“You hardly ever meet any longtime bombers who aren’t missing a few chunks, a couple fingers,” Barlow said. “They fool around with the explosive. Sometimes they blow themselves up.”
“With Pelex?”
“Not so much with Pelex,” Barlow admitted. “Pelex is really pretty safe, you don’t even have to be especially careful with it. But if you’d already rigged it as a bomb, with a sensitive switch . . .”
One of the ATF techs came up carrying a tool chest, and Barlow pointed him at the pipe. “Take a look in there with your flashlight. Don’t touch it. But is it a bomb? Is it wired?”
The tech took a heavy LED flash from his box and stepped over to the pipe, bent over it, and shone the flash down the interior. Then he stepped away: “Better get Tim over here, with his gear.”
“It’s a bomb?” Virgil asked.
“It looks like it’s stuffed with Pelex. I don’t see any wiring, but I can’t see in the bottom end—it could be booby-trapped.”
BARLOW MOVED EVERYBODY AWAY from the garage, then asked Virgil, “Is Erikson’s name on your list? In your survey?”
“No, he’s not,” Virgil said. “But I can’t tell you what that means. Is he in your bomber database?”
“Give me two minutes on that,” he said.
“I’ll get to the NCIC,” Virgil said. He walked to his truck, sat in the driver’s seat, and called Davenport, told him what had happened. Davenport tracked down their researcher, who found Erikson’s driver’s license, and used the birth date to check his records with the National Crime Information Center.
Davenport came back and said, “She says he’s clean.”
“Goddamnit. This complicates things,” Virgil said. “We’ve got two TV trucks here now, and they’re going to start saying that we might have gotten the bomber. Maybe we did, but I don’t believe it yet.”
“What about your survey?” Davenport asked. “You started pushing the list yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll do that now.”
BARLOW CAME BACK. “He’s not in our database.”
“Nothing with the NCIC,” Virgil said.
Neighbors were starting to gather on the lawns adjacent to Erikson’s house, and Virgil left Barlow and walked over to two women. “You guys friends with the Eriksons?”
“Is he really the bomber?” one woman asked.
“Well, a bomb went off, but we really don’t know anything yet,” Virgil said.
“Is he going to make it?” the second woman asked.
Virgil shook his head: “No.”
“Oh, God, poor Sarah,” the first woman said.
“That’s his wife?”
“Yes. No children, thank God. I can’t believe he’s the bomber.”
“Why not?” Virgil asked.
“Well, because . . . he’s a car salesman kind of guy, he’s always running around yelling and waving his arms, but he’s a nice man. I can’t believe he’d bomb people.”
“Not exactly a loner, like you hear about,” said the second one. “He was always talking to everybody, sort of bs-ing around the neighborhood. He’d fix lawn mowers—everybody’s lawn mowers. Bring him a broken lawn mower, he’d get it running like new.”
“Thanks.” Virgil shook his head and walked back to Barlow and the tech, who were standing behind the wrecked car, looking at the backseat. Virgil asked them, “Did you guys see any other bomb-making stuff in the garage? More pipe, switches, blasting caps . . .”
“Just the pipe and the blasting cap,” Barlow said.
The tech said, “But it’s the same kind of blasting cap that was stolen from the quarry.”
“Yeah? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
THEY HAD A CASE, Virgil thought, as he watched the two ATF men prowl the perimeter of the explosion. Erikson apparently had the motive—the pollution of the trout stream—and he had the mechanical skills, judging from his garage workshop.
But it was all very pat. One bomb went off. One bomb remained in evidence, and one blasting cap. No more pipe, no more explosive, no more blasting caps. Just enough to hang him, without much diminishing the bomber’s stockpile of explosive . . . if the bomber was indeed somebody else.
One thing I can check, Virgil thought. He found Ahlquist and said, “Where’s the Chevy dealer?”
The Chevy dealer was five minutes away, on Highway 71: Virgil went that way, in a hurry, pulled into the lot and dumped the truck in a visitor’s space. Inside, he showed his ID to the receptionist and asked to see the manager: “Is this about Henry?” she asked.
“Yes it is.”
“Is he . . . all right?” She knew the answer to that: Virgil could see it in her eyes.
“No,” he said.
“Ah, jeez,” she said. “C’mon, let’s find Ron, he was calling the hospital.”
The manager saw them coming through the window in his office, hung up, looking at Virgil, said, “Are you with the police?”
“Yeah.”
“Is Henry okay?”
Virgil shook his head. “No, he’s not.”
“Ah, boy. This is fuckin’ nuts. No way—”
“I need to look at a calendar or a time card or something. I need to know if Henry was working two weeks ago Tuesday.”
“He works Tuesdays through Saturdays, off Sundays and Mondays. He hasn’t, hadn’t, taken any extra days off lately. I can look at my schedule. . . .”
