“Willard can be a very sweet man and he’s tremendously loyal to his employees—but he is a ferocious businessman. He does what he thinks he needs to do.” She hesitated, and rolled the bottom of her margarita glass on the tabletop, making a tracery out of a couple drops of water. “We’re now getting into an area that I want to reserve for my book.”
“So he knows.”
“I can’t say that. I can tell you that the man, the expediter, who went to jail in Indiana, served eight months of the one-year sentence. When he got out, he landed on his feet: he got a great job with a major paper company, a maker of all kinds of paper products, everything from notebooks to paper plates.”
“Yeah?”
“A major supplier to PyeMart,” she said.
“So the guy got taken care of.”
“That would be for somebody else to say,” she said. Then, “Are you investigating Willard?”
“I’m trying to find the bomber,” Virgil said. “But you know there’ve been accusations of bribery . . . you were at the press conference, almost a fistfight there.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Virgil, I’ve said about as much as I’m going to say,” Chapman said. “I won’t betray Willard, or go sneaking around to find information for you. If you’re going to investigate him, you’ll have to do it on your own.”
“Be a good thing for your book,” Virgil said. “You know, if Pye got pitched into some kind of crisis.”
She looked at him for a long moment, then laughed, a short, choppy sound, and said, “The snake crawls out from behind the surfer-boy smile.”
“Hey . . . I’m just telling you what’s going on,” Virgil said.
“We ought to talk about something else,” she said.
So they did.
They had a pleasant meal, talked about writing, and about police work, about where they grew up, and about Virgil’s cases—Chapman had access to an excellent news clipping service, and knew about Virgil’s major busts. She was, Virgil thought, an interesting woman, but something had fundamentally changed between them when the word “snake” came out of her mouth. He dropped her at the AmericInn at nine o’clock and, feeling a little melancholy, went on to the sheriff ’s department.
OF THE FOURTEEN LETTERS sent out, they’d gotten back eleven—three people declined to participate. Virgil took two hours to work through the mass of names, entering them on his laptop, with addresses. After eliminating duplicates, he had a list of a hundred and seventy-eight people who’d be asked to nominate possible bombers.
Ahlquist had come through several times while Virgil was working out the list, and finally he said, “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s gonna cause a stink.”
“Yeah, it will, but it’s a whole new way of looking at an investigative problem,” Virgil said. “I’m almost as curious to see how it comes out as I am anxious to catch the bomber.”
When he had the list, and the addresses, he wrote a carefully worded cover letter, explaining the idea behind the nominations, asking that the lists be returned to the sheriff ’s department no later than the next evening. He left space at the bottom, with ten blank underlines, for the bomber nominees, and noted that the letter’s recipients didn’t need to sign the letter or identify themselves in making their nominations.
He was working through the letter, revising, when he took a call from Lee Coakley. He perked up as soon as he saw the incoming number, and heard her voice: “Virgil, how are you?”
“Aw, I’m in a mess of a case. I’m up in Butternut Falls.”
“David told me, I looked it up on the Star Tribune’s website. Are you getting anywhere with it?”
“Well, I’m trying something new. . . .” He explained about the letters. When he finished explaining, she started laughing, and after a minute, said, “Virgil, you have a different kind of mind.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“But you’re doing it. I hope Earl knows what you’re getting him into.”
“Earl’s gonna do just fine, if I pull this off. Anyway, what have you been up to?”
So she told him, a bunch of stuff he didn’t entirely understand about working through a gunfight on a TV show. “It’s about half real, and half movie. I tell them what’d really happen, they tell me what they need to have happen, for the movie. Then, we try to work something out that feels sorta real, but gets done what they need done.”
She went on for five minutes and sounded so enthusiastic about it that Virgil felt the melancholy coming back. Because, he thought, Lee probably wouldn’t be. When she said, “I gotta go, the boys are raising hell,” it was a notably friendly, and non-intimate, good-bye. A kind of good-bye he recognized, a good-bye from a friend, not from a lover. He wondered if she recognized it, and thought she probably did, since women were always a few steps ahead in such matters.
