Shock Wave

  Oh, he’d made plans. One of them involved dumping Barbara, but, surprise, surprise, she’d moved first, and he’d found himself with no house and only half an eventual pension. She’d nailed him down with pussy, and then, when she left, nailed him down with economics and legal decrees. She was followed by a couple more mistakes, and finally, he would sit on this patio and he could see the future stretching out in front of him, ending in penury . . . ending with dog food and a hot plate.

  That made him smile: the alcohol talking.

  He was in no serious danger of dog food, but he was in danger of something that was probably worse: irrelevance, in his own eyes. He looked at the people around him, at their trivial lives, and he sneered at them, but then he came home to look in the mirror and ask, “How am I different?”

  The truth was, he wasn’t. If a Martian landed tomorrow, and was told to sort people into piles of the relevant and the irrelevant, judging by what they did, by what they were, he’d wind up in the same pile as those he sneered at.

  Then came PyeMart, and everything that rained down from that.

  LOOSEN UP, HE THOUGHT, loosen up. He poured another martini, and thought about bombs.

  Jesus God, he was becoming fond of his bombs. Nobody—nobody—would say that his bombs were irrelevant. He was already the most important element in the lives of two people, in that he’d ended those lives.

  Where should the next one go? Where would it do the most good?

  There’d been a rumor that the state cops were protecting the city council and the city hall. That there were snipers in town. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but it had to be considered. He considered it, more than a little drunk after the third martini . . . and there were still two martinis left. He giggled: whoa, boy, he was really gonna be pounded when he finished the last one.

  So what about the city council? He went back and forth on them. Could they hurt him more than they could help? If they all went up in an instant of smoke and flame, would that be the beginning of everything? Or the end?

  He thought about the council all through the fourth martini, and decided that while he had no objection, in principle, to killing them all, the fallout from such an event was too unpredictable.

  NO. HE’D STARTED out to intimidate PyeMart, to slow them down, and also to lay a trail of bombs that had a seeming purpose. He was not stupid, so the trail was a crooked one, but it would eventually lead the authorities, by the nose, to one certain conclusion. And that still seemed the best way to go.

  He’d never had a full set plan for his campaign; a set plan could crack. He’d known from the start that he had to remain flexible, and improvise from time to time. This was one of those times.

  If the city council was actually found to be corrupt, if a city councilman could be terrorized into confessing, or if the cops could be pressured into looking at them seriously, then the whole PyeMart deal would go down like the Titanic.

  That was a compelling thought.

  But PyeMart’s deal couldn’t go down too soon, or too late. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it had to be just right.

  HE CONSIDERED THE THOUGHT, and drunk as he was, it was a slippery thing to hang onto. The problem was, the local cops couldn’t be counted on to cooperate with the city council. Basically, they couldn’t find their own balls with both hands and a radar unit. A serious investigation was unlikely.

  The ideal thing would be to bring in the state cops, or the FBI. The ATF was in town, but the ATF wouldn’t be much interested in doing a political corruption investigation.

  Stray thought: somebody had been distributing a bumper sticker in town—he’d seen three or four of them—that said: “Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms . . . What’s not to like?”

  Anyhoo . . .

  Whoa, really drunk now. He struggled to stay on track.

  The state cops were in town; state cop, that is. One guy, and all he apparently was thinking about was finding the bomber.

  WHAT YOU REALLY NEEDED, the bomber thought, was a whole bunch of cops, pulling the whole town apart. If that happened, they’d eventually get around to the city council.

  THE BOMBER SAT on his deck, drunk and plotting, and at some point well into his last martini, too drunk to even consider getting up and making more, an out-of-the-box plan began to form.

  Take brass balls, but he had brass balls. No question about that. Not anymore.

  He needed to think about it sober; couldn’t do it tonight, anyway. There was too much action right now, too many people with an eye out. Paranoia was a good thing, in the bombing business. So tonight he’d sleep it off, and tomorrow, he’d make the bomb. Make the bomb, and plant it tomorrow night.