“Please look,” Virgil said.
The manager turned to a computer screen and brought up a schedule, shook his head, and said, “I show him working eleven to seven on that Tuesday.”
“And on Wednesday?”
“Same.”
The bomb at the Pinnacle had gone off at nine A.M. on Wednesday, and the ATF didn’t think it could have been planted any more than twenty-four hours earlier. If that was true, Erikson couldn’t have planted the bomb before work, because he wouldn’t have had time to get back. He could have theoretically flown to Michigan after work . . . but then, how’d he get a bomb on the plane? Have to be a private plane. But a private plane would be obvious, there’d be lots of records, and a smart guy wouldn’t do that.
No, it just didn’t work. He’d have the researcher check, but it didn’t work.
Erikson could, of course, have an accomplice in Grand Rapids, who planted the bomb on a Tuesday because that would give Erikson an alibi....
But Virgil didn’t like the feel of that, either.
The manager broke into his chain of thought. “Does Sarah know?”
VIRGIL WENT BACK to the bombed garage thinking that Erikson was more likely a victim than a bomber. If that were correct, then the obvious question was, Why?
Why Erikson, and not somebody else? There were at least two good reasons why somebody might be bombed.
First, the real bomber might be trying to hang a frame on somebody else, in preparing to end his own bombings. If he were ditching all of his Pelex, the blasting caps, the rest of the pipe, and so on, and if he did a complete and efficient cleanup of his workshop, then even if Virgil managed to identify him, a conviction would be tough: no physical evidence, plus another bomber candidate to point at.
Second, Erikson might have been killed because he knew something.
Which one?
VIRGIL STOOD OUTSIDE THE GARAGE and watched the cops and the ATF people working. The ATF tech with bomb disposal experience had moved the pipe, from a distance, and nothing blew.
“How’d he do that?” Virgil asked.
“We’ve got all kinds of high-tech equipment with us, we just haven’t had to bring it out yet.”
“Like what? A robot?”
“A long string,” Barlow said. “He dropped it over the end of the pipe, then we all cleared out, and he pulled it over. So then we knew it wasn’t booby-trapped, and when we got a close look at it, we saw that it’d been packed with Pelex, but he hadn’t put in the blasting cap yet. We may be lucky: if it’s got a good fingerprint, or a little DNA in the Pele
x . . .”
“Isn’t that a little weird, that he’d pack it without a blasting cap?” Virgil asked. “Wouldn’t you have to take the Pelex back out before you put the blasting cap in?”
“No, not necessarily . . . I mean, we don’t know if that’s all the Pelex he was planning to put in there,” Barlow said.
“Still seems weird to me,” Virgil said.
“We don’t know his working style yet, so we don’t know if it’s weird,” Barlow said. He sounded, Virgil thought, like a guy who really wanted Erikson to be the Man.
Virgil stood and looked at the garage for a long time, and another thought occurred: if Erikson was not the bomber, then the bomber knew how to get into his garage, in the night, and where the workbench was.
Virgil went to Ahlquist, who was talking to another one of the neighbors. “I want to talk to Erikson’s wife as soon as we find her,” Virgil said. “Give me a call?”
Ahlquist nodded. “She’s on the way, but she’ll be another hour yet.”
AS VIRGIL WAS WALKING BACK to his truck, Pye showed up, with Marie Chapman. Virgil walked them across the police tape, and Pye asked, “Is this the guy? The bomber?”
“The ATF is leaning that way, and they could be right,” Virgil said. “I have some doubts.”
“Like what?”
“Like he couldn’t have put the bomb in the Pinnacle. He would have needed an accomplice to plant it. I don’t like the idea of two killers, linking up over that big of a space.”
Pye peered at the garage, grunted, and said, “You know what? Neither do I. I’m not kissing your ass at this point.”
Chapman wrote it all down, then said, “Mike Sullivan got out of the hospital. He’s back at the AmericInn, but I think he’s headed home to Wichita tomorrow morning, if you need to talk to him again.”
Virgil shook his head. “I can’t think of anything more. You guys gonna give up on the store?”
“Absolutely not,” Pye said. “We’ve already replaced him, and we’ve got another guy coming up to take Kingsley’s spot. Volunteers. I’m paying them triple time, forty hours a week. By the time the store’s up, they’ll have an extra year’s pay in their pockets.”
Barlow came over. “Mr. Pye. You want to take a look? This may be the guy. . . .”
VIRGIL LEFT THE SCENE, headed back to the county courthouse. He was halfway back when he saw the AmericInn, and that tripped off a thought about Sullivan, and that tripped off an entirely new thought, about the security cameras at the construction trailer.
He swerved into the AmericInn parking lot, parked, identified himself to the desk clerk, got Sullivan’s room number. Sullivan’s wife answered the door and said, “Virgil. We heard something happened.”
