And he thought a little about the sheriff out in LA, Lee Coakley. She was still warm enough on the telephone, but she’d been infected by show business. She’d gone out as a consultant on a made-for-TV movie, based on one of her cases, and had been asked to consult on another. And then another. Women cops were hot in the movies and on TV, and there was work to be had. Her kids liked it out there, the whole surfer thing. Just yesterday, she’d had lunch in Malibu…
Once you’d seen Malibu, would you come back to Minnesota? To the Butternut Falls of the world? To Butternut cops?
“Ah, poop,” Virgil said out loud, his heart cracked, if not yet broken.
Virgil took U.S. 14 out of town, back through North Mankato and past the 5B, resisting the temptation to stop and see if Johnson Johnson was still alive. He went through the town of New Ulm, which once was-and maybe still was-the most ethnically homogeneous town in the nation, being 99 percent German; then took State 15 north to U.S. 212, and 212 west past Buffalo Lake, Hector, Bird Island, and Olivia, then U.S. 71 north into Butternut Falls.
Butternut was built at the point where the Butternut River, formerly Butternut Creek, ran into a big depression and filled it up, to form the southernmost lake in a chain that stretched off to the north. Butternut’s lake was called Dance Lake, after a man named Frederick Dance, who ran the first railroad depot in town, back in the 1800s.
The railroad was still big in town, and included a switching yard. The tracks ran parallel to U.S. 12, which ran through the town east to west, crossing U.S. 71 right downtown. Butternut, with about eighteen thousand people, was the county seat of Kandiyohi County, which was pronounced Candy-Oh-Hi.
Virgil knew some of that-and would get the rest out of Google-because he had, at one time or another, been in and out of most of the county seats in the state, also because he’d played Legion ball against the Butternut Woodpeckers, more commonly referred to, outside Butternut, and sometimes inside, as the wooden peckers.
Virgil drove into Butternut at half past six o’clock in the evening, in full daylight, and checked into the Holiday Inn. He got directions out to the PyeMart site from a notably insouciant desk clerk, a blond kid, and drove west on U.S. 12 to the edge of town. He passed what looked like an industrial area on the south side of the highway, crossed the Butternut River-a small, cold stream no more than fifty feet wide where it ran into the lake on the north side of the highway- then past a transmission shop. After the transmission shop, there were fields, corn, beans, oats, and alfalfa.
Most people, he thought, didn’t know that alfalfa was a word of Arabic derivation…
He was beginning to think that he’d missed the PyeMart site when he rolled over a low hill and saw the plot of raw earth on the south side of the highway, along with some concrete pilings sticking out of the ground. When he got closer, he saw the pilings were on the edges and down the middle of two huge concrete pads.
Everything else, including the soon-to-be parking lot, was raw dirt. A couple of bulldozers were parked at one edge of the site, and to the left, as he went in, he saw the construction trailer. There was a ring of yellow crime-scene tape around it, tied to rebar poles stuck upright in the dirt, to make a fence. Two sheriff’s deputies, one of each sex, sat on metal chairs just outside the tape, in the sun, and watched Virgil’s truck bouncing across the site.
Trailers on the plains are sometimes called “tornado bait,” and this one looked like it’d taken a direct hit. Virgil had seen a lot of tornado damage and several trailer fires; one thing he realized before he’d gotten out of the truck was that as hard as this trailer had been hit, there’d been no fire. In another minute, he was picking out the difference between a bomb blast and a tornado hit.
A tornado would shred a trailer, twisting it like an empty beer can in the hands of a redneck. This trailer looked like a full beer can that had been left outside in a blizzard to freeze: everything about it looked swollen. A door had been mostly blown off and was hanging from a twisted hinge.
He climbed out of the truck and walked up to the trailer, and as he did that, the female deputy, who wore sergeant’s stripes, asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Well, right here,” Virgil said. He was still in the pink T-shirt and jeans, although he’d traded his sandals for cowboy boots. He had a sport coat in the car, but the day was too warm to put it on. “I’m Virgil Flowers, with the BCA, up here to arrest your bomber.”
