Shock Wave

  He got on the phone to Barlow and told him about it. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Barlow said. “Don’t go anywhere. Keep an eye on the saw, too.”

  WHILE THEY WAITED FOR BARLOW to show up, Virgil and Card sat on a couple of stools and talked about who’d have a key, or access to the shop. Card said the shop was unlocked from about seven o’clock in the morning, when he got there, until about ten o’clock at night, when the night adult class ended and the instructor locked up.

  Sometimes, he said, the door didn’t get locked—“I run into that a few times every year. Then, there are quite a few keys around, janitors and administrators. The local firefighters have a master set.... What I think happened was, it was a guy with a key. He came in late . . . The pipe would be heavy, so he’d have to park right outside and carry the pipe in. Wouldn’t have to worry about turning on the lights, because there are no windows. He cuts his pipe and gets out. He doesn’t take the time to clean up, because he’s in a hurry, but he does know enough to throw the waste piece in the bin.”

  “So then . . . It’d have to be a guy who works here,” Virgil said.

  “Well, a guy who has a key for here. Could be a firefighter. And then, this place has been here since the fifties. I bet there are a hundred keys for these doors. Maybe more. We don’t know where most of them are at. If you had somebody come through here as a student . . .”

  “Okay.”

  They thought about it together, and then Virgil asked, “Why wouldn’t he just buy a saw? He could do it in his basement with a ten-dollar hacksaw. Buy the hacksaw in the Cities, nobody would remember.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot of work, that’s why. This is steel we’re talking about, and it’s pretty thick,” Card said. “If he wanted to make a lot of cuts, he could wear himself out doing it. And maybe he doesn’t think that way. Maybe he gets the pipe and thinks, How do I cut this stuff? And he thinks, Hmm, there’s my old shop. . . .”

  “That could happen,” Virgil said.

  “One more thing,” Card said. “This is a tech school. When people who work here upgrade their homes, they tend to do it themselves. Put in a new bathroom or finish a basement, most of us would think nothing of it. A lot of guys here look at the school as a resource. Need to cut some pipe, go on down to the shop and do it. Technically, you’re not supposed to, but almost everybody does. And why not?”

  “So it could be an instructor.”

  “It could be. It’s a logical possibility,” Card said. “We got a lot of instructors—a couple hundred, when you include outsiders.”

  “You’ve given me something to think about, Jesse,” Virgil said.

  BARLOW ARRIVED, bringing one of the techs with him. Card ran through the whole explanation again, and they went over and peered in the metal debris bin, and after taking a photograph, the tech started digging through it, throwing non-relevant bits and pieces into a trash can that Card wheeled over. After two or three minutes, he said, “There it is.”

  He was wearing yellow plastic evidence gloves, and he stripped them off, pulled on a fresh one, then reached down and slipped two fingers inside a three-inch length of pipe and lifted it out. The pipe had been crushed at one end; the other end showed bright steel where the blade had gone through it.

  Card said, “That’s it.”

  They all looked at it for a moment, then Barlow asked the tech, “What do you think?”

  “I’d be really surprised if this isn’t a piece of the bomb pipe,” the tech said. “It’s exactly the right size, the cut looks the same as in the end we found, the material looks exactly the same—we can check that in the lab—and it looks like it was used as a piece of old plumbing pipe, a water pipe, same as the bombs. I’d say he cut it off to get rid of the crushed part. He wanted access to both ends.”

  Barlow turned to Virgil and said, “Good catch.”

  “Not me,” Virgil said. “It was Jesse and his gang.”

  Card said, “Man, this is something else. This is a story.”

  BARLOW WOULD SEND the pipe end to the ATF lab to see if any fingerprints or DNA could be recovered.

  As Virgil was leaving, he asked Card if he knew the fly fisherman George Peck. “Oh, sure, I know George. Why?”

  “Is he an instructor here?”

  “No, no. He’s the town photographer,” Card said. “He does portraits and high school yearbooks and so on. He’s a blowhard, in my opinion. Harmless, though.”