  Bring in a whole swarm of cops.

  Guaranteed.

  Or was that just the alcohol talking?

  Billions and billions of stars shone down at him, twinkling their asses off, but they didn’t say shit.

  The bomber fell asleep in his deck chair, and slept the sleep of the innocent.

  11

  VIRGIL DROPPED CHAPMAN at her motel and called Davenport to report on the trip out to Michigan. He was sitting in the truck, talking to Davenport, when he saw George Peck, the traditionalist fly fisherman, walking along the street, looking into store windows.

  “I just saw a clue,” Virgil said. “I gotta go.”

  He hung up and waited until Peck got even with him, then rolled down the passenger-side window and yelled, “Hey, George.”

  Peck turned, a frown on his face, saw Virgil in the truck, and walked over. “You shouted?”

  “Yeah. I need to talk to you. Come on, get in.”

  Peck paused for a moment, as if thinking about it, then nodded and popped the door and climbed in. He pulled the door shut, tilted his head up, sniffed, and said, “This truck smells like McDonald’s french fries.”

  “It should—french fries are about eighty-five percent of my diet when I’m traveling,” Virgil said. “Listen, I’ve talked to a few guys about your whole market research idea. They don’t like it. I kinda do—but then, I might not be as smart as they are. There’s talk of lynch mobs.”

  “I doubt you’d get a lynch mob,” Peck said.

  “That’s not real reassuring—if you only doubt that I’d get one.”

  “Not my problem,” Peck said. “But, consensus-seeking research seems to work with problems like yours. Of course, they’re usually asking about stock market moves, or some such. There’s usually no lynching involved. Or bombs.”

  Virgil said, “What if instead of putting up a website, I got twenty very knowledgeable people . . .”

  Peck was shaking his head. “That might not be enough. You need lots and lots of people. You could ask twenty people and just out of coincidence, because of social-class acquaintance problems, maybe none of them know the bomber . . . so they can’t nominate him. You need not just one set of smart people, but a whole spectrum of people.”

  “But the bomber has to come from a class of people who object to PyeMart. So if I come up with a long list of people who don’t like PyeMart, they’d almost certainly know him.”

  Peck thought about it for a minute, then said, “Unless . . . hmmm.” And he thought some more.

  “Say it,” Virgil said.

  “I was going to say, ‘Unless he was acting on an impulse.’ I was thinking, what if it’s, say, a college kid, and these opinions are new and he got swept up in them, but doesn’t have a history in town politics or issues arguments. He’s simply crazy, and looking for an outlet. Then, you might never see him, if you only surveyed people who were familiar with PyeMart opponents. But . . . on second thought . . . from what I know, that doesn’t seem likely. It seems more likely to be the work of a mature man. A planner. Somebody who thinks things through. Somebody more like me. So I’d probably know him. So . . .”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So if you made a list based on your investigation, and on the federal investigation, of the bomber’s characteristics, and if you gave th
at list to me and, say, ten other people I might suggest . . . I think those ten people might be able to come up with a second list of a couple hundred people you could survey. Then, I think you would get your man.”

  Virgil turned and pulled his briefcase out of the backseat. “Let’s make a list of characteristics right now. Then you can give me your list of names, and I’ll get the list around.”

  Peck said, “Why don’t we go down to McDonald’s and work through this. It’s right around the corner.”

  “Good with me. I could use some fries,” Virgil said.

  THEY GOT A BOOTH at McDonald’s, and soft drinks and fries, and Virgil laid out what he’d found to that point. Peck listened carefully, and they began their list.

  The bomber, they thought:

  • was almost certainly male (because bombers almost always were).

  • was willing to take serious, but calculated, risks, both in building bombs and in planting them.

  • was intelligent. Was building bombs and detonators from first principles. Knew something about switches and electricity.

