Shock Wave vf-5

by John Sandford

  “I’ll talk to Davenport,” Virgil said.

  “Boy, that survey thing… the shit really hit the fan, huh? Pardon my French.”

  Virgil and good thunder were talking about who they’d go after first, if Shepard cooperated, to see if they could triangulate on the mayor, when Ahlquist ran in the door and blurted, “We’ve got another one, another bomb.”

  Virgil said into the phone, “Shirley, I gotta go. Earl says we’ve got another bomb.”

  “Talk to you later,” she said. “Be careful.”

  Ahlquist was in a hurry. “Follow me out of the lot. You got lights?”

  “Yeah.”

  They trotted out of the courthouse and into the parking lot, and Virgil saw a TV truck moving fast. The TV already knew. “Okay, stick close, we’re going west and south,” Ahlquist said.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Something different-could even be a break,” Ahlquist said. “The bomb blew in a guy’s garage. Henry Erikson. Big trout guy, one of the loudmouths. Not a bad guy, but pretty hard-core. Car salesman out at the Chevy dealer.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Virgil said, and jogged to the truck.

  They got across town in a hurry, but never did catch the TV truck, which, when they arrived, was already unloading behind a couple of wooden barricades that said “Butternut Public Works.” Ahlquist didn’t slow much for the barricades, just put two wheels of his truck up on the curb and went around, and Virgil did the same. The Erikson house was a long half-block down from the barricades, where three deputies, including O’Hara, were standing in the yard talking, and looking into a wrecked garage, with a twisted SUV sitting inside. Two fire trucks were parked in the street, but there was no fire.

  A scent of explosive and shattered pine and drywall lingered in the air, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He and Ahlquist headed across the lawn.

  O’Hara said, as they came up, “We got a situation here. Henry was hurt bad. He could die. It looks like the bomb was under his car seat, and blew when he sat down.”

  “No fire?”

  “No fire, the scene is still pretty much intact,” O’Hara said.

  Ahlquist: “When was this?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago,” O’Hara said, looking at her watch. “The first guys were mostly interested in getting Henry out of here, getting the ambulance, but one of them…” She turned, looking for the right deputy, spotted him and yelled, “Hey, Jim. Jimmy. Come over here.”

  The deputy was a young, fleshy guy wearing mirrored sunglasses, with a white sidewall haircut, and he hurried over.

  O’Hara said, “Tell them what you saw in there.”

  The deputy said, “Erikson was a mess, he was lying on the ground by the wall over there. We did what we could, got the ambulance going. Don’t think he’s going to make it, though, looked like both legs are gone, looked like his balls… looked like stuff blew up into his stomach…”

  “Anyway,” O’Hara said, prompting him.

  “Anyway, when he was gone, I was looking around the mess in there, and noticed over there by his workbench, it’s all blown up, but there’s a pipe over there. It looks like the pipes that were used in the bombs.”

  Ahlquist: “You mean… from the bomb? Or another pipe?”

  “It looks like an unused pipe from these bombs. I saw the piece of pipe that the feds had, and it looks like the same pipe.”

  “Let’s see it,” Virgil said, and, as they stepped toward the wrecked garage, “Did you touch it?”

  “Absolutely not. We knew you’d want prints or DNA. As soon as I saw it, I cleared everybody away.”

  Virgil nodded. “You did good.”

  The Deputy took them into the garage, close to the front fender of the wrecked truck, and pointed out the pipe: it was lying against one wall of a cabinet, where the cabinet intersected with a workbench. A trashed table saw was overturned on the other side of the bench, along with a toolbox and a bunch of tools. The place smelled of blood-a lot of blood, a nasty, cutting odor, like sticking your head in the beef case at a butcher shop.

  The pipe looked right.

  The deputy said, “We’re trying to find his wife, but a neighbor said she’s in the Cities, buying some fabric. She’s a decorator. We haven’t been able to get in touch.”

  Ahlquist said, “Speaking of the feds, here they are.”

