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  “That sounds dangerous . . . to the bomber,” Ahlquist said.

  “You’d need good hands,” Barlow agreed. “The bomb in Michigan used a cheap mechanical clock as a switch, and was a lot safer. But that was a time bomb, and this was a trigger-set. Of course, we haven’t found all the pieces of the switch here.... It might not have been all that dangerous. For example, there could be a safety switch in the circuit that wasn’t as touchy as the mousetrap. So he’d set the trap, and then only close the safety switch when he was sure the mousetrap was solid and he was on his way out.”

  “So is that sophisticated, or unsophisticated?” Virgil asked.

  “Interesting question,” Barlow said. “We occasionally run into guys who are bomb hobbyists and take a lot of pride in building clever detonation circuits. Using cell phones, and so on. They’re nuts, basically, but their engineering can be pretty clever. These bombs look as if they’re made by a guy working from first principles. That is, he doesn’t know the sophisticated ways of wiring up a weapon like this, but he’s smart enough to figure out some very effective ways of doing it. That means—this is just my opinion—that he’s a guy who learned how to build bombs for this single mission. He’s not bombing things to hear the boom and make his weenie hard, he’s bombing PyeMart because he’s got a grudge against PyeMart.”

  “How much of this Pelex stuff did he steal?” asked LeCourt, the chief of police. “Is he done now, or has he got more?”

  “If he took it from the Cold Spring quarry, which we think he did, he’s got enough to make maybe fifty or sixty of these,” Barlow said.

  “Oh my Lord,” said Ahlquist. He looked at Virgil. “You better get him in a hurry.”

  “What are the chances that he’ll find out he likes it?” Virgil asked. “That he’ll go from grudges, to getting his weenie hard?”

  “That happens,” Barlow said. “The thing is, he’s nuts. Whether he’s killing because he likes to kill, or because he’s got a grudge, either way, he’s nuts. And nuts tend to evolve toward greater violence.”

  BARLOW HAD MORE TO SAY about the bomb and the technique, and from what he said, Virgil came to two conclusions: (a) building an effective bomb was not rocket science, once you had the explosive and some blasting caps, and (b) the killer was smart.

  They continued to talk for fifteen minutes or so, and stuck their heads inside the trailer, which looked as though somebody had attacked it with a sledgehammer and a lot of time. When Barlow began to run out of new information, Virgil drifted over to Ahlquist and said, “I’ll buy you dinner if you’re hungry.”

  “I’m starving to death. Let’s go up to Mable Bunson’s—today’s Fish Monday.”

  Virgil got directions to the restaurant, and they were all about to get back in their trucks, leaving the trailer to the ATF technicians, when a white stretch limo eased out of the street and onto the beaten-down dirt track to the trailer.

  “That’s the prom limo,” Ahlquist said.

  “Gotta be Pye,” said Gore. She added, “I’ve never seen that limousine in the daylight.”

  The limo bumped nervously over the last few feet, and then a short heavyset man popped out of the second door behind the driver. He was wearing a blue chalk-striped suit over a golf shirt, a Michigan Wolverines ball cap, and an angry look. One second later, the second door opened on the other side, and a tall, thin woman climbed out. She had honey-blond hair worn loose to her shoulders, eyes that were either green or brown, wore a tweed suit and a tired look, and carried a notebook.

  “That’s Mr. Pye,” Barlow said, and he went that way and said, “Mr. Pye—I didn’t realize you were planning to come out.”

  “Of course I came, you damn fool. One of my people’s dead,” Pye snapped, as he walked up. His face appeared to be permanently red and frustrated. “When the hell are you gonna get this nut? It’s been two weeks and we’ve seen nothing.”

  Barlow said, “We’re focused on it, and this new bomb tells us a lot. We now believe we’re dealing with a man from here in the Butternut Falls area. We’re coordinating with the Kandiyohi sheriff’s department and the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

  “Apprehension,” Virgil said.

  “Sounds like more bullshit to me,” Pye interrupted. “Is this the trailer? Holy crap, it looks like the Nazis bombed it.” He said gnatzees. “Where’s the hospital here? Is this boy Sullivan still there? Has Mrs. Kingsley got here yet? I hear she got hung up in Detroit, plane was delayed or she got bumped or some crap like that. I’m talking to the CEO of Delta, he’s seeing what he can do, but it don’t seem like much.”

