“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.”
9
P YE’S PILOT was a reassuringly square-chinned, gray-haired man wearing a military-style olive-drab nylon flight jacket over a blue canvas shirt, jeans, with brown leather boots and a long-billed blue hat that said “Pye” in white script. The copilot was a square-chinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, also reassuringly aviator-like, in the same flight jacket, canvas shirt, jeans, boots, and hat, which Virgil took as a uniform dreamed up by a designer with delusions of manhood.
The plane itself was larger than Virgil expected, a blue Gulfstream 550 with the same white “Pye” script as the pilots’ hats. A cabin attendant, an Asian woman in a jade business dress, was putting together a meal in a forward galley when Virgil climbed aboard; she asked, “Something to drink after takeoff ?”
“Diet Coke?” Virgil asked.
Chapman said, “The usual.”
CHAPMAN SAID THAT the interior of the plane had been customized for long-distance trips; that Pye was expanding in Latin America and Asia, and that they traveled twenty weeks of the year. “He’s pushing really hard, because he’s got nothing else to do. Willard’s wife died six years ago. He’s never gotten over it. He told me that he still talks to her at night, when he goes to bed.”
“That’s tough,” Virgil said; though he really had no idea.
Chapman showed him two private sleeper cabins in the back, with fold-down beds; the center of the plane was taken up with six seats that could be swiveled into a meeting formation, with a folding desk that could be swiveled in front of each. The plane had Wi-Fi and electrical plug-ins for laptops.
Forward of the cabin door, but behind the pilot’s cockpit, was the galley, and a long folding chair for the cabin attendant.
THE PILOT CALLED BACK to suggest that they take their seats, and Chapman said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” She led him back to the bedroom suites, leaving the door open behind her, then opened a smaller, shorter door that Virgil thought probably went back to the baggage compartment. Instead, he found himself on his knees in a four-foot-high, four-foot-long compartment.
Chapman, kneeling beside him, said, “Pull on your side,” and Virgil helped peel back a thick plastic cover over two body-length windows set in the fuselage floor.
“This is always a trip,” she said. “The idea is to lie down and look straight down while we take off. . . . It’s like flying.”
And it was. Ten minutes later, they were off the ground, Virgil and Chapman lying side by side with their noses right on the window glass, and Chapman started laughing in delight as the plane banked in a tight turn to the east. They climbed quickly over the summer-green landscape, the trees below throwing long shadows like dark hands over the farm fields, the lakes as dark and hard as granite tiles set in a glowing green carpet.
When they’d finished climbing out, Chapman said, “That’s the show,” and Virgil said, “You were right—it was like flying.” They went back to their seats, and the cabin attendant brought Virgil his Diet Coke, a martini with three olives for Chapman, and a paper menu.
Virgil ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a chopped salad, and Chapman a salmon steak.
“Hell, this is better than what we’d get in Butternut,” Virgil said, when the food came. “We ought to eat here every night.”
AS THEY ATE, they chatted about the bombings, and Chapman got out a sketchbook and drew cartoon-like pictures of the Pye Pinnacle, to illustrate the problems a bomber would have getting in. “I’m not an expert on security, but we’ve had all kinds of experts there in the past two weeks. They all talked to Willard, and I took notes,” she said. “It’s almost like a locked-room mystery, but the problem is, how did the guy get in?”
“I was an MP captain in the army, and a lot of MPs wind up guarding prisons,” Virgil told her. “I never did, but I took the course work, and we looked at a lot of prison escapes. The ways people get out of prison are amazing—and they mostly depend on sleight of hand, just like with magicians.”
“Like what?”
“Like guys disguising themselves as guards and walking out. Make the guard uniforms right in their cells. Another guy . . . See, when trucks come and go, the guards roll mirrors under them to make sure nobody has tied themselves onto the bottom. One guy made a folding papier-mâché box and spray-painted it brown and gray that looked like the underside of a Sysco truck. He tied himself on, with the box facing down. The guards looked at it, not expecting to see anything, and they didn’t, and waved the truck through. What the guy hadn’t figured out, though, was that the truck was traveling a long way, and by the time he got to where he was going, he was almost dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. They found him lying on the ground under the truck. He’d managed to cut himself down before he passed out. But, he got out.”
“But they’ve got all these cameras at the Pinnacle.”
“The point is, they see what happened, but they don’t understand it,” Virgil said.
“The guys who were looking seemed smart,” Chapman said. “I think they would have made allowance for that.”
“Maybe,” Virgil said. “But everybody knows magicians do tricks, and they still don’t see it. If you’re good enough . . . but who knows? Maybe it was an insider, who was cooperating with somebody from Butternut Falls. Did anybody look at the insiders and ask about relatives from Minnesota?”
“That’s something I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask Barlow.”
THEY SPENT THE REST of the flight talking about how they’d gotten where they were—she’d worked as a reporter for a while, hadn’t liked the money, wrote for a couple of magazines as a freelancer, then caught on doing research for a Washington, D.C., public relations company, and worked for a Michigan congressman for a while. After a couple years with the congressman, she ghostwrote, for the congressman, a moderately successful book about Washington lobbying. The congressman introduced her to Pye, after Pye mentioned to him that he was looking for an unusual kind of assistant.
She said, “When I was researching you, I found a lot of stuff about shoot-outs you’d been in, and then I found out you were a writer. You’ve even written for the New York Times Magazine.”
“I have,” Virgil admitted. “I don’t like to talk about it, for fear of offending my straight friends.”
“I read the articles,” she said. “You’re really good. Why would you continue to do . . . this?”
“Because I like it. It’s extremely interesting,” Virgil said. “I like writing, too, but in small doses. Sitting in a room, alone, for six hours a day, like a full-time pro writ
er . . . that’s no way to go through life.”
She was attractive, articulate, and liked to talk about writing: she made Virgil nervous. His sheriff was still out there, somewhere, and she was heavily armed.
THEY ARRIVED AT Gerald R. Ford International Airport outside of Grand Rapids at ten o’clock at night, eastern time. As they turned, just before they started down, Virgil could see the faint orange glow of sunlight to the west. On the ground, it was full dark. They were met by a man in a large blue Chevy Tahoe, with the Pye script on the doors.
“Fast as you can get there, Harry,” Chapman told the driver, and he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
A few minutes later, they were headed east on I-96, and Harry put the speedometer on eighty. Virgil sat in front, and Chapman dozed in the back. Thirty minutes later, Harry said, “There she is.”
The Pye Pinnacle came up as a shaft of shimmering light that, a few miles later, had resolved itself into hundreds of brightly lit windows climbing up into the sky. The highway ran just to the south of the building; but all around the building was a puddle of pitch darkness.
Harry took an off-ramp that seemed to go nowhere but the Pinnacle; and then a couple of right turns got them on an approach road, and they drove through a parking lot, stopped at a railroadstyle guard arm, which Harry opened with a key card, and then they rolled up a gentle ramp to an entrance door on the side of the building. Chapman, yawning, said, “VIP entrance. Thanks, Harry.”
As they pulled up, three men in suits stepped out through the glass doors, and Virgil and Chapman got out and Chapman said, “Hey, guys,” and they said, “Marie,” and Chapman said, “This is Virgil Flowers,” and then, “Virgil, this is Bob Brown, head of security, David McCullough, he’s with the ATF, and Barrett Newman runs the building systems.”