Both deputies frowned, as though they suspected they were being put on. “You got an ID?” the woman asked. She was a redhead, with freckles, and a narrow, almost-cute diastema between her two front teeth. One eyelid twitched every few seconds, as though she were over-caffeinated.
“I do, in my truck, if you want to see it,” Virgil said. “Though to tell you the truth, I thought I was so famous I didn’t need it.”
“It was a Virgil Flowers killed those Vietnamese up north,” the male deputy said.
“I didn’t kill anybody, but I was there,” Virgil said. “The sheriff around? I thought this place would be crawling with feds.”
“There’re two crime-scene guys in the trailer,” the female deputy said, poking a thumb back over her shoulder. “The rest of them are at the courthouse-they should be back out here any minute. The chief left us out here to keep an eye on things. I should have been off three hours ago.”
“I was having a beer when they called me,” Virgil said. “Watching some young women playing beach volleyball.”
“That’s better’n what I was going to do,” the male said. “I was just gonna mow my yard.”
They still seemed a little standoffish, so Virgil said, “Let me get you that ID.”
He went back to the truck, got his ID case, came over, and flipped it open to show the woman, who seemed to be the senior cop. She nodded and said her name was something O’Hara, and that the other deputy was Tom Mack. Virgil stuck the case in his back pocket and asked, “So where’d this guy get killed? Right here?”
Mack nodded, and faced off to his left, pointed behind the yellow tape. “Right over there. You can still see a little blood. That’s where most of him was. His head was over there-popped right off, like they do. There were other pieces around. The guy who was wounded, he soaked up quite a bit of the body.”
“He still in the hospital?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, he was crazy hysterical, I guess,” O’Hara said. “He’s not right yet. They gave him a bunch of drugs, trying to straighten him out. Not hurt bad. Can’t hear anything, but there’re no holes in him.”
At that moment, a business jet flew overhead, low, and Mack said, “That must be Pye. Willard T. Pye. They said he was coming in.”
“Good, that’ll help,” Virgil said.
O’Hara showed a hint of a smile and said, “Nothing like a multibillionaire looking over your shoulder, when you’re trying to work.”
“So, you said the guy’s head popped off, like they do,” Virgil said to Mack. “You know about bombs or something? I don’t know anything.”
Mack shrugged. “I did two tours in Iraq with the Guard. That’s what you always heard about suicide bombers-they’d pull the trigger, and their heads would go straight up, like basketballs. Think if there’s a big blast, and you’re close to it, well, your skull is a pretty solid unit, and it hangs together, but it comes loose of your neck. So… that’s what I heard. But I don’t really know.” He looked at O’Hara. “You hear that?”
“Yeah, I think everybody did. But maybe it was from some movie. I don’t know that it’s a fact.”
“You in the Guard, too?” Virgil asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, I did a tour with a Black Hawk unit. I was a crew chief and door gunner.”
“I did some time in the army, but I was a cop, and never had much to do with bombs,” Virgil said. They traded a few war stories, and then Mack nodded toward the road. “Here comes the VIP convoy. That’d be the sheriff in front, and that big black Tahoe is the ATF, and I don’t know who-all
behind that. They’ve been having a meeting at the courthouse.”
“Good thing I’m late,” Virgil said. “I might’ve had to go to it… You got media?”
“Yeah, and there they are,” O’Hara said. “Right behind the convoy. Tell you what, and don’t mention I said it, but you don’t want to be standing between the sheriff and a TV camera, unless you want cleat marks up your ass.”
Virgil saw a white truck, followed by another white truck, and then a third one. “Ah, man. I forgot to wash my hair this morning.”
“Forgot to bring your gun, too,” Mack said.
“Oh, I got a gun,” Virgil said. “I just forgot where it is.”
The Kandiyohi County Sheriff was a tall beefy Swede named Earl Ahlquist, a known imperialist. Four years past, he’d pointed out to a money-desperate city council that there was a lot of police-work duplication in Kandiyohi County, and they could cut their policing costs in half by firing their own department and hiring him to do the city’s police work. There was some jumping up and down, but when the dust settled, the two departments had merged and Ahlquist was king.
