Shock Wave

  WHICH BROUGHT UP a new thought: he needed to end this, but there was more to be done. He’d not yet finished. If he quit now, it’d all have been for nothing.

  So he had to go on, but the quicker he finished, the sooner he could pull back into the weeds, and lay low.

  He pulled back into the County Market parking lot and thought of something he’d once seen in an all-night Home Depot: a man who’d bought some chain, an axe, and a large black plastic tub.

  All right, the ax and the chain could be used to cut down and drag a tree. But the tub? The tub made you think of bodies being cut up with the ax, and sunk with the chain . . . or something.

  If he went into County Market and bought six bottles of assorted detergents, would the cops . . .

  Ah, fuck it: that was paranoid.

  Had to watch himself. Had to be careful. Had to walk between the over-recklessness generated by the pleasure of the bombs, and the paranoia caused by the fear of prison.

  He had to walk between the raindrops of pleasure and paranoia, but he still had to move.

  A new thought popped into his head, full and complete, like a religious vision: a way out.

  He needed to build another bomb, and right now.

  16

  THE NEXT MORNING, quote, the shit hit the fan, unquote. Virgil had expected that there might be some reaction, but he hadn’t expected the intensity of it. The phone rang the first time a few minutes after seven o’clock, and the Star Tribune reporter Ruffe Ignace asked, “Why are you asleep? I’m not. I just had a fourteenyear-old assistant city editor snatch my ass out of bed because you did some kind of cockamamy survey. What the hell are you doing, Virgil?”

  Virgil told him in a few brief sentences, and Ignace said, “That would almost make sense, if we didn’t have a Constitution.”

  “What part of the Constitution does this violate?” Virgil asked.

  “It must violate some part,” Ignace said. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia later.”

  “Call me back when you find the violation,” Virgil said. “Right now, I’m going back to bed.”

  “Not for long. They got morning news cycles on TV, and they are gonna be on you like Holy on the Pope. The shit has hit the fan.”

  “You think?”

  “Of course I think. I’m about to call up the governor and ask him what the hell you’re doing,” Ignace said. “You know, with the Constitution and all.”

  “Can we go off the record for a moment?” Virgil asked.

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Good. Fuck you, Ruffe. I’m going back to bed.”

  THE SHERIFF CALLED eight minutes later and said, “Virgil? Man, you gotta get up. The shit has hit the fan. They’re saying we’re running a witch hunt.”

  “Earl, could we go off the record for a minute?”

  WHEN VIRGIL GOT DOWN to the courthouse, there were three TV vans in the parking lot. He went in a side entrance, through the jail, and down to Ahlquist’s office. Ahlquist said, “We’ve got a lot to talk about, but let me say, the goddamn Fox reporter is not believable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everything jiggles,” he said, astonished by the thought. “Everything. I’m afraid to go on with her, because I’d forget how to speak in English. To say nothing of having a boner like a hammer handle.”

  “You gotta model yourself on me, Earl,” Virgil said. “Mind like moon. Mind like water.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like more hippie shit, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the Fox reporter.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Virgil said.

  THE NEWS PEOPLE were stacked up in the open lobby. Virgil went out, trailed by Ahlquist, and stood on the second step of a stairway and asked for everybody’s attention. He introduced himself, and a bunch of lights clicked on, and a triangle of on-camera reporters moved to the front. At the very tip of the spearhead was the Fox reporter, whom Virgil had seen on television, but had not experienced in person.

  As Ahlquist had said, she jiggled even when she was standing still. She had a flawless, pale complexion with just a hint of rose in her cheeks, and green eyes, and real blond hair. She got along with just a touch of lipstick. She did not, Virgil thought, appear to be from this planet.

  She asked the first question, and her teeth were perfectly regular, and a brilliant white, and her voice a husky paean to sex: “Agent Flowers, isn’t this questionnaire a violation of the Constitution?”

