“Well, a guy who has a key for here. Could be a firefighter. And then, this place has been here since the fifties. I bet there are a hundred keys for these doors. Maybe more. We don’t know where most of them are at. If you had somebody come through here as a student…”
“Okay.”
They thought about it together, and then Virgil asked, “Why wouldn’t he just buy a saw? He could do it in his basement with a ten-dollar hacksaw. Buy the hacksaw in the Cities, nobody would remember.”
“It’s a hell of a lot of work, that’s why. This is steel we’re talking about, and it’s pretty thick,” Card said. “If he wanted to make a lot of cuts, he could wear himself out doing it. And maybe he doesn’t think that way. Maybe he gets the pipe and thinks, How do I cut this stuff? And he thinks, Hmm, there’s my old shop…”
“That could happen,” Virgil said.
“One more thing,” Card said. “This is a tech school. When people who work here upgrade their homes, they tend to do it themselves. Put in a new bathroom or finish a basement, most of us would think nothing of it. A lot of guys here look at the school as a resource. Need to cut some pipe, go on down to the shop and do it. Technically, you’re not supposed to, but almost everybody does. And why not?”
“So it could be an instructor.”
“It could be. It’s a logical possibility,” Card said. “We got a lot of instructors-a couple hundred, when you include outsiders.”
“You’ve given me something to think about, Jesse,” Virgil said.
Barlow arrived, bringing one of the techs with him. Card ran through the whole explanation again, and they went over and peered in the metal debris bin, and after taking a photograph, the tech started digging through it, throwing non-relevant bits and pieces into a trash can that Card wheeled over. After two or three minutes, he said, “There it is.”
He was wearing yellow plastic evidence gloves, and he stripped them off, pulled on a fresh one, then reached down and slipped two fingers inside a three-inch length of pipe and lifted it out. The pipe had been crushed at one end; the other end showed bright steel where the blade had gone through it.
Card said, “That’s it.”
They all looked at it for a moment, then Barlow asked the tech, “What do you think?”
“I’d be really surprised if this isn’t a piece of the bomb pipe,” the tech said. “It’s exactly the right size, the cut looks the same as in the end we found, the material looks exactly the same-we can check that in the lab-and it looks like it was used as a piece of old plumbing pipe, a water pipe, same as the bombs. I’d say he cut it off to get rid of the crushed part. He wanted access to both ends.”
Barlow turned to Virgil and said, “Good catch.”
“Not me,” Virgil said. “It was Jesse and his gang.”
Card said, “Man, this is something else. This is a story.”
Barlow would send the pipe end to the ATF lab to see if any fingerprints or DNA could be recovered.
As Virgil was leaving, he asked Card if he knew the fly fisherman George Peck. “Oh, sure, I know George. Why?”
“Is he an instructor here?”
“No, no. He’s the town photographer,” Card said. “He does portraits and high school yearbooks and so on. He’s a blowhard, in my opinion. Harmless, though.”
“I met him up on the Butternut, fly-fishing.”
“Was he wearing that white suit?” Card asked.
“Yeah. I’d never seen anything quite like it,” Virgil said.
“That’s George. He can’t just be a fly fisherman, he has to be an antique fly fisherman. He’s also a member of a tommy-gun club over in Wisconsin. They get together and shoot tommy guns. He collects pocket watches. He’s got an enormous camera, a hundred years old, the size of a Volkswagen. He uses it to go around and document authentic people. He used to be a glider pilot. A regular airplane wasn’t exotic enough-he had to go up without an engine.”
“Authentic people?”
“You know. Poor people, I guess,” Card said. “I’ve known him a long time. Since we were kids. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. You don’t seriously suspect him?”
“No, no. Just doing market research,” Virgil said.
Before going back to his truck, Virgil walked down to the college admissions department and got a copy of the current class catalog, which also listed instructors. The woman behind the admissions desk told him that all instructors, both full-time and part-time, were listed on the college’s website, and most had e-mail addresses.
He sat in the 4Runner for a few minutes, flipping through the catalog. There were dozens of courses, more dozens of instructors. Browsing through the list of courses, he realized that the level of technical sophistication meant that not only the instructors, but the students, could almost certainly build any kind of bomb you wanted.
Including, he thought, atomic. Even if they couldn’t provide the plutonium, they almost certainly could build the mechanism of an atomic bomb, with their computer-assisted design programs: Electronics technology, engineering CAD technology, machine-tool technology, manufacturing engineering technology, mechanical design tech (CAD), research-and-development technology, welding and metal fabrication technology…
A pipe bomb would be child’s play.
In fact, the bombs so far had perhaps been too unsophisticated for the college… but then, there was that pipe debris. Virgil bought the idea that the pipe had been cut in a machine shop, that the bomber had been there.
Ahlquist called: “Everybody’s here for the press conference. You coming?”
Virgil looked at his watch. The time was sneaking past him. “See you in five minutes,” he said. “You know what you’re going to say?”
“Well, it’ll be just like we decided. That we’re making progress, that we’re expecting arrests. It’d be nice if we had made some progress. I’d feel less like a dirty rotten liar, but I guess I can live with it.”
“We did find the bomb factory,” Virgil said. “You could mention that.”
“What?”
“And I’d like to talk to you about market research.”
8
The parking lot was full of white television vans, with camera guys in jeans and golf shirts lolling about the courthouse doors, the talent in dresses and sport coats. Three or four newspaper reporters mixed in, along with a radio guy from Minnesota Public Radio and an online reporter from MinnPost.
Ahlquist bustled about, glad-handing the television people, joking with the reporters. Pye was there, with Chapman, his assistant; the redheaded cop, O’Hara, sat in a chair by herself at the back of the press conference, arms folded across her chest, watching. Barlow came in, wearing a suit and tie, a few minutes after Virgil got there. Barlow said he was mostly a prop. “I’ll just say that we’re making progress, and confirm the find up at BTC. What’s this thing about market research?”
Virgil told him about George Peck’s suggestion, and Barlow scratched an ear and said, “I dunno. I never heard of anything like that.”
Virgil said, “Can’t hurt. I mean, everybody in town knows we’re looking for the bomber, and most of them have some opinions. The sheriff already has a reserved website for natural disaster information and so on. We could use that… Be kind of interesting, I think.”
“But it’s not based on evidence-it’s just based on… nothing. A vote,” Barlow said.
“No, it’s based on collective judgment,” said Virgil. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to have proof. We’d still have to prove that the bomber did it.”
“Let me suggest something-think about it for a couple of days,” Barlow said. “It sounds goofy to me and it’ll sound goofy to the media. In fact, let me make an executive decision here: I’m gonna stay as far away from it as I can.”
