do know one thing about the world, though, and that’s that we’ve got way too many people, and way too few trout. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ We’re not talking about trout qua trout, but trout as a symbol of everything that’s good for the environment.”
They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”
As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.
“You think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.
Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”
“Tell me,” Virgil said.
“Market research.”
“Market research?”
“Do an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your friends and tell you confidentially who is most likely to be the bomber. You set up some rules: tell people they aren’t to name old enemies, or people of color or other victims of prejudice. Then give them the clues you have, so far, tell them to think really hard: Who is he? If you put this in the paper, you’d have five thousand replies by tonight. You go through the replies, and you’d find probably ten suspects, coming up over and over. One of them will be the bomber.”
“You think?”
“I’d bet you a thousand American dollars,” Peck said. He finished putting the last fly in a fly case, put it in another pocket.
“You got a thousand dollars?” Virgil asked.
“I do.”
Virgil said, “I like the concept, but it’d be pretty unorthodox. My boss would have a hernia.”
Peck said, “Because he’s stuck in the past.” He nodded to Virgil and said, “Don’t fall in,” and went on his way, back upstream.
Virgil went downstream, for a quarter mile, then back up, ambling along the bank, looking for anything, not finding much. The riverbanks saw quite a bit of foot traffic, Virgil thought, judging from the beaten-down brush. He got back to the spot where he’d met Peck, and continued upstream after him, but never saw him again.
Fifty yards above the place where they’d talked, he saw another trail cutting into the brush toward the PyeMart, and he followed it. Toward the end of it, fifteen yards from the edge of the raw earth of the construction zone, he found a nest beaten down in the weeds-a spot were somebody, or something, had spent some time. It could have been a deer bed, he thought, although it might be a little short for that, and he’d seen none of the liver- colored deer poop he would have expected around a bedding area.
On the other hand, even if it wasn’t a deer bed, there wasn’t anything about it that would point toward a particular human being. He walked along the edge of the construction line, back to the point where he’d first stepped into the brush, but saw nothing else that looked like a bed, or a nest.
If somebody were still watching the PyeMart, would he be coming back? Might it be worthwhile to ask the sheriff to have a deputy camp out here for a while? Get a sleeping bag and a book or two, and simply lie back in the weeds and see who came along?
He’d think about that.
He’d also think about market research; and about the man who suggested profiling. Wouldn’t market research just be a mass profiling? Didn’t the FBI believe in profiling, even if the ATF didn’t?
In the meantime, he had people to interview.
Ernie Stanton was working in his office behind Ernie’s Oil #1-the office was one of the modest, prefab brick- and-corrugated-metal buildings that could be thrown up in a couple of weeks, and that dotted the back streets of small working towns. His secretary, with a plaque that said “Office Manager,” sat next to the door, a delicate, slightly fleshy prairie flower with honey-blond hair and pink cheeks. Stanton, a squarish man with deep lines cutting his wind-burned face on either side of his prominent nose, sat at a desk in the back. Virgil introduced himself and Stanton said, “I wondered when you’d be around, me being the town radical and all.”
He smiled, but there was nothing funny or happy about his face, which was getting redder by the second.
Virgil said, “Well, you said it. I mean, everybody I talk to says, ‘Ernie Stanton.’ They say that not only do you want to stop PyeMart, any way you can, but you’ve got the brains and the background to do it.”
“You mean I’m a shitkicker,” Stanton said.
“Hell, I’m a shitkicker,” Virgil said. He dropped in a chair in front of Stanton’s desk. “But I don’t go around blowing people up with pipe bombs.”
“Neither do I,” Stanton said. “Though, if somebody’s got to get blown up, Pye would be a good place to start. That damn store is going to tear this town up. Hell, it already has. Everybody knows that Pye bought the city council and the mayor. They’ll be leaving town right after the next election.”
“So you didn’t blow anybody up, and you don’t know who’s doing it?”
“If I knew, I’d tell the cops,” Stanton said. He hesitated, then added, “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Pye’s killing me. I won’t even be able to sell my businesses when he gets through. Probably won’t even be able to sell the buildings-what’d you use them for? Art studios? If he got killed and they pulled the plug on this store, it’d be like I got a reprieve from the death penalty.”
Virgil looked at him for a moment, and from behind him, the secretary said, “I second everything Ernie just said.”
“Where were you last night?” Virgil asked.
“At home. Ate dinner down at Bunson’s with my wife and my youngest kid, got home about seven, watched a ball game until about nine o’clock or so. Put the kids to bed, watched TV with my wife until eleven, went to bed. Of course, that alibi’s no good, because it’s only my wife and kids, and this whole deal will drag them down, just as much as me.”
“You been out of town in the last month?”
“No, sir. I been here every day,” Stanton said.
“And you’ve got people who aren’t in your family… aren’t your secretary… who’ll say that?”
“Well, hell, I don’t know,” Stanton said. “Probably. I use my credit card for most everything I buy, and I usually buy something every day. Groceries, or something. But, how’d I know I’d have to prove I was here every day? If I’d known that, I could have set something up.”
“Good answer,” Virgil said.
He saw Stanton relax just a notch, his shoulders folding back and down into his office chair. From behind Virgil, the secretary said, “I also have a calendar which gives you his appointments every day. Like he went to the dentist twice last week.”
Virgil swiveled around and said, “Don’t throw it away.”
Going back to Stanton, he asked, “You know about the car bombing this morning?”
Stanton nodded. “Yeah, I went out and looked at it. It’s still sitting there. Didn’t hear the boom, but my wife was down at County Market, shopping, and she heard it, and saw it, and called me.”
Virgil said, “The bomb was probably triggered when the limo went over a bump or something. Something that jarred the car. About a minute before it went off, the driver went past a bunch of elementary school kids on a field trip. If it had gone off next to them, you’d be missing a few kids.”
Stanton leaned forward and said, “That’s why I wouldn’t be a bomber. If I was going to kill Pye, I’d figure out a way to shoot the sonofabitch. But a bomb… this bomb in Michigan, killed that gal, the secretary. Why would you take a chance of doing that? Then our first bomb, he killed the construction super. That won’t stop the store-they’ll just get another supervisor. I mean, what the guy is doing is nuts.”
“But shooting him with a gun wouldn’t be?”
