“Another thing,” said Newman, the building systems guy, “is that whoever planted the bomb had to know exactly when and where the board meeting was, and had to know something about the building layout, and how to get into the room.” He turned to Brown: “ Has to be an insider. Has to be a conspiracy.”
After leaving the boardroom, Virgil was shown what McCullough called Pye’s inner sanctum, a small but comfortable office behind a large outer office, with a big desk, “in” and “out” boxes, a computer, and a view of the interstate.
“We’ve wondered why the bomber didn’t put it in here, but it’s possible that Jelly Brown locked the outer office doors at night. We don’t know that she did, but we can’t ask her.”
Virgil looked through the office suite, which included a conference room, a small bedroom with a bathroom, and a sitting area with a wide-screen television. When he was finished looking, he asked to be taken up the stairwell to the roof. He noticed that the doors into and out of the stairwell were not locked-“Because of nine-eleven,” Brown said. “Willard considered us something of a target out here, and we did a review of what we could do to get people out in case we were hit by a plane. One thing we could do is allow people to go down one stairwell or the other-there are four of them, one on each side of the building-and then cross over and go down another one. So you could zigzag down through the building if you needed to. If you’re below fifty, you can’t go up, but if you’re above fifty, you can go out.”
The roof was big and flat and had the usual ventilation equipment and a big shed for window-washing equipment. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “Nobody used the window-washing grooves. They begin thirty feet above ground level, and even if you managed to get at them, unseen, it’d take you hours to climb the building. You’d be in plain sight all the time.”
There wasn’t much of a view from the top. Virgil could see the glow of Grand Rapids on the horizon to the west, another glow to the southeast-Lansing? Virgil thought-and headlights and taillights on the highway to the south. To the north there was nothing but darkness.
Chapman looked up into the night sky and said, “If you parachuted onto the roof…”
Brown said, “Right. You get a pilot and a skydiving plane to fly you over the building in the middle of the night with a bomb in your arms, and then you base-dive off the building when you’re done… I don’t think so. If you’re gonna have a conspiracy, it’s a thousand times more likely that it’s an insider.”
McCullough said, “I bet Ford International has a radar track tape for that night… Maybe we ought to check.”
Brown said, “Sure, check.”
They came off the roof and took the elevator down to the third floor, where the company had set up overnight suites for visitors, and a lounge. They sat in the lounge, and the three men detailed the investigation, and again, Virgil had a hard time faulting it. When they were done, Brown asked, “What do you think?”
“I’m glad I saw it, so it wasn’t a total waste of time coming out,” Virgil said. “I gotta say, the place seems pretty tight. I mean, maybe, maybe there’s some way a guy could have ridden in, inside a UPS truck or something, with a key card, and gotten up there… but I don’t see it. He’d have to know too much. Too much small detail. He’d have to have done a lot of surveillance.”
“It’s an insider,” McCullough said.
“And a conspiracy,” Brown said. “But that’s weird. How did they hook up? What’s the relationship?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what we’re going to focus on,” McCullough said. “There has to be a link between here and Butternut Falls. We have to push until we find it.”
Virgil was shown into a room a little before two in the morning. He lay awake for a few minutes, thinking about this and that, and for a while about God, and then almost went to sleep. But not quite asleep. Eventually, he crawled out from under the sheet and got out his laptop and linked into the Pinnacle’s Wi-Fi system, and went out on the Net, researching “Pye Pinnacle.”
It took a while, but he eventually found a PyeMart promotional video about the building that included a shot of a much younger Willard Pye greeting board members as they got off the elevators. When the doors opened, Virgil could see a metal “55” set in the edges of the elevator doors.
He said, “Huh.”
In twenty minutes, he had the information he needed to plant a bomb in the boardroom; he even knew he could plant it in the credenza.
But he still had no way in, or up.
He checked his e-mail before he went to sleep and found a message from Lee Coakley, his sheriff in Malibu, or West Hollywood, or wherever it was. The note said: I tried to call you several times on your cell, but got no service. Talk to you soon.
He checked his phone: she’d called while he was in the air, with the phone turned off.
He got to sleep a little after three, and the alarm woke him at seven. At seven-twenty, he was in the Pye truck with a sleepy Chapman, who said, “We’ll have breakfast on the plane, and then I’m gonna crash again. I feel like somebody put a Vulcan nerve pinch on me.”
“Sounds right,” Virgil said, yawning.
“You figure anything out?” she asked.
“I spent some time online. There’s enough information about the Pinnacle that you could figure out where the boardroom is, and you can also figure out when the board meetings are, and where. The last board meeting, before the bomb, was in Dallas. I don’t know where the next one will be, but I could probably find out a few days before it happens… It’s deep in the business news, but it’s in there.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll mention that to Willard.”
Virgil shook his head. “It looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel that way. Everything is too clockwork-like, too precise. If it’s a conspiracy, that would mean that we have two nuts-one here and one in Butternut-who are both absolutely murderous, and who were willing to trust each other, and both intelligent. How did they find each other? How did they get together?”