Which, when he thought about it, was how he lost his Tim Kaihatsu–signed Gibson guitar when his second wife moved out.
HE WENT BACK to the letters, editing them, then printing them. Before stuffing them in envelopes, he numbered each of the one hundred and seventy-eight names on his list, and on each letter, carefully, with black ink, put a small dot in a word that corresponded, in number, to the number of each name on the list.
In other words, the letter began with the phrase, As you undoubtedly know . . . and the first name on the list, Andrew Lane, got a small black dot between the legs of the capital A in As. The second name on the list got a tiny dot in the o in you. The third name got a dot in the o of undoubtedly.
Because the letters had said the responses would be anonymous, it felt dishonest, but, he thought, it might be useful to know who nominated whom. He couldn’t think of a reason why it might be useful, but then, he’d never done anything like this.
He finished after one o’clock in the morning, left a stack of letters with the duty officer, for delivery the next day, and headed back to the hotel.
HE SPENT A RESTLESS NIGHT in the over-soft bed; too much to think about. He didn’t have many new ideas about chasing the bomber, at least, not until the letters came back. That would give him as much work as he could handle.
In the meantime, he could look into the question of whether the city council had been bribed. That would not be fun—he would need to extort the necessary information, using marital infidelity as a wedge. He’d had a checkered past himself when it came to women—three divorces in three years, before he at least temporarily quit getting married. So you had some schoolteachers engaging in some bed-hopping—so what? Except, unfortunately for them, it might be tangled up with bribery.
He could also stay in bed, the pillow hard as a pumpkin, and spend the night brooding about Lee Coakley. Had she already been unfaithful? What about himself; was thinking about the honeyhaired Marie Chapman actually unfaithful? Taking her out to dinner? Jimmy Carter would have said . . . But, you know, fuck Jimmy Carter.
IN THE MORNING, he cleaned up and decided to head out to Country Kitchen for French toast and link sausage; and, he thought, since he didn’t know exactly what he’d be doing all day, he might as well take the boat, just in case.
He backed around, hooked up, and took off. At the street, he took the curb-cut too short and he felt the trailer’s right wheel bounce over the curb.
IN AN INFINITESIMALLY SHORT SPACE of time, the bomb in the trailer blew up and the world lurched and Virgil found himself on the street, crawling away from the truck, with the sense of blood in his nose and mouth, though when he wiped his face with his hand, there wasn’t any. He rolled onto his butt and looked back. The boat had been cut in half, but the truck itself seemed untouched; gasoline was pouring onto the street, and he thought, Fire.
He turned and continued crawling, then got to his feet and staggered away. He thought, How did I get in the street . . . ?
He could hear sirens, then, and two people ran out of the Holiday Inn’s front door; he saw a window had blown out. The smell of gasoline was intense.... He pulled hi
mself together and realized that when the bomb went off, he’d instinctively jammed the truck’s gear shift into park, and had rolled out the door.... Hadn’t thought about it—nothing had gone through his mind at all—he’d just done it.
More people were running toward him, and the truck and trailer, and he pointed at the two closest, the ones who’d come out of the Holiday Inn, and said, “Keep everybody away. Keep everybody back. There’s gasoline all over the place. One of you, get inside and call nine-one-one and tell them we need a fire truck here now. Go.”
A minute later, when the first deputy arrived, Virgil was already on the phone to Barlow: “The guy came after me. He blew up my boat.”
“I’m coming,” Barlow said.
THE DEPUTY RAN UP and asked, “You okay?”
“Well, I’m scared shitless,” Virgil said.
“Man: you’re lucky to be alive. Anybody hurt inside?” He went running into the Holiday Inn.
Virgil let him go: he was feeling a little distant from events.
