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 fine.”
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 cafe where the bomber hung out.
Or not.
7