“Well, maybe on the Internet,” she said. “There are anti-PyeMart and anti-Walmart and anti-Target websites. What if a couple of people cooked up a conspiracy… I mean, one was from Butternut, but the other one could have been from anywhere. He or she moves to Grand Rapids or Lansing and gets a job out at the Pinnacle-gets a job for the sole purpose of blowing up the board.”
Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a researcher at the BCA who is really good at the Net. I’ll have her troll those PyeMart sites, see what she comes up with.”
“But we don’t know when they would have met.”
“In the last two years, if there were two of them. PyeMart didn’t start making noises about building in Butternut until two years ago,” Virgil said. “Took them a year to get the permits, and another year to get under way.”
“Have to check,” she said.
“Yeah, but I still… don’t think it’s a conspiracy. We’re missing something. I think it’s one guy, pretty smart, who figured out a way to get into the Pinnacle. Are there tours of the building? If there are, did anyone go missing for a few minutes? That kind of thing.”
“There are tours, but not often-and not one recently,” she said. “McCullough checked that. The ATF guys are really good.”
They speculated, but came up with nothing solid; got to Ford International a few minutes after eight, were off the ground at eightfifteen. After a quick breakfast of Cheerios and sweet rolls, the cabin attendant folded out beds for Virgil and Chapman, and Virgil was asleep in two minutes; he woke again when the wheels touched down in Butternut.
The trip, he thought, might have been time wasted.
But it didn’t feel wasted; it felt, instead, like he’d learned something about the mind of the bomber. He was clever, and had a streak of boldness, even recklessness. He’d somehow gotten into the Pinnacle, and back out, and had never touched any of the trip lines set up by a very professional security system.<
br />
Interesting.
10
The bomber got a little drunk, and he did it deliberately.
He’d been trained as a straight-line thinker, which was good, most of the time, but he was smart enough to recognize the weaknesses of straight-line thinking. Sometimes, you had to get out of the box, out of the geometry. In his experience, nothing loosened up the mind like a pitcher of martinis, drunk alone. He had the pitcher, he had the gin, he had the vermouth. And he certainly was alone.
He mixed up the booze, got a tumbler, and carried it out to his tiny backyard deck, where he sat in a wooden deck chair with plastic cushions, looked up at the stars, and let his mind roam free.
How had he landed here, in Butternut Falls? He should be in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. At Columbia, the University of Chicago, UCLA. He had this recurring image of himself, pushing through some gilded revolving doors somewhere-a big city, probably New York, because he’s wearing a New York kind of hat-and a newsman pushes a microphone in his face and asks, “What do you think of the president’s plan?”
“The president’s a fool, a lightweight,” he’d say, his face sharply outlined, almost like one of those yellow-suited superheroes in the comics.
Like that was going to happen. Every time he’d been ready to make a move, something had jumped up to thwart him. Everything from an ill-timed job recession, to an ill-planned marriage. Barbara had been the worst of it. She’d dragged him out to Butternut and used her family’s influence to get him a job, and the job had nailed his feet to the ground. All so she could be near her mother; though he couldn’t imagine anybody would want to stay close to that witch.
Barbara had dragged him, pushed him. Hectored him.
The power of pussy, he thought. The power of pussy.
And time kept passing. He was hardly aware of it, the days passing so quickly and seamlessly; every time he turned around, it seemed like he was shaving in the morning to go out and waste another day of his life. He felt like he was in his twenties, still a young guy, on the move, with a great future-but somehow, nearly twenty years had slipped away. He was nearly as old as that fool, the president.
Oh, he’d made plans. One of them involved dumping Barbara, but, surprise, surprise, she’d moved first, and he’d found himself with no house and only half an eventual pension. She’d nailed him down with pussy, and then, when she left, nailed him down with economics and legal decrees. She was followed by a couple more mistakes, and finally, he would sit on this patio and he could see the future stretching out in front of him, ending in penury… ending with dog food and a hot plate.
That made him smile: the alcohol talking.
He was in no serious danger of dog food, but he was in danger of something that was probably worse: irrelevance, in his own eyes. He looked at the people around him, at their trivial lives, and he sneered at them, but then he came home to look in the mirror and ask, “How am I different?”
The truth was, he wasn’t. If a Martian landed tomorrow, and was told to sort people into piles of the relevant and the irrelevant, judging by what they did, by what they were, he’d wind up in the same pile as those he sneered at.
Then came PyeMart, and everything that rained down from that.
Loosenup, he thought, loosen up. He poured another martini, and thought about bombs.
Jesus God, he was becoming fond of his bombs. Nobody- nobody -would say that his bombs were irrelevant. He was already the most important element in the lives of two people, in that he’d ended those lives.
Where should the next one go? Where would it do the most good?
There’d been a rumor that the state cops were protecting the city council and the city hall. That there were snipers in town. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but it had to be considered. He considered it, more than a little drunk after the third martini… and there were still two martinis left. He giggled: whoa, boy, he was really gonna be pounded when he finished the last one.