GAS HAD STOPPED POURING out of the boat, but was still trickling out. He had a twenty-gallon tank that ran under the floor, and it had been a miracle, he thought, that the gas hadn’t started burning. Staying well back, Virgil made a wide circle, checking the damage. The boat was gone: totaled. The blast had ripped the boat in half, right at the midsection. The bomb must have been in one of the rod-storage lockers down the right side of the boat, he thought.
He worked through it. The bomb would have been more certainly deadly, he thought, if it had been placed under the driver’s door of the truck. That would have done him for sure. But he’d parked the truck right out front, where it could be seen from both the Holiday Inn and the highway. Too much traffic to take the risk . . .
The boat, on the other hand, had been in the overflow lot, where Virgil had parked it to get it out of the way. There were lights, but it’d still be dim back there; and depending on how the bomb was rigged, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds to put it down inside the rod locker.
At least, he thought—still feeling a little distant—they hadn’t gotten his muskie rods. He hadn’t had them out yet. He’d lost a couple walleye rigs, and a nice little ultralight bass rod and reel....
More deputies came in, and rubberneckers, and then the fire truck, and Virgil stood on a curb and watched them foam the gasoline. Barlow arrived, and came trotting over, followed by one of the crime-scene technicians. He put a hand on Virgil’s shoulder and asked, “You okay?”
“More or less,” Virgil said. “I’d like to get the truck away from there, so I can stay mobile. I didn’t want to do anything until you got here.”
“Give us a few minutes to look at it,” Barlow said. Then, “I wonder why he didn’t put it under the truck . . . ?”
Virgil told him his theory on that, and the ATF man nodded and said, “You’re probably right.” They’d been drifting down the line of the wrecked boat, still well away, as the firemen finished up. Barlow said, “I bet it was another mousetrap and it was set to go off when you opened that locker. It would have taken you apart. It would have been like somebody stuffed a hand grenade down your shirt. You were lucky.”
Ahlquist showed up, red-faced and angry: “Man, he’s going after us now. He’s completely off the goldarned rails. You okay? Man . . .”
VIRGIL WANDERED OFF and took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Davenport. “Did I mention to you that I brought my boat along, you know, in case an after-hours fishing opportunity came up?”
“Tell me something surprising,” Davenport said.
“Okay. This fuckin’ bomber just blew it up.”
“What?”
“It’s gone, man. Cut in half. Truck’s okay.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m a little freaked. He set it to kill me, no question. Goddamnit, Lucas, I’m shakin’ like a shaved Chihuahua.”
“You want some guys? I could get Shrake and Jenkins and be up there in a couple hours, help you tear the ass off the place.”
“Nothing to tear up right now. Maybe tomorrow—I’ll let you know. I just gotta get organized here, I gotta get the truck and get going.”
“Hey, Virg—go get a beer, or a cheeseburger, or something. Sit down for a while. That’s what I do when some shit happens. Man . . .”
VIRGIL RANG OFF and walked back to where Ahlquist was standing, talking to Barlow, and asked, “Anybody hurt inside?”
“Two windows got knocked out, that big one on the front, and then there’s a small one, upstairs, in an empty room,” Ahlquist said. “So . . . no. Nobody hurt.”
“But he was trying his best,” Barlow said. “When he put the bomb in that rod locker, he did you a favor—there are about six aluminum walls between the bomb and the truck, and they soaked up the blast going forward. Didn’t even knock the windows out of the truck. But if somebody had been standing on the sidewalk when it went, they’d be dead.”
“It’s been sheer luck that he hasn’t killed a whole bunch of people,” Ahlquist said.
“We can move the truck, if you want it,” Barlow said. “We’re not going to get much out of this bomb—all that gasoline and foam would have taken out most of the evidence.”
Ahlquist: “I wonder why the gas didn’t blow?”
“Not much fire involved,” Barlow said. “That’s why most cars don’t burn when they’re hit.”
