Virgil went up to bed, undressed, lay in the dark, and asked God, “Why did the bomber try to kill me? And how did he sneak into the Pye building? You can answer this question either as a sudden revelation, or you could write it up in the sky, or whisper it to Thor, your namesake. Okay? Deal? I’m going to sleep now, God. Please answer before anybody else gets hurt. Oh-and keep an eye on Mrs. Shepard. She seems like a nice-enough lady. And Thor. Keep an eye on Thor.”
Satisfied, he went to sleep, and slept well, for a man who’d almost been blown up.
The last thing he thought of, as he drifted off, was that Lee Coakley hadn’t called.
15
The bomber was worried. He’d missed twice in a row, once with Pye, once with the cop. The misses weren’t really the problem. His intention with the cop was to pull more cops into town, to bring more pressure, to tear the place up. That would now surely happen, would it not?
What worried him was not the misses, but his own reaction to them. When he heard about the miss with Pye, he’d been angry about it, but accepted it as just a matter of chance and inexperience. He’d taken a shot-a good shot, a creative one-and it had gone sour. The cop was no different, though he’d taken some extra risks there, in placing the bomb so close to a busy street; but again the reflexive anger came, stronger this time, almost despair.
He controlled it, but… where did that come from? The despair?
He’d started out thinking of the bombs as tools. But now, he thought, it was like he needed them. Almost like he was addicted to them.
The bomber had been addicted to cigarettes earlier in life, and kicking the habit had been a struggle. He could remember the gravitational pull of the cigarette packs, sitting on their shelves in the gas stations and the convenience stores, calling to him. For years after he’d quit, he would wake up in the night, having dreamed that he’d fallen off the wagon, that he’d taken a cigarette… and when he woke, he could taste the nicotine and tar, and feel the buzz.
The bomb thing was almost like that. When he heard that he’d missed the cop, he felt a powerful impulse to get in his car, drive up in the hills, to the box of explosives, and get what he needed for another bomb. To do it right now.
To hit them again.
To kill somebody. That was the problem.
His whole campaign had been a rational effort to solve a serious problem-serious from his point of view, anyway-and the killing was just a by-product of that effort.
If he just let himself go… it seemed like the killing could become the point. If that should happen, if he should need to kill, then sooner or later he’d be caught, and he’d spend the rest of his life in a hole in the ground.
He had to be coldly rational about it: he would need another bomb or two, simply to complete the campaign as he’d planned it. He didn’t need to start building bombs willy-nilly, and hitting everything in sight.
He hadn’t thought of all of this at once, but in bits and pieces as he worked through his day, did the mail, wrote some checks. Late that night, he saw the delivery guy unloading the next morning’s paper at County Market. He no longer got the paper, but glanced at this one because of all the tumult around the bombings, and found an end-of-the-world headline, which said:
State Police ask town: who’s guilty?
Beneath that was a secondary head that said:
Pipe bomb factory found.
And below that, the stub of a story, which jumped inside for a much longer spread. The headline on the third story said: POLICE BAFFLED BY PYE TOWER ATTACK.
He stuffed the paper in his basket with the vanilla-flavored rice drink, the fat-free Rice Krispies, the tofu wieners, the Greek yogurt, the salads, waited impatiently at the cash register for an old woman to write a check for three dollars and fifty-three cents, and finally paid and got out of the place.
He couldn’t wait to get back to the house, so he sat in the parking lot, under a streetlamp, and read the two stories. Flowers, he read, had sent out a letter asking a selected group of people in the town to nominate suspects in the bombings. Some of the people objected to the idea, and a couple of them had sent the letters along to the newspaper, which had reproduced them.
The idea was outrageous. Flowers would get dozens of nominations, and if the very best thing happened, for Flowers, they’d all but one be innocent. Was the cop that stupid? Maybe it was a good thing that he hadn’t killed him.
The second story reported that police had discovered the pipebomb factory where the pipes had been cut, and that “factory” was Butternut Tech. The story said that Flowers refused to comment, which suggested that Flowers was the one who had found the place.
How had he done that? Maybe not so stupid after all.
He closed his eyes and thought about it. Really, how outrageous, he wondered, was this survey the cop was doing? The more he thought about it, the more complicated it seemed, the more intricate the possible outcomes.
Finally, he concluded, it wasn’t crazy at all. It was even… interesting. If he weren’t the object of the hunt, he wouldn’t mind participating in it.
The third story was a long Associated Press piece out of Minneapolis, wrapping up all the bombings so far. One of the most baffling aspects of the case, according to the story, was how the first bomb got into the Pye Pinnacle. “If we could figure that out, we’d know who the bomber is,” an ATF agent said.
On the drive home, the bomber began to wonder: Had anyone suggested his name, in Flowers’s survey? He did have a temper, which flashed from time to time. Would the cops be looking at him? If they did, they would quickly discover his relationship to Butternut Tech.
Not good, not good at all.