  • had hard opinions and was willing to act on them, even to the point of killing people. A streak of fanaticism. The bomber is crazy.

  • was acting out of an economic or environmentalist impulse.

  • probably had some close connection with Butternut Tech.

  • was intimately familiar with Butternut environs and personalities, down to limousine drivers.

  • could have close relatives or friends in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area.

  “IN THE LETTER YOU WRITE to the survey people, you have to say that they need to consider all the points,” Peck said. “But in the end, you’re also looking for gut feelings.”

  Virgil wrote gut feelings at the bottom of the list.

  “And you’ll have to say that nobody will see the answers except you, and that you’ll destroy the lists. Or, better yet, that it’ll all be anonymous, and nobody will know who answered what, not even you. Or even, who answered. Because not everybody will.”

  “George, you’re a big help,” Virgil said. “Give me the list of ten names that’ll get me the list of two hundred.”

  GETTING PECK TO PRODUCE ten names took a while, but when he got them, Virgil drove over to the county courthouse and began putting together a letter to the ten people recommended by Peck. The sheriff came by to see what he was up to, and Virgil showed him Peck’s list.

  The sheriff agreed that the ten names had been well chosen, added two more names, plus his own and his wife’s, for a total of fourteen. He had a deputy get together a list of home and business addresses.

  In his letter to the first, smaller group, Virgil asked that their lists be returned to the sheriff ’s department that afternoon or evening.

  Time is of the essence, he wrote. We hope to begin distributing the survey tomorrow morning.

  THE SHERIFF GOT TWO DEPUTIES and told them to chase down the twelve people on Virgil’s list; he would take his own letter and his wife’s. “This is gonna be weird,” Ahlquist said. “Never heard anything like it being done. Could freak people out.”

  “With any luck, it’ll keep the bomber laying low,” Virgil said.

  “Speaking of which, you oughta lay low yourself,” Ahlquist said. “You’re the most obvious threat to him. You could wind up with a bomb in your boat.”

  “I don’t think he’s that kind of a monster,” Virgil said. “Bombing a man’s boat.”

  “I’m serious,” Ahlquist said. “I’d ask the people at the Holiday to move you to another room, one that opens to the inside, over the pool, where he’d be seen if he went to your door.”

  Virgil said, “I’ll do that. I’ll be back at eight o’clock or so, to pick up the responses. If I can collate the list we get back tonight, and get the second letter out to however many people we have—Peck thinks a couple hundred would be good—we could start getting a list together tomorrow night.”

  “Be interesting,” Ahlquist said. “What’re you doing for the rest of the day?”

  “I got a couple of guys I want to talk to, and, uh . . . you got any fish in that lake?”

  VIRGIL FOUND CAMERON SMITH, president of the local trout-fishing club, at work at the Butternut Outdoor Patio Design Center. Smith was busy with a female customer when Virgil walked in, so he spent fifteen minutes chatting with a nice-looking blond bookkeeper who worked in the back office. When Virgil introduced himself, she called Smith, who was thirty feet away, on the other side of a door, on her cell phone. Smith said he’d be there as soon as he could get away.

  “That’s a big order out there,” the woman said. Her name, according to a desk plaque, was Kiki Bjornsen. “She’s looking at spending over nine thousand on patioware and a spa.”

  “Is that PyeMart gonna sell patio stuff?”

  “Not like ours,” Bjornsen said. “I mean, they might sell some rickety old aluminum chairs, but they won’t be selling any Sunbrella products.”

  “Good for you.”

  “And I can tell you for sure that Cam didn’t blow anything up,” she said. “He just got back from Canada last night. He was up there with about six college friends. He was up there for a week.”

  “Well, shoot, there goes my day,” Virgil said. “I was planning to drag him kicking and screaming down to the county jail.”

  “That’d be something to see,” she said.