Ahlquist climbed out of his car, nodded at Virgil, and said, “I hate that shirt.”
“It’s what I wear on my day off,” Virgil said. “How you doing, Earl?”
“Other than the fact that a guy got murdered this morning, and we got a mad bomber roaming around loose, and I missed both lunch and dinner, and I’m running on three Snickers bars and some Ding Dongs, I’m just fine.”
“I had some pretty good barbeque and a few beers this afternoon, before I was called on my day off,” Virgil said. “I was watching some good-looking women play beach volleyball.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. This is your day off. Tough titty,” Ahlquist said. He turned to the crowd coming up behind him. “You know Jack LeCourt? He’s our top man here in the city. Jack, this is Virgil Flowers from the BCA, and, Virgil, this is Jim Barlow, he’s with the ATF outa the Grand Rapids field office, he’s been working the first bomb up in Michigan… This is Geraldine Gore, the mayor.”
The sheriff made all the introductions and they all shook hands and had something to say about Virgil’s pink shirt, and then O’Hara said, “We got a jet just landed at the airport, Chief. I think Pye’s here.”
“Aw, man,” Barlow said. He was a tall dark man, with hooded dark brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and a neatly trimmed black mustache. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue button-down shirt, and a dark blue blazer.
“He hasn’t been that much help?” Virgil asked.
“First thing he did was offer a one-million-dollar reward leading to the arrest and conviction,” Barlow said. “Then he gave his secretary’s family a two-million-dollar gift from the company, and gave the food-service lady, who was cut up, a quarter-million-dollar bonus. All the millions flying around meant he got wall-to-wall TV, and every time he went on, he bitched about progress. When we told him what we were doing, he leaked it. When I heard about this bomb, I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere. At least we know where the guy’s from. But you watch: it’ll be wall-to-wall TV here, too, in about fifteen minutes.”
“I can handle that. No need for you to get involved,” Ahlquist said, and from behind his back, O’Hara winked at Virgil.
Virgil said, “So, as the humblest of the investigators here… can somebody tell me what happened?”
The mayor unself-consciously scratched her ass and said, “I’d like to know that myself.”
3
Barlow knew his bombs.
The explosive, he said, had the same characteristics as the first one, so he was assuming that it was again the stuff called Pelex, as in the Michigan bomb. “That’s basically TNT, which is 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene. To make Pelex, they mixed in about fifteen percent aluminum powder, which makes the TNT faster-increases the speed with which it develops its maximum pressure.”
“To give you a bigger pop,” Virgil said.
“Exactly. The bomber put this stuff, I think, inside a good-sized galvanized steel plumbing pipe,” Barlow said. “The pipe was sitting on the floor, just inside the door. The trigger could have been something as simple as a string down from the handle to a mousetrap.”
“Mousetrap?”
“Yes.” Barlow gestured at the techs working inside the trailer. “We found a wire spring that looks like it came from an ordinary mousetrap. We don’t know if there were mousetraps set inside the trailer to catch mice, but it would have been an effective way to fire the switch on the bomb. You get a battery, an electric blasting cap, a switch worked through the mousetrap, and there you go. Move the door, fire the mousetrap, and boom.”
“That sounds dangerous… to the bomber,” Ahlquist said.
“You’d need good hands,” Barlow agreed. “The bomb in Michigan used a cheap mechanical clock as a switch, and was a lot safer. But that was a time bomb, and this was a trigger-set. Of course, we haven’t found all the pieces of the switch here… It might not have been all that dangerous. For example, there could be a safety switch in the circuit that wasn’t as touchy as the mousetrap. So he’d set the trap, and then only close the safety switch when he was sure the mousetrap was solid and he was on his way out.”
“So is that sophisticated, or unsophisticated?” Virgil asked.