  “I met him up on the Butternut, fly-fishing.”

  “Was he wearing that white suit?” Card asked.

  “Yeah. I’d never seen anything quite like it,” Virgil said.

  “That’s George. He can’t just be a fly fisherman, he has to be an antique fly fisherman. He’s also a member of a tommy-gun club over in Wisconsin. They get together and shoot tommy guns. He collects pocket watches. He’s got an enormous camera, a hundred years old, the size of a Volkswagen. He uses it to go around and document authentic people. He used to be a glider pilot. A regular airplane wasn’t exotic enough—he had to go up without an engine.”

  “Authentic people?”

  “You know. Poor people, I guess,” Card said. “I’ve known him a long time. Since we were kids. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. You don’t seriously suspect him?”

  “No, no. Just doing market research,” Virgil said.

  BEFORE GOING BACK to his truck, Virgil walked down to the college admissions department and got a copy of the current class catalog, which also listed instructors. The woman behind the admissions desk told him that all instructors, both full-time and part-time, were listed on the college’s website, and most had e-mail addresses.

  He sat in the 4Runner for a few minutes, flipping through the catalog. There were dozens of courses, more dozens of instructors. Browsing through the list of courses, he realized that the level of technical sophistication meant that not only the instructors, but the students, could almost certainly build any kind of bomb you wanted.

  Including, he thought, atomic. Even if they couldn’t provide the plutonium, they almost certainly could build the mechanism of an atomic bomb, with their computer-assisted design programs: Electronics technology, engineering CAD technology, machine-tool technology, manufacturing engineering technology, mechanical design tech (CAD), research-and-development technology, welding and metal fabrication technology . . .

  A pipe bomb would be child’s play.

  In fact, the bombs so far had perhaps been too unsophisticated for the college . . . but then, there was that pipe debris. Virgil bought the idea that the pipe had been cut in a machine shop, that the bomber had been there.

  AHLQUIST CALLED: “EVERYBODY’S HERE for the press conference. You coming?”

  Virgil looked at his watch. The time was sneaking past him. “See you in five minutes,” he said. “You know what you’re going to say?”

  “Well, it’ll be just like we decided. That we’re making progress, that we’re expecting arrests. It’d be nice if we had made some progress. I’d feel less like a dirty rotten liar, but I guess I can live with it.”

  “We did find the bomb factory,” Virgil said. “You could mention that.”

  “What?”

  “And I’d like to talk to you about market research.”

  8

  THE PARKING LOT WAS full of white television vans, with camera guys in jeans and golf shirts lolling about the courthouse doors, the talent in dresses and sport coats. Three or four newspaper reporters mixed in, along with a radio guy from Minnesota Public Radio and an online reporter from MinnPost.

  Ahlquist bustled about, glad-handing the television people, joking with the reporters. Pye was there, with Chapman, his assistant; the redheaded cop, O’Hara, sat in a chair by herself at the back of the press conference, arms folded across her chest, watching. Barlow came in, wearing a suit and tie, a few minutes after Virgil got there. Barlow said he was mostly a prop. “I’ll just say that we’re making progress, and confirm the find up at BTC. What’s this thing a
bout market research?”

  Virgil told him about George Peck’s suggestion, and Barlow scratched an ear and said, “I dunno. I never heard of anything like that.”

  Virgil said, “Can’t hurt. I mean, everybody in town knows we’re looking for the bomber, and most of them have some opinions. The sheriff already has a reserved website for natural disaster information and so on. We could use that.... Be kind of interesting, I think.”

  “But it’s not based on evidence—it’s just based on . . . nothing. A vote,” Barlow said.

  “No, it’s based on collective judgment,” said Virgil. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to have proof. We’d still have to prove that the bomber did it.”

  “Let me suggest something—think about it for a couple of days,” Barlow said. “It sounds goofy to me and it’ll sound goofy to the media. In fact, let me make an executive decision here: I’m gonna stay as far away from it as I can.”