“I’ll take the truck,” Virgil said. “I gotta get some breakfast. I’m just, uh . . . I gotta get some food.”
“Sure you’re okay?” Ahlquist asked. “You’re sorta mumbling at us.”
“I was scared,” Virgil said. “But now, I’m getting pissed. Really, really, royally . . . I gotta get some food.”
HE ATE WHAT HE THOUGHT was about a three-thousand-calorie breakfast at Country Kitchen: French toast with hash browns, eggs over easy, regular toast, and two orders of link sausage, gobbling it down like somebody was going to take it away from him. When he was done, he felt a little sick from the grease, but his head was clearing out.
The bomb wasn’t the first time somebody had tried to kill him, but this one had shaken him. He hadn’t been kept alive by skill, or by reflexes, or by fast thinking; he was alive because he got lucky. If he hadn’t driven over a curb, he’d have died sometime during the day.
Simple as that. The coldness of the fact shook him. He was finishing the third of his three Diet Cokes when Davenport called him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Except for the fact that I just swallowed about a pint of grease, I’m okay.”
“ ’Cause I just talked to Hendrix, and he said if you’re too close to an explosion, the atmospheric pressure overload can screw you up, all by itself. Even if you don’t get hit by any of the shrapnel. They’re seeing that with guys coming back from Afghanistan.”
“I’ll take my pulse three times a day,” Virgil said.
“Seriously, keep it in mind,” Davenport said. “They say that what happens is, the next time you’re under a lot of stress, a vein pops in your brain. Usually, when you’re having sex. You get really worked up, and your blood pressure goes up, and just when you’re, you know, getting there, pop, there goes the vein, and you’re dead.”
“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said.
“I did make up that last part, about the sex,” Davenport said. “But seriously, if you start getting funky, talk to someone. It’s called ‘blastrelated traumatic brain injury’ or ‘blast syndrome.’ You can look it up on the Net. They see it even in people with no obvious physical injury.”
“Lucas . . . thanks. I’m more pissed off than hurt. I’m so mad, I . . . Now it’s personal.”
“Glad to hear it,” Davenport said. “Things move quicker that way.”
13
VIRGIL WENT BACK TO THE SCENE of destruction: because of the mess caused by fire suppression, preservation of the crime scene wasn’t as important as it otherwise might have been, and the boat and trailer had b
een towed out of the street and parked at the far end of the Holiday Inn lot, where one of the ATF crime-scene techs was working through it.
“The guy’s giving us a lot of business,” he said, when Virgil walked up.
“You find anything good?”
“Got one end of the pipe. It blew right through the front sidewall on that locker, and the wall of the next locker, but then the hull stopped it. Same pipe as before. The guy went into that college and cut it up, and he’s using it one piece at a time. If we can find him, we can hang him with the rest of it.”
“We’ll find him,” Virgil said.
“Sorry about your boat. I thought maybe you could salvage the engine, but some shrapnel went right through the cowling. The electronics are toast.”
“Wonderful.” Made him want to cry.
THE BOAT WAS AN OLDER Alumacraft Classic single-console model with a fifty-horse Yamaha hung off the back; a decent boat, usable on big water only on calmer days, but fine for most smaller Minnesota lakes. Virgil had bought it used, with a state credit union loan, and had only just finished paying it off. He wasn’t sure, but if he remembered correctly his insurance policy had some kind of caveat about payment in case of “war or civil insurrection.”
Was a bomb the same as war?
HE WAS STILL LOOKING at the boat when he got a call from Ahlquist: “The paper got a crazy note, supposedly from the bomber. You need to come take a look at it. We’ve got it down at my office.”
“Are they sure it’s from the bomber?”
“Yeah. They’re sure. It mentions, I quote, ‘state Gestapo agents.’ The state Gestapo agents would be you,” Ahlquist said.
“I’ll be over,” Virgil said. “Listen, have you had anybody checking the motel and the other buildings around here for witnesses?”