  Barlow and Ahlquist took turns answering questions, and introduced LeCourt and Virgil. As they were doing that, Virgil noticed that the tall woman was taking notes, in what looked like shorthand; O’Hara was watching her with one eye closed, like a housewife in a butcher shop, inspecting a suspect pork chop. Pye looked at Virgil’s shirt and asked, “What the hell’s these Freelance Whales?”

  Ahlquist jumped in: “It’s a band. Virgil rushed up here on his day off, didn’t have time to change.”

  Pye turned back to Barlow and LeCourt, and the sheriff caught Virgil’s eye and tipped his head toward the trucks. They started drifting that way, until Pye said, “Whoa, whoa, where’re you going? We’ve got some planning to do.”

  “We’re going to go investigate,” Virgil said. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll let you know.”

  “Hey: this is my goddamn building going up here, and my people got hurt and killed,” Pye said. “I want to know what the crap is going on here, and you’re gonna tell me or I’ll call somebody up and tell them I need a new investigator.”

  Virgil nodded, slipped his ID case out from his pocket, took out a business card, and scrawled Davenport’s office number on it. “This is my boss. Call him up and tell him you need a new investigator.”

  “That don’t worry you, huh?” Pye cocked an eye at him.

  “Not much,” Virgil said. “Davenport will either tell you to kiss his ass, or, if you’re important enough, he’ll pass you on to the governor, who’ll tell you to kiss his ass. So either way, somebody’ll tell you to kiss his ass, and I’ll keep investigating.”

  Pye frowned. “Huh. Your goldanged governor’s got almost as much money as I do, and it’s older.” He scratched his head, then asked, “How long will it take you to catch this nut?”

  He and Virgil were now almost toe to toe, and the woman was still taking notes, writing at such a pace that it had to be verbatim.

  Virgil looked at his watch, scratched his cheek, then said, “I can’t see it going much more than a week.”

  Pye nodded. “All right. You get me this guy in a week, and I will kiss your ass.” To the woman, he said, “You got that? One week and I kiss his ass.”

  “I got it,” she said. Her eyes flicked to Virgil: “Good luck, Mr. Flowers. I’ll prepare an appropriate ceremony.”

  Virgil thought, Hmm. But then, his sheriff had been in Hollywood for a while.

  AHLQUIST AND VIRGIL WENT on to their trucks, and Virgil followed the sheriff out of the parking lot. Virgil had worked with Ahlquist a couple of times, to their mutual satisfaction. A former highway patrolman turned to politics, Ahlquist probably knew half the people in the county on sight, and, since the sheriff’s department ran the jail, all of the bad ones. As a politician, he’d know all about any local pissing matches over the PyeMart site.

  Mable Bunson’s Restaurant and Cheesery was on the other side of the Butternut downtown from the highway, all the way through the business district to the lake, and then a couple blocks down the waterfront. A solid brick building with a peaked roof and small windows, it looked as though it might have been a rehabbed train station; it turned out, when Virgil asked the hostess, that it was a rehabbed bank.

  Ahlquist got a booth in the back, a couple places away from the nearest other customers. Ahlquist ordered a bourbon and water, Virgil got a Leinie’s, and as they started through the menu, Virgi
l said, “I hear you’re still fighting over the PyeMart.”

  “I’m not fighting over it,” Ahlquist said. “But there’s sure as shit some questions floating around. The mayor was against it, but then she says she saw the youth unemployment figures, and she does an about-face and now she’s all for it. We got seven city councilmen, six against and one in favor, and somehow, time passes, and four are in favor and only three against.”

  “You’re saying that they might have been encouraged to change their positions.”

  “I’m not saying that, but some people are. And not in private. One of the councilmen, Arnold Martin, lived here all his life, doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Never has had. He’s worked retail since he got out of high school, he’s now a stock manager out at a car-parts place. Him and his wife took a winter vacation last February, took off in their car and went to Florida, Arnold says. The Redneck Riviera. But the rumor is, they went to Tortola and took sailing lessons, and this spring they’ve got a nice little sailboat out on the lake. Not a big one, and it was used, but, it’s a sailboat.”

