“And just climbing the stairs if you had a key card,” Virgil said. “If you had a card for the door at the fiftieth floor… right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Brown said. “It’s like we said-we can see the possibility that an insider could have planted the bomb. The complication is, we don’t see any way an outsider could have done it, and everything you guys developed in Minnesota suggests that there’s an outsider involved. Whoever planted that bomb in Willard’s limo out there… he wasn’t from here. Whoever cut the pipe at the college, he wasn’t from here, either. We started checking as soon as we heard about it-where everybody was, who worked here. So it’s either a conspiracy, or we just don’t know what happened.”
“Is there any possibility that the bomb was there a long time?” Virgil asked. “If it had a cell phone as a detonator…”
McCullough said, “Not really. The cabinet was used to store office supplies-notebooks, file folders, reports, that kind of thing. You couldn’t tell when it was going to be opened, but it was opened often enough. I know it’s possible, but I really don’t think there was a cell phone. I think it was set off by the clock, and it was placed inside the twenty-four-hour period before it went off.”
“Another thing,” said Newman, the building systems guy, “is that whoever planted the bomb had to know exactly when and where the board meeting was, and had to know something about the building layout, and how to get into the room.” He turned to Brown: “ Has to be an insider. Has to be a conspiracy.”
After leaving the boardroom, Virgil was shown what McCullough called Pye’s inner sanctum, a small but comfortable office behind a large outer office, with a big desk, “in” and “out” boxes, a computer, and a view of the interstate.
“We’ve wondered why the bomber didn’t put it in here, but it’s possible that Jelly Brown locked the outer office doors at night. We don’t know that she did, but we can’t ask her.”
Virgil looked through the office suite, which included a conference room, a small bedroom with a bathroom, and a sitting area with a wide-screen television. When he was finished looking, he asked to be taken up the stairwell to the roof. He noticed that the doors into and out of the stairwell were not locked-“Because of nine- eleven,” Brown said. “Willard considered us something of a target out here, and we did a review of what we could do to get people out in case we were hit by a plane. One thing we could do is allow people to go down one stairwell or the other-there are four of them, one on each side of the building-and then cross over and go down another one. So you could zigzag down through the building if you needed to. If you’re below fifty, you can’t go up, but if you’re above fifty, you can go out.”
The roof was big and flat and had the usual ventilation equipment and a big shed for window-washing equipment. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “Nobody used the window-washing grooves. They begin thirty feet above ground level, and even if you managed to get at them, unseen, it’d take you hours to climb the building. You’d be in plain sight all the time.”
There wasn’t much of a view from the top. Virgil could see the glow of Grand Rapids on the horizon to the west, another glow to the southeast-Lansing? Virgil thought-and headlights and taillights on the highway to the south. To the north there was nothing but darkness.
Chapman looked up into the night sky and said, “If you parachuted onto the roof…”
Brown said, “Right. You get a pilot and a skydiving plane to fly you over the building in the middle of the night with a bomb in your arms, and then you base-dive off the building when you’re done… I don’t think so. If you’re gonna have a conspiracy, it’s a thousand times more likely that it’s an insider.”
McCullough said, “I bet Ford International has a radar track tape for that night… Maybe we ought to check.”
Brown said, “Sure, check.”
They came off the roof and took the elevator down to the third floor, where the company had set up overnight suites for visitors, and a lounge. They sat in the lounge, and the three men detailed the investigation, and again, Virgil had a hard time faulting it. When they were done, Brown asked, “What do you think?”
“I’m glad I saw it, so it wasn’t a total waste of time coming out,” Virgil said. “I gotta say, the place seems pretty tight. I mean, maybe, maybe there’s some way a guy could have ridden in, inside a UPS truck or something, with a key card, and gotten up there… but I don’t see it. He’d have to know too much. Too much small detail. He’d have to have done a lot of surveillance.”
“It’s an insider,” McCullough said.
“And a conspiracy,” Brown said. “But that’s weird. How did they hook up? What’s the relationship?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what we’re going to focus on,” McCullough said. “There has to be a link between here and Butternut Falls. We have to push until we find it.”
Virgil was shown into a room a little before two in the morning. He lay awake for a few minutes, thinking about this and that, and for a while about God, and then almost went to sleep. But not quite asleep. Eventually, he crawled out from under the sheet and got out his laptop and linked into the Pinnacle’s Wi-Fi system, and went out on the Net, researching “Pye Pinnacle.”
It took a while, but he eventually found a PyeMart promotional video about the building that included a shot of a much younger Willard Pye greeting board members as they got off the elevators. When the doors opened, Virgil could see a metal “55” set in the edges of the elevator doors.
He said, “Huh.”
In twenty minutes, he had the information he needed to plant a bomb in the boardroom; he even knew he could plant it in the credenza.
But he still had no way in, or up.
He checked his e-mail before he went to sleep and found a message from Lee Coakley, his sheriff in Malibu, or West Hollywood, or wherever it was. The note said: I tried to call you several times on your cell, but got no service. Talk to you soon.
He checked his phone: she’d called while he was in the air, with the phone turned off.
He got to sleep a little after three, and the alarm woke him at seven. At seven-twenty, he was in the Pye truck with a sleepy Chapman, who said, “We’ll have breakfast on the plane, and then I’m gonna crash again. I feel like somebody put a Vulcan nerve pinch on me.”
“Sounds right,” Virgil said, yawning.
“You figure anything out?” she asked.
“I spent some time online. There’s enough information about the Pinnacle that you could figure out where the boardroom is, and you can also figure out when the board meetings are, and where. The last board meeting, before the bomb, was in Dallas. I don’t know where the next one will be, but I could probably find out a few days before it happens… It’s deep in the business news, but it’s in there.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll mention that to Willard.”
Virgil shook his head. “It looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel that way. Everything is too clockwork-like, too precise. If it’s a conspiracy, that would mean that we have two nuts-one here and one in Butternut-who are both absolutely murderous, and who were willing to trust each other, and both intelligent. How did they find each other? How did they get together?”
“Well, maybe on the Internet,” she said. “There are anti-PyeMart and anti-Walmart and anti-Target websites. What if a couple of people cooked up a conspiracy… I mean, one was from Butternut, but the other one could have been from anywhere. He or she moves to Grand Rapids or Lansing and gets a job out at the Pinnacle-gets a job for the sole purpose of blowing up the board.”
Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a researcher at the BCA who is really good at the Net. I’ll have her troll those PyeMart sites, see what she comes up with.”
“But we don’t know when they would have met.”
“In the last two years, if there were two of them. PyeMart didn’t start making noises about building in Butternut until two years ago,” Virgil said. “Took them a year to get the permits, and another year to get under way.”
“Have to check,” she said.
“Yeah, but I still… don’t think it’s a conspiracy. We’re missing something. I think it’s one guy, pretty smart, who figured out a way to get into the Pinnacle. Are there tours of the building? If there are, did anyone go missing for a few minutes? That kind of thing.”
“There are tours, but not often-and not one recently,” she said. “McCullough checked that. The ATF guys are
