He got on the phone to Barlow, and when the ATF man answered, he asked, “You find any pieces of the bomb casing? The pipe, or whatever?”
“Yeah, a few pieces from the trailer,” Barlow said. “It’s galvanized steel pipe, probably salvaged from an older house, used for interior plumbing. Same as was used in Michigan. Might have got it from a dump. Hell, sometimes it’s used for outdoor railings . . . used to be all over the place.”
“Did you ever find a piece of a cut end?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, we did. We found both ends in Michigan,” Barlow said. “We’re not talking about it, because if we find the guy, we can match the pipe. We don’t want him to get rid of it.”
“Was it cut with a power saw, or a hacksaw?”
“Power saw, definitely . . . . Hmm, I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“The guy has some tools,” Virgil said. “He has a power saw that cuts pipe. That’s not something you see in everybody’s workshop. He can get parts. He knows about electrical wiring . . . at least something. How to use batteries . . .”
“See? You’re profiling him,” Barlow said. “This town has eighteen thousand people? You probably got it down to a few hundred. Maybe less.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know which few hundred,” Virgil said.
BUTTERNUT FALLS HAD a half-dozen hardware stores, but only a couple that might sell something as specialized as a pipe cutter. Virgil didn’t know much about metal-cutting tools, but even if the bomber was simply able to buy a metal-cutting blade for a table saw, there were only a few places that sold table saws: a Home Depot, a Menards, a Fleet Farm, a Hardware Hank.
He’d seen the Home Depot when he came into town, so he headed that way, a five-minute trip, parked, went inside to the “Tools” section, found a woman in an orange apron, identified himself, and asked, “You got anybody here who’s like a woodworking hobbyist, a guy who knows about workshops and so on?”
“That would be Lawrence,” she said. “Let me find him for you.”
While she did that, Virgil went down the aisle and looked at all the power saws—table saws, band saws, miter saws. He’d always been handy enough with simple tools, but like a lot of men, always felt guilty about not knowing more. Like, exactly how did a router work? Shouldn’t all males know that?
The store clerk came back with a mustachioed older man in another orange apron, and introduced him as Lawrence, who had a home workshop and gave woodworking lessons. Virgil explained the problem, and concluded with: “. . . so we’d like to know who’d have a workshop well-enough equipped to cut a three-inch galvanized steel pipe.”
“Well, hell, you could do that with a Sawzall. You wouldn’t need a workshop. If you didn’t want to buy the Sawzall, you could rent one from us,” Lawrence said.
“Really?”
“Sure. You’d have to buy a bi-metal blade, but I mean, you really don’t need a workshop,” Lawrence said. “Who told you you’d need a workshop?”
Virgil didn’t want to say, “I did,” because he’d sound ignorant, so he said, “This federal guy. Hang on, I’m going to give him a ring.”
He stepped away and got Barlow on the phone and relayed what Lawrence had said. “Sawzall’s are a dime a dozen, man.”
Barlow said, “Well, your Lawrence guy is absolutely right, you could cut the pipe with a Sawzall. But our guy didn’t. Our tool-marks specialist says it was cut with some kind of chop saw, not with a Sawzall.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Virgil said.
Virgil relayed what Barlow had said, and Lawrence scratched his thinning yellow hair and said, “They can tell that? Huh. Must be, heck, I don’t know—I probably know forty guys who have chop saws, miter saws, in their workshops, and there are probably two hundred floating around town. Of course, we sell almost no metal-cutting blades here. Most people use their saws for woodworking.”
“You sell any of the metal-cutting blades recently?” Virgil asked.
“I didn’t. But the guy probably wouldn’t ask, he’d probably just come in and find it himself. There’s probably some way to look at the inventory . . . that’d be one of the computer guys who could tell you that,” Lawrence said. “They sell them over at Fleet Farm and Menards, too. And if you were going to do something illegal, and didn’t want to buy one locally, you might run into the Cities, and they probably sell hundreds of blades over there.”