  “You look into it?”

  “Not the Tortola part. But I was chatting with a guy over at Eddie’s Marine, and he said the former owner wanted fourteen grand for the boat. It’s called a Flying Scot, it’s two years old, and I’m told it’s got a high-end racing rig. I had one of my deputies, who can keep his mouth shut, talk to the former owner, and he said Arnold financed it through the Wells Fargo. I got a friend there, and I found out Arnold did finance half of it, over three years, and he’s been making regular cash payments on the deal.”

  “So what does that make you think?” Virgil asked.

  “What it made me think was, Arnold got some money from somewhere, but wasn’t dumb enough to just go plop it down on a boat,” Ahlquist said. “He financed the boat, and is making payments out of the stash.”

  “That’s not very charitable of you,” Virgil said. “Maybe he saved the money.”

  “And maybe the mold on my basement door will turn out to be a miracle image of Jesus Christ, but I doubt it,” Ahlquist said.

  A waitress dropped a basket of bread on the table, took their orders, and Ahlquist got another bourbon.

  Virgil said, “So there might be a little informal economic assistance going on . . . but the bombs wouldn’t be coming from those guys. The bombs would be coming from somebody who doesn’t like those guys. So who would that be?”

  “If I knew, I’d be on them like lips on a chicken—but I don’t know,” Ahlquist said. “There’s always been rumors that this-or-that councilman or county commissioner took a little money under the table, for doing this-or-that. Who knows if it’s true? Impossible to prove.”

  “But this is different.”

  Ahlquist nodded. “It is. See, Virgil, you know about these big-box stores all over the place. You get a bunch of them in a small town, and it can wreck the place. Drive out half the merchants, and their families, who always made decent livings, and the downtown dies. In exchange you get a bunch of minimum-wage jobs. You hollow out the town. Well, we’re big enough that we could take a Walmart and a Home Depot. It hurt, but we took it. People adjusted. You throw in a PyeMart, which is a little more upscale, and it doesn’t leave people with anywhere to adjust.”

  He shook his head. “A lot of these folks are going to lose their businesses. Going to lose their livelihoods. Some of them have been here a hundred years, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers started their companies. They’re bitter, they’re angry, they’ve said some crazy things.”

  “Crazy enough that there might be a bomber amongst them?”

  “Yeah, that’s one place he could be coming from,” Ahlquist said. “Then, there’s the trout-fishing cranks.”

  “Careful,” Virgil said.

  Ahlquist grinned at him. “I know. I see you’re dragging your boat. Anyway, the Butternut runs a half mile or so behind the PyeMart site, and then makes a big loop down to the south, and then comes back north and runs into town. Some people think that the runoff from the PyeMart parking lot is going to pollute their precious crick. If it does, it’d be the whole bottom two miles, before it runs into the lake. That’s the best part, I’m told. Some of the trout guys, they were screaming at the council meetings. They were completely out of control.”

  “Could I get some names?” Virgil asked.

  “Sure. I can get you a list. People you can go around and talk to.”

  “If I’m gonna handle this fast enough to get my ass kissed, I’ll need the list pretty quick.”

  Ahlquist nodded, fished in his oversized uniform shirt pocket, and pulled out a black Moleskine reporter’s notebook. “I can give you a good part of it right now. I’ll think about it overnight, and give you the rest tomorrow.”

  “Works for me,” Virgil said. He slid down in the booth a bit, yawned, and asked, “So how’s your old lady?”

  “Pretty damn unhappy right now, since the housing bust,” Ahlquist said. He wrote a couple names in his notebook. “She can find people who want to buy, and people who want to sell, but the buyers are having a hell of a time getting loans. Goddamn banks.”

  “Maybe she could just find a place to sit down and chill out for a while,” Virgil suggested. He’d eaten several partial dinners with Ahlquist’s wife; she was eternally on her way to somewhere else.

  Ahlquist snorted: “Like that’s going to happen. Woman hasn’t sat down for fifteen minutes since she got her real estate license. Five years ago, it was glory days. You could sell a shack on the lake for the price of a castle. Now you can’t sell a castle on the lake for the price of a shack.”