  Barlow was hurrying up the driveway, O’Hara at his elbow. Inside the garage, Virgil pointed, wordlessly, and Barlow moved up to the pipe, peering at it, and then into it, and said, “There’s something in there. I think we might have another bomb. Better get everybody out of here until we can have a tech look at it.”

  Virgil asked, “Is this the guy?”

  “I’d be willing to bet that the pipe is right,” Barlow said, as they backed away. “This kind of thing happens, too, especially with new guys. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They screw something up, and boom. ”

  O’Hara stepped away to take a cell phone call, and Barlow said, “The guy’s got a lot of tools.”

  Virgil nodded. The garage was double-deep, three cars wide. The back half had been set up as a workshop, with storage cabinets in the corner and a long stretch of Peg-Board on the back wall. There were a half-dozen old Snap-on tool calendars on one wall-collector’s items, now-photos of cars, an airplane propeller with one end broken off, a bunch of blocks of wood, most with oil on them, a half-dozen cases of empty beer bottles along one wall.

  The back wall was taken up with mechanics and woodworking tools, the side wall with garden implements. Most of the tools still hung on the Peg-Board, though some had been knocked to the floor.

  “The question is,” Barlow said, “with this kind of setup, why’d he go to the college to cut that pipe? He could have cut it all right here.”

  “Good question,” Virgil said. “But Jesus, talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “I hate gift horses,” Barlow said. “Half the time, they wind up biting you on the ass.”

  O’Hara came back: “Erikson died. Never even got him on the operating table.”

  “Ah, man,” Virgil said.

  Then Barlow said, “Hey…” He stepped down the length of the garage and pointed to the floor. He was pointing at a thin silver cylinder a couple of inches long, with two wires coming out the bottom-it looked like a stick man with thin legs. “We got a blasting cap.”

  “Okay,” Virgil said.

  They looked at it for a moment and Barlow half-tiptoed around the rest of the garage, looking at the debris, and under it, and then Virgil asked, “How many bombers are married?”

  “I don’t know,” Barlow said. “Some of them. Most of them, not-that’s what I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “I always had the idea that they were like crazy loners, working in their basements.”

  “Not always.”

  “I really don’t like this,” Virgil said. “The guy’s been so smart, and then he blows himself up?”

  “You hardly ever meet any longtime bombers who aren’t missing a few chunks, a couple fingers,” Barlow said. “They fool around with the explosive. Sometimes they blow themselves up.”

  “With Pelex?”

  “Not so much with Pelex,” Barlow admitted. “Pelex is really pretty safe, you don’t even have to be especially careful with it. But if you’d already rigged it as a bomb, with a sensitive switch…”

  One of the ATF techs came up carrying a tool chest, and Barlow pointed him at the pipe. “Take a look in there with your flashlight. Don’t touch it. But is it a bomb? Is it wired?”

  The tech took a heavy LED flash from his box and stepped over to the pipe, bent over it, and shone the flash down the interior. Then he stepped away: “Better get Tim over here, with his gear.”

  “It’s a bomb?” Virgil asked.

  “It looks like it’s stuffed with Pelex. I don’t see any wiring, but I can’t see in the bottom end-it could be booby-trapped.”

  Barlow mov
ed everybody away from the garage, then asked Virgil, “Is Erikson’s name on your list? In your survey?”

  “No, he’s not,” Virgil said. “But I can’t tell you what that means. Is he in your bomber database?”

  “Give me two minutes on that,” he said.

  “I’ll get to the NCIC,” Virgil said. He walked to his truck, sat in the driver’s seat, and called Davenport, told him what had happened. Davenport tracked down their researcher, who found Erikson’s driver’s license, and used the birth date to check his records with the National Crime Information Center.

  Davenport came back and said, “She says he’s clean.”

  “Goddamnit. This complicates things,” Virgil said. “We’ve got two TV trucks here now, and they’re going to start saying that we might have gotten the bomber. Maybe we did, but I don’t believe it yet.”

  “What about your survey?” Davenport asked. “You started pushing the list yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll do that now.”

  Barlow came back. “He’s not in our database.”

  “Nothing with the NCIC,” Virgil said.