He felt the first hot finger of panic. That damn pipe thing… what had he been thinking of? Pure laziness, that’s all it was. The pipe cutter was there, he knew about it, he could get in and out. But he could have cut the pipe the way he first intended, with a hacksaw. He even tried it. The first cut took nearly an hour, and nearly wore out his arm. Still, he could have done one a day, and it would have been time well spent: the hacksaw would now be in the bottom of the river…
He smacked his hands against the steering wheel as he looked up at the red light on a traffic signal. Damnit. Damnit.
One thing he had to do: go over the house and the car with a fine-tooth comb and make sure there wasn’t the slightest evidence of bomb-making activity. He’d stashed the explosives out in the hills, but had actually assembled the bombs in his basement. If there were any chemical remnants about, much less any mechanical stuff, and if it came to a search by the ATF, they might well have the equipment to detect the residue.
He had, he thought, thrown the bodies of three old thermostats in the trash, their mercury switches torn out. In the same trash, probably, were such things as junk mail with his address on it.
That had to stop. In fact…
He was halfway home, but he turned the car around and headed back toward County Market, where he planned to buy a few bottles of the harshest chemical house cleaner he could find, along with new sponges, a pail, and a mop. When he was done with them, they’d all go in the trash.
Somebody else’s trash, he thought. Things were coming to a head: he was almost there, and he had to be extra careful.
Which brought up a new thought: he needed to end this, but there was more to be done. He’d not yet finished. If he quit now, it’d all have been for nothing.
So he had to go on, but the quicker he finished, the sooner he could pull back into the weeds, and lay low.
He pulled back into the County Market parking lot and thought of something he’d once seen in an all-night Home Depot: a man who’d bought some chain, an axe, and a large black plastic tub.
All right, the ax and the chain could be used to cut down and drag a tree. But the tub? The tub made you think of bodies being cut up with the ax, and sunk with the chain… or something.
If he went into County Market and bought six bottles of assorted detergents, w
ould the cops…
Ah, fuck it: that was paranoid.
Had to watch himself. Had to be careful. Had to walk between the over-recklessness generated by the pleasure of the bombs, and the paranoia caused by the fear of prison.
He had to walk between the raindrops of pleasure and paranoia, but he still had to move.
A new thought popped into his head, full and complete, like a religious vision: a way out.
He needed to build another bomb, and right now.
16
The next morning, quote, the shit hit the fan, unquote. Virgil had expected that there might be some reaction, but he hadn’t expected the intensity of it. The phone rang the first time a few minutes after seven o’clock, and the Star Tribune reporter Ruffe Ignace asked, “Why are you asleep? I’m not. I just had a fourteenyear-old assistant city editor snatch my ass out of bed because you did some kind of cockamamy survey. What the hell are you doing, Virgil?”
Virgil told him in a few brief sentences, and Ignace said, “That would almost make sense, if we didn’t have a Constitution.”
“What part of the Constitution does this violate?” Virgil asked.
“It must violate some part,” Ignace said. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia later.”
“Call me back when you find the violation,” Virgil said. “Right now, I’m going back to bed.”
“Not for long. They got morning news cycles on TV, and they are gonna be on you like Holy on the Pope. The shit has hit the fan.”
“You think?”
“Of course I think. I’m about to call up the governor and ask him what the hell you’re doing,” Ignace said. “You know, with the Constitution and all.”
“Can we go off the record for a moment?” Virgil asked.
“Just for a minute.”
“Good. Fuck you, Ruffe. I’m going back to bed.”
The Sheriff called eight minutes later and said, “Virgil? Man, you gotta get up. The shit has hit the fan. They’re saying we’re running a witch hunt.”
“Earl, could we go off the record for a minute?”
When Virgil got down to the courthouse, there were three TV vans in the parking lot. He went in a side entrance, through the jail, and down to Ahlquist’s office. Ahlquist said, “We’ve got a lot to talk about, but let me say, the goddamn Fox reporter is not believable.”
“Why?”
“Because everything jiggles,” he said, astonished by the thought. “ Everything. I’m afraid to go on with her, because I’d forget how to speak in English. To say nothing of having a boner like a hammer handle.”
“You gotta model yourself on me, Earl,” Virgil said. “Mind like moon. Mind like water.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like more hippie shit, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the Fox reporter.”
“I’ll handle it,” Virgil said.
The news people were stacked up in the open lobby. Virgil went out, trailed by Ahlquist, and stood on the second step of a stairway and asked for everybody’s attention. He introduced himself, and a bunch of lights clicked on, and a triangle of on-camera reporters moved to the front. At the very tip of the spearhead was the Fox reporter, whom Virgil had seen on television, but had not experienced in person.
As Ahlquist had said, she jiggled even when she was standing still. She had a flawless, pale complexion with just a hint of rose in her cheeks, and green eyes, and real blond hair. She got along with just a touch of lipstick. She did not, Virgil thought, appear to be from this planet.
She asked the first question, and her teeth were perfectly regular, and a brilliant white, and her voice a husky paean to sex: “Agent Flowers, isn’t this questionnaire a violation of the Constitution?”
Virgil wanted to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” but, for a few seconds, he forgot how to speak English.
His pause was taken for either guilt or stupidity, or she was simply familiar with the reaction, and she enlarged on her question: “The American Constitution?”