“Interesting question,” Barlow said. “We occasionally run into guys who are bomb hobbyists and take a lot of pride in building clever detonation circuits. Using cell phones, and so on. They’re nuts, basically, but their engineering can be pretty clever. These bombs look as if they’re made by a guy working from first principles. That is, he doesn’t know the sophisticated ways of wiring up a weapon like this, but he’s smart enough to figure out some very effective ways of doing it. That means-this is just my opinion-that he’s a guy who learned how to build bombs for this single mission. He’s not bombing things to hear the boom and make his weenie hard, he’s bombing PyeMart because he’s got a grudge against PyeMart.”
“How much of this Pelex stuff did he steal?” asked LeCourt, the chief of police. “Is he done now, or has he got more?”
“If he took it from the Cold Spring quarry, which we think he did, he’s got enough to make maybe fifty or sixty of these,” Barlow said.
“Oh my Lord,” said Ahlquist. He looked at Virgil. “You better get him in a hurry.”
“What are the chances that he’ll find out he likes it?” Virgil asked. “That he’ll go from grudges, to getting his weenie hard?”
“That happens,” Barlow said. “The thing is, he’s nuts. Whether he’s killing because he likes to kill, or because he’s got a grudge, either way, he’s nuts. And nuts tend to evolve toward greater violence.”
Barlow had more to say about the bomb and the technique, and from what he said, Virgil came to two conclusions: (a) building an effective bomb was not rocket science, once you had the explosive and some blasting caps, and (b) the killer was smart.
They continued to talk for fifteen minutes or so, and stuck their heads inside the trailer, which looked as though somebody had attacked it with a sledgehammer and a lot of time. When Barlow began to run out of new information, Virgil drifted over to Ahlquist and said, “I’ll buy you dinner if you’re hungry.”
“I’m starving to death. Let’s go up to Mable Bunson’s-today’s Fish Monday.”
Virgil got directions to the restaurant, and they were all about to get back in their trucks, leaving the trailer to the ATF technicians, when a white stretch limo eased out of the street and onto the beaten-down dirt track to the trailer.
“That’s the prom limo,” Ahlquist said.
“Gotta be Pye,” said Gore. She added, “I’ve never seen that limousine in the daylight.”
The limo bumped nervously over the last few feet, and then a short heavyset man popped out of the second door behind the driver. He was wearing a blue chalk-striped suit over a golf shirt, a Michigan Wolverines ball cap, and an angry look. One second later, the second door opened on the other sid
e, and a tall, thin woman climbed out. She had honey-blond hair worn loose to her shoulders, eyes that were either green or brown, wore a tweed suit and a tired look, and carried a notebook.
“That’s Mr. Pye,” Barlow said, and he went that way and said, “Mr. Pye-I didn’t realize you were planning to come out.”
“Of course I came, you damn fool. One of my people’s dead,” Pye snapped, as he walked up. His face appeared to be permanently red and frustrated. “When the hell are you gonna get this nut? It’s been two weeks and we’ve seen nothing.”
Barlow said, “We’re focused on it, and this new bomb tells us a lot. We now believe we’re dealing with a man from here in the Butternut Falls area. We’re coordinating with the Kandiyohi sheriff’s department and the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”
“Apprehension,” Virgil said.
“Sounds like more bullshit to me,” Pye interrupted. “Is this the trailer? Holy crap, it looks like the Nazis bombed it.” He said gnatzees. “Where’s the hospital here? Is this boy Sullivan still there? Has Mrs. Kingsley got here yet? I hear she got hung up in Detroit, plane was delayed or she got bumped or some crap like that. I’m talking to the CEO of Delta, he’s seeing what he can do, but it don’t seem like much.”
Barlow and Ahlquist took turns answering questions, and introduced LeCourt and Virgil. As they were doing that, Virgil noticed that the tall woman was taking notes, in what looked like shorthand; O’Hara was watching her with one eye closed, like a housewife in a butcher shop, inspecting a suspect pork chop. Pye looked at Virgil’s shirt and asked, “What the hell’s these Freelance Whales?”
Ahlquist jumped in: “It’s a band. Virgil rushed up here on his day off, didn’t have time to change.”
Pye turned back to Barlow and LeCourt, and the sheriff caught Virgil’s eye and tipped his head toward the trucks. They started drifting that way, until Pye said, “Whoa, whoa, where’re you going? We’ve got some planning to do.”
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