Shock Wave (32 page)

“I knew that,” Virgil said. “I'm a professional detective.”

“But you might be outsmarting yourself. Go back to the fundamentals of detecting. If there is such a thing. Another beer? I've only got two left, and it seems a shame just to leave them sitting there by themselves.”

 

 

GO BACK TO FUNDAMENTALS,
Virgil thought, when he finally left.

Shoe leather. Compile facts. Throw out whatever was impossible . . .

Whatever. Unfortunately, he didn't know where to start walking, and while he had a lot of facts, they were mostly irrelevant. What about motive? The fundamentals would say that murder is committed because of greed and sex, to which Virgil added craziness, druginduced or otherwise.

There was craziness here, but also a method: it wasn't the kind of compulsive, uncontrolled murder that's done by what psychiatrists referred to as nut jobs. This was craziness on a mission, and the mission probably involved greed or sex.

But not trout.

Virgil realized that he'd psychologically eliminated about half the people nominated for the bombings: the trout fishermen.

Trout fishermen, he thought, were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn't even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.

As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you'd lose your fuckin' lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.

Anyhoo . . . the trout fishermen were out.

Which made him feel better.

Sex and greed.

He'd made some progress, fueled by three beers.

 

 

BACK AT THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE,
he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they've got Block upstairs, and they're squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”

“Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.

“Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he's on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he's got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn't cooperate, he was going for twenty years.
Twenty years.
You can
kill
somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies' can, and she said he's serious.... So, I wanted you to know.”

“Okay.”

“Now what's this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.

“The bomber's blowing stuff up because of greed or sex—I've eliminated trout—and I don't see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it's greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”

“The guy isn't here,” Ahlquist said. “He's long gone. Last I heard, he's down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”

“We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye—maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”

“Did somebody say that? The money thing?”

“Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”

“Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I'll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block's balls.”

 

 

VIRGIL DECIDED HE HAD
to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”

Virgil went in and lay on the couch, his feet up on one arm. Lot of stuff going on. Had to think about it. After five minutes, he hadn't thought of anything, so he called Davenport and told him what was going on. Davenport summarized it: “So you cleaned up the town, but you don't have the bomber.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do. I gotta go.”

“Why'd he try to kill me? That's what I want to know. If he'd killed me, he would have gotten a whole storm of cops in here.”

“Maybe he was making a point of some kind, about resistance,” Davenport said. “Or maybe he wanted a whole storm of cops in there.”

 

 

 

He was still on the couch when the governor called. “Hey, Virgil, I talked to State Farm, and you're good to go. You haul the boat to the State Farm place up there, and they'll resell what they can—scrap, I guess—and you get a check for the boat and motor and a thousand in personal property.”

“Ah, jeez, Governor. Thanks, I guess. There's nothing criminal in this, is there?”

“Criminal? This is the least criminal thing I've done this week,” the governor said. “The second-least-criminal thing I've done is, I talked to an old buddy up at East Coast Marine in Stillwater. He's got a Ranger, there, a beauty, used, but not hard, owned by some rich guy who went out about once a year.... Anyway, your check exactly matches the asking price, including sales tax. You gotta go look at it.”

“A Ranger?” Virgil's mouth started to water. “Jeez, Governor, I don't know—”

“Hey, don't worry about it,” the governor said. “Everything's totally on the up-and-up. Well, as much on the up-and-up as these things get. Anyway, I gotta go violate somebody's civil rights. Talk to you later. It's Andy at East Coast Marine. He's making out the papers right now.”

“Well . . . thanks,” he said, but he was thinking,
Holy shit, a Ranger.
He had the urge to drop the entire bomb case and get the hell over to Stillwater before Andy died....

“So Davenport said you'd been out to Michigan, to the Pinnacle. I didn't hear about that. What's going on there?”

Virgil explained the problem of planting the bomb, and his thoughts, and the governor said, “Any way he could climb it? Or come down? Parachute, maybe?”

Virgil thought back to the conversation he'd had with the guys at the Pye Pinnacle and said, “Someone would've seen a plane, or heard it at least. I thought maybe a helicopter, but you couldn't land one there without
someone
noticing. A hang glider, maybe, but the Pinnacle's the tallest thing out there. There'd be nowhere to launch it from.”

The governor rang off, and Virgil closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch. The word “glider” floated through his mind, and he thought,
Hey, wait a minute. Did somebody say something about Peck flying a glider?
The guy at Butternut Tech. Huh. Could you land a glider on top of a building?

