“Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.
“Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he’s on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he’s got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn’t cooperate, he was going for twenty years. Twenty years. You can kill somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies’ can, and she said he’s serious… So, I wanted you to know.”
“Okay.”
“Now what’s this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.
“The bomber’s blowing stuff up because of greed or sex-I’ve eliminated trout-and I don’t see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it’s greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”
“The guy isn’t here,” Ahlquist said. “He’s long gone. Last I heard, he’s down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”
“We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye-maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”
“Did somebody say that? The money thing?”
“Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”
“Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I’ll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block’s balls.”
Virgil decided he had to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”
Virgil went in and lay on the couch, his feet up on one arm. Lot of stuff going on. Had to think about it. After five minutes, he hadn’t thought of anything, so he called Davenport and told him what was going on. Davenport summarized it: “So you cleaned up the town, but you don’t have the bomber.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, let me know when you do. I gotta go.”
“Why’d he try to kill me? That’s what I want to know. If he’d killed me, he would have gotten a whole storm of cops in here.”
“Maybe he was making a point of some kind, about resistance,” Davenport said. “Or maybe he wanted a whole storm of cops in there.”
NO HELP THERE.
He was still on the couch when the governor called. “Hey, Virgil, I talked to State Farm, and you’re good to go. You haul the boat to the State Farm place up there, and they’ll resell what they can-scrap, I guess-and you get a check for the boat and motor and a thousand in personal property.”
“Ah, jeez, Governor. Thanks, I guess. There’s nothing criminal in this, is there?”
“Criminal? This is the least criminal thing I’ve done this week,” the governor said. “The second-least-criminal thing I’ve done is, I talked to an old buddy up at East Coast Marine in Stillwater. He’s got a Ranger, there, a beauty, used, but not hard, owned by some rich guy who went out about once a year… Anyway, your check exactly matches the asking price, including sales tax. You gotta go look at it.”
“A Ranger?” Virgil’s mouth started to water. “Jeez, Governor, I don’t know-”
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the governor said. “Everything’s totally on the up-and-up. Well, as much on the up-and-up as these things get. Anyway, I gotta go violate somebody’s civil rights. Talk to you later. It’s Andy at East Coast Marine. He’s making out the papers right now.”
“Well… thanks,” he said, but he was thinking, Holy shit, a Ranger. He had the urge to drop the entire bomb case and get the hell over to Stillwater before Andy died…
“So Davenport said you’d been out to Michigan, to the Pinnacle. I didn’t hear about that. What’s going on there?”
Virgil explained the problem of planting the bomb, and his thoughts, and the governor said, “Any way he could climb it? Or come down? Parachute, maybe?”
Virgil thought back to the conversation he’d had with the guys at the Pye Pinnacle and said, “Someone would’ve seen a plane, or heard it at least. I thought maybe a helicopter, but you couldn’t land one there without someone noticing. A hang glider, maybe, but the Pinnacle’s the tallest thing out there. There’d be nowhere to launch it from.”
The governor rang off, and Virgil closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch. The word “glider” floated through his mind, and he thought, Hey, wait a minute. Did somebody say something about Peck flying a glider? The guy at Butternut Tech. Huh. Could you land a glider on top of a building?
He didn’t know anyone else who could answer that question, so he called Peck.
“Hey, George-could you land a glider on top of a building?”
After a moment of silence, Peck said, “A glider? Somebody told you I used to fly gliders?”
“Yeah, somebody did, but I’ll be damned if I can remember who. So, could you?”
“Well, not me, personally, because I’d be too chicken. But I guess if you had a big enough roof, without any obstructions, you could.”
“How big a roof?”
“Maybe… three hundred yards at the absolute minimum. But that would be scary as hell, even with perfect wind and good visibility. The problem is, you’d have to come in high enough to make sure you got on the roof-you don’t want to crash into the side of the building. Then you’d have to stop before you got to the far parapet, because if you didn’t, and hit it, you’d either get squashed like an eggshell hitting a wall, or if the parapet was low enough, it’d trip the glider and you’d go right over the edge and drop like a stone. Or both.”
“You had me at three hundred yards,” Virgil said. “The roof of the Pye Pinnacle is probably fifty yards across. Maybe less. It’s got all kinds of pipes and chimneys and air-conditioning ducts up there.”
“No way you’re gonna land a glider on that. That’s just not going to work.”
And Virgil thought, Hey, wait a minute. What’d Davenport just say? Maybe the bomber wanted a whole storm of cops to come in? Why would he want that?
Virgil closed his eyes and thought about it, and came up with exactly one answer: the bomber wanted a bigger, wider investigation. Why would he want that? Because a bigger, wider investigation would probably get into the question of whether the city council was bribed, and if it had been, then… PyeMart was gone.
So maybe there was a good reason to try to kill him-nothing personal, not anger or revenge or because Virgil was a threat, but an effort to get as many cops as possible into town.