Virgil leaned toward her and said, “I’m glad you specified ‘American.’ No, it’s not. I’d suggest you read that document. Nowhere does it mention either surveys or questionnaires.”
“You don’t have to get snippy about it,” she said.
A guy from public radio, edging into the camera’s line of sight, and maybe going for a little frottage on the Fox reporter, along with the validation of TV time, asked, “But aren’t you essentially establishing a state-sponsored witch hunt?”
“No. I looked up ‘witch hunt’ in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, before I came over here,” Virgil said. “I believe I’m quoting verbatim when I say that a witch hunt is defined as, one, a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft, and two, the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views. Are you suggesting that we are doing one of those things?”
“Not exactly,” he conceded.
“Not at all,” Virgil said. “All we’re doing is surveying responsible citizens to see if they have any ideas who might have been involved in murdering two people, injuring two more, and barely missing several more. The surveys can’t be made public because they are anonymous, and it wouldn’t be ethical to make anonymous accusations public; and since a number of people refused to participate, by not returning letters, even we don’t know whether a particular individual participated or not. We won’t be making public the names of any of those mentioned in the survey.”
The public radio guy: “But somehow… it feels like a witch hunt.”
“That’s because we’ll be looking at people against whom we have no evidence at all,” Virgil said. “But, if you’ll excuse me for making the point, that’s what a detective always does, in any kind of complicated case. You go around and ask people who they think did it, whatever it was. Often, just walk up and down the street, knocking on doors. This is just like that, except that we have to move faster. This bomber is now turning out a bomb a day. Another thing: a witch hunt operates on fear and emotion and rumor. We have to have definitive proof before we can accuse somebody. We’re not going to indict somebody on somebody else’s say-so. We need to find explosives, blasting caps, bomb parts, and motive. We’re asking people where we should look. In a small city like this, where most people know most other people, we have hopes that we’ll pinpoint some good suspects.”
They went on for a while, and Virgil outlined what he thought about the bomber, and the TV people finally went away, apparently satisfied. Back in Ahlquist’s office, the sheriff said, “You see? She never stopped jiggling.” And, he added, “You’re goldarned near as good on TV as I am.”
Virgil got Ahlquist to assign him an assistant, Dick Pruess, and between them, they began running the list of names through the National Crime Information Center. Lyle McLachlan, the leading candidate in the survey, had thirty NCIC returns, varying from resisting arrest without violence at the bottom end, to felony theft and aggravated assault at the high end. He was thirty-eight, and had spent fourteen years in prison.
“Not him,” Pruess said. “Be nice if it was, but the guy can barely make a sandwich. He could never figure this out.”
They had seven more hits among the twenty names they checked, fewer than Virgil expected, given that all those named were, in the mind of some sober citizen, capable of multiple murder.
Ahlquist came by and looked at the list, and the hits, and said, “The problem I see with most of the hits is that they involve guys right at the bottom of things-they’ve hardly got a stake in the town, so why would they do something as weird as attack a PyeMart? If anything, these guys would want to take revenge on the town, not defend it.”
Of the two people with direct ties to Butternut Tech, one came back clean, the other had a drunk driving conviction. The first one had served in the army, and Virgil called a BCA researcher and asked her to get in touch with the army and see if he’d had any training in explosives.
Th
ey were still looking for returns when Davenport called and said, “Your press conference made all the news shows. You looked pretty straight, with that black-on-black coat and shirt.”
“Pain in the ass,” Virgil said.
“I’ve got a bet for you-and I’ll take either side,” Davenport said. “Do you think only one, or both, of the major papers will use the phrase ‘witch hunt’ in an editorial tomorrow?”
“Both,” Virgil said.
“Damnit, I was hoping you’d pick ‘one.’ ”
“I can’t help it, Lucas. I’m doing the best I can,” Virgil said.
“I know it, but everybody’s watching now. It’d be best if you wrapped this up in the next couple of days.”
“Did Ruffe call the governor and ask him about the Constitution?”
“Everybody called the governor,” Davenport said. “I think this is what us liberals call ‘a teaching moment.’ ”
Good Thunder called: “I took down Pat Shepard this morning, early, because he had a summer school class. He freaked. He cried. You know what? This isn’t going to be any fun.”
“It never is, when you go after people who think of themselves as honest, upright citizens,” Virgil said. “Because down in their heart, they feel the guilt.”
“And because he’s going to lose both his wife and his job.”
“Yeah, it is brutal,” Virgil said.
“I’m waiting for you to do the ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.’ ”
“Be a long wait,” Virgil said. “Will he flip?”
“Yeah, I think so. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as his wife suggested he’d be,” Good Thunder said. “In fact, I’m a little worried. I don’t want to find him at the end of a rope, or with his head in the oven.”
“Where is he?” Virgil asked.
“Last time I saw him, he was with his lawyer. I’ve told him that he’ll be arrested, but I haven’t arrested him yet. I’ve laid out the deal. They’re talking, and if he’s not crazy, he’ll go for it. We’re going to need the wire, and the monitoring gear.”
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