He went back to the truck, got his ID case, came over, and flipped it open to show the woman, who seemed to be the senior cop. She nodded and said her name was something O’Hara, and that the other deputy was Tom Mack. Virgil stuck the case in his back pocket and asked, “So where’d this guy get killed? Right here?”
Mack nodded, and faced off to his left, pointed behind the yellow tape. “Right over there. You can still see a little blood. That’s where most of him was. His head was over there-popped right off, like they do. There were other pieces around. The guy who was wounded, he soaked up quite a bit of the body.”
“He still in the hospital?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, he was crazy hysterical, I guess,” O’Hara said. “He’s not right yet. They gave him a bunch of drugs, trying to straighten him out. Not hurt bad. Can’t hear anything, but there’re no holes in him.”
At that moment, a business jet flew overhead, low, and Mack said, “That must be Pye. Willard T. Pye. They said he was coming in.”
“Good, that’ll help,” Virgil said.
O’Hara showed a hint of a smile and said, “Nothing like a multibillionaire looking over your shoulder, when you’re trying to work.”
“So, you said the guy’s head popped off, like they do,” Virgil said to Mack. “You know about bombs or something? I don’t know anything.”
Mack shrugged. “I did two tours in Iraq with the Guard. That’s what you always heard about suicide bombers-they’d pull the trigger, and their heads would go straight up, like basketballs. Think if there’s a big blast, and you’re close to it, well, your skull is a pretty solid unit, and it hangs together, but it comes loose of your neck. So… that’s what I heard. But I don’t really know.” He looked at O’Hara. “You hear that?”
“Yeah, I think everybody did. But maybe it was from some movie. I don’t know that it’s a fact.”
“You in the Guard, too?” Virgil asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, I did a tour with a Black Hawk unit. I was a crew chief and door gunner.”
“I did some time in the army, but I was a cop, and never had much to do with bombs,” Virgil said. They traded a few war stories, and then Mack nodded toward the road. “Here comes the VIP convoy. That’d be the sheriff in front, and that big black Tahoe is the ATF, and I don’t know who-all behind that. They’ve been having a meeting at the courthouse.”
“Good thing I’m late,” Virgil said. “I might’ve had to go to it… You got media?”
“Yeah, and there they are,” O’Hara said. “Right behind the convoy. Tell you what, and don’t mention I said it, but you don’t want to be standing between the sheriff and a TV camera, unless you want cleat marks up your ass.”
Virgil saw a white truck, followed by another white truck, and then a third one. “Ah, man. I forgot to wash my hair this morning.”
“Forgot to bring your gun, too,” Mack said.
“Oh, I got a gun,” Virgil said. “I just forgot where it is.”
The Kandiyohi County Sheriff was a tall beefy Swede named Earl Ahlquist, a known imperialist. Four years past, he’d pointed out to a money-desperate city council that there was a lot of police-work duplication in Kandiyohi County, and they could cut their policing costs in half by firing their own department and hiring him to do the city’s police work. There was some jumping up and down, but when the dust settled, the two departments had merged and Ahlquist was king.
Ahlquist climbed out of his car, nodded at Virgil, and said, “I hate that shirt.”
“It’s what I wear on my day off,” Virgil said. “How you doing, Earl?”
“Other than the fact that a guy got murdered this morning, and we got a mad bomber roaming around loose, and I missed both lunch and dinner, and I’m running on three Snickers bars and some Ding Dongs, I’m just fine.”
“I had some pretty good barbeque and a few beers this afternoon, before I was called on my day off,” Virgil said. “I was watching some good-looking women play beach volleyball.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. This is your day off. Tough titty,” Ahlquist said. He turned to the crowd coming up behind him. “You know Jack LeCourt? He’s our top man here in the city. Jack, this is Virgil Flowers from the BCA, and, Virgil, this is Jim Barlow, he’s with the ATF outa the Grand Rapids field office, he’s been working the first bomb up in Michigan… This is Geraldine Gore, the mayor.”
The sheriff made all the introductions and they all shook hands and had something to say about Virgil’s pink shirt, and then O’Hara said, “We got a jet just landed at the airport, Chief. I think Pye’s here.”
“Aw, man,” Barlow said. He was a tall dark man, with hooded dark brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and a neatly trimmed black mustache. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue button-down shirt, and a dark blue blazer.
“He hasn’t been that much help?” Virgil asked.
“First thing he did was offer a one-million-dollar reward leading to the arrest and conviction,” Barlow said. “Then he gave his secretary’s family a two-million-dollar gift from the company, and gave the food-service lady, who was cut up, a quarter-million-dollar bonus. All the millions flying around meant he got wall-to-wall TV, and every time he went on, he bitched about progress. When we told him what we were doing, he leaked it. When I heard about this bomb, I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere. At least we know where the guy’s from. But you watch: it’ll be wall-to-wall TV here, too, in about fifteen minutes.”
“I can handle that. No need for you to get involved,” Ahlquist said, and from behind his back, O’Hara winked at Virgil.
Virgil said, “So, as the humblest of the investigators here… can somebody tell me what happened?”
The mayor unself-consciously scratched her ass and said, “I’d like to know that myself.”
3
Barlow knew his bombs.
The explosive, he said, had the same characteristics as the first one, so he was assuming that it was again the stuff called Pelex, as in the Michigan bomb. “That’s basically TNT, which is 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene. To make Pelex, they mixed in about fifteen percent aluminum powder, which makes the TNT faster-increases the speed with which it develops its maximum pressure.”
“To give you a bigger pop,” Virgil said.
“Exactly. The bomber put this stuff, I think, inside a good-sized galvanized steel plumbing pipe,” Barlow said. “The pipe was sitting on the floor, just inside the door. The trigger could have been something as simple as a string down from the handle to a mousetrap.”
“Mousetrap?”
“Yes.” Barlow gestured at the techs working inside the trailer. “We found a wire spring that looks like it came from an ordinary mousetrap. We don’t know if there were mousetraps set inside the trailer to catch mice, but it would have been an effective way to fire the switch on the bomb. You get a battery, an electric blasting cap, a switch worked through the mousetrap, and there you go. Move the door, fire the mousetrap, and boom.”
“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