  Neighbors were starting to gather on the lawns adjacent to Erikson’s house, and Virgil left Barlow and walked over to two women. “You guys friends with the Eriksons?”

  “Is he really the bomber?” one woman asked.

  “Well, a bomb went off, but we really don’t know anything yet,” Virgil said.

  “Is he going to make it?” the second woman asked.

  Virgil shook his head: “No.”

  “Oh, God, poor Sarah,” the first woman said.

  “That’s his wife?”

  “Yes. No children, thank God. I can’t believe he’s the bomber.”

  “Why not?” Virgil asked.

  “Well, because… he’s a car salesman kind of guy, he’s always running around yelling and waving his arms, but he’s a nice man. I can’t believe he’d bomb people.”

  “Not exactly a loner, like you hear about,” said the second one. “He was always talking to everybody, sort of bs-ing around the neighborhood. He’d fix lawn mowers-everybody’s lawn mowers. Bring him a broken lawn mower, he’d get it running like new.”

  “Thanks.” Virgil shook his head and walked back to Barlow and the tech, who were standing behind the wrecked car, looking at the backseat. Virgil asked them, “Did you guys see any other bomb-making stuff in the garage? More pipe, switches, blasting caps…”

  “Just the pipe and the blasting cap,” Barlow said.

  The tech said, “But it’s the same kind of blasting cap that was stolen from the quarry.”

  “Yeah? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They had a case, Virgil thought, as he watched the two ATF men prowl the perimeter of the explosion. Erikson apparently had the motive-the pollution of the trout stream-and he had the mechanical skills, judging from his garage workshop.

  But it was all very pat. One bomb went off. One bomb remained in evidence, and one blasting cap. No more pipe, no more explosive, no more blasting caps. Just enough to hang him, without much diminishing the bomber’s stockpile of explosive… if the bomber was indeed somebody else.

  One thing I can check, Virgil thought. He found Ahlquist and said, “Where’s the Chevy dealer?”

  The Chevy dealer was five minutes away, on Highway 71: Virgil went that way, in a hurry, pulled into the lot and dumped the truck in a visitor’s space. Inside, he showed his ID to the receptionist and asked to see the manager: “Is this about Henry?” she asked.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Is he… all right?” She knew the answer to that: Virgil could see it in her eyes.

  “No,” he said.

  “Ah, jeez,” she said. “C’mon, let’s find Ron, he was calling the hospital.”

  The manager saw them coming through the window in his office, hung up, looking at Virgil, said, “Are you with the police?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Henry okay?”

  Virgil shook his head. “No, he’s not.”

  “Ah, boy. This is fuckin’ nuts. No way-”

  “I need to look at a calendar or a time card or something. I need to know if Henry was working two weeks ago Tuesday.”

  “He works Tuesdays through Saturdays, off Sundays and Mondays. He hasn’t, hadn’t, taken any extra days off lately. I can look at my schedule…”

  “Please look,” Virgil said.

  The manager turned to a computer screen and brought up a schedule, shook his head, and said, “I show him working eleven to seven on that Tuesday.”

  “And on Wednesday?”

  “Same.”

  The bomb at the Pinnacle had gone off at nine A.M. on Wednesday, and the ATF didn’t think it could have been planted any more than twenty-four hours earlier. If that was true, Erikson couldn’t have planted the bomb before work, because he wouldn’t have had time to get back. He could have theoretically flown to Michigan after work… but then, how’d he get a bomb on the plane? Have to be a private plane. But a private plane would be obvious, there’d be lots of records, and a smart guy wouldn’t do that.

  No, it just didn’t work. He’d have the researcher check, but it didn’t work.

  Erikson could, of course, have an accomplice in Grand Rapids, who planted the bomb on a Tuesday because that would give Erikson an alibi…

  But Virgil didn’t like the feel of that, either.

  The manager broke into his chain of thought. “Does Sarah know?”

  Virgil went back to the bombed garage thinking that Erikson was more likely a victim than a bomber. If that were correct, then the obvious question was, Why?

  Why Erikson, and not somebody else? There were at least two good reasons why somebody might be bombed.