  “So I’ll think about it,” Virgil said. “No big rush.”

  “What? Of course there’s a big rush,” Barlow said. “We can’t get this guy too soon, no matter how we do it.”

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE WAS HELD in a courtroom at the new county courthouse, a space that did its best to translate justice into laminated wood. A Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter stopped to chat, and when he drifted away in pursuit of Barlow, Pye walked over, trailed by Chapman and her steno pad, and asked, “You still thinking about the plane?”

  “I started thinking about it again,” Virgil said. “If I don’t come up with anything the rest of the day, I might go.”

  “If you can figure out how the bomber got in the building, I think you’ll know who he is,” Chapman said, over Pye’s head.

  “Why’s that?”

  She tipped her head toward the back of the courtroom, and the three of them found a pew and sat side by side, Pye in the middle, and Chapman spoke around him. “This all comes from my stenography, my reporting in following Willard around, talking to ATF guys.”

  The Pinnacle, she said, was deep in the countryside, all by itself, surrounded by a wide plaza that sat fifteen feet above the surrounding parking lots. The parking lots were a hundred and fifty feet across, and were, in turn, surrounded by farm fields.

  “You can’t see the bottom floor of the building from the fields, because the plaza is set up too high. That means you can’t do longterm surveillance from the cornfields, because you can’t see up on top of the plaza. And you can’t get close to the plaza without being in the open, where the security cameras would pick you up. The cameras never found anybody. Everybody who comes through, front and back, twenty-four hours a day, is on multiple cameras, and there are no gaps in the videos.”

  “Barlow said that the bomb had to be in there less than a day,” Virgil said.

  “The ATF found fragments of the clock used as a timer. The technicians say that it didn’t have a running time of more than twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. So the bomber had to be in the building less than twenty-four hours before the bomb went off. They checked everybody coming through the front and back—the loading dock is around back—and checked them off. Found them all. No obvious suspects,” Chapman said.

  Pye bobbed his head, and Chapman continued: “So then they thought that the bomb had been placed by an insider. They’d tracked down the probable origin of the explosives, up at that quarry—around here someplace, Cold Spring?—and decided that an insider had simply known about that quarry for some reason, and had come here to get the explosives. They also checked out people, insiders, who’d been out here for this construction project. There were about a dozen of them, and they were all eliminated by the ATF.”

  Pye jumped in: “So that was it: had to be an insider, who came out here by chance. Then the bomb went off here, and they were . . . confused. Because that made it seem like it might be an outsider again, and they didn’t think it could be an outsider. Now this second bomb—”

  “It wasn’t an insider,” Virgil said. “At least, it seems unlikely. We’ve located the place where the pipe was cut for the bombs.” He told them about the tech college, and the metal shop.

  Pye clouded up: “How come nobody told me about this? This is a big deal.”

  “Just happened, a few minutes ago,” Virgil said. “They got a piece of pipe. Maybe it’ll have a fingerprint, or DNA.”

  “Not the way that our luck has been running,” Pye said. “But it sounds like you’ve been making progress. I don’t want you to go running off to Grand Rapids if it’ll slow you down.”

  “If you can turn me around in a hurry, I won’t lose much time here,” Virgil said. “But I’d want to work tonight, and get back on the plane first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Chapman said to Pye, “If you want, I could go along with him. That way, I could cut through any bureaucratic bullshit.”

  Pye squeezed his lower lip, thinking about it, then said, “If you got out of here at seven o’clock, you’d be in the building by eleven. You lose an hour in the time zones. I could have everybody waiting for you. You talk to them, look around, see what you think, get a few hours’ sleep, get back on the plane at eight—the pilots need an eighthour turnaround. You could get another couple hours of sleep on the plane, and still be back here by nine o’clock in the morning, because you get the hour back. Eat breakfast on the plane, you’d lose no working time at all.”

  Virgil said, “Set it up. I’ll be at the airport at seven o’clock, if nothing else blows up.”