  SMITH WAS A CHUNKY, sunburned man who said he’d just spent five days getting blown off Lake of the Woods, and Virgil told him that he’d been blown off Lake of the Woods himself, on several occasions.

  “Fishing out of Kenora?” Smith asked.

  “Yeah, most of the time. I really like that town,” Virgil said.

  “Got the most vicious, impolite, asshole game wardens I ever met,” Smith said. “We were out five days, got stopped three times. Hell, we’re fishing on a conservation tag, not keeping anything, and they’re tearing our boats apart.”

  “They do that,” Virgil said. “But the fishing is good.”

  “And they got some good pizza,” Smith said. “So, what can I do for you?”

  “Is there anybody in your trout club that might be setting off these bombs?”

  “I been thinking about that ever since I heard about the bomb, the first one,” Smith said. “I call my wife every night to tell her I didn’t drown, and she told me about it, about that poor bastard getting blown to pieces. I mean, jeez, nobody deserves that.... Anyway, no. I don’t think any of our guys would do that. We’ve got some rednecks, but you know, they’re all . . . fishermen. Fishermen don’t kill people.”

  “Well, maybe muskie fishermen,” Virgil said.

  “Okay, I’ll give you that,” Smith said. “But not us trout guys. Crappie guys might be bombers, but I don’t think walleye guys, or bass or bluegill guys. Bullhead guys . . . well, we don’t talk about bullhead guys. I don’t think they’d go violent, but they’re not quite right in the head, if you know what I mean.”

  Virgil nodded: he tended to agree with Smith’s characterizations.

  “You know Larry Butz,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, and he’s the one everybody would point at, because he’s got a loud mouth. But he’s really a good guy,” Smith said. “The paper this morning said that a group of kids were crossing the street just before Harvey’s limo blew up, and that’s the kind of thing that Larry would have thought of. About other people getting hurt. He’s got five kids, and there’s no way he’d ever take a chance like that. That he’d hurt a kid. I mean, I don’t think he’d hurt anybody.”

  “I’m getting a lot of that,” Virgil said. “Nobody knows anybody who’d do something like this.”

  “Well, do you know anybody who’d do it? A bomb guy, he’s gotta be a rare creature.”

  “That was my opinion, before I got tangled up in this, but the ATF guy tells me they’re not as rare as you’d think,” Virgil said. Then, “Have you ever been fishing any of those lower pools and seen a guy aroun
d there in camo? Maybe with a camera or a pair of binoculars?”

  Smith said, “Noooo . . . not exactly. I mean, if you mean sneaking around the PyeMart site. I mean, in the fall we get a couple of bow hunters back there.”

  “I was thinking, sneaking around looking at PyeMart, specifically,” Virgil said.

  “Haven’t seen anything like that, but then, I’m only back there once a week. Maybe not that often. Hardly ever see any cars parked up by the bridge, either. Those are usually guys that I know, and could vouch for.”

  “The bridge?”

  “Yeah, there’s a bridge upstream a half mile or so above the Walmart site, off County Road Y. There’s a parking area down beside the bridge.”

  “Could you ask around, among your friends, about any unusual cars?”

  “I can do that,” Smith said.

  Virgil pushed himself out of his chair, gave Smith a business card, and said, “Just mostly wanted to check with you. Think about it. If anything occurs to you, give me a ring, or if somebody saw a strange car out there in the last month.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Virgil was backing his boat into Dance Lake. The lake had two basins, a shallow upper basin with lots of weed, and a deeper lower basin. After parking his rig, he took his boat north out of the landing, under a bridge and into the upper basin, picked out a weed bed on the flattest part of the lake, dropped his trolling motor. The depth finder said he was in four feet of water. He wasn’t expecting much, just a short afternoon of messing with small pike.

  He got his fly rod going, throwing a Bigeye Baitfish, and zenned out, letting the problem of the bomber percolate through the back of his brain. Talking with Peck had been useful; he had some hope for the survey. The connection with the tech school should help winnow suspects.