“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?
HE THOUGHT 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 reason. 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.”
“You can’t see potential money,” Virgil said.
“But it’s real,” Pye said, shaking a fat finger at him. “It’s the thing that drives this whole country. People thinking about money, and how to get it. There are people out there who break their hearts over money. It happens every day. The shrinks talk about sex, and cops talk about drugs, and liberals talk about fundamentalist religion, and the right-wingers talk about creeping socialism, but what people think of, most of the time, is money. When I was the horniest I ever was, and I was a horny rascal, I didn’t think about sex for more’n an hour a day, and I’d spend sixteen hours thinking about money.”
“But that means that the motive might not have any . . . exterior . . . at all,” Virgil said. “It’s just something in some guy’s head.”
Pye shrugged: “That’s true. But that doesn’t make it unimportant.”
“Not a hell of a lot of help, Willard,” Virgil said.
“It might be, if you ever come up with a good suspect,” Pye said. “Once you get a name, start analyzing his history, talking to his friends and neighbors, there’s a good chance you’ll find his . . . dream.”
“Which you stepped on,” Virgil said.
Pye shrugged again, waved his hand at the raw dirt and the concrete pads: “This is my dream. Why shouldn’t I have my dream?”
VIRGIL HAD A FEW ANSWERS to that, but didn’t feel like tangling with Pye right at the moment. So he said good-bye to Pye and Chapman, and headed back to his truck. Halfway into downtown, he took a call from Jenkins, the BCA investigator.
“All done. We’re going over to a place called Bunson’s. You know where it is?”
“I can find it,” Virgil said, which he could, having eaten almost all of his meals there. “You get both Martin and Gore?”
“Yeah. Gore put up a fight, but we clubbed her to her knees, cuffed her. I don’t know how she got those bruises on her face; probably a domestic squabble.”
“You’re joking,” Virgil said.
“Of course I am,” Jenkins said. “I only said that because you’d be worried that I wasn’t.”
“I’ll see you at Bunson’s,” Virgil said.
JENKINS AND SHRAKE WERE PARTNERS of long standing, both big men who dressed in sharp suits that looked like they might have fallen off a truck in Little Italy, and were referred to as “the thugs” around the BCA. They were often used for hard takedowns; they were fairly easygoing, when not actually involved in a fight.
Virgil found them talking over beers at Bunson’s, took a chair, ordered a beer of his own, and asked how it had gone.
“Routine, but you know—you feel a little bad,” Shrake said. “They were both crying and pleading. It’s not like busting some asshole who knows the rules.”
“I didn’t feel that bad,” Jenkins said.
“That’s because you’re cruel, and you enjoy the spectacle of other human beings in pain,” Shrake said. “I’m not that way.”
Jenkins said, “Mmm. This beer is kinda skunky.”
Shrake said to Virgil, “So walk us through this case. Lucas said you’d flown in some private luxury jet over to Michigan.”
Virgil took them through it, and when he was done, Shrake said, “So let me get this straight: you can’t get anybody into this Pinnacle, but you think someone could have gotten down from the roof.”
“But you can’t get on the roof,” V
irgil said. “I even found a guy who’s a glider pilot, and he says you’d need at least three hundred yards to land a glider up there.... I asked about parachutes, but then you’d need a pilot who’s an accomplice.”
Shrake unwrapped his index finger from his beer bottle, pointed it at Virgil and said, “So I guess it’s a safe bet that you never heard of motorized paragliders.”
Virgil said, “Uh . . .”
Jenkins said to his partner, “No more beer.”
SHRAKE SAID, “I SAW A WI-FI label on the door, wonder if it’s real.” He groped around in his bag, pulled out a battered white MacBook, got online with Google, poked a few keys, called up a YouTube video, and turned the computer around so it faced Virgil.
YouTube was running a Cadillac ad, followed by a four-minute video in which a guy drove into a parking lot and unpacked what looked like a parachute, laying it on the concrete. He then pulled on a backpack motor, with a small propeller in a metal cage, hooked himself to the parachute, and fired up the motor.
The airstream from the propeller inflated the chute, and the guy took a few steps across the concrete pad and was in the air. He flew a few hundred feet in a circle, did a short running landing, killed the engine, put the backpack motor in the back of his truck, folded up the chute, packed it away, then threw it in his truck . . . and did it all in four minutes and ten seconds.
“Holy shit,” Virgil said. “How did you know about this?”
“I have wide interests,” Shrake said. “Also, insomnia.”
Virgil spent another five minutes on Google, looking up paragliders, then gulped the rest of his beer and said, “I gotta go,” and he was gone. Outside, he got on the phone to Barlow: “Are you still at Erikson’s?”
“Just left.”