Shock Wave

8

The parking lot was full of white television vans, with camera guys in jeans and golf shirts lolling about the courthouse doors, the talent in dresses and sport coats. Three or four newspaper reporters mixed in, along with a radio guy from Minnesota Public Radio and an online reporter from MinnPost.

Ahlquist bustled about, glad-handing the television people, joking with the reporters. Pye was there, with Chapman, his assistant; the redheaded cop, O’Hara, sat in a chair by herself at the back of the press conference, arms folded across her chest, watching. Barlow came in, wearing a suit and tie, a few minutes after Virgil got there. Barlow said he was mostly a prop. “I’ll just say that we’re making progress, and confirm the find up at BTC. What’s this thing about market research?”

Virgil told him about George Peck’s suggestion, and Barlow scratched an ear and said, “I dunno. I never heard of anything like that.”

Virgil said, “Can’t hurt. I mean, everybody in town knows we’re looking for the bomber, and most of them have some opinions. The sheriff already has a reserved website for natural disaster information and so on. We could use that… Be kind of interesting, I think.”

“But it’s not based on evidence-it’s just based on… nothing. A vote,” Barlow said.

“No, it’s based on collective judgment,” said Virgil. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to have proof. We’d still have to prove that the bomber did it.”

“Let me suggest something-think about it for a couple of days,” Barlow said. “It sounds goofy to me and it’ll sound goofy to the media. In fact, let me make an executive decision here: I’m gonna stay as far away from it as I can.”

“So I’ll think about it,” Virgil said. “No big rush.”

“What? Of course there’s a big rush,” Barlow said. “We can’t get this guy too soon, no matter how we do it.”

The press conference was held in a courtroom at the new county courthouse, a space that did its best to translate justice into laminated wood. A Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter stopped to chat, and when he drifted away in pursuit of Barlow, Pye walked over, trailed by Chapman and her steno pad, and asked, “You still thinking about the plane?”

“I started thinking about it again,” Virgil said. “If I don’t come up with anything the rest of the day, I might go.”

“If you can figure out how the bomber got in the building, I think you’ll know who he is,” Chapman said, over Pye’s head.

“Why’s that?”

She tipped her head toward the back of the courtroom, and the three of them found a pew and sat side by side, Pye in the middle, and Chapman spoke around him. “This all comes from my stenography, my reporting in following Willard around, talking to ATF guys.”

The Pinnacle, she said, was deep in the countryside, all by itself, surrounded by a wide plaza that sat fifteen feet above the surrounding parking lots. The parking lots were a hundred and fifty feet across, and were, in turn, surrounded by farm fields.

“You can’t see the bottom floor of the building from the fields, because the plaza is set up too high. That means you can’t do longterm surveillance from the cornfields, because you can’t see up on top of the plaza. And you can’t get close to the plaza without being in the open, where the security cameras would pick you up. The cameras never found anybody. Everybody who comes through, front and back, twenty-four hours a day, is on multiple cameras, and there are no gaps in the videos.”

“Barlow said that the bomb had to be in there less than a day,” Virgil said.

“The ATF found fragments of the clock used as a timer. The technicians say that it didn’t have a running time of more than twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. So the bomber had to be in the building less than twenty-four hours before the bomb went off. They checked everybody coming through the front and back-the loading dock is around back-and checked them off. Found them all. No obvious suspects,” Chapman said.

Pye bobbed his head, and Chapman continued: “So then they thought that the bomb had been placed by an insider. They’d tracked down the probable origin of the explosives, up at that quarry-around here someplace, Cold Spring?-and decided that an insider had simply known about that quarry for some reason, and had come here to get the explosives. They also checked out people, insiders, who’d been out here for this construction project. There were about a dozen of them, and they were all eliminated by the ATF.”

Pye jumped in: “So that was it: had to be an insider, who came out here by chance. Then the bomb went off here, and they were… confused. Because that made it seem like it might be an outsider again, and they didn’t think it could be an outsider. Now this second bomb-”

“It wasn’t an insider,” Virgil said. “At least, it seems unlikely. We’ve located the place where the pipe was cut for the bombs.” He told them about the tech college, and the metal shop.

Pye clouded up: “How come nobody told me about this? This is a big deal.”

“Just happened, a few minutes ago,” Virgil said. “They got a piece of pipe. Maybe it’ll have a fingerprint, or DNA.”