He didn't know anyone else who could answer that question, so he called Peck.

“Hey, George—could you land a glider on top of a building?”

After a moment of silence, Peck said, “A glider? Somebody told you I used to fly gliders?”

“Yeah, somebody did, but I'll be damned if I can remember who. So, could you?”

“Well, not me, personally, because I'd be too chicken. But I guess if you had a big enough roof, without any obstructions, you could.”

“How big a roof?”

“Maybe . . . three hundred yards at the absolute minimum. But that would be scary as hell, even with perfect wind and good visibility. The problem is, you'd have to come in high enough to make sure you got on the roof—you don't want to crash into the side of the building. Then you'd have to stop before you got to the far parapet, because if you didn't, and hit it, you'd either get squashed like an eggshell hitting a wall, or if the parapet was low enough, it'd trip the glider and you'd go right over the edge and drop like a stone. Or both.”

“You had me at three hundred yards,” Virgil said. “The roof of the Pye Pinnacle is probably fifty yards across. Maybe less. It's got all kinds of pipes and chimneys and air-conditioning ducts up there.”

“No way you're gonna land a glider on that. That's just not going to work.”

 

 

Virgil closed his eyes and thought about it, and came up with exactly one answer: the bomber wanted a bigger, wider investigation. Why would he want that? Because a bigger, wider investigation would probably get into the question of whether the city council was bribed, and if it had been, then . . . PyeMart was gone.

So maybe there was a good reason to try to kill him—nothing personal, not anger or revenge or because Virgil was a threat, but an effort to get as many cops as possible into town.

The guy might be nuts, but there was a logic buried in his craziness.

So why did he go after Pye first? Why weren't there any warnings? Maybe because he was worried about heightened security around Pye, if he set the first one off in Butternut. So he went after Pye first—after the whole board of directors, but had failed. If he'd succeeded, what would he have done then?

Issued a warning, perhaps: quit building the PyeMart, or else.

But then, if the company didn't do it, what would he do next?

Virgil thought about it, and decided that there wouldn't have been a warning: he would have continued on to Butternut, and would have blown up the trailer even if he had been successful with the Pinnacle bomb.

The first bomb was an announcement of his seriousness; the second bomb was the beginning of the actual campaign.

The third bomb, at the equipment yard, would slow down the construction process, and make it more expensive.

The fourth one, another attack on Pye . . . keeping the pressure on.

Then the attack on Virgil, maybe to bring more pressure into town.

And finally, the bomb at Erikson's.

HE CONSIDERED THE LIST,
and after a moment, focused on the bombing of the equipment yard. That one wasn't quite right: he took a big risk, to do nothing more than slow down the process. In fact, he wouldn't even slow down the construction or opening of the store—he'd just slow down the water and sewer connection by a couple of months. If done on schedule, the connection would have been made three or four months before the store was finished. Now, it'd only be two months.

So why would that have been important to him? Important enough to make a couple of dozen bombs, or however many it was?

Then, there was the bomb at Erikson's. If he was fully rational, he had a reason for picking Erikson as the fall guy. He wasn't just chosen at random. Why Erikson?

 

 

HE THOUGHT ABOUT KLINE,
the pharmacist he'd visited on his second day in town. He knew everything and everybody....

Virgil rolled off the couch and went out to his car and drove downtown. Ed Kline, said the girl behind the pharmacy cash register, was on break.

“Up on the roof?”

“You know about the roof? Let me call him.”

She took out her cell phone, made the call, mentioned Virgil's name, then rang off and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”

“I do.”

Kline was sitting in a recliner, looking out at the lake, his feet up on a round metal lawn table, blowing smoke at the sky.

“You find him?” he asked Virgil.

“No. But I can refine the list. The bomber, I think, is working through some kind of logic. I think it most likely has to do with money. There also has to be a link with Henry Erikson, but I can't see what it would be. And I think he's probably on my list.”

“And . . .”

Virgil took the survey list out of his pocket. “So, I need you to look at my list and tell me who on the list would either make money, or save money, if PyeMart went down. I've already talked to a couple of the major possibilities, and sorta scratched them off. I really need an Erikson-money connection.”

Kline worked his way through the cigarette as he studied the list, and finally shook his head and handed it back to Virgil. “I don't see it. I see the usual suspects, people who lose when PyeMart comes in. Nothing that involves Erikson.”

“Did Erikson ever serve on the city council? I mean, was he ever in a spot where he could have affected what happened with PyeMart?”

Again, Kline shook his head. “No. Never ran for anything, far as I know.”