match the pipe. We don’t want him to get rid of it.”

“Was it cut with a power saw, or a hacksaw?”

“Power saw, definitely… Hmm, I think I see where you’re going with this.”

“The guy has some tools,” Virgil said. “He has a power saw that cuts pipe. That’s not something you see in everybody’s workshop. He can get parts. He knows about electrical wiring… at least something. How to use batteries…”

“See? You’re profiling him,” Barlow said. “This town has eighteen thousand people? You probably got it down to a few hundred. Maybe less.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know which few hundred,” Virgil said.

Butternut Falls had a half-dozen hardware stores, but only a couple that might sell something as specialized as a pipe cutter. Virgil didn’t know much about metal-cutting tools, but even if the bomber was simply able to buy a metal-cutting blade for a table saw, there were only a few places that sold table saws: a Home Depot, a Menards, a Fleet Farm, a Hardware Hank.

He’d seen the Home Depot when he came into town, so he headed that way, a five-minute trip, parked, went inside to the “Tools” section, found a woman in an orange apron, identified himself, and asked, “You got anybody here who’s like a woodworking hobbyist, a guy who knows about workshops and so on?”

“That would be Lawrence,” she said. “Let me find him for you.”

While she did that, Virgil went down the aisle and looked at all the power saws-table saws, band saws, miter saws. He’d always been handy enough with simple tools, but like a lot of men, always felt guilty about not knowing more. Like, exactly how did a router work? Shouldn’t all males know that?

The store clerk came back with a mustachioed older man in another orange apron, and introduced him as Lawrence, who had a home workshop and gave woodworking lessons. Virgil explained the problem, and concluded with: “… so we’d like to know who’d have a workshop well-enough equipped to cut a three-inch galvanized steel pipe.”

“Well, hell, you could do that with a Sawzall. You wouldn’t need a workshop. If you didn’t want to buy the Sawzall, you could rent one from us,” Lawrence said.

“Really?”

“Sure. You’d have to buy a bi-metal blade, but I mean, you really don’t need a workshop,” Lawrence said. “Who told you you’d need a workshop?”

Virgil didn’t want to say, “I did,” because he’d sound ignorant, so he said, “This federal guy. Hang on, I’m going to give him a ring.”

He stepped away and got Barlow on the phone and relayed what Lawrence had said. “Sawzall’s are a dime a dozen, man.”

Barlow said, “Well, your Lawrence guy is absolutely right, you could cut the pipe with a Sawzall. But our guy didn’t. Our tool-marks specialist says it was cut with some kind of chop saw, not with a Sawzall.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Virgil said.

Virgil relayed what Barlow had said, and Lawrence scratched his thinning yellow hair and said, “They can tell that? Huh. Must be, heck, I don’t know-I probably know forty guys who have chop saws, miter saws, in their workshops, and there are probably two hundred floating around town. Of course, we sell almost no metal-cutting blades here. Most people use their saws for woodworking.”

“You sell any of the metal-cutting blades recently?” Virgil asked.

“I didn’t. But the guy probably wouldn’t ask, he’d probably just come in and find it himself. There’s probably some way to look at the inventory… that’d be one of the computer guys who could tell you that,” Lawrence said. “They sell them over at Fleet Farm and Menards, too. And if you were going to do something illegal, and didn’t want to buy one locally, you might run into the Cities, and they probably sell hundreds of blades over there.”

“Damn it: I thought I was onto something,” Virgil said.

“Let me ask around, the boys,” Lawrence said. “Maybe somebody’ll have an idea.”

Virgil thanked him, gave him a card, and told him to call if he learned anything.

Back in the truck, he made a note to check with the BCA researcher to see if there was a way to check with Home Depot, Menards, and Fleet Farm to see if any metal-cutting chop-saw blades had been sold recently, and if so, if there’d been a credit card attached to the sale. He had little hope that anything would come of it.

Sitting there in the sun, looking at Ahlquist’s list of possible interviews, and Kline the pharmacist’s list of names, he sighed and shook his head. He’d have to do the legwork, but if the guy was clever, the legwork wouldn’t turn up much.

What, the guy was going to confess when Virgil dropped by?

If he got anything, it’d come at an angle-he’d get it as a result of looking at something else. Looking at Kline’s list, he called Ahlquist and asked him to get subpoenas for people who used antipsychotic medications.

“I’ll have O’Hara do it, and have her serve them,” the sheriff said. “We’ll have them tonight.”

“How about the press conference?”

“We’re gonna have one whether we want to or not, with two separate incidents, now. I got a TV truck right now, taking pictures of the limo, and talking to Harvey, and more are coming in. What time should I make the conference?”

“Later this afternoon… give us some space, and time to think. Maybe… three o’clock?”

