Shock Wave

  The man said, “What? You’ve never seen a nineteenth-century fly-fishing outfit?”

  “Uh, no,” Virgil said. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Not a lot of us traditionalists around,” the man said. “But a few.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Mmm. I’ve overstayed, I’m afraid.”

  Virgil said, “Listen, have you seen a guy in camo hanging around here? A local guy? Maybe carrying a pair of binoculars?”

  “Camouflage? No, no, I haven’t, but then, I don’t usually fish this low,” the man said. “I’m usually upstream, but things weren’t going so well up there, so I persisted, and here I am.”

  “You know anybody who fishes down here?”

  “I do,” the man said. “Cameron Smith. He likes these two pools, and two more down below. There’s an old mill dam, fallen down now, but there’s still a good deep pool behind it. He’s more of a wetfly man. I’m dry.”

  “Cameron Smith . . . he’s in town here?”

  “Yes. He’s the president of the Cold Stream Fishers, which is a local fly-fishing club. I’m also a member.”

  “The club members pretty pissed about the PyeMart?”

  “Shouldn’t they be? I’ll tell you what, this river is one of the western outposts of the trout in Minnesota. Everything south and west of here is too warm and too muddy. Too many farms, too much plowing, too much fertilizer. There’s a river fifteen miles south of here. In the middle of the summer it gets an algae bloom you could almost walk across, from the fertilizer runoff. Looks like a goddamned golf fairway. This creek is a jewel; it should have been a state park long ago. Nothing good can happen with this PyeMart. Nothing. Maybe nothing terrible will happen, but then, maybe something terrible will happen. That’s the way we look at it. There’s no upside, but there could be a huge downside. There are damn few things worth blowing up people for, but this creek might be one of them.”

  “But you wouldn’t do that,” Virgil said.

  “Of course not. I’d be chicken, for one thing. For another, I’m not that certain of the moralities involved. We do know one thing about the world, though, and that’s that we’ve got way too many people, and way too few trout. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ We’re not talking about trout qua trout, but trout as a symbol of everything that’s good for the environment.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”

  As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.

  “You think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.

  Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”

  “Tell me,” Virgil said.

  “Market research.”

  “Market research?”

  “Do an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your friends and tell you confidentially who is most likely to be the bomber. You set up some rules: tell people they aren’t to name old enemies, or people of color or other victims of prejudice. Then give them the clues you have, so far, tell them to think really hard: Who is he? If you put this in the paper, you’d have five thousand replies by tonight. You go through the replies, and you’d find probably ten suspects, coming up over and over. One of them will be the bomber.”

  “You think?”

  “I’d bet you a thousand American dollars,” Peck said. He finished putting the last fly in a fly case, put it in another pocket.

  “You got a thousand dollars?” Virgil asked.

  “I do.”

  Virgil said, “I like the concept, but it’d be pretty unorthodox. My boss would have a hernia.”

  Peck said, “Because he’s stuck in the past.” He nodded to Virgil and said, “Don’t fall in,” and went on his way, back upstream.

  VIRGIL WENT DOWNSTREAM, for a quarter mile, then back up, ambling along the bank, looking for anything, not finding much. The riverbanks saw quite a bit of foot traffic, Virgil thought, judging from the beaten-down brush. He got back to the spot where he’d met Peck, and continued upstream after him, but never saw him again.

  Fifty yards above the place where they’d talked, he saw another trail cutting into the brush toward the PyeMart, and he followed it. Toward the end of it, fifteen yards from the edge of the raw earth of the construction zone, he found a nest beaten down in the weeds—a spot were somebody, or something, had spent some time. It could have been a deer bed, he thought, although it might be a little short for that, and he’d seen none of the liver-colored deer poop he would have expected around a bedding area.

  On the other hand, even if it wasn’t a deer bed, there wasn’t anything about it that would point toward a particular human being. He walked along the edge of the construction line, back to the point where he’d first stepped into the brush, but saw nothing else that looked like a bed, or a nest.

  If somebody were still watching the PyeMart, would he be coming back? Might it be worthwhile to ask the sheriff to have a deputy camp out here for a while? Get a sleeping bag and a book or two, and simply lie back in the weeds and see who came along?

  He’d think about that.

  He’d also think about market research; and about the man who suggested profiling. Wouldn’t market research just be a mass profiling? Didn’t the FBI believe in profiling, even if the ATF didn’t?

  In the meantime, he had people to interview.

  ERNIE STANTON WAS WORKING in his office behind Ernie’s Oil #1—the office was one of the modest, prefab brick-and-corrugated-metal buildings that could be thrown up in a couple of weeks, and that dotted the back streets of small working towns. His secretary, with a plaque that said “Office Manager,” sat next to the door, a delicate, slightly fleshy prairie flower with honey-blond hair and pink cheeks. Stanton, a squarish man with deep lines cutting his wind-burned face on either side of his prominent nose, sat at a desk in the back. Virgil introduced himself and Stanton said, “I wondered when you’d be around, me being the town radical and all.”

