Shock Wave vf-5

by John Sandford

  “Who’d know that?”

  “Well… I guess maybe a lot of people would. I mean, we have backyard parties, barbeques, people coming and going. They’d know what was in the garage.”

  “Could they count on that door being unlocked?” Virgil asked.

  “Sometimes it’s locked,” she said. “Most of the time, it isn’t.”

  “You ever have a key go missing?”

  “No, not that I know of,” Erikson said. “But all our locks open with one key, and we’ve had a lot of those keys. I suppose somebody could have stolen one.”

  Virgil thought it over, and shook his head. “It can’t just be the availability of a key. There has to be something… Is he involved in the PyeMart situation in any way?”

  “No, except that he was against it,” Erikson said. “He thought the Butternut was such a great resource. He grew up back there, his family had a farm. He used to float down it on rafts, and then he got a canoe-”

  “So he didn’t sell any of that land to PyeMart? Or his family?”

  “No, they were way down to the south of there. They don’t own the land anymore, anyway. His folks sold it years ago.”

  Virgil chewed that over for a moment, but couldn’t see how it would go anywhere. Maybe the bomber had simply seen the size of the workshop, and chose him because it would make bomb production look more credible? Maybe.

  Before he left the sheriff’s office, he’d written down the names of the people who’d shown up more than once on his survey, plus the two who worked at the college. The kitchen was empty, and he said, “Mrs. Erikson, I’d like you to step into the kitchen with me for a moment. I want to show you something privately.”

  She looked around at her friends for a moment, then shrugged and stood and led the way into the kitchen. At the far end, at a breakfast nook, Virgil quietly explained his survey, then said, “I want you to look at this list. How many of the people do you know?”

  She took the list, scanned it, blinked a couple of times, then stepped back to the kitchen counter and took a pencil out of a cup, put the list on a magazine and the magazine on the countertop, and started checking them off. “I’ll put one check by the people I just know, and two checks by the ones who might know our house a little.”

  “There are some?”

  She bent over the list. “Three. There are three.”

  “Do any of them seem to be the kind…”

  She stared at the list for a long time, and then said, “I never liked Bill Barber. He’s a jerk and he’s angry, and I think he was once mixed up in some kind of assault.”

  “Doesn’t have a record,” Virgil said.

  “His uncle was on the police force, before it became part of the sheriff’s department. He might have hushed it up. Or maybe he was a juvenile or something. It was quite a while ago.”

  Virgil had brought an annotated master list with him, and checked Barber’s name: he’d been mentioned four times. Interesting. “Why would Barber have been here?”

  “Because he lives down the block. He bought a couple of cars from Henry, though that’s not a big deal: a lot of people have bought cars from Henry.”

  “Is his house like this one?”

  “Mmm, a little. They were all built by the same contractor,” she said.

  “Okay. Okay… what about the other two?” Virgil asked.

  “John Haden. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, he’s a nice enough man. I mean, Henry used to play guitar in a band. He was good. John used to build guitars, just as a hobby, electric guitars, and Henry got interested, and he started building some. They sort of got into it together. Henry was really good at the woodwork, and cutting the hollows in the back for the electronics, that kind of stuff. John did all the hand-finish work and the paint. They could sell the guitars for a thousand dollars each. They had a waiting list.”

  Virgil was interested: Haden was one of the two men who worked at Butternut Tech. “How many? In a year?”

  “Ten, maybe? Sometimes a couple more or less.”

  “So Haden would have a reason to want to keep your husband alive, if anything.”

  “Oh, sure. They were friends.”

  “He works at the college, right?”

  “Yeah. Math. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, though. Maybe because he’s a little odd. Kinda geeky, you know. Once you get to know him, he seems really nice. He likes cats, we’ve got cats.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Virgil said. He liked cats himself. “When you say geeky, do you mean ineffectual? Or is he one of those, you know, more-manic geeks? Some of them have really strong beliefs.”

  “Oh, not like that. He has an off-the-wall sense of humor. Maybe you could ask one of his ex-wives.”

  “More than one?” Virgil asked. “He has trouble with relationships?”

  “I think he’s been married and divorced three times, hard as that is to believe,” she said. “Who in their right mind would make that kind of mistake three times? Anyway, Henry said that even though he’s geeky, women like him. Heck, I guess I like him.”

  “Okay.” He looked at the checks on her list. “What about this Gordon Wilson?”

  “Gordy… he’s another car salesman, he works over at the Ford dealer. He’s been in and out of this house, off and on, sometimes he and Henry would be working deals. I don’t know him that well, really. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, either.”

  Virgil looked at the master list: Wilson had been named three times.

  “You don’t know this William Wyatt?” Wyatt was the other teacher.

  “I’ve heard the name. It’s a small town, in some ways.”

  “But you know Dick Gates? You gave him one check.” Gates was another name with four checks after it, like Barber.

  “I don’t think he’s ever been to the house, but we both know him, knew him. He’s a police officer, you know, a wildlife officer. He patrols the lakes in the summer.”