“Damn it: I thought I was onto something,” Virgil said.
“Let me ask around, the boys,” Lawrence said. “Maybe somebody’ll have an idea.”
Virgil thanked him, gave him a card, and told him to call if he learned anything.
BACK IN THE TRUCK, he made a note to check with the BCA researcher to see if there was a way to check with Home Depot, Menards, and Fleet Farm to see if any metal-cutting chop-saw blades had been sold recently, and if so, if there’d been a credit card attached to the sale. He had little hope that anything would come of it.
Sitting there in the sun, looking at Ahlquist’s list of possible interviews, and Kline the pharmacist’s list of names, he sighed and shook his head. He’d have to do the legwork, but if the guy was clever, the legwork wouldn’t turn up much.
What, the guy was going to confess when Virgil dropped by?
If he got anything, it’d come at an angle—he’d get it as a result of looking at something else. Looking at Kline’s list, he called Ahlquist and asked him to get subpoenas for people who used antipsychotic medications.
“I’ll have O’Hara do it, and have her serve them,” the sheriff said. “We’ll have them tonight.”
“How about the press conference?”
“We’re gonna have one whether we want to or not, with two separate incidents, now. I got a TV truck right now, taking pictures of the limo, and talking to Harvey, and more are coming in. What time should I make the conference?”
“Later this afternoon . . . give us some space, and time to think. Maybe . . . three o’clock?”
“See you then. Unless another bomb goes off. Then I’ll see you sooner.”
With that taken care of, he dug out his iPad, turned it on, and got a map with directions to the hospital. He stopped at a local coffee shop and got a skinny hot chocolate, and then went off to the hospital.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN WAS in a bed in the critical care ward, not because he was badly hurt, but because he was confused, and the confusion could be the result of some continuing head injury.
“We want to protect against the possibility of a trauma-induced seizure, or stroke,” a doctor told Virgil.
Sullivan’s confusion seemed to be diminishing, the doc said, but at times he flashed back to the moment after the explosion, when he wiped the gore from his face and eyes and saw Kingsley’s head on the ground, and saw the dead man’s eyes open and looking at him.
“A pure psychological thing, but real enough,” the doc said. “It should get better over time, but he’ll never escape it completely. The effects will always be there, the changes in his life and career and prospects.”
“Could those be better, instead of worse?” Virgil asked.
The doc grinned and said, “Nobody ever asked me that. Okay, they could be better, but how would you know? Say he goes on to be a millionaire, and he thinks, If I hadn’t been blown up, I’d be a billionaire. So what do you say about that?”
Virgil shrugged. “You say, ‘Well, that’s life. Suck it up, cowboy.’ ”
“That’s why you’re not getting paid two hundred dollars an hour, like me,” the doc said.
SULLIVAN WAS PROPPED UP on a couple of pillows, and except for what looked like a wind-burned face, seemed okay. A handsome young woman sat on a chair to one side, flipping through an Elle magazine, while a guy in a suit had his butt propped against a windowsill, taking notes on a yellow pad inside a leather folder.
When Virgil came in and introduced himself, the woman said, “He’s been really good. He still has a ringing in his ears, but I think he’ll be just fi
ne.”
And the man said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t know anything of the sort, Mary, and you have to stop telling people that.”
Virgil understood that the man with the folder was a lawyer and the woman was Sullivan’s wife. Virgil turned to the injured man and said, “I don’t really, uh, want to question your condition, Mr. Sullivan. I’m more interested in what happened before the explosion. People you may have seen around the site. . . .”
The lawyer said, “No matter who he may or may not have seen around the site, I don’t think we can say he really had any responsibility—”
Virgil said, “Look, I’m here to interview Mr. Sullivan. He is not suspected of a crime and I’m not investigating him. He’s a witness and he has no right of silence. So, I’m happy enough to let you sit there, but if you interrupt, I’ll have to ask you to leave. Okay?”