  He smiled, but there was nothing funny or happy about his face, which was getting redder by the second.

  Virgil said, “Well, you said it. I mean, everybody I talk to says, ‘Ernie Stanton.’ They say that not only do you want to stop PyeMart, any way you can, but you’ve got the brains and the background to do it.”

  “You mean I’m a shitkicker,” Stanton said.

  “Hell, I’m a shitkicker,” Virgil said. He dropped in a chair in front of Stanton’s desk. “But I don’t go around blowing people up with pipe bombs.”

  “Neither do I,” Stanton said. “Though, if somebody’s got to get blown up, Pye would be a good place to start. That damn store is going to tear this town up. Hell, it already has. Everybody knows that Pye bought the city council and the mayor. They’ll be leaving town right after the next election.”

  “So you didn’t blow anybody up, and you don’t know who’s doing it?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell the cops,” Stanton said. He hesitated, then added, “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Pye’s killing me. I won’t even be able to sell my businesses when he gets through. Probably won’t even be able to sell the buildings—what’d you use them for? Art studios? If he got killed and they pulled the plug o
n this store, it’d be like I got a reprieve from the death penalty.”

  Virgil looked at him for a moment, and from behind him, the secretary said, “I second everything Ernie just said.”

  “Where were you last night?” Virgil asked.

  “At home. Ate dinner down at Bunson’s with my wife and my youngest kid, got home about seven, watched a ball game until about nine o’clock or so. Put the kids to bed, watched TV with my wife until eleven, went to bed. Of course, that alibi’s no good, because it’s only my wife and kids, and this whole deal will drag them down, just as much as me.”

  “You been out of town in the last month?”

  “No, sir. I been here every day,” Stanton said.

  “And you’ve got people who aren’t in your family . . . aren’t your secretary . . . who’ll say that?”

  “Well, hell, I don’t know,” Stanton said. “Probably. I use my credit card for most everything I buy, and I usually buy something every day. Groceries, or something. But, how’d I know I’d have to prove I was here every day? If I’d known that, I could have set something up.”

  “Good answer,” Virgil said.

  He saw Stanton relax just a notch, his shoulders folding back and down into his office chair. From behind Virgil, the secretary said, “I also have a calendar which gives you his appointments every day. Like he went to the dentist twice last week.”

  Virgil swiveled around and said, “Don’t throw it away.”

  Going back to Stanton, he asked, “You know about the car bombing this morning?”

  Stanton nodded. “Yeah, I went out and looked at it. It’s still sitting there. Didn’t hear the boom, but my wife was down at County Market, shopping, and she heard it, and saw it, and called me.”

  Virgil said, “The bomb was probably triggered when the limo went over a bump or something. Something that jarred the car. About a minute before it went off, the driver went past a bunch of elementary school kids on a field trip. If it had gone off next to them, you’d be missing a few kids.”

  Stanton leaned forward and said, “That’s why I wouldn’t be a bomber. If I was going to kill Pye, I’d figure out a way to shoot the sonofabitch. But a bomb . . . this bomb in Michigan, killed that gal, the secretary. Why would you take a chance of doing that? Then our first bomb, he killed the construction super. That won’t stop the store—they’ll just get another supervisor. I mean, what the guy is doing is nuts.”

  “But shooting him with a gun wouldn’t be?”

  “Be a hell of a lot less nuts,” Stanton said. “Wouldn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t make that kind of judgment,” Virgil said.

  “You would if you were a real shitkicker, and not some phoniedup city cowboy in crocodile boots and a Rolling Stones tongue shirt.”

  “Listen—”

  “Come on, admit it,” Stanton said. “You got a guy like Pye, wrecking a town, and you might not like him getting shot, but it’s a hell of a lot less nuts than taking a chance of blowing up some schoolkids. Isn’t it?”

  “Well . . .”

  “C’mon, say it,” Stanton said.

  “All right. It’s less nuts,” Virgil said. “I still don’t hardly approve of it.”

  “Neither do I,” Stanton said. “That’s one reason I didn’t do it. Shoot him, I mean.”

  Stanton said he’d thought about the bomber, but the more he thought, the more bewildered he became. “I know guys around town who could do it, but they wouldn’t. I mean, they’ve got the skills. Hell, I could probably do it. Me and my friends, we sit around talking about it—we’re asking each other, who’s nuts enough? We really don’t know anybody like that.”

  With that, Virgil left.

  As he was going out the door, the prairie flower said, “If you see that cocksucker Pye, tell him I hope he roasts in hell.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” Virgil said.

  OUT IN THE SUNSHINE, Virgil looked at his watch. Time was passing, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And, he thought, the bomber was probably already at work on another bomb. He took a call from Ahlquist. “The TV’s already here, taking pictures of the limo and the blown-up pipes, interviewing everybody in sight. They’re asking if you’re gonna make a statement for the BCA?”

