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 on 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 to 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.”
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 e
xotic 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?”
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