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE almost went off as planned, with Ahlquist as an upbeat master of ceremonies. He told the gathered reporters that substantial progress had been made toward finding the bomber, that arrests were expected in the next few days, that the ATF lab was processing DNA evidence found on pieces of the bomb.

  And he announced that they’d found the saw where the pipes had been cut, but refused to say where that was. “We have to hold some of this tight, for investigative reasons.”

  One of the reporters said, “We heard it was out at Butternut Tech.”

  Ahlquist said, “I can’t confirm anything—”

  “Everybody already knows,” the reporter said.

  “Ah, shit,” Ahlquist said, then, “Excuse me.”

  Barlow, in his turn, conceded that the lab work would take a few days, and that “nothing was certain.” The media people detected the tap dancing and went after him, asking for a timetable on which they could decide whether or not the investigation was looking like a failure. Barlow slipped that punch and turned the pageant back to the sheriff.

  Ahlquist recovered some ground by lying about the amount of progress made, including references to additional information that couldn’t be disclosed.

  Then things turned ugly.

  A middle-aged dark-haired woman stood up and shouted, “How come you spend all this time investigating this bomber, and you don’t investigate that little fat man for killing this whole town?” She turned around and poked an index finger at Pye, who was still sitting next to Virgil. “That one! The people who elected you to office would like to know that.”

  “This ain’t good,” Pye muttered, and Chapman wrote it down.

  Ahlquist tried to dodge the bullet by saying, “Now, Beth, goldarnit, you know I’m not a city official and I had nothing to do with the PyeMart deal.”

  Beth Robertson, the bookstore woman, Virgil thought. She shouted, “Everybody knows that Pye bought the city council and the mayor, and you sure got the right to investigate that. If you investigated that—”

  At that point, the mayor, who’d been sitting in the front row, half-stood and turned, and shouted, “Robertson, you shut your mouth or I’ll sue your butt off. I never did anything I didn’t think was for the good of this town. I work sixty hours a week—”

  “YOU shut up, bitch-face,” Robertson shouted. She stepped into the aisle and took a couple steps toward the mayor. Virgil wondered why none of the sheriff’s deputies were trying to get between them; i
t seemed like the responsible thing to do. Chapman leaned around Pye and said, “Maybe you ought to stop them.”

  Virgil: “Me?”

  Robertson screamed at the mayor, “You and that goddamned crook you’re married to would sell your children for ten dollars and a rubber tire. . . .”

  Her voice reached toward a screech and Virgil thought, Hmm, and, at the same time, decided he liked her turn of phrase. Pye had lowered himself in his seat, but nobody was much looking at him anyway, because the mayor squeezed out of her pew into the aisle, the same aisle that Robertson had just gotten to.

  The cops were moving now, nearly too late, and though Robertson was the smaller of the two women, probably giving up twenty pounds, she went for the mayor like a lion after a zebra, teeth and claws. The mayor was right there, ready to take her on, but one of the cops got to Robertson just two feet short of the mayor, grabbed her around the waist and horsed her toward the back of the room, kicking and screaming.

  As the cop wrestled with Robertson, a tall bearded man in a plaid shirt stood up and shouted, “Beth is right, Ahlquist, and you know it. Those sonsof bitches were paid off big-time. Now that parking lot is going to bleed all over the Butternut and we’re gonna leave our children a polluted swamp. A polluted swamp.”

  A television reporter called, “What do you have to say to that, Sheriff ?”

  Ahlquist ignored her and said, “We’re all done here, we’re all finished. Let’s have a little peace and quiet, folks. . . .”

  Robertson started screaming from the crowd in the back, as a deputy cuffed her, and the man in the plaid shirt shouted, “No! We deserve some answers. Who’s investigating the city council, is what we want to know.”

  The mayor shouted, “Shut up, Butz. Just shut up.”

  Chapman leaned over to Virgil and said, “Fistfight in Butternut. Film at eleven.”