“Not the way that our luck has been running,” Pye said. “But it sounds like you’ve been making progress. I don’t want you to go running off to Grand Rapids if it’ll slow you down.”

“If you can turn me around in a hurry, I won’t lose much time here,” Virgil said. “But I’d want to work tonight, and get back on the plane first thing tomorrow morning.”

Chapman said to Pye, “If you want, I could go along with him. That way, I could cut through any bureaucratic bullshit.”

Pye squeezed his lower lip, thinking about it, then said, “If you got out of here at seven o’clock, you’d be in the building by eleven. You lose an hour in the time zones. I could have everybody waiting for you. You talk to them, look around, see what you think, get a few hours’ sleep, get back on the plane at eight-the pilots need an eighthour turnaround. You could get another couple hours of sleep on the plane, and still be back here by nine o’clock in the morning, because you get the hour back. Eat breakfast on the plane, you’d lose no working time at all.”

Virgil said, “Set it up. I’ll be at the airport at seven o’clock, if nothing else blows up.”

The press conference almost went off as planned, with Ahlquist as an upbeat master of ceremonies. He told the gathered reporters that substantial progress had been made toward finding the bomber, that arrests were expected in the next few days, that the ATF lab was processing DNA evidence found on pieces of the bomb.

And he announced that they’d found the saw where the pipes had been cut, but refused to say where that was. “We have to hold some of this tight, for investigative reasons.”

One of the reporters said, “We heard it was out at Butternut Tech.”

Ahlquist said, “I can’t confirm anything-”

“Everybody already knows,” the reporter said.

“Ah, shit,” Ahlquist said, then, “Excuse me.”

Barlow, in his turn, conceded that the lab work would take a few days, and that “nothing was certain.” The media people detected the tap dancing and went after him, asking for a timetable on which they could decide whether or not the investigation was looking like a failure. Barlow slipped that punch and turned the pageant back to the sheriff.

Ahlquist recovered some ground by lying about the amount of progress made, including references to additional information that couldn’t be disclosed.

Then things turned ugly.

A middle-aged dark-haired woman stood up and shouted, “How come you spend all this time investigating this bomber, and you don’t investigate that little fat man for killing this whole town?” She turned around and poked an index finger at Pye, who was still sitting next to Virgil. “That one! The people who elected you to office would like to know that.”

“This ain’t good,” Pye muttered, and Chapman wrote it down.

Ahlquist tried to dodge the bullet by saying, “Now, Beth, goldarnit, you know I’m not a city official and I had nothing to do with the PyeMart deal.”

Beth Robertson, the bookstore woman, Virgil thought. She shouted, “Everybody knows that Pye bought the city council and the mayor, and you sure got the right to investigate that. If you investigated that-”

At that point, the mayor, who’d been sitting in the front row, half-stood and turned, and shouted, “Robertson, you shut your mouth or I’ll sue your butt off. I never did anything I didn’t think was for the good of this town. I work sixty hours a week-”

“You shut up, bitch-face,” Robertson shouted. She stepped into the aisle and took a couple steps toward the mayor. Virgil wondered why none of the sheriff’s deputies were trying to get between them; it seemed like the responsible thing to do. Chapman leaned around Pye and said, “Maybe you ought to stop them.”

Virgil: “Me?”

Robertson screamed at the mayor, “You and that goddamned crook you’re married to would sell your children for ten dollars and a rubber tire…”

Her voice reached toward a screech and Virgil thought, Hmm, and, at the same time, decided he liked her turn of phrase. Pye had lowered himself in his seat, but nobody was much looking at him anyway, because the mayor squeezed out of her pew into the aisle, the same aisle that Robertson had just gotten to.

The cops were moving now, nearly too late, and though Robertson was the smaller of the two women, probably giving up twenty pounds, she went for the mayor like a lion after a zebra, teeth and claws. The mayor was right there, ready to take her on, but one of the cops got to Robertson just two feet short of the mayor, grabbed her around the waist and horsed her toward the back of the room, kicking and screaming.

As the cop wrestled with Robertson, a tall bearded man in a plaid shirt stood up and shouted, “Beth is right, Ahlquist, and you know it. Those sonsof bitches were paid off big-time. Now that parking lot is going to bleed all over the Butternut and we’re gonna leave our children a polluted swamp. A polluted swamp.”