  They went through the rest of the list; and when he asked her, she looked thoughtfully at the list and said, “I’m just guessing.”

  “That’s all I’m asking,” Virgil said. “I’ll take it purely as a guess.”

  “And it makes me feel kind of crappy… but if I had to pick one, I guess I’d pick Dick Gates. Henry didn’t like him, and he didn’t like Henry. Henry liked to fish, and it seemed like every time he went out, and Gates was out, he would pull Henry over and check to see what he’d caught, and how many. After fifteen times, you’d think he’d know Henry was an ethical fisherman, who usually didn’t keep anything.” The tears started again, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “But he just kept doing it. Because I think he liked the power. It got so, if Gates’s boat wasn’t at the dock, Henry’d just go up the Butternut and fish. Gates didn’t go up the river. Too easy to get stuck, and then, nobody would help him out.”

  Virgil considered that. He knew lots of cops who liked the power-and that, he thought, was probably why Gates was on the list four times. If he didn’t like the power, he might well have never been on it at all. Not that he was excusing him, just because he was a cop …

  “Did Henry ever say anything to you about seeing something odd, up the river? Somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or acted weird?”

  She shook her head. “He had a lot of Butternut stories, but nothing like that. But, you know, if it was just a little odd, he might not have mentioned it.”

  They talked for a while longer, then Virgil thanked her and excused himself, and went out to the garage and watched the ATF crime-scene guys for a few minutes, and finally asked Barlow, “You still think he’s the guy?”

  “I’m saying sixty percent, and slowly dropping. We could be down to fifty-fifty by this evening. The thing is, we found all the bomb stuff at once-and then nothing else. It was right out in the open. And we don’t find any of the small stuff you’d expect-more detonators, more batteries, a bunch of clocks or old thermostats… Didn’t find any rolls of wire. We did fin
d some really odd-looking electronics, but we can’t put them with any bomb-making techniques.”

  “He made electric guitars as a hobby,” Virgil said.

  “Okay. I’ll mark that down,” Barlow said. “The other thing is, I can think of good reasons he could be the bomber and at the same time, we’d only find one pipe, and one blasting cap.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like, he was limiting his exposure. He was planning to do two more bombs, and he kept the other stuff off-site to limit the possibility of detection.”

  “Good thought, Jim,” Virgil said, not believing it.

  “So anyway, I haven’t talked to Mrs. Erikson yet. I want to know exactly what to ask her, when I get to her,” Barlow said. “I want her to have an attorney.”

  “Sure,” Virgil said. “Keep digging. And call me.”

  The math professor interested him: not only because he’d been named on the list, but because he’d be a really bright guy, and he was a little odd, both of which the bomber apparently was, and because he might have some idea of how valid the survey might be.

  Virgil looked at his watch, wondered how Shepard was doing-nothing he could do about that-wondered if Block had been arrested, then got on his phone and called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to find out where John Haden lived, and what his phone number was.

  He had the information in five minutes, called Haden, and was surprised when Haden promptly picked up: a good sign.

  “I’ve got some questions for you,” Virgil said, after introducing himself. “I wonder if I might stop by?”

  “You think I’m the bomber?”

  “I have no idea who the bomber is,” Virgil said. “I mostly want to talk to you about a survey I took.”

  “Well, come on over. You can tell me about what happened with Henry.”

  19

  John Haden was a tall, slender, pale man with glasses and a mop of brown hair; he wore a T-shirt with a hand-painted yoga warrior pose, simple black and white, which Virgil envied the moment he saw it, and jeans and flip-flops.

  He lived in a modest brick house with a neatly kept yard, and pulled open the door and peered nearsightedly at Virgil, and said, “You look like a stoner.”

  “A flaw in your Vedic perception,” Virgil said; his first wife had been a yoga practitioner. “I am, in fact, a cop.”

  Haden liked that and swung the door back, and said, “Well, bring your cop ass inside. You want a beer?”

  “Sure. But no more than two.”

  “We can sit out on the patio,” Haden said. He got a couple of Dos Equis from the refrigerator, popped the tops, and handed one cold sweaty bottle to Virgil.

  On the way out to the patio, he said, “So why do you think I’m the bomber?”

  “I don’t. Not the bomber, anyway. But, as Henry’s business partner, you might have had reason to get rid of him. Either because the business was doing badly, or doing well. Either way. You might be copycatting the real bomber.”

  “Your theory’s basically screwed-the business wasn’t doing much of anything,” Haden said. He took a webbed chair, pointed Virgil at another one, and said, “I don’t want you to think I’m taking this thing lightly. I just don’t really know what to say. Henry was a heck of a nice guy. Smart, happy, good marriage-he enjoyed his job. I freaked out when I heard. I was amazed. I went over there, but his wife was in the Cities.”

  “She’s back now.”

  “She was in the Cities, anyway. So, I canceled my summer school class, and I’ve just been wandering around the house wondering what the fuck? Why?”