  Virgil wanted to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” but, for a few seconds, he forgot how to speak English.

  His pause was taken for either guilt or stupidity, or she was simply familiar with the reaction, and she enlarged on her question: “The American Constitution?”

  Virgil leaned toward her and said, “I’m glad you specified ‘American.’ No, it’s not. I’d suggest you read that document. Nowhere does it mention either surveys or questionnaires.”

  “You don’t have to get snippy about it,” she said.

  A guy from public radio, edging into the camera’s line of sight, and maybe going for a little frottage on the Fox reporter, along with the validation of TV time, asked, “But aren’t you essentially establishing a state-sponsored witch hunt?”

  “No. I looked up ‘witch hunt’ in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, before I came over here,” Virgil said. “I believe I’m quoting verbatim when I say that a witch hunt is defined as, one, a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft, and two, the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views. Are you suggesting that we are doing one of those things?”

  “Not exactly,” he conceded.

  “Not at all,” Virgil said. “All we’re doing is surveying responsible citizens to see if they have any ideas who might have been involved in murdering two people, injuring two more, and barely missing several more. The surveys can’t be made public because they are anonymous, and it wouldn’t be ethical to make anonymous accusations public; and since a number of people refused to participate, by not returning letters, even we don’t know whether a particular individual participated or not. We won’t be making public the names of any of those mentioned in the survey.”

  The public radio guy: “But somehow . . . it feels like a witch hunt.”

  “That’s because we’ll be looking at people against whom we have no evidence at all,” Virgil said. “But, if you’ll excuse me for making the point, that’s what a detective always does, in any kind of complicated case. You go around and ask people who they think did it, whatever it was. Often, just walk up and down the street, knocking on doors. This is just like that, except that we have to move faster. This bomber is now turning out a bomb a day. Another thing: a witch hunt operates on fear and emotion and rumor. We have to have definitive proof before we can accuse somebody. We’re not going to indict somebody on somebody else’s say-so. We need to find explosives, blasting caps, bomb parts, and motive. We’re asking people where we should look. In a small city like this, where most people know most other people, we have hopes that we’ll pinpoint some good suspects.”

  They went on for a while, and Virgil outlined what he thought about the bomber, and the TV people finally went away, apparently satisfied. Back in Ahlquist’s office, the sheriff said, “You see? She never stopped jiggling.” And, he added, “You’re goldarned near as good on TV as I am.”

  VIRGIL GOT AHLQUIST to assign him an assistant, Dick Pruess, and between them, they began running the list of names through the National Crime Information Center. Lyle McLachlan, the leading candidate in the survey, had thirty NCIC returns, varying from resisting arrest without violence at the bottom end, to felony theft and aggravated assault at the high end. He was thirty-eight, and had spent fourteen years in prison.

  “Not him,” Pruess said. “Be nice if it was, but the guy can barely make a sandwich. He could never figure this out.”

  They had seven more hits among the twenty names
they checked, fewer than Virgil expected, given that all those named were, in the mind of some sober citizen, capable of multiple murder.

  Ahlquist came by and looked at the list, and the hits, and said, “The problem I see with most of the hits is that they involve guys right at the bottom of things—they’ve hardly got a stake in the town, so why would they do something as weird as attack a PyeMart? If anything, these guys would want to take revenge on the town, not defend it.”

  Of the two people with direct ties to Butternut Tech, one came back clean, the other had a drunk driving conviction. The first one had served in the army, and Virgil called a BCA researcher and asked her to get in touch with the army and see if he’d had any training in explosives.

  They were still looking for returns when Davenport called and said, “Your press conference made all the news shows. You looked pretty straight, with that black-on-black coat and shirt.”

  “Pain in the ass,” Virgil said.

  “I’ve got a bet for you—and I’ll take either side,” Davenport said. “Do you think only one, or both, of the major papers will use the phrase ‘witch hunt’ in an editorial tomorrow?”