The lawyer said four or five hundred words, which Virgil waved off. “Fine, fine. But if you interrupt, I’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for interfering with a police officer, even though doing that would be a pain in the ass, and handcuff you out in the hallway until I’m done here, and then we’ll both go down to the jail. Okay? Just shut up, and let me do my job.”
The woman said, “I don’t think you can talk to a lawyer like that.”
“Of course I can,” Virgil said. “I just did. Now, Mr. Sullivan . . .”
Sullivan had one thing.
He couldn’t remember the explosion, though he could remember seeing Kingsley’s head. He didn’t see anything suspicious around the work site, except the one thing.
“The one thing was, there was a guy who was watching us through binoculars. We all saw him, once or twice. We joked about it. He was off behind the site, between the site and the river. I only actually saw him once. He was pretty far away, and I saw more movement than I did his body. He was wearing camo, I think, which seemed weird to me, because I don’t think there are any hunting seasons going on. It made me wonder if he’d been watching us regular-like. The way I saw him was that it was in the evening, and the sun was going down to the northwest, and he was south of us, and I saw the flash off the binocular lenses. I saw the flash two different days, but the second day, I never saw the man, just a flash from down in the bush.”
“Down in the bush,” Virgil said. “He was below you?”
“Yeah. There’s heavy brush back there, but the land generally falls away from the store, toward the river,” Sullivan said. “That’s why these people think the parking lot will drain into the Butternut, because the land falls away. We’ve got retention systems and everything else and I was telling—”
Suddenly his eyes went wide, the blood drained from his face, and he turned his face to the woman and groaned, “Mary, my God . . .”
The woman dropped the magazine and stood and then bent over him and said, “It’s okay, Mike, you’re just fine, Mike.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, his eyes are looking right at me but they’re all white, looking right at me . . .”
THE FLASHBACK LASTED only a few seconds, but there was no question of its reality: Sullivan appeared to be slipping into shock, and Virgil sent the lawyer to find a doctor.
“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore,” Sullivan’s wife said.
Virgil nodded: “I think you’re right.”
Back outside, Virgil thought about what Sullivan had said, and decided to go look in the brush behind the PyeMart site. Maybe he’d find a matchbook from the café where the bomber hung out.
Or not.
7
BEFORE DRIVING OUT to the PyeMart site, Virgil stopped at the scene of the limo bombing. The twisted vehicle was still in the middle of the street, and Barlow was working on it with one of the ATF technicians. Virgil ducked under the crime-scene tape and asked Barlow, “Anything?”
“The usual. Did find pieces of the pipe, that galvanized plumbing stuff, but finding a fingerprint . . .” He shook his head.
“A pipe dream,” Virgil said.
“Yeah.”
Virgil filled him in on his morning, and Barlow said that Sullivan’s symptoms weren’t unusual. “People see other people shot to death, and it affects them, but not the way a nearby bomb does. The Israelis have all kinds of studies on it—there’s actually a physical impact, from the shock wave, and then the psychological aftereffects. Any of it can kill you. Bombing victims have an elevated rate of suicide . . . they can’t deal with it, a bomb.”
Willard Pye and his assistant were still on the scene, and Pye came over and asked Virgil for a minute of his time. They stepped away from Barlow, who went back to work, digging out the inside of the limousine, scrap by scrap.
Pye said, “I’ve decided to stick around for a couple more days, but I’ve had my assistant researching you, and what she found out, it’s pretty interesting. You might be my guy.”
“Mr. Pye—”
Pye made a shushing hand gesture and said, “Just listen for a minute. I’m gonna stay out here and watch them work this. In the meantime, my jet airplane is sitting out there at the airport, doing nothing, for a couple thousand dollars a day. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in flying back to Grand Rapids, to take a look at the Pinnacle. See if you can figure out how this butthead got inside, for one thing. Maybe you’ll learn something. Barlow’s a smart guy, but he’s not somebody who can . . . put himself in a criminal’s place, so to speak.”
Virgil said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea, if I come up dry here. But I’ve got more stuff to do here.”