The guy might be nuts, but there was a logic buried in his craziness.
So why did he go after Pye first? Why weren’t there any warnings? Maybe because he was worried about heightened security around Pye, if he set the first one off in Butternut. So he went after Pye first-after the whole board of directors, but had failed. If he’d succeeded, what would he have done then?
Issued a warning, perhaps: quit building the PyeMart, or else.
But then, if the company didn’t do it, what would he do next?
Virgil thought about it, and decided that there wouldn’t have been a warning: he would have continued on to Butternut, and would have blown up the trailer even if he had been successful with the Pinnacle bomb.
The first bomb was an announcement of his seriousness; the second bomb was the beginning of the actual campaign.
The third bomb, at the equipment yard, would slow down the construction process, and make it more expensive.
The fourth one, another attack on Pye… keeping the pressure on.
Then the attack on Virgil, maybe to bring more pressure into town.
And finally, the bomb at Erikson’s.
He considered the list, and after a moment, focused on the bombing of the equipment yard. That one wasn’t quite right
: he took a big risk, to do nothing more than slow down the process. In fact, he wouldn’t even slow down the construction or opening of the store-he’d just slow down the water and sewer connection by a couple of months. If done on schedule, the connection would have been made three or four months before the store was finished. Now, it’d only be two months.
So why would that have been important to him? Important enough to make a couple of dozen bombs, or however many it was?
Then, there was the bomb at Erikson’s. If he was fully rational, he had a reason for picking Erikson as the fall guy. He wasn’t just chosen at random. Why Erikson?
Hethought about Kline, the pharmacist he’d visited on his second day in town. He knew everything and everybody…
Virgil rolled off the couch and went out to his car and drove downtown. Ed Kline, said the girl behind the pharmacy cash register, was on break.
“Up on the roof?”
“You know about the roof? Let me call him.”
She took out her cell phone, made the call, mentioned Virgil’s name, then rang off and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”
“I do.”
Kline was sitting in a recliner, looking out at the lake, his feet up on a round metal lawn table, blowing smoke at the sky.
“You find him?” he asked Virgil.
“No. But I can refine the list. The bomber, I think, is working through some kind of logic. I think it most likely has to do with money. There also has to be a link with Henry Erikson, but I can’t see what it would be. And I think he’s probably on my list.”
“And…”
Virgil took the survey list out of his pocket. “So, I need you to look at my list and tell me who on the list would either make money, or save money, if PyeMart went down. I’ve already talked to a couple of the major possibilities, and sorta scratched them off. I really need an Erikson-money connection.”
Kline worked his way through the cigarette as he studied the list, and finally shook his head and handed it back to Virgil. “I don’t see it. I see the usual suspects, people who lose when PyeMart comes in. Nothing that involves Erikson.”
“Did Erikson ever serve on the city council? I mean, was he ever in a spot where he could have affected what happened with PyeMart?”
Again, Kline shook his head. “No. Never ran for anything, far as I know.”
“Sarah Erikson couldn’t point out any tight ties between Henry and anybody on the list.”
“I really didn’t know him well enough to suggest any connections,” Kline said.
They were sitting around, speculating, and Virgil took two calls, one after the other.
The first came from a BCA agent named Jenkins, who said, “Me’n Shrake are in town. We’re busting the mayor, and then some guy named Arnold.”
“God bless you,” Virgil said. “Are you staying at the AmericInn?”
“We are. See you for dinner?”
“If it’s not blown up.”
A moment later, he took another call, this one originating at the BCA office itself.
“Virgil? Gabriel Moss here. We loaded up your disk drives, and we got images.”
“How good?”
“The images are good enough, but you can’t see a face. He’s wearing a camo mask. We can tell you how tall he is, about what he weighs, and his shoe size, but there’s no face.”
“Can you send it to me?”
“Sure. I can e-mail it if you want. You’ll have it in five minutes.”
“And send me the numbers-height, weight, and all that.”
Virgil rang off and asked Kline, “Could you think about this? How many ways are there to squeeze money out of PyeMart? Out of the situation? There’s got to be something, and we’re just not seeing it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Kline said. “I think you’re probably right, but I suspect I’ll be awful damn surprised when you catch the guy. You might have to catch him before I can see where the money’d be coming from.”
20
Virgil hooked into the sheriff’s wi-fi and downloaded the video-clip file, watched it once-a murky series of black-andwhite images of a man in camo moving around the inside of the trailer.
A note with the file said that the man was six feet, three and one-half inches tall, in his boots, the brand of which was unknown, but had approximately a one-and-one-half-inch heel; that the boots were size eleven, D width, one of the most common sizes for men; that he probably weighed between one hundred and seventy-five and one hundred and eighty-five-that is, was slender to average weight, but not fat or husky-and that the camo was Realtree. The man wore a mask commonly worn by bow hunters.