“Another bomb.”
She shivered and said, “I’m glad we’re leaving. Was the man . . . ?”
“He was killed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to Mike, just for a second.”
SHE STEPPED BACK and let him in. Sullivan was lying on the bed, half asleep. When his wife called him, he dragged open his eyelids, saw Virgil, and asked, “Everybody okay?”
“No.” Virgil told the story again, then asked his question: “That recorder for the security camera at the trailer—how big was it?”
Sullivan held his hands eighteen inches apart. “I dunno . . . about like this. It looked like a stereo receiver, or a DVD player, I guess.”
“Was the camera big or small?”
“Oh, you know, it was like the cameras you see in stores,” Sullivan said. “Not very big. It was round, white, had some LEDs in it.”
“Was it in a place where the guy would see it right away?” Virgil asked. “Or was it out of sight?”
“It was up in a corner over Gil’s desk, where it could see the door. It didn’t jump right out at you, but if you looked around, you wouldn’t have any trouble finding it.... But after you found it, it’d take a while to find the recorder. That was in a cabinet on the floor, and it was locked shut.”
“But he found it.”
“I guess. The ATF guys say it wasn’t there.”
“I wonder if he’d been inside the trailer? You know, at some earlier date?” Virgil asked.
“Mm, there were guys in and out—city inspectors and stuff—but it wasn’t really a place to hang out. It was too small. Mostly a place where you had some power, and you could get out of the dirt and noise and make phone calls and run your laptop.”
“Is this going someplace?” Sullivan’s wife asked.
“I don’t know,” Virgil said.
Sullivan said, “Well, if you want to look at the whole video setup, there’s a new trailer on-site, brought up from one of our construction centers in Omaha. Donny Clark, he’s my replacement, he’ll be out there, he could show you.”
“Don Clark . . . good luck to him, and God bless him,” Sullivan’s wife said.
VIRGIL DROVE OUT to the construction site and found Don Clark sitting in the new trailer, working on a laptop. A burly blond man with a curly blond mustache, he was as tall as Virgil but twice as wide. He took Virgil down the length of the new construction trailer and popped open a cabinet door. “There it is,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
The server was an aluminum box with a couple of switches and an LCD panel. Virgil picked it up: four to six pounds, he thought. The camera was mostly plastic, and maybe weighed two pounds.
He left Clark and repeated his walk across the construction site and down through the brush and weeds to the river. The most obvious path came out at one of the pools where Peck had been fishing; nobody fishing at the moment. He got right down by the black water, startled a green heron out of a tangle of weeds, probably a nest. Couldn’t see anything.
Thought about it.
Cameron Smith had said that there was a bridge to the west, and not too far. Virgil followed the riverside trail, a dusty rut off a gravel county road. There were two more pools between the first one he’d visited and the bridge. He stood on the bridge looking into the water, then got on his cell phone and called Ahlquist.
“You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn’t come up?”
“Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There’s a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they’ve got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”
“How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.
“Go to Butternut Scuba—they’re open every day. What’re you up to?”
“Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”
“What?”
“Talk to you later,” Virgil said.
17
BUTTERNUT SCUBA WAS a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.
When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank—I’m back here.”
Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”
“That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”
Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he’d gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the h
abits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice In-Fisherman article out of that, but he hadn’t had a tank on since the summer before.
“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said Gretchen.
“Actually, I need some divers. I’m a cop and I’d like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”
“You don’t look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.
“Well, I am, Virgil Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
“Okay, I’ve read about you,” she said. “We do dives for the police.... Somebody drown?”
Virgil shook his head: “We’re not looking for a body. We’re looking for some electronic equipment.”
“Uh, will we get paid?”
“We can work something out,” Virgil said. “It’s the state, so it might take a while to get the check.”
A short, square, red-haired man with a red British RAF mustache came through the door, looked at Gretchen, then at Virgil, and Virgil said, “Hey, Frank.”
THE DEAL WAS DONE in five minutes, and Frank called a guy named Retrief and told him to bring his gear up to the PyeMart site, and make it quick. Thinking that he might rent some equipment and go in the water, Virgil dug out his certification card, and Frank asked him how many dives he had in. Virgil said, “Maybe a hundred . . . maybe. Haven’t been down for a while.”
Frank said, “We’d spend more time making sure you’re okay, than it’d be worth. You get down there, and you can’t see more than about two feet. Blind diving’s a whole new thing. It’s easy to get tangled up in shit.”
That made sense to Virgil, since visibility was one of the reasons he quit diving in Minnesota; so he helped Gretchen and Frank load their gear in the back of Frank’s truck, and they followed him out to the PyeMart site, and then back along the track to the river, Virgil plowing down the weeds in his government truck.