“We’re two hours from the airport at Grand Rapids. When you finish up tonight—you can’t be working it much after dark—you could get on the plane, have a nice little meal, a couple of beers, check out the building, bed down in the Pinnacle’s guest quarters, good as any hotel, get up early and be back here for breakfast.”
“How many people are going in and out of the building?” Virgil asked.
“A lot,” Pye admitted. “There’s right around twenty-five hundred employees, and we have another big administrative site over in Grand Rapids, and those people are coming and going all the time. But we have security. We have a card check at the door, we have cameras, we have guards all over the first couple of floors.”
“Did the feds go through the photography?”
“Yeah, they had a couple of guys working it, but it didn’t come to anything.”
“Let me think about it,” Virgil said.
“You got the plane if you want it,” Pye said. “I hope you take it.”
VIRGIL WENT OUT to the PyeMart site and found two deputies sitting on the same two folding chairs, and a patrol car, but no crime-scene technician. The senior cop told Virgil, “The one guy is helping Barlow at the car-bombing scene, and the other went out to the limo driver’s house, to see if there’s anything around where the car was parked. So, we’re just sitting here.”
“Nice day for it, anyway,” Virgil said. And it was. He went back to his truck, put on hiking boots, got a hat and his Nikon, and headed across the construction pad. Given the location of the trailer, and with the binocular flash coming from the southeast, the watcher, whoever he was, must have been in a fairly narrow piece of real estate to the left of the main building pad.
Virgil walked to the edge of the construction site—nobody working, construction had been halted until the ATF gave the go-ahead—and plunged into the brush. He hadn’t gone far, quartering back and forth through the scrub, before he found a game trail that led away to the south. Fifty yards south, a gopher mound that overlapped the trail showed the edge of a human footprint. Virgil stepped carefully around it, then took a photo, using a dollar bill for scale, and moved on south.
He’d looked at the site on a Google satellite photo: a loop of the Butternut cut a channel in the rising land to a point that the Google measuring tape said was about six hundred and fifty yards from the highway, and directly south of the PyeMart site. The game trail went that way, and Virgil follow
ed it, looking for more prints. He found a couple of indentations, but nothing that would help identify a shoe.
He’d been walking for fifteen minutes or so, brush and weeds up higher than his head, following the game trail, slowly, when he broke into an open grassy slope that went down to the Butternut.
The river—creek—wasn’t much more than thirty or forty feet wide at that point, and shallow, with riffles showing where the water was running over stone. Both above and below the riffles, broad pools cut into the banks. A hundred yards upstream, a man in a weirdlooking white suit, broad-brimmed white hat, and waders was working deeper water with a fly-casting rod. Virgil went that way, and when he’d covered about half the ground, the man snapped the rod up, and Virgil saw that he had a fish on the line, and stopped to watch.
The man’s rod was long and slender and caramel-colored, and he played the fish with great delicacy. At some point, Virgil realized that the rod was made of bamboo—something you didn’t see much of—and the pale gold fishing line was probably silk.
The man brought in the trout, landing it with a small net that he unclipped from an equipment belt. He looked around, as if for witnesses, spotted Virgil, and held up the trout—it was perhaps a foot long, not a bad fish, for a trout, in the Butternut—and then slipped it back in the water.
Virgil continued toward him, and the man clambered out of the water and said, “Be nice if the water were about ten degrees warmer. Nice for me, if not the trout.”
Virgil said, “That was a nice little fish. I’ll have to bring my rod down.”
“I haven’t seen you around,” the man said. “Are you working over at the PyeMart?”
“Sort of,” Virgil said. “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m looking for this bomber.”
“Good luck with that,” the fisherman said.
As they were talking, Virgil was looking the guy over. He was tall and thin and large-nosed, his face weathered from sun exposure, like a golfer . . . or a fisherman. He was perhaps forty-five. Virgil had never seen a fishing outfit like the man was wearing: not quite white, more of a muslin color, and fitted like a suit coat, with lapels, and matching pleated pants.