night. He was up there with about six college friends. He was up there for a week.”
“Well, shoot, there goes my day,” Virgil said. “I was planning to drag him kicking and screaming down to the county jail.”
“That’d be something to see,” she said.
Smith was a chunky, sunburned man who said he’d just spent five days getting blown off Lake of the Woods, and Virgil told him that he’d been blown off Lake of the Woods himself, on several occasions.
“Fishing out of Kenora?” Smith asked.
“Yeah, most of the time. I really like that town,” Virgil said.
“Got the most vicious, impolite, asshole game wardens I ever met,” Smith said. “We were out five days, got stopped three times. Hell, we’re fishing on a conservation tag, not keeping anything, and they’re tearing our boats apart.”
“They do that,” Virgil said. “But the fishing is good.”
“And they got some good pizza,” Smith said. “So, what can I do for you?”
“Is there anybody in your trout club that might be setting off these bombs?”
“I been thinking about that ever since I heard about the bomb, the first one,” Smith said. “I call my wife every night to tell her I didn’t drown, and she told me about it, about that poor bastard getting blown to pieces. I mean, jeez, nobody deserves that… Anyway, no. I don’t think any of our guys would do that. We’ve got some rednecks, but you know, they’re all… fishermen. Fishermen don’t kill people.”
“Well, maybe muskie fishermen,” Virgil said.
“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Smith said. “But not us trout guys. Crappie guys might be bombers, but I don’t think walleye guys, or bass or bluegill guys. Bullhead guys… well, we don’t talk about bullhead guys. I don’t think they’d go violent, but they’re not quite right in the head, if you know what I mean.”
Virgil nodded: he tended to agree with Smith’s characterizations.
“You know Larry Butz,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, and he’s the one everybody would point at, because he’s got a loud mouth. But he’s really a good guy,” Smith said. “The paper this morning said that a group of kids were crossing the street just before Harvey’s limo blew up, and that’s the kind of thing that Larry would have thought of. About other people getting hurt. He’s got five kids, and there’s no way he’d ever take a chance like that. That he’d hurt a kid. I mean, I don’t think he’d hurt anybody.”
“I’m getting a lot of that,” Virgil said. “Nobody knows anybody who’d do something like this.”
“Well, do you know anybody who’d do it? A bomb guy, he’s gotta be a rare creature.”
“That was my opinion, before I got tangled up in this, but the ATF guy tells me they’re not as rare as you’d think,” Virgil said. Then, “Have you ever been fishing any of those lower pools and seen a guy around there in camo? Maybe with a camera or a pair of binoculars?”
Smith said, “Noooo… not exactly. I mean, if you mean sneaking around the PyeMart site. I mean, in the fall we get a couple of bow hunters back there.”
“I was thinking, sneaking around looking at PyeMart, specifically,” Virgil said.
“Haven’t seen anything like that, but then, I’m only back there once a week. Maybe not that often. Hardly ever see any cars parked up by the bridge, either. Those are usually guys that I know, and could vouch for.”
“The bridge?”
“Yeah, there’s a bridge upstream a half mile or so above the Walmart site, off County Road Y. There’s a parking area down beside the bridge.”
“Could you ask around, among your friends, about any unusual cars?”
“I can do that,” Smith said.
Virgil pushed himself out of his chair, gave Smith a business card, and said, “Just mostly wanted to check with you. Think about it. If anything occurs to you, give me a ring, or if somebody saw a strange car out there in the last month.”
Half an hour later, Virgil was backing his boat into Dance Lake. The lake had two basins, a shallow upper basin with lots of weed, and a deeper lower basin. After parking his rig, he took his boat north out of the landing, under a bridge and into the upper basin, picked out a weed bed on the flattest part of the lake, dropped his trolling motor. The depth finder said he was in four feet of water. He wasn’t expecting much, just a short afternoon of messing with small pike.
He got his fly rod going, throwing a Bigeye Baitfish, and zenned out, letting the problem of the bomber percolate through the back of his brain. Talking with Peck had been useful; he had some hope for the survey. The connection with the tech school should help winnow suspects.
Critical question: What should he do to keep pressure on the bomber? What would make him keep his head down? He was thinking about that when a small pike hit the Bigeye and, feeling the resistance of the line, tried to make a run into the weed bank. Virgil turned his head, got him running sideways, turned him toward the boat, played him, eventually brought him alongside-maybe twenty-three or twenty-four inches, he thought-grabbed the eye of the hook and shook it loose.
He’d gotten some pike slime on his hand and rinsed it off, then sat in the boat and let the sunshine sink into his shoulders; nothing like it. After a few minutes, he sighed, took the cell phone out of his pocket and called a reporter, Ruffe Ignace, at the Star Tribune.
“Ruffe? Virgil Flowers here.”
“Virgil-I heard you were up in Nutcup, trying to find that bomber.”
“Yeah, I am, still,” Virgil said. “Some of the media are spreading a rumor that I’d like to squelch.”
“A rumor? In the media? No, you gotta be joking,” Ignace said.
“As far as I know, there are no plans whatever to secretly deploy seventy-five to a hundred BCA infrared cameras around Butternut Falls, to monitor the coming and going of cars to sensitive sites,” Virgil said.
“Wait-wait-wait, let me get the last part of that… ‘to monitor the coming and going of cars to sensitive sites.’ Is that right?”
“That’s right. I have no information about any such plans.”
“By sensitive sites, you mean like the city hall, the county courthouse, the city councilmen’s houses, Willard Pye’s cars, the PyeMart site, and so on?”
“Those would be sensitive sites,” Virgil agreed.
“You’re not saying that there aren’t any plans, you’re saying that you don’t have any information about such plans.”
“That’s correct.”
“I’m not writing the story, but I’ll pass it on,” Ignace said.
“God bless you,” Virgil said. “And any children you may have spawned.”
Done with Ignace, he called Barlow to see if the ATF had come up with anything at the tech school. They had not. “It’s not a dead end, it’s a rats’ nest,” Barlow said. “There’re hundreds of people coming and going all the time, and they have adult evening classes, enrichment classes, and most of the adults in Butternut have been through there, at one time or another.”
“I have a feeling that it’s not a casual acquaintance, it’s somebody who goes through there on a regular basis. Somebody who’s familiar with the working of the place. A staff member, a full-time student.”
“Well, we’re still looking,” Barlow said.
Another possibility occurred to him: What if there were more than one thing going on? What if the first bomb was aimed at Pye himself, as the third one had been-and had been brought in by some desperate board member? Desperate, why? Virgil didn’t know, but he was sure that board members must get desperate from time to time. Pye was an older man, and there must be some kind of succession waiting in the wings. If you knew when the bomb was going to go off, then you could absent yourself… Of course, if you knew when it was going to go off, you would have set it for later, after the board meeting was sure to be under way.
Still, there might be something in it-someone desperate, or greedy, in Grand Rapids, hooking up with somebody desperate in Butternut Falls.
As weird as it seemed, there was a history of crazy bombers getting together-9/11 of course, but also the Oklahoma City bombing. There’d been cases of serial killers finding each other, or recruiting accomplices.
How would you do that? The Internet. He remembered Marie Chapman talking about anti-PyeMart sites. He’d forgotten to do anything about that… Virgil got back on the phone and called the BCA researcher. “Sandy? This is
