“I have,” Virgil admitted. “I don’t like to talk about it, for fear of offending my straight friends.”
“I read the articles,” she said. “You’re really good. Why would you continue to do… this?”
“Because I like it. It’s extremely interesting,” Virgil said. “I like writing, too, but in small doses. Sitting in a room, alone, for six hours a day, like a full-time pro writer… that’s no way to go through life.”
She was attractive, articulate, and liked to talk about writing: she made Virgil nervous. His sheriff was still out there, somewhere, and she was heavily armed.
They arrived at Gerald R. Ford International Airport outside of Grand Rapids at ten o’clock at night, eastern time. As they turned, just before they started down, Virgil could see the faint orange glow of sunlight to the west. On the ground, it was full dark. They were met by a man in a large blue Chevy Tahoe, with the Pye script on the doors.
“Fast as you can get there, Harry,” Chapman told the driver, and he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
A few minutes later, they were headed east on I-96, and Harry put the speedometer on eighty. Virgil sat in front, and Chapman dozed in the back. Thirty minutes later, Harry said, “There she is.”
The Pye Pinnacle came up as a shaft of shimmering light that, a few miles later, had resolved itself into hundreds of brightly lit windows climbing up into the sky. The highway ran just to the south of the building; but all around the building was a puddle of pitch darkness.
Harry took an off-ramp that seemed to go nowhere but the Pinnacle; and then a couple of right turns got them on an approach road, and they drove through a parking lot, stopped at a railroadstyle guard arm, which Harry opened with a key card, and then they rolled up a gentle ramp to an entrance door on the side of the building. Chapman, yawning, said, “VIP entrance. Thanks, Harry.”
As they pulled up, three men in suits stepped out through the glass doors, and Virgil and Chapman got out and Chapman said, “Hey, guys,” and they said, “Marie,” and Chapman said, “This is Virgil Flowers,” and then, “Virgil, this is Bob Brown, head of security, David McCullough, he’s with the ATF, and Barrett Newman runs the building systems.”
They all shook hands and Virgil said, “You know what I’d like to do? Right now, I’d just like to walk around the outside of the building and look at stuff. You mind?”
They didn’t and Virgil said, “Just a minute,” and walked over to the door, and pulled on it, and it opened. “The door isn’t locked,” he said.
“The inside one is,” said Brown. “You can wave at the cameras while you wait for the guard to unlock it.”
“Okay,” Virgil said.
“So the idea is,” Brown said, “that a guy with a skateboard, which can be quiet, is waiting at the bottom of the ramp, under a car. A VIP truck comes up, and he rolls out and grabs the bumper, and they tow him up the hill, right to the glass. He’s got a key card, which he stole off a careless employee… But how does he get past the guard? And why didn’t we see him on the cameras?”
“I didn’t think of the skateboard idea,” Virgil said. “Hadn’t gotten that far.”
“We did,” Brown said.
“Any of the regular employees check in, who should have been on vacation?” Virgil asked.
“Two did. Both had reasons,” Brown said. “We checked the reasons. Neither one went above the fiftieth floor. To go higher than that, you have to have a specially authorized key card, which they didn’t.”
“So you checked.”
“Yes, we did.”
“Anybody’s houses get broken into? When the key cards might have been compromised?”
“Not in the last month,” Brown said.
Virgil asked, “Did you check all the board members?”
“We did,” Brown said.
“Are there cameras inside the stairwells above the fiftieth floor?”
“No, nothing like that, though the access doors are locked at the fiftieth. But if you had a key card to get through those doors, you could go all the way to the top.”
Newman, the building systems man, said, “There’s another crack in the security, too. Years ago, there was a deck up on the top floor, and the employees were allowed to go to sixty, on the elevator, without a key card, and then out the doors to the deck. But not many people went, and maintenance got expensive, so that was eventually ended. But if you had one of those old key cards, you could still get to sixty. Then, you could go outside, and down the interior stairs to the fifty-to-fifty-nine levels without anybody seeing you. But you’d have to have that old key card… and we don’t know that anybody does.”
“Custodians?”
Brown said, “When everything is said and done, there are at least two hundred and fifty-one insiders who could get up to fifty-five and place the bomb. We’ve talked to every one of them. That’s pretty much gotta be how it happened, but boy, it’s tough. We’ve found anger, and grudges, and resentment, and whatever-but nothing like what you’d need to plant a bomb. At least, not that we’ve been able to detect.”
McCullough, of the ATF, said, “We are, by the way, looking at all the video for the last month, after Barlow called us. He told us about the pipe, about finding that piece of pipe at the college, and the possibility that the bomb might have been detonated by cell phone.”
“Huh,” Virgil said. “Let’s take that walk.”
They walked around the building, looking at exterior doors, at the loading dock, at the outlets for a package sewage-treatment plant, at storm-water drains; all of it was lit by heavy exterior lighting, which, though designed to enhance the building’s aesthetics, also made it impossible to get close to the building unseen. When they were done, Virgil was ready to concede that the building would have been difficult to penetrate from the outside-as difficult as it would be to penetrate a prison. Even if it had been possible to penetrate the building because of some regular security lapse discovered by an intruder, he’d still be on the comprehensive video, and he wasn’t.
“So you’re now where we’re at,” Brown said. “It’s an insider.”
“Who must have some connection to a bomb maker in Butternut Falls,” Virgil said. “Has to be a tight relationship. Probably not a relative, now that I think about it. Probably an ideological connection.”
Done with the inspection of the building’s perimeter, the group took Virgil inside, through the front doors, past a guard desk with two guards, and through an electronic gate operated with a key card. Brown pointed out an array of cameras that covered the doors and the reception area, showed him how the elevators worked, and finally took him up to the fifty-fifth floor, where the bomb had been set off.
The boardroom was still a mess, though sheets of Plexiglas had been fitted into the gaps left by blown-out windows, and the furniture pushed into a corner. “What about the woman who was killed?” Virgil asked.
“Angela ‘Jelly’ Brown, Mr. Pye’s secretary,” Brown said. “What about her?”
“Have you checked her out?”
After a moment of silence, McCullough said, “Yeah, to a certain extent. Not much to check. Quiet, routine life. Husband works as a driver at a data-services place. No politics that we could find-registered Republicans, but not active. They live in Grand Rapids. We didn’t, uh, go through her apartment or anything.”
Virgil said, “Huh.”
McCullough said, “I suppose we could have done that, but to tell the truth, I’d bet my job on the idea that she’s innocent. That she had no connection with the bombing. She liked Pye, a lot, and she liked her coworkers, and they liked her… and if she placed the bomb, why in God’s name would she have been standing one foot away when it blew?”
“Could she have been moving it?”
“No. We’ve established that it was inside the credenza, on the upper shelf, above four reams of paper, when it blew. The credenza door was closed.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. The room still stank of death, though the carpet had been taken away. A bunch of thin waxy pink and blue birthday candles were scattered along the base of one wall. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “They were going to have a birthday party for Mr. Pye. The board was. Almost died at his own birthday party.”
There were no security cameras on the fiftieth floor, the barrier floor, Brown said, because there were cameras at every access point.
“Except the elevator… going up the elevator to sixty, and then coming down the stairs,” Chapman said.