A television reporter called, “What do you have to say to that, Sheriff?”

Ahlquist ignored her and said, “We’re all done here, we’re all finished. Let’s have a little peace and quiet, folks…”

Robertson started screaming from the crowd in the back, as a deputy cuffed her, and the man in the plaid shirt shouted, “No! We deserve some answers. Who’s investigating the city council, is what we want to know.”

The mayor shouted, “Shut up, Butz. Just shut up.”

Chapman leaned over to Virgil and said, “Fistfight in Butternut. Film at eleven.”

“I better get the fuck out of here,” Pye said. He stood up, and behind him, Chapman wrote it down. Pye said to Virgil as he was leaving, “I’ll tell the pilots you’re flying at seven o’clock. Marie’ll come with you.”

Out in the hall, Virgil bumped into Ahlquist, who had a shiny patina of sweat on his forehead. The sheriff said, “That worked out real well.”

“Am I gonna be able to talk to Robertson?” Virgil asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, she was being cuffed.”

“Aw, shit, she just scratched one of my guys,” Ahlquist said. “We all agreed that nothing serious happened, and she’s on the way back to her store.”

Beth Robertson was one of those bookstore women who wore her hair in a bun, who was a little overweight, but not too, who dressed in shades of brown but referred to them as earth colors, and who always tried to sell you an Annie Dillard when you were looking for a Stephen King. Nice enough, and sometimes a pain in the ass, Virgil thought. She was peering out the front window of the bookstore when Virgil went in; he was the only other person in the place.

“Virgil Flowers,” she said, turning away from the window. “You were pointed out to me. You seem to be pretty close to Pye.”

Virgil shrugged. “I’m not, no. But he’s a target of this bomber, and I need to talk with him from time to time.”

“So, what do you want with me?”

“I need to scratch you off my list of people who might be making these bombs,” Virgil said.

She suddenly sat down on a metal folding chair and began to weep. Virgil let her go for a minute, then said, “Is there anything…?”

“I am completely humiliated,” she said. “I completely lost control back there. They handcuffed me.”

“That was to keep you from scratching any more deputies,” Virgil said. “You have a lot of sympathizers, from what I can tell.”

“Ah, God,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“So, about the bombs…”

Robertson said she’d never do anything to hurt a living creature; she neither ate meat, nor wore leather. “I sure wouldn’t make a bomb. Though I could.”

“Make a bomb?”

“Sure. All these idiot rednecks run around making bombs, why couldn’t I?” she asked.

“Well, a lot of rednecks aren’t idiots,” Virgil said. “A lot of them have experience with tools and so on.”

She waved him off. “I could do it. I just wouldn’t. No: we need to stop the PyeMart, and we could, if anyone would just pay attention to the simple fact that the mayor and the city council were bribed to approve the zoning change. Once that was established, PyeMart would be stopped cold.”

“If you have any evidence of that…”

“There’s the problem. We all know it, but we can’t prove it.”

They spent ten minutes talking, and two minutes in, Virgil scratched her off the list. She really wouldn’t hurt a flea, he thought. She told him that she had no idea of who’d done the bombings, but there were a lot of people who were angry enough to be suspects. She wouldn’t name them, because there were too many of them, and because she didn’t want to point at a lot of innocent people-“And all but one of them is innocent.”

He asked about the college and she shook her head. “None of the people who seem the angriest are from the college, as far as I know. But if I were so angry that I’d start setting off bombs, I’d pretend that I wasn’t angry at all. Wouldn’t you? Just keep my mouth shut and build my bombs.”

Virgil scratched his chin and said, “Yeah. You may be right. I should be looking for somebody who isn’t angry.”

She showed the smallest of smiles: “Doesn’t sound like you have an easy job.”

Virgil found Larry Butz, who’d joined Robertson in shouting at the sheriff at the press conference, working in the back of Butz Downtown Jewelers. “I figured you’d be showing up,” he said, after a sales clerk ushered Virgil into the back office. “I’m not blowing anybody up.”

“You know anybody who might be?” Virgil asked.

“I probably know him, if he’s local, but I couldn’t identify him as the bomber, if you see what I mean,” Butz said. He hesitated, and then said, “Aren’t you pulling a fishing boat around? Somebody told me that you write for Gray’s and a couple other magazines.”