“See you then. Unless another bomb goes off. Then I’ll see you sooner.”

With that taken care of, he dug out his iPad, turned it on, and got a map with directions to the hospital. He stopped at a local coffee shop and got a skinny hot chocolate, and then went off to the hospital.

Michael Sullivan was in a bed in the critical care ward, not because he was badly hurt, but because he was confused, and the confusion could be the result of some continuing head injury.

“We want to protect against the possibility of a trauma-induced seizure, or stroke,” a doctor told Virgil.

Sullivan’s confusion seemed to be diminishing, the doc said, but at times he flashed back to the moment after the explosion, when he wiped the gore from his face and eyes and saw Kingsley’s head on the ground, and saw the dead man’s eyes open and looking at him.

“A pure psychological thing, but real enough,” the doc said. “It should get better over time, but he’ll never escape it completely. The effects will always be there, the changes in his life and career and prospects.”

“Could those be better, instead of worse?” Virgil asked.

The doc grinned and said, “Nobody ever asked me that. Okay, they could be better, but how would you know? Say he goes on to be a millionaire, and he thinks, If I hadn’t been blown up, I’d be a billionaire. So what do you say about that?”

Virgil shrugged. “You say, ‘Well, that’s life. Suck it up, cowboy.’ ”

“That’s why you’re not getting paid two hundred dollars an hour, like me,” the doc said.

Sullivan was propped up on a couple of pillows, and except for what looked like a wind-burned face, seemed okay. A handsome young woman sat on a chair to one side, flipping through an Elle magazine, while a guy in a suit had his butt propped against a windowsill, taking notes on a yellow pad inside a leather folder.

When Virgil came in and introduced himself, the woman said, “He’s been really good. He still has a ringing in his ears, but I think he’ll be just fine.”

And the man said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t know anything of the sort, Mary, and you have to stop telling people that.”

Virgil understood that the man with the folder was a lawyer and the woman was Sullivan’s wife. Virgil turned to the injured man and said, “I don’t really, uh, want to question your condition, Mr. Sullivan. I’m more interested in what happened before the explosion. People you may have seen around the site…”

The lawyer said, “No matter who he may or may not have seen around the site, I don’t think we can say he really had any responsibility-”

Virgil said, “Look, I’m here to interview Mr. Sullivan. He is not suspected of a crime and I’m not investigating him. He’s a witness and he has no right of silence. So, I’m happy enough to let you sit there, but if you interrupt, I’ll have to ask you to leave. Okay?”

The lawyer said four or five hundred words, which Virgil waved off. “Fine, fine. But if you interrupt, I’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for interfering with a police officer, even though doing that would be a pain in the ass, and handcuff you out in the hallway until I’m done here, and then we’ll both go down to the jail. Okay? Just shut up, and let me do my job.”

The woman said, “I don’t think you can talk to a lawyer like that.”

“Of course I can,” Virgil said. “I just did. Now, Mr. Sullivan.. .”

Sullivan had one thing.

He couldn’t remember the explosion, though he could remember seeing Kingsley’s head. He didn’t see anything suspicious around the work site, except the one thing.

“The one thing was, there was a guy who was watching us through binoculars. We all saw him, once or twice. We joked about it. He was off behind the site, between the site and the river. I only actually saw him once. He was pretty far away, and I saw more movement than I did his body. He was wearing camo, I think, which seemed weird to me, because I don’t think there are any hunting seasons going on. It made me wonder if he’d been watching us regular-like. The way I saw him was that it was in the evening, and the sun was going down to the northwest, and he was south of us, and I saw the flash off the binocular lenses. I saw the flash two different days, but the second day, I never saw the man, just a flash from down in the bush.”

“Down in the bush,” Virgil said. “He was below you?”

“Yeah. There’s heavy brush back there, but the land generally falls away from the store, toward the river,” Sullivan said. “That’s why these people think the parking lot will drain into the Butternut, because the land falls away. We’ve got retention systems and everything else and I was telling-”

Suddenly his eyes went wide, the blood drained from his face, and he turned his face to the woman and groaned, “Mary, my God…”

The woman dropped the magazine and stood and then bent over him and said, “It’s okay, Mike, you’re just fine, Mike.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, his eyes are looking right at me but they’re all white, looking right at me…”

The flashback lasted only a few seconds, but there was no question of its reality: Sullivan appeared to be slipping into shock, and Virgil sent the lawyer to find a doctor.

“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore,” Sullivan’s wife said.

Virgil nodded: “I think you’re right.”

Back outside, Virgil thought about what Sullivan had said, and decided to go look in the brush behind the PyeMart site. Maybe he’d find a matchbook from the cafe where the bomber hung out.

Or not.