  “Found some bomb stuff in the garage,” Virgil said. “The feds think he might be the bomber.”

  Haden waved the thought away: “That’s absurd. If you knew Henry, you’d know how absurd it was. Somebody planted it there, which means, it has to be somebody who knows Henry.” Then, “Oh, wait-that’s why you’re here. You’re checking out his friends.”

  “That, too,” Virgil said. He took a hit on the beer, which tasted good in the hot afternoon, looked around the small backyard, and said, “You’re a marigold enthusiast.”

  “They keep moles out of your yard,” Haden said.

  “You got moles?” Virgil asked.

  “No, because I plant marigolds.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” Virgil said. “I got moles.”

  Virgil said, “I was told you’ve been divorced three times.”

  “That’s true,” Haden said.

  “Do you still think about the exes?”

  “All the time. Especially when I’m not in a relationship,” Haden said. “The thing about three exes is, there are always some good memories.”

  “True,” Virgil said. He thought of Janey, and her ass.

  “You’d know?” Haden asked.

  “Yeah, I got three down myself,” Virgil said. “I’ve given it up for the time being. I’ve got a girlfriend, but I think she’s about to break it off with me.”

  “You want her to go?” Haden asked.

  Virgil considered. He hadn’t actually thought about it that way. Finally, he said, “Maybe.”

  “Ah. So you’ve maneuvered her into breaking it off with you, so you won’t have to deal with the guilt,” Haden said.

  “That’s a facile bit of pseudo-psychology,” Virgil said.

  “Facile. A subtle word for a cop. One bit of advice. If she breaks it off with you, don’t sleep with her again for at least a year.”

  “A year?”

  “Okay, six months.”

  “Is that your practice?”

  “No, I won’t sleep with them for at least three weeks, but then, I think I have a more resilient personality than you. You look like a kinder soul than I am.”

  They sat and bullshitted for a while, then Haden got a second beer for each of them, and Virgil passed over the list of names, and told him how he’d acquired it. He scanned the list and said, “There I am. .. Probably my department chairman. Somebody told him once that I smoke dope.”

  “He’s a non-smoker?”

  “Oh, yeah… Weird for a college professor, huh? So let me see if I get this right. You made this list with no real mathematical or statistical basis. It’s a back-of-the-envelope guess by a bunch of hosers who are getting even with enemies, and may have a few good ideas as well.”

  Virgil considered again, then nodded: “I think that’s fair.”

  Haden handed the list back, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Thought about it. Then, “I’d say there’s a better than even chance that he’s on the list. You can probably strike several people off right away.”

  “We have.”

  Haden nodded. “From what I know about the bombs, I have no alibis, except that I couldn’t have done the one in Michigan, if it was, in fact, a simple time bomb, as the newspaper said. I have a lady friend who’ll tell you that, since I spent that night pounding her like a jackhammer. During the day, I was doing finals.”

  “I’ll check, if I need to,” Virgil said. “Give her my name. I’m not fooling around about this, John.”

  “I know that. I looked you up on the Net while you were on the way over,” Haden said. Then he said, “I’ve been toying with the possibility that Henry was simply killed at random, but I don’t think so. There’s something in Henry’s killing that’s important to the bomber, and it’s not just that Henry was somebody to frame. You gotta go pull Sarah apart. She must know what it is, even if she doesn’t know that she knows.”

  “Mmmm.” Virgil closed his eyes. “Nice out here. I need a patio.”

  “I’m serious. You know what Sherlock Holmes used to say.”

  “Sherlock Holmes actually didn’t say anything,” Virgil said. “He’s a fictional character, invented by Theodore Roosevelt, or some other Boy Scout just like him.”

  “He said, and I quote, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

  “I knew that,” Virgil
said. “I’m a professional detective.”

  “But you might be outsmarting yourself. Go back to the fundamentals of detecting. If there is such a thing. Another beer? I’ve only got two left, and it seems a shame just to leave them sitting there by themselves.”

  Go back to fundamentals, Virgil thought, when he finally left.

  Shoe leather. Compile facts. Throw out whatever was impossible.. .

  Whatever. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where to start walking, and while he had a lot of facts, they were mostly irrelevant. What about motive? The fundamentals would say that murder is committed because of greed and sex, to which Virgil added craziness, druginduced or otherwise.

  There was craziness here, but also a method: it wasn’t the kind of compulsive, uncontrolled murder that’s done by what psychiatrists referred to as nut jobs. This was craziness on a mission, and the mission probably involved greed or sex.

  But not trout.

  Virgil realized that he’d psychologically eliminated about half the people nominated for the bombings: the trout fishermen.

  Trout fishermen, he thought, were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn’t even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.

  As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you’d lose your fuckin’ lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.

  Anyhoo… the trout fishermen were out.

  Which made him feel better.

  Sex and greed.

  He’d made some progress, fueled by three beers.

  Back at the county courthouse, he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they’ve got Block upstairs, and they’re squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”