  “Both,” Virgil said.

  “Damnit, I was hoping you’d pick ‘one.’ ”

  “I can’t help it, Lucas. I’m doing the best I can,” Virgil said.

  “I know it, but everybody’s watching now. It’d be best if you wrapped this up in the next couple of days.”

  “Did Ruffe call the governor and ask him about the Constitution?”

  “Everybody called the governor,” Davenport said. “I think this is what us liberals call ‘a teaching moment.’ ”

  GOOD THUNDER CALLED: “I took down Pat Shepard this morning, early, because he had a summer school class. He freaked. He cried. You know what? This isn’t going to be any fun.”

  “It never is, when you go after people who think of themselves as honest, upright citizens,” Virgil said. “Because down in their heart, they feel the guilt.”

  “And because he’s going to lose both his wife and his job.”

  “Yeah, it is brutal,” Virgil said.

  “I’m waiting for you to do the ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.’ ”

  “Be a long wait,” Virgil said. “Will he flip?”

  “Yeah, I think so. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as his wife suggested he’d be,” Good Thunder said. “In fact, I’m a little worried. I don’t want to find him at the end of a rope, or with his head in the oven.”

  “Where is he?” Virgil asked.

  “Last time I saw him, he was with his lawyer. I’ve told him that he’ll be arrested, but I haven’t arrested him yet. I’ve laid out the deal. They’re talking, and if he’s not crazy, he’ll go for it. We’re going to need the wire, and the monitoring gear.”

  “I’ll talk to Davenport,” Virgil said.

  “Boy, that survey thing . . . the shit really hit the fan, huh? Pardon my French.”

  VIRGIL AND GOOD THUNDER were talking about who they’d go after first, if Shepard cooperated, to see if they could triangulate on the mayor, when Ahlquist ran in the door and blurted, “We’ve got another one, another bomb.”

  Virgil said into the phone, “Shirley, I gotta go. Earl says we’ve got another bomb.”

  “Talk to you later,” she said. “Be careful.”

  AHLQUIST WAS IN A HURRY. “Follow me out of the lot. You got lights?”

  “Yeah.”

  They trotted out of the courthouse and into the parking lot, and Virgil saw a TV truck moving fast. The TV already knew. “Okay, stick close, we’re going west and south,” Ahlquist said.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Something different—could even be a break,” Ahlquist said. “The bomb blew in a guy’s garage. Henry Erikson. Big trout guy, one of the loudmouths. Not a bad guy, but pretty hard-core. Car salesman out at the Chevy dealer.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Virgil said, and jogged to the truck.

  THEY GOT ACROSS TOWN in a hurry, but never did catch the TV truck, which, when they arrived, was already unloading behind a couple of wooden barricades that said “Butternut Public Works.” Ahlquist didn’t slow much for the barricades, just put two wheels of his truck up on the curb and went around, and Virgil did the same. The Erikson house was a long half-block down from the barricades, where three deputies, including O’Hara, were standing in the yard talking, and looking into a wrecked garage, with a twisted SUV sitting inside. Two fire trucks were parked in the street, but there was no fire.

  A scent of explosive and shattered pine and drywall lingered in the air, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He and Ahlquist headed across the lawn.

  O’Hara said, as they came up, “We got a situation here. Henry was hurt bad. He could die. It looks like the bomb was under his car seat, and blew when he sat down.”

  “No fire?”

  “No fire, the scene is still pretty much intact,” O’Hara said.

  Ahlquist: “When was this?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago,” O’Hara said, looking at her watch. “The first guys were mostly interested in getting Henry out of here, getting the ambulance, but one of them . . .” She turned, looking for the right deputy, spotted him and yelled, “Hey, Jim. Jimmy. Come over here.”

  The deputy was a young, fleshy guy wearing mirrored sunglasses, with a white sidewall haircut, and he hurried over.

  O’Hara said, “Tell them what you saw in there.”

