folks…”
Robertson started screaming from the crowd in the back, as a deputy cuffed her, and the man in the plaid shirt shouted, “No! We deserve some answers. Who’s investigating the city council, is what we want to know.”
The mayor shouted, “Shut up, Butz. Just shut up.”
Chapman leaned over to Virgil and said, “Fistfight in Butternut. Film at eleven.”
“I better get the fuck out of here,” Pye said. He stood up, and behind him, Chapman wrote it down. Pye said to Virgil as he was leaving, “I’ll tell the pilots you’re flying at seven o’clock. Marie’ll come with you.”
Out in the hall, Virgil bumped into Ahlquist, who had a shiny patina of sweat on his forehead. The sheriff said, “That worked out real well.”
“Am I gonna be able to talk to Robertson?” Virgil asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, she was being cuffed.”
“Aw, shit, she just scratched one of my guys,” Ahlquist said. “We all agreed that nothing serious happened, and she’s on the way back to her store.”
Beth Robertson was one of those bookstore women who wore her hair in a bun, who was a little overweight, but not too, who dressed in shades of brown but referred to them as earth colors, and who always tried to sell you an Annie Dillard when you were looking for a Stephen King. Nice enough, and sometimes a pain in the ass, Virgil thought. She was peering out the front window of the bookstore when Virgil went in; he was the only other person in the place.
“Virgil Flowers,” she said, turning away from the window. “You were pointed out to me. You seem to be pretty close to Pye.”
Virgil shrugged. “I’m not, no. But he’s a target of this bomber, and I need to talk with him from time to time.”
“So, what do you want with me?”
“I need to scratch you off my list of people who might be making these bombs,” Virgil said.
She suddenly sat down on a metal folding chair and began to weep. Virgil let her go for a minute, then said, “Is there anything…?”
“I am completely humiliated,” she said. “I completely lost control back there. They handcuffed me.”
“That was to keep you from scratching any more deputies,” Virgil said. “You have a lot of sympathizers, from what I can tell.”
“Ah, God,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“So, about the bombs…”
Robertson said she’d never do anything to hurt a living creature; she neither ate meat, nor wore leather. “I sure wouldn’t make a bomb. Though I could.”
“Make a bomb?”
“Sure. All these idiot rednecks run around making bombs, why couldn’t I?” she asked.
“Well, a lot of rednecks aren’t idiots,” Virgil said. “A lot of them have experience with tools and so on.”
She waved him off. “I could do it. I just wouldn’t. No: we need to stop the PyeMart, and we could, if anyone would just pay attention to the simple fact that the mayor and the city council were bribed to approve the zoning change. Once that was established, PyeMart would be stopped cold.”
“If you have any evidence of that…”
“There’s the problem. We all know it, but we can’t prove it.”
They spent ten minutes talking, and two minutes in, Virgil scratched her off the list. She really wouldn’t hurt a flea, he thought. She told him that she had no idea of who’d done the bombings, but there were a lot of people who were angry enough to be suspects. She wouldn’t name them, because there were too many of them, and because she didn’t want to point at a lot of innocent people-“And all but one of them is innocent.”
He asked about the college and she shook her head. “None of the people who seem the angriest are from the college, as far as I know. But if I were so angry that I’d start setting off bombs, I’d pretend that I wasn’t angry at all. Wouldn’t you? Just keep my mouth shut and build my bombs.”
Virgil scratched his chin and said, “Yeah. You may be right. I should be looking for somebody who isn’t angry.”
She showed the smallest of smiles: “Doesn’t sound like you have an easy job.”
Virgil found Larry Butz, who’d joined Robertson in shouting at the sheriff at the press conference, working in the back of Butz Downtown Jewelers. “I figured you’d be showing up,” he said, after a sales clerk ushered Virgil into the back office. “I’m not blowing anybody up.”
“You know anybody who might be?” Virgil asked.
“I probably know him, if he’s local, but I couldn’t identify him as the bomber, if you see what I mean,” Butz said. He hesitated, and then said, “Aren’t you pulling a fishing boat around? Somebody told me that you write for Gray’s and a couple other magazines.”
“I do from time to time,” Virgil said.
Butz leaned forward: “Then you should be on our side, man. These drainage things are insidious. We’ve got them all over the state-gas and oil and brake fluid getting into the groundwater, and then into the lakes. It’s a disgrace.”
“I am on your side, from that angle,” Virgil said. “But I wouldn’t be murdering people to stop it.”
“Probably won’t help me to say it, but killing off a few of these assholes would probably be a good thing,” Butz said. “Trouble is, this bomb guy is blowing up the wrong people. He killed two innocent people, just doing their jobs, and he missed Pye. He missed the board of directors. If murdering people was going to help, he’s managed to murder all the wrong ones, and turn Pye into a hero, giving away all those millions of dollars. How in the hell did that happen? Is he really on our side? What I want to know is, how did one of us Butternuts get up on top of Pye’s skyscraper? He’s got all kinds of security, is what I hear. I think we’re being set up.”
“Huh,” Virgil said.
They talked for a few more minutes, and then Virgil left: he did not scratch Butz off the list. Butz did get him thinking about the Pye Pinnacle again, and he called Barlow.
“Are you sure that bomb at the Pinnacle was set off with a clock?”
“Pretty sure. We found the clock. Pieces of it, anyway.”
“What if the bomber is bullshitting you? What if he had the bomb wired through a cheap plastic cell phone or walkie-talkie, and he put it right on top of the Pelex, or molded the Pelex around it, with the clock off to one side. Then, when it went off, the cell phone vanishes and you find pieces of the clock… which means you look for somebody who was in the building twenty-four hours before the explosion, and maybe he was there a week before.”
Barlow said, “Well, the reason is, our lab is really good at this stuff, and our techs are really good at picking up evidence. That’s why we’re still out there in that trailer, two days later. If there’d been a cell phone involved, we’d have picked it up.”
“For sure? One hundred percent?”
“Nothing’s one hundred percent,” Barlow said.
“How fast can you get to your lab guy?” Virgil asked.
“Got him on my speed dial.”
“Call him up and ask him what percent,” Virgil said.
“Get back to you in three minutes,” Barlow said.
Five minutes later, Barlow called back: “He said seventy-five to eighty percent. I was kinda surprised it was that low.”
“So there’s one chance in four or five that you wouldn’t find a cell phone,” Virgil said.
“Yes, under certain conditions, but the guy would have to know a lot about what he was doing. We’re not seeing that level of sophistication.”
“We’re talking about a tech college,” Virgil said.
“Yeah… gives us something more to think about. I’ll get the ATF guys to look at that video as far back as it goes. There’s a terabyte of memory for every one of the cameras, so that’d cover a lot of time.”
“Keep talking to me,” Virgil said.