Virgil found Ahlquist talking to a couple deputies, and ran the video for them to see if they could pick out anything else. Ahlquist shook his head and said, “It’s Realtree, all right, but hell, half the bow hunters in the state wear it.”
“Yeah, I got some myself,” Virgil said.
“So did Erikson, but Erikson was maybe five-eleven,” Virgil said. “I asked when I found out the lab guys had saved the video.”
“So it’s definitely not him.”
“I wouldn’t say definitely,” Virgil said. “The problem with labs, they come up with exact answers. Sometimes, they’re wrong, and it really screws you up.”
They all nodded.
He called Barlow and told him about the video, and about the size problem, and Barlow said, “So we’re down to forty-sixty. I just don’t have anybody else, Virgil. What are you doing?”
“Still talking to people,” Virgil said. “Wandering around town.”
He called Pye, who said he was at the store site. Virgil told him to stay there, he was coming out. “You get the guy?” Pye asked.
“Not yet,” Virgil said. “But we’re closing in on him.”
Pye made a rude noise, and clicked off.
Pye was not particularly happy to see him. “I hear you’re making more accusations,” he said.
“It’s gone beyond that, Willard,” Virgil said. “We’re taking down the city council-there are state investigators in town, right now, making arrests. We’re probably going to bust your expediter guy, and I wouldn’t doubt that when that happens, the prosecutors will try to work up the chain.”
“There is no chain,” Pye said. Over his shoulder, to Chapman, he added, “Keep taking it down. Put in there, ‘Pye seemed unaffected by the rash accusations made by the hippie-looking cop.’ ”
“Whatever,” Virgil said. “But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. My focus is on this bomber. We got three dead now, and two hurt bad, and four or five scared shitless, who could be dead, except they got lucky… Chapman says that you’re a big goddamn financial and business expert. I need to know, how many ways are there to make or lose money when a PyeMart goes into a town?”
Pye stuck out his lower lip and said, “Everybody knows the ways-”
“No. You might, the rest of us don’t,” Virgil said. “We know that the oil-change place might go broke, and the pharmacy, and a bookstore and a clothing store. We know that some brick layers are going to get some jobs, and somebody’s going to pay the city to lay some pipe, and that means they’ve got to buy some pipe, and now they’ve got to buy a couple more pieces of heavy equipment… but I don’t think anybody’s going around blowing up Pye Pinnacle so they can sell another excavator. I’ve thought about the basic reasons people do this stuff, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably money, in some way that I can’t see. Since you’re the money guy, I thought you could.”
Pye took off his ball cap, scratched his head, and said, “Chapman has done some research. Bombers are usually either plain nuts-they just want to bomb something-or they’re political nuts. Like the Unabomber.”
Virgil shook his head. “This seems to be too focused for a political bombing campaign. They hit the Pinnacle, they hit the city equipment yard, they hit you, me, then Erikson… They didn’t blow up the equipment yard, or Erikson, for some ideological reas
on. They’re not Marxists or something.”
“Barlow thinks Erikson might be the guy,” Pye said. “Maybe.”
“I don’t believe he really thinks so,” Virgil said. “He’s grasping at straws. He’s hoping. And I don’t believe it. So: money.”
Pye walked off a way, looking at the concrete pads that would hold up the new store-a store that Virgil now believed would never be built. Chapman said, quietly, “He’s thinking.”
“I can see the steam coming off his forehead,” Virgil said.
A minute later, Pye wandered back. “I’ve got nothing specific for you, but I can give you some theory. Whether it’ll help, I don’t know.”
“So give,” Virgil said.
Pye said that there were three ways money would move in a situation like PyeMart. Some of it was quite direct and positive: people getting paid for building the store, people who would have jobs at the store, taxes that would come out of the store, profits made by the store.
There were direct and negative movements as well: money lost by people who couldn’t compete with the stores. That money could be in the form of lost profits, or lost jobs.
“Or lost lives,” Virgil said. “People who lose good jobs in towns like these don’t get them back. Not in town,” Virgil said. “They have to leave. Their whole life is changed.”
“That, too,” Pye conceded. “But it’s just the way of the world.”
“What’s the third way?” Virgil asked.
“That’s the hardest to see, and maybe that’s where you should look, since you’re not finding it in the obvious places,” Pye said. “What it is, is lost opportunity. Somebody saw an opportunity out there, and was counting on it, and somehow the store upset that.”
“Like what?” Virgil asked.
“Okay. Say a guy had an idea for a little computer store. Nothing like that in town. So he saves his money, and maybe starts trying to arrange a loan. Then he finds out a PyeMart’s coming in, and he finds out that we have a pretty strong line of computers. All of a sudden, this guy’s bidness plan makes no sense. He can’t get the loan, either. This idea was going to make him rich, and in his head, he was already sailing a yacht on the ocean and hanging out with Tiger Woods. Then somebody took it away from him. Snatched it right away. No actual money moved-no currency, no dollar bills-but potential money moved.”
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