  The deputy said, “Erikson was a mess, he was lying on the ground by the wall over there. We did what we could, got the ambulance going. Don’t think he’s going to make it, though, looked like both legs are gone, looked like his balls . . . looked like stuff blew up into his stomach. . . .”

  “Anyway,” O’Hara said, prompting him.

  “Anyway, when he was gone, I was looking around the mess in there, and noticed over there by his workbench, it’s all blown up, but there’s a pipe over there. It looks like the pipes that were used in the bombs.”

  Ahlquist: “You mean . . . from the bomb? Or another pipe?”

  “It looks like an unused pipe from these bombs. I saw the piece of pipe that the feds had, and it looks like the same pipe.”

  “Let’s see it,” Virgil said, and, as they stepped toward the wrecked garage, “Did you touch it?”

  “Absolutely not. We knew you’d want prints or DNA. As soon as I saw it, I cleared everybody away.”

  Virgil nodded. “You did good.”

  THE DEPUTY TOOK THEM into the garage, close to the front fender of the wrecked truck, and pointed out the pipe: it was lying against one wall of a cabinet, where the cabinet intersected with a workbench. A trashed table saw was overturned on the other side of the bench, along with a toolbox and a bunch of tools. The place smelled of blood—a lot of blood, a nasty, cutting odor, like sticking your head in the beef case at a butcher shop.

  The pipe looked right.

  The deputy said, “We’re trying to find his wife, but a neighbor said she’s in the Cities, buying some fabric. She’s a decorator. We haven’t been able to get in touch.”

  Ahlquist said, “Speaking of the feds, here they are.”

  BARLOW WAS HURRYING UP the driveway, O’Hara at his elbow. Inside the garage, Virgil pointed, wordlessly, and Barlow moved up to the pipe, peering at it, and then into it, and said, “There’s something in there. I think we might have another bomb. Better get everybody out of here until we can have a tech look at it.”

  Virgil asked, “Is this the guy?”

  “I’d be willing to bet that the pipe is right,” Barlow said, as they backed away. “This kind of thing happens, too, especially with new guys. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They screw something up, and boom.”

  O’Hara stepped away to take a cell phone call, and Barlow said, “The guy’s got a lot of tools.”

  Virgil nodded. The garage was double-deep, three cars wide. The back half had been set up as a workshop, with
storage cabinets in the corner and a long stretch of Peg-Board on the back wall. There were a half-dozen old Snap-on tool calendars on one wall—collector’s items, now—photos of cars, an airplane propeller with one end broken off, a bunch of blocks of wood, most with oil on them, a half-dozen cases of empty beer bottles along one wall.

  The back wall was taken up with mechanics and woodworking tools, the side wall with garden implements. Most of the tools still hung on the Peg-Board, though some had been knocked to the floor.

  “The question is,” Barlow said, “with this kind of setup, why’d he go to the college to cut that pipe? He could have cut it all right here.”

  “Good question,” Virgil said. “But Jesus, talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “I hate gift horses,” Barlow said. “Half the time, they wind up biting you on the ass.”

  O’HARA CAME BACK: “Erikson died. Never even got him on the operating table.”

  “Ah, man,” Virgil said.

  Then Barlow said, “Hey . . .” He stepped down the length of the garage and pointed to the floor. He was pointing at a thin silver cylinder a couple of inches long, with two wires coming out the bottom—it looked like a stick man with thin legs. “We got a blasting cap.”

  “Okay,” Virgil said.

  They looked at it for a moment and Barlow half-tiptoed around the rest of the garage, looking at the debris, and under it, and then Virgil asked, “How many bombers are married?”

  “I don’t know,” Barlow said. “Some of them. Most of them, not—that’s what I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “I always had the idea that they were like crazy loners, working in their basements.”

  “Not always.”

  “I really don’t like this,” Virgil said. “The guy’s been so smart, and then he blows himself up?”