  First, the real bomber might be trying to hang a frame on somebody else, in preparing to end his own bombings. If he were ditching all of his Pelex, the blasting caps, the rest of the pipe, and so on, and if he did a complete and efficient cleanup of his workshop, then even if Virgil managed to identify him, a conviction would be tough: no physical evidence, plus another bomber candidate to point at.

  Second, Erikson might have been killed because he knew something.

  Which one?

  Virgil stood outside the garage and watched the cops and the ATF people working. The ATF tech with bomb disposal experience had moved the pipe, from a distance, and nothing blew.

  “How’d he do that?” Virgil asked.

  “We’ve got all kinds of high-tech equipment with us, we just haven’t had to bring it out yet.”

  “Like what? A robot?”

  “A long string,” Barlow said. “He dropped it over the end of the pipe, then we all cleared out, and he pulled it over. So then we knew it wasn’t booby-trapped, and when we got a close look at it, we saw that it’d been packed with Pelex, but he hadn’t put in the blasting cap yet. We may be lucky: if it’s got a good fingerprint, or a little DNA in the Pelex…”

  “Isn’t that a little weird, that he’d pack it without a blasting cap?” Virgil asked. “Wouldn’t you have to take the Pelex back out before you put the blasting cap in?”

  “No, not necessarily… I mean, we don’t know if that’s all the Pelex he was planning to put in there,” Barlow said.

  “Still seems weird to me,” Virgil said.

  “We don’t know his working style yet, so we don’t know if it’s weird,” Barlow said. He sounded, Virgil thought, like a guy who really wanted Erikson to be the Man.

  Virgil stood and looked at the garage for a long time, and another thought occurred: if Erikson was not the bomber, then the bomber knew how to get into his garage, in the night, and where the workbench was.

  Virgil went to Ahlquist, who was talking to another one of the neighbors. “I want to talk to Erikson’s wife as soon as we find her,” Virgil said. “Give me a call?”

  Ahlquist nodded. “She’s on the way, but she’ll be another hour yet.”

  As Virgil was walking bac
k to his truck, Pye showed up, with Marie Chapman. Virgil walked them across the police tape, and Pye asked, “Is this the guy? The bomber?”

  “The ATF is leaning that way, and they could be right,” Virgil said. “I have some doubts.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he couldn’t have put the bomb in the Pinnacle. He would have needed an accomplice to plant it. I don’t like the idea of two killers, linking up over that big of a space.”

  Pye peered at the garage, grunted, and said, “You know what? Neither do I. I’m not kissing your ass at this point.”

  Chapman wrote it all down, then said, “Mike Sullivan got out of the hospital. He’s back at the AmericInn, but I think he’s headed home to Wichita tomorrow morning, if you need to talk to him again.”

  Virgil shook his head. “I can’t think of anything more. You guys gonna give up on the store?”

  “Absolutely not,” Pye said. “We’ve already replaced him, and we’ve got another guy coming up to take Kingsley’s spot. Volunteers. I’m paying them triple time, forty hours a week. By the time the store’s up, they’ll have an extra year’s pay in their pockets.”

  Barlow came over. “Mr. Pye. You want to take a look? This may be the guy…”

  Virgil left the scene, headed back to the county courthouse. He was halfway back when he saw the AmericInn, and that tripped off a thought about Sullivan, and that tripped off an entirely new thought, about the security cameras at the construction trailer.

  He swerved into the AmericInn parking lot, parked, identified himself to the desk clerk, got Sullivan’s room number. Sullivan’s wife answered the door and said, “Virgil. We heard something happened.”

  “Another bomb.”

  She shivered and said, “I’m glad we’re leaving. Was the man… ?”

  “He was killed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to Mike, just for a second.”

  She stepped back and let him in. Sullivan was lying on the bed, half asleep. When his wife called him, he dragged open his eyelids, saw Virgil, and asked, “Everybody okay?”

  “No.” Virgil told the story again, then asked his question: “That recorder for the security camera at the trailer-how big was it?”

  Sullivan held his hands eighteen inches apart. “I dunno… about like this. It looked like a stereo receiver, or a DVD player, I guess.”