  “Somebody’s going to make money out of that situation,” Virgil said.

  “You’re right,” Ahlquist said. “Just not none of us.”

  They spent the rest of the meal chatting about life, speculating about the bomber and the nuts Ahlquist knew, and which of them had both the brains and the motive to get into, and then blow up, the boardroom at the Pye Pinnacle. “That there’s a tough question,” Ahlquist said. “I was talking to Barlow about that, and he said that penetrating that building took time, planning, and maybe an insider.”

  “You give a list like this to Barlow?” Virgil asked.

  “No, and he hasn’t actually asked for one. He’s more of a technical guy, going at it from the computer end. He cross-references stuff. That could work; and maybe not. He’s not so much of a social investigator, like you,” Ahlquist said.

  “I didn’t even know that’s what I was,” Virgil said.

  VIRGIL GOT BACK to the Holiday Inn after dark. He unloaded the loose stuff in his boat, locked it in the back of the truck, dug his pistol out of his gun safe, and carried both the pistol and the shotgun into the motel room. A pistol was as good as money on the street; he was determined not to contribute.

  When he was settled in, he looked at the clock—nearly ten—and called Lee Coakley, in Los Angeles. He and Coakley had been conducting a romance for six months or so, until a production company began making a TV movie about Coakley’s part in breaking up a huge, multi-generational child-abuse ring in southern Minnesota. Coakley, as the local sheriff, had been the media face on the whole episode.

  The production company had rented an apartment for her in West Hollywood, for the duration of the shoot. The duration had recently lengthened, and Coakley had grown evasive on the exact time of her return.

  So Virgil called, and her oldest son, David, answered the phone. “Uh, hi, Virg, Mom’s, uh, at a meeting of some kind. I don’t know when she’s getting home.”

  He was lying through his teeth, Virgil thought; he was not a good liar. Mom was somewhere with somebody, and you probably wouldn’t go too far wrong if you called it a date. “Okay. I’ve got a deal I’m working on, out of town—a bomb thing. I’m going to bed. Tell her I’ll try to give her a call tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, uh, okay.”

  Virgil hung up. Little rat. Of course, she was his mother. If you wouldn’t li
e for your mom, who would you lie for?

  VIRGIL TOOK OFF HIS BOOTS, shut off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, lay on his bed, and thought about his conversation with Ahlquist. The bomber almost certainly had a direct tie to some of the protesters—either the people whose livelihoods were threatened by the PyeMart, or the trout freaks.

  Of the two, he thought the businessmen were more likely to produce a killer. Some of the people who’d lose out to PyeMart would move from prosperity to poverty, and virtually overnight. Businesses, homes, college plans, comfortable retirements, all gone. How far would somebody go to protect his family? Most people wouldn’t even shoplift, much less kill. But to protect his family . . . and all you needed was one.

  And then the environmentalists . . .

  Virgil had a degree in ecological science, and was a committed green. But he’d met quite a few people over the years who’d come into the green movement from other, more ideologically violent movements—people who’d started as anti-globalization protesters, or tree-spikers as opposed to tree sitters, who thought that trashing a McDonald’s was a good day’s work, people who talked about Marx and Greenpeace in the same sentence.

  The greenest people Virgil knew were hunters and fishermen, with Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited and Pheasants Forever and the Ruffed Grouse Society, and the Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation and all the rest, people who put their money and their time where their mouths were; but these others . . .

  There could be a radical somewhere in the mix, somebody who had twisted a bunch of ideologies all together and decided that bombs were an ethical statement.

  A guy sitting home alone, the blue glow of the Internet on his face, getting all tangled up with the other nuts out there, honing himself . . .

  Again, all it took was one.

  BEFORE HE WENT TO SLEEP, Virgil spent a few minutes thinking about God, and why he’d let a bomber run around killing people, although he was afraid that he knew the reason: because the small affairs of man were of not much concern to the All-Seeing, All-Knowing. Everybody on earth would die, sooner or later, there was no question about that: the only question was the timing, and what would time mean to a timeless Being?