“I do from time to time,” Virgil said.

Butz leaned forward: “Then you should be on our side, man. These drainage things are insidious. We’ve got them all over the state-gas and oil and brake fluid getting into the groundwater, and then into the lakes. It’s a disgrace.”

“I am on your side, from that angle,” Virgil said. “But I wouldn’t be murdering people to stop it.”

“Probably won’t help me to say it, but killing off a few of these assholes would probably be a good thing,” Butz said. “Trouble is, this bomb guy is blowing up the wrong people. He killed two innocent people, just doing their jobs, and he missed Pye. He missed the board of directors. If murdering people was going to help, he’s managed to murder all the wrong ones, and turn Pye into a hero, giving away all those millions of dollars. How in the hell did that happen? Is he really on our side? What I want to know is, how did one of us Butternuts get up on top of Pye’s skyscraper? He’s got all kinds of security, is what I hear. I think we’re being set up.”

“Huh,” Virgil said.

They talked for a few more minutes, and then Virgil left: he did not scratch Butz off the list. Butz did get him thinking about the Pye Pinnacle again, and he called Barlow.

“Are you sure that bomb at the Pinnacle was set off with a clock?”

“Pretty sure. We found the clock. Pieces of it, anyway.”

“What if the bomber is bullshitting you? What if he had the bomb wired through a cheap plastic cell phone or walkie-talkie, and he put it right on top of the Pelex, or molded the Pelex around it, with the clock off to one side. Then, when it went off, the cell phone vanishes and you find pieces of the clock… which means you look for somebody who was in the building twenty-four hours before the explosion, and maybe he was there a week before.”

Barlow said, “Well, the reason is, our lab is really good at this stuff, and our techs are really good at picking up evidence. That’s why we’re still out there in that trailer, two days later. If there’d been a cell phone involved, we’d have picked it up.”

“For sure? One hundred percent?”

“Nothing’s one hundred percent,” Barlow said.

“How fast can you get to your lab guy?” Virgil asked.

“Got him on my speed dial.”

“Call him up and ask him what percent,” Virgil said.

“Get back to you in three minutes,” Barlow said.

Five minutes later, Barlow called back: “He said seventy-five to eighty percent. I was kinda surprised it was that low.”

“So there’s one chance in four or five that you wouldn’t find a cell phone,” Virgil said.

“Yes, under certain conditions, but the guy would have to know a lot about what he was doing. We’re not seeing that level of sophistication.”

“We’re talking about a tech college,” Virgil said.

“Yeah… gives us something more to think about. I’ll get the ATF guys to look at that video as far back as it goes. There’s a terabyte of memory for every one of the cameras, so that’d cover a lot of time.”

“Keep talking to me,” Virgil said.

By the time he finished with Butz, it was five o’clock and people were going to dinner. He hadn’t gotten any closer to identifying the bomber, but he was getting the lay of the land, Virgil thought. He went back to the Holiday Inn, set his clock for six, and took a nap.

At two minutes to six, he rolled out, turned the alarm off before it had a chance to start beeping at him, went in the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he sat on the bed and called Davenport, told him about the trip to Michigan, and also about the market research idea.

Davenport approved of the trip and was interested in the market research concept. “Let me run it by a couple of computer people. I think it’s worth a try, if we’re confident that people would try to tell the truth. Probably every high school kid would nominate one of his teachers.”

“It could get messy, but if you got enough people to participate. .. Lots of smart people around, and they all know each other.”

“You know what would be even better?” Davenport asked. “If you charged ten dollars per person to make a suggestion, and then the winners divide up the pot. Give them some incentive to be right.”

“Jeez, I dunno. Would that be legal?”

“Why should I care? I’m not planning to do it,” Davenport said. “Anyway… I’d give it some more thought before you do anything. It’s interesting, but in a funky way. Maybe too funky.”

Virgil said he’d call if anything broke, rang off, put a couple of clean shirts, a fresh pair of jeans, and some socks in a duffel bag, along with his dopp kit, sunglasses, laptop, and pistol, threw it all in the truck, and drove out to the airport.

A black SUV was arriving just as he did, and Marie Chapman got out, carrying nothing but an oversized purse.

“An adventure,” she said.

“Adventures are what you have when you screw up,” Virgil said.

“Been there,” she said, “and done that.”