  “No, no, apologize if anybody asks for me. Tell them that I’m tracking down leads, or something,” Virgil said. “But I’ll sneak in the back and watch.”

  “Are you? Tracking down leads?”

  “Not so much. I just finished talking to Ernie Stanton. I’m gonna go find this Don Banning guy, that runs the clothing store, and then Beth Robertson over at the Book Nook.”

  “I think Don is too much of a sissy to pull this off. Beth isn’t a sissy, but she’s not crazy, and I really can’t see her crawling around under a car, with a bomb. Or breaking into a quarry shed and stealing explosive. She’s too . . . ladylike.”

  AHLQUIST WAS RIGHT ABOUT BANNING, Virgil decided: he was a basic clothing salesman, deferential, eager to please. Soft and slender, he seemed unlike a man who’d have enough executive grit to travel to Michigan with a bomb, and then crack a skyscraper to plant it. Like Stanton, he confessed that he would not be unhappy to see Pye drop dead.

  “But you know, I’m not really all that angry with Mr. Pye himself. He’s just doing what he does. I’m more angry with the city council, who let him come in here and set up a store in an area that was supposed to remain open space, or, at least, not to have city facilities, for at least another fifty years. Instead, they completely subvert the city plan, and run water and sewer out there, specifically for the PyeMart. They were bought, and that’s what you should be investigating.”

  Virgil said, “I’ve been told that by a couple of people. Of course, if I find any evidence of it, I’ll act on it. Right now, I’m more focused on stopping this bomber.”

  “And when you do that, you’ll never come back to look at the city council,” Banning said. “That’s just too much trouble for the BCA, and they’ve all got political friends, and it wouldn’t be an important enough case for somebody like you anyway.”

  “After I stop the bomber, we’ll see about that,” Virgil said.

  Banning showed a little grit: “I’m sorry. I don’t believe you.”

  VIRGIL WAS BACK in his truck, mentally scratching Banning off his list of suspects, when Lawrence, the clerk at Home Depot, called on Virgil’s cell phone. “I put out a message on our woodworker phone tree. I got a call back from Jesse Card at BTC. You better get over there and talk to him.”

  Butternut Technical College was a collection of a half-dozen yellow-brick buildings surrounding a group of tennis and basketball courts on the far south side of town. A two-year college, it functioned as an extension of high school, and focused on a variety of building trades.

  Jesse Card was the lead instructor in the metal shop, and had a small paper- and manual-clogged office down the hall from the shop itself. The office smelled pleasantly of tobacco and oil, as Virgil thought such places should, though the tobacco was illegal. Card was talking with another instructor when Virgil arrived, and Card broke away to take him down to the shop.

  Card was excited: “The thing is, our number one rule here is, you clean up. You get these kids in here, and if you didn’t make them clean up, spotlessly, every time they use a tool, it’d be chaos. So, about a month ago, I came in and was walking through, when I see this mess behind the pipe cutter. This is the pipe cutter.”

  Card pointed at a power saw with a circular blade, that was bolted on a black steel table. The saw looked like an ordinary miter saw, except for a vise-like tool on the front, designed to hold a pipe in place while it was being cut.

  “I’m pretty sure that there was no mess when I went home the night before—my eye catches that kind of stuff. So I see all these metal filings behind the saw and on the floor, and I’m asking, What the heck? I got the kids and asked who did it: they all swore that they hadn’t. I believed them, because, for one thing, they would have had t
o come in at night, and for that they’d need a key. There was a night class for adults going on, but the instructor there said they hadn’t been doing any pipe-cutting at all. Anyway, I let it go until I got the call from Lawrence.”

  “So whoever came in, had a key,” Virgil said.

  “Unless they were in the night class,” Card said. “Or maybe somebody forgot to lock up. There are lots of keys around, and sometimes the doors don’t get locked.”

  “Do you know what kind of filings? Was there much of it?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, there was quite a bit. Whoever used it cut quite a bit of material. It was steel, was what it was. It was magnetic, and it was bright, so it was steel.”

  Virgil said, “Hmm. There weren’t any bits and pieces left over?”

  “There were, unless somebody took them. Come over this way.”

  Virgil followed him across the shop to a metal bin, which was half full of pieces of steel and iron. An adjacent bin contained a bucketful of copper pieces.

  “This is where we throw metal debris,” Card said. “A guy from the local junkyard picks it up when it gets full, and we get a few bucks for it. So after this incident with the mess by the saw, I was throwing some stuff in here—the bin was almost empty—and I noticed this piece of three-inch galvanized pipe in there. We don’t use anything like that, we’re not a plumbing shop. It occurred to me right then that this might be where the filings came from. I didn’t do anything about it, I just noticed it, and it popped right up in my mind when Lawrence called.”

  Virgil peered into the bin: “You think it’s still in there?”

  “I believe so. Unless, like I said, somebody took it.”

  Virgil said, “Okay, this is good. I’m bringing the ATF in.”