“Be a hell of a lot less nuts,” Stanton said. “Wouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t make that kind of judgment,” Virgil said.
“You would if you were a real shitkicker, and not some phoniedup city cowboy in crocodile boots and a Rolling Stones tongue shirt.”
“Listen-”
“Come on, admit it,” Stanton said. “You got a guy like Pye, wrecking a town, and you might not like him getting shot, but it’s a hell of a lot less nuts than taking a chance of blowing up some schoolkids. Isn’t it?”
“Well…”
“C’mon, say it,” Stanton said.
“All right. It’s less nuts,” Virgil said. “I still don’t hardly approve of it.”
“Neither do I,” Stanton said. “That’s one reason I didn’t do it. Shoot him, I mean.”
Stanton said he’d thought about the bomber, but the more he thought, the more bewildered he became. “I know guys around town who could do it, but they wouldn’t. I mean, they’ve got the skills. Hell, I could probably do it. Me and my friends, we sit around talking about it-we’re asking each other, who’s nuts enough? We really don’t know anybody like that.”
With that, Virgil left.
As he was going out the door, the prairie flower said, “If you see that cocksucker Pye, tell him I hope he roasts in hell.”
“I’ll try to remember,” Virgil said.
Out in the sunshine, Virgil looked at his watch. Time was passing, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And, he thought, the bomber was probably already at work on another bomb. He took a call from Ahlquist. “The TV’s already here, taking pictures of the limo and the blown-up pipes, interviewing everybody in sight. They’re asking if you’re gonna make a statement for the BCA?”
“No, no, apologize if anybody asks for me. Tell them that I’m tracking down leads, or something,” Virgil said. “But I’ll sneak in the back and watch.”
“Are you? Tracking down leads?”
“Not so much. I just finished talking to Ernie Stanton. I’m gonna go find this Don Banning guy, that runs the clothing store, and then Beth Robertson over at the Book Nook.”
“I think Don is too much of a sissy to pull this off. Beth isn’t a sissy, but she’s not crazy, and I really can’t see her crawling around under a car, with a bomb. Or breaking into a quarry shed and stealing explosive. She’s too… ladylike.”
Ahlquist was right about Banning, Virgil decided: he was a basic clothing salesman, deferential, eager to please. Soft and slender, he seemed unlike a man who’d have enough executive grit to travel to Michigan with a bomb, and then crack a skyscraper to plant it. Like Stanton, he confessed that he would not be unhappy to see Pye drop dead.
“But you know, I’m not really all that angry with Mr. Pye himself. He’s just doing what he does. I’m more angry with the city council, who let him come in here and set up a store in an area that was supposed to remain open space, or, at least, not to have city facilities, for at least another fifty years. Instead, they completely subvert the city plan, and run water and sewer out there, specifically for the PyeMart. They were bought, and that’s what you should be investigating.”
Virgil said, “I’ve been told that by a couple of people. Of course, if I find any evidence of it, I’ll act on it. Right now, I’m more focused on stopping this bomber.”
“And when you do that, you’ll never come back to look at the city council,” Banning said. “That’s just too much trouble for the BCA, and they’ve all got political friends, and it wouldn’t be an important enough case for somebody like you anyway.”
“After I stop the bomber, we’ll see about that,” Virgil said.
Banning showed a little grit: “I’m sorry. I don’t believe you.”
Virgil was back in his truck, mentally scratching Banning off his list of suspects, when Lawrence, the clerk at Home Depot, called on Virgil’s cell phone. “I put out a message on our woodworker phone tree. I got a call back from Jesse Card at BTC. You better get over there and talk to him.”
Butternut Technical College was a collection of a half-dozen yellow-brick buildings surrounding a group of tennis and basketball courts on the far south side of town. A two-year college, it functioned as an extension of high school, and focused on a variety of building trades.
Jesse Card was the lead instructor in the metal shop, and had a small paper- and manual-clogged office down the hall from the shop itself. The office smelled pleasantly of tobacco and oil, as Virgil thought such places should, though the tobacco was illegal. Card was talking with another instructor when Virgil arrived, and Card broke away to take him down to the shop.
Card was excited: “The thing is, our number one rule here is, you clean up. You get these kids in here, and if you didn’t make them clean up, spotlessly, every time they use a tool, it’d be chaos. So, about a month ago, I came in and was walking through, when I see this mess behind the pipe cutter. This is the pipe cutter.”
Card pointed at a power saw with a circular blade, that was bolted on a black steel table. The saw looked like an ordinary miter saw, except for a vise-like tool on the front, designed to hold a pipe in place while it was being cut.
“I’m pretty sure that there was no mess when I went home the night before-my eye catches that kind of stuff. So I see all these metal filings behind the saw and on the floor, and I’m asking, What the heck? I got the kids and asked who did it: they all swore that they hadn’t. I believed them, because, for one thing, they would have had to come in at night, and for that they’d need a key. There was a night class for adults going on, but the instructor there said they hadn’t been doing any pipe-cutting at all. Anyway, I let it go until I got the call from Lawrence.”
“So whoever came in, had a key,” Virgil said.
“Unless they were in the night class,” Card said. “Or maybe somebody forgot to lock up. There are lots of keys around, and sometimes the doors don’t get locked.”
“Do you know what kind of filings? Was there much of it?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, there was quite a bit. Whoever used it cut quite a bit of material. It was steel, was what it was. It was magnetic, and it was bright, so it was steel.”
Virgil said, “Hmm. There weren’t any bits and pieces left over?”
“There were, unless somebody took them. Come over this way.”
Virgil followed him across the shop to a metal bin, which was half full of pieces of steel and iron. An adjacent bin contained a bucketful of copper pieces.
“This is where we throw metal debris,” Card said. “A guy from the local junkyard picks it up when it gets full, and we get a few bucks for it. So after this incident with the mess by the saw, I was throwing some stuff in here- the bin was almost empty-and I noticed this piece of three-inch galvanized pipe in there. We don’t use anything like that, we’re not a plumbing shop. It occurred to me right then that this might be where the filings came from. I didn’t do anything about it, I just noticed it, and it popped right up in my mind when Lawrence called.”
Virgil peered into the bin: “You think it’s still in there?”
“I believe so. Unless, like I said, somebody took it.”
Virgil said, “Okay, this is good. I’m bringing the ATF in.”
He got on the phone to Barlow and told him about it. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Barlow said. “Don’t go anywhere. Keep an eye on the saw, too.”
While they waited for Barlow to show up, Virgil and Card sat on a couple of stools and talked about who’d have a key, or access to the shop. Card said the shop was unlocked from about seven o’clock in the morning, when he got there, until about ten o’clock at night, when the night adult class ended and the instructor locked up.
Sometimes, he said, the door didn’t get locked-“I run into that a few times every year. Then, there are quite a few keys around, janitors and administrators. The local firefighters have a master set… What I think happened was, it was a guy with a key. He came in late… The pipe would be heavy, so he’d have to park right outside and carry the pipe in. Wouldn’t have to worry about turning on the lights, because there are no windows. He cuts his pipe and gets out. He doesn’t take the time to clean up, because he’s in a hurry, but he does know enough to throw the waste piece in the bin.”
“So then… It’d have to be a guy who works here,” Virgil said.