So what about the city council? He went back and forth on them. Could they hurt him more than they could help? If they all went up in an instant of smoke and flame, would that be the beginning of everything? Or the end?
He thought about the council all through the fourth martini, and decided that while he had no objection, in principle, to killing them all, the fallout from such an event was too unpredictable.
No. He’d started out to intimidate PyeMart, to slow them down, and also to lay a trail of bombs that had a seeming purpose. He was not stupid, so the trail was a crooked one, but it would eventually lead the authorities, by the nose, to one certain conclusion. And that still seemed the best way to go.
He’d never had a full set plan for his campaign; a set plan could crack. He’d known from the start that he had to remain flexible, and improvise from time to time. This was one of those times.
If the city council was actually found to be corrupt, if a city councilman could be terrorized into confessing, or if the cops could be pressured into looking at them seriously, then the whole PyeMart deal would go down like the Titanic.
That was a compelling thought.
But PyeMart’s deal couldn’t go down too soon, or too late. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it had to be just right.
He considered the thought, and drunk as he was, it was a slippery thing to hang onto. The problem was, the local cops couldn’t be counted on to cooperate with the city council. Basically, they couldn’t find their own balls with both hands and a radar unit. A serious investigation was unlikely.
The ideal thing would be to bring in the state cops, or the FBI. The ATF was in town, but the ATF wouldn’t be much interested in doing a political corruption investigation.
Stray thought: somebody had been distributing a bumper sticker in town-he’d seen three or four of them-that said: “Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms… What’s not to like?”
Anyhoo…
Whoa, really drunk now. He struggled to stay on track.
The state cops were in town; state cop, that is. One guy, and all he apparently was thinking about was finding the bomber.
What you really needed, the bomber thought, was a whole bunch of cops, pulling the whole town apart. If that happened, they’d eventually get around to the city council.
The Bomber sat on his deck, drunk and plotting, and at some point well into his last martini, too drunk to even consider getting up and making more, an out-of-the-box plan began to form.
Take brass balls, but he had brass balls. No question about that. Not anymore.
He needed to think about it sober; couldn’t do it tonight, anyway. There was too much action right now, too many people with an eye out. Paranoia was a good thing, in the bombing business. So tonight he’d sleep it off, and tomorrow, he’d make the bomb. Make the bomb, and plant it tomorrow night.
Bring in a whole swarm of cops.
Guaranteed.
Or was that just the alcohol talking?
Billions and billions of stars shone down at him, twinkling their asses off, but they didn’t say shit.
The bomber fell asleep in his deck chair, and slept the sleep of the innocent.
11
Virgil dropped Chapman at her motel and called Davenport to report on the trip out to Michigan. He was sitting in the truck, talking to Davenport, when he saw George Peck, the traditionalist fly fisherman, walking along the street, looking into store windows.
“I just saw a clue,” Virgil said. “I gotta go.”
He hung up and waited until Peck got even with him, then rolled down the passenger-side window and yelled, “Hey, George.”
Peck turned, a frown on his face, saw Virgil in the truck, and walked over. “You shouted?”
“Yeah. I need to talk to you. Come on, get in.”
Peck paused for a moment, as if thinking about it, then nodded and popped the door and climbed in. He pulled the door shut, tilted his head up, sniffed, and said, “This truck smells like McDonald’s french fries.”
“It should-fre
nch fries are about eighty-five percent of my diet when I’m traveling,” Virgil said. “Listen, I’ve talked to a few guys about your whole market research idea. They don’t like it. I kinda do-but then, I might not be as smart as they are. There’s talk of lynch mobs.”
“I doubt you’d get a lynch mob,” Peck said.
“That’s not real reassuring-if you only doubt that I’d get one.”
“Not my problem,” Peck said. “But, consensus-seeking research seems to work with problems like yours. Of course, they’re usually asking about stock market moves, or some such. There’s usually no lynching involved. Or bombs.”
Virgil said, “What if instead of putting up a website, I got twenty very knowledgeable people…”
Peck was shaking his head. “That might not be enough. You need lots and lots of people. You could ask twenty people and just out of coincidence, because of social-class acquaintance problems, maybe none of them know the bomber… so they can’t nominate him. You need not just one set of smart people, but a whole spectrum of people.”
“But the bomber has to come from a class of people who object to PyeMart. So if I come up with a long list of people who don’t like PyeMart, they’d almost certainly know him.”
Peck thought about it for a minute, then said, “Unless… hmmm.” And he thought some more.
“Say it,” Virgil said.
“I was going to say, ‘Unless he was acting on an impulse.’ I was thinking, what if it’s, say, a college kid, and these opinions are new and he got swept up in them, but doesn’t have a history in town politics or issues arguments. He’s simply crazy, and looking for an outlet. Then, you might never see him, if you only surveyed people who were familiar with PyeMart opponents. But… on second thought.. . from what I know, that doesn’t seem likely. It seems more likely to be the work of a mature man. A planner. Somebody who thinks things through. Somebody more like me. So I’d probably know him. So…”
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