“So I’ll think about it,” Virgil said. “No big rush.”
“What? Of course there’s a big rush,” Barlow said. “We can’t get this guy too soon, no matter how we do it.”
The press conference was held in a courtroom at the new county courthouse, a space that did its best to translate justice into laminated wood. A Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter stopped to chat, and when he drifted away in pursuit of Barlow, Pye walked over, trailed by Chapman and her steno pad, and asked, “You still thinking about the plane?”
“I started thinking about it again,” Virgil said. “If I don’t come up with anything the rest of the day, I might go.”
“If you can figure out how the bomber got in the building, I think you’ll know who he is,” Chapman said, over Pye’s head.
“Why’s that?”
She tipped her head toward the back of the courtroom, and the three of them found a pew and sat side by side, Pye in the middle, and Chapman spoke around him. “This all comes from my stenography, my reporting in following Willard around, talking to ATF guys.”
The Pinnacle, she said, was deep in the countryside, all by itself, surrounded by a wide plaza that sat fifteen feet above the surrounding parking lots. The parking lots were a hundred and fifty feet across, and were, in turn, surrounded by farm fields.
“You can’t see the bottom floor of the building from the fields, because the plaza is set up too high. That means you can’t do longterm surveillance from the cornfields, because you can’t see up on top of the plaza. And you can’t get close to the plaza without being in the open, where the security cameras would pick you up. The cameras never found anybody. Everybody who comes through, front and back, twenty-four hours a day, is on multiple cameras, and there are no gaps in the videos.”
“Barlow said that the bomb had to be in there less than a day,” Virgil said.
“The ATF found fragments of the clock used as a timer. The technicians say that it didn’t have a running time of more than twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. So the bomber had to be in the building less than twenty- four hours before the bomb went off. They checked everybody coming through the front and back-the loading dock is around back-and checked them off. Found them all. No obvious suspects,” Chapman said.
Pye bobbed his head, and Chapman continued: “So then they thought that the bomb had been placed by an insider. They’d tracked down the probable origin of the explosives, up at that quarry-around here someplace, Cold Spring?-and decided that an insider had simply known about that quarry for some reason, and had come here to get the explosives. They also checked out people, insiders, who’d been out here for this construction project. There were about a dozen of them, and they were all eliminated by the ATF.”
Pye jumped in: “So that was it: had to be an insider, who came out here by chance. Then the bomb went off here, and they were… confused. Because that made it seem like it might be an outsider again, and they didn’t think it could be an outsider. Now this second bomb-”
“It wasn’t an insider,” Virgil said. “At least, it seems unlikely. We’ve located the place where the pipe was cut for the bombs.” He told them about the tech college, and the metal shop.
Pye clouded up: “How come nobody told me about this? This is a big deal.”
“Just happened, a few minutes ago,” Virgil said. “They got a piece of pipe. Maybe it’ll have a fingerprint, or DNA.”
“Not the way that our luck has been running,” Pye said. “But it sounds like you’ve been making progress. I don’t want you to go running off to Grand Rapids if it’ll slow you down.”
“If you can turn me around in a hurry, I won’t lose much time here,” Virgil said. “But I’d want to work tonight, and get back on the plane first thing tomorrow morning.”
Chapman said to Pye, “If you want, I could go along with him. That way, I could cut through any bureaucratic bullshit.”
Pye squeezed his lower lip, thinking about it, then said, “If you got out of here at seven o’clock, you’d be in the building by eleven. You lose an hour in the time zones. I could have everybody waiting for you. You talk to them, look around, see what you think, get a few hours’ sleep, get back on the plane at eight-the pilots need an eighthour turnaround. You could get another couple hours of sleep on the plane, and still be back here by nine o’clock in the morning, because you get the hour back. Eat breakfast on the plane, you’d lose no working time at all.”
Virgil said, “Set it up. I’ll be at the airport at seven o’clock, if nothing else blows up.”
The press conference almost went off as planned, with Ahlquist as an upbeat master of ceremonies. He told the gathered reporters that substantial progress had been made toward finding the bomber, that arrests were expected in the next few days, that the ATF lab was processing DNA evidence found on pieces of the bomb.
And he announced that they’d found the saw where the pipes had been cut, but refused to say where that was. “We have to hold some of this tight, for investigative reasons.”
One of the reporters said, “We heard it was out at Butternut Tech.”
Ahlquist said, “I can’t confirm anything-”
“Everybody already knows,” the reporter said.
“Ah, shit,” Ahlquist said, then, “Excuse me.”
Barlow, in his turn, conceded that the lab work would take a few days, and that “nothing was certain.” The media people detected the tap dancing and went after him, asking for a timetable on which they could decide whether or not the investigation was looking like a failure. Barlow slipped that punch and turned the pageant back to the sheriff.
Ahlquist recovered some ground by lying about the amount of progress made, including references to additional information that couldn’t be disclosed.
Then things turned ugly.
A middle-aged dark-haired woman stood up and shouted, “How come you spend all this time investigating this bomber, and you don’t investigate that little fat man for killing this whole town?” She turned around and poked an index finger at Pye, who was still sitting next to Virgil. “That one! The people who elected you to office would like to know that.”
“This ain’t good,” Pye muttered, and Chapman wrote it down.
Ahlquist tried to dodge the bullet by saying, “Now, Beth, goldarnit, you know I’m not a city official and I had nothing to do with the PyeMart deal.”
Beth Robertson, the bookstore woman, Virgil thought. She shouted, “Everybody knows that Pye bought the city council and the mayor, and you sure got the right to investigate that. If you investigated that-”
At that point, the mayor, who’d been sitting in the front row, half-stood and turned, and shouted, “Robertson, you shut your mouth or I’ll sue your butt off. I never did anything I didn’t think was for the good of this town. I work sixty hours a week-”
“You shut up, bitch-face,” Robertson shouted. She stepped into the aisle and took a couple steps toward the mayor. Virgil wondered why none of the sheriff’s deputies were trying to get between them; it seemed like the responsible thing to do. Chapman leaned around Pye and said, “Maybe you ought to stop them.”
Virgil: “Me?”
Robertson screamed at the mayor, “You and that goddamned crook you’re married to would sell your children for ten dollars and a rubber tire…”
Her voice reached toward a screech and Virgil thought, Hmm, and, at the same time, decided he liked her turn of phrase. Pye had lowered himself in his seat, but nobody was much looking at him anyway, because the mayor squeezed out of her pew into the aisle, the same aisle that Robertson had just gotten to.
The cops were moving now, nearly too late, and though Robertson was the smaller of the two women, probably giving up twenty pounds, she went for the mayor like a lion after a zebra, teeth and claws. The mayor was right there, ready to take her on, but one of the cops got to Robertson just two feet short of the mayor, grabbed her around the waist and horsed her toward the back of the room, kicking and screaming.
As the cop wrestled with Robertson, a tall bearded man in a plaid shirt stood up and shouted, “Beth is right, Ahlquist, and you know it. Those sonsof bitches were paid off big-time. Now that parking lot is going to bleed all over the Butternut and we’re gonna leave our children a polluted swamp. A polluted swamp.”
A television reporter called, “What do you have to say to that, Sheriff?”
Ahlquist ignored her and said, “We’re all done here, we’re all finished. Let’s have a little peace and quiet,
