“Hey… I’m just telling you what’s going on,” Virgil said.
“We ought to talk about something else,” she said.
So they did.
They had a pleasant meal, talked about writing, and about police work, about where they grew up, and about Virgil’s cases-Chapman had access to an excellent news clipping service, and knew about Virgil’s major busts. She was, Virgil thought, an interesting woman, but something had fundamentally changed between them when the word “snake” came out of her mouth. He dropped her at the AmericInn at nine o’clock and, feeling a little melancholy, went on to the sheriff ’s department.
Of the fourteen letters sent out, they’d gotten back eleven-three people declined to participate. Virgil took two hours to work through the mass of names, entering them on his laptop, with addresses. After eliminating duplicates, he had a list of a hundred and seventy-eight people who’d be asked to nominate possible bombers.
Ahlquist had come through several times while Virgil was working out the list, and finally he said, “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s gonna cause a stink.”
“Yeah, it will, but it’s a whole new way of looking at an investigative problem,” Virgil said. “I’m almost as curious to see how it comes out as I am anxious to catch the bomber.”
When he had the list, and the addresses, he wrote a carefully worded cover letter, explaining the idea behind the nominations, asking that the lists be returned to the sheriff ’s department no later than the next evening. He left space at the bottom, with ten blank underlines, for the bomber nominees, and noted that the letter’s recipients didn’t need to sign the letter or identify themselves in making their nominations.
He was working through the letter, revising, when he took a call from Lee Coakley. He perked up as soon as he saw the incoming number, and heard her voice: “Virgil, how are you?”
“Aw, I’m in a mess of a case. I’m up in Butternut Falls.”
“David told me, I looked it up on the Star Tribune ’s website. Are you getting anywhere with it?”
“Well, I’m trying something new…” He explained about the letters. When he finished explaining, she started laughing, and after a minute, said, “Virgil, you have a different kind of mind.”
“ I didn’t think of it.”
“But you’re doing it. I hope Earl knows what you’re getting him into.”
“Earl’s gonna do just fine, if I pull this off. Anyway, what have you been up to?”
So she told him, a bunch of stuff he didn’t entirely understand about working through a gunfight on a TV show. “It’s about half real, and half movie. I tell them what’d really happen, they tell me what they need to have happen, for the movie. Then, we try to work something out that feels sorta real, but gets done what they need done.”
She went on for five minutes and sounded so enthusiastic about it that Virgil felt the melancholy coming back. Because, he thought, Lee probably wouldn’t be. When she said, “I gotta go, the boys are raising hell,” it was a notably friendly, and non-intimate, good-bye. A kind of good-bye he recognized, a good-bye from a friend, not from a lover. He wondered if she recognized it, and thought she probably did, since women were always a few steps ahead in such matters.
Which, when he thought about it, was how he lost his Tim Kaihatsu-signed Gibson guitar when his second wife moved out.
He went back to the letters, editing them, then printing them. Before stuffing them in envelopes, he numbered each of the one hundred and seventy-eight names on his list, and on each letter, carefully, with black ink, put a small dot in a word that corresponded, in number, to the number of each name on the list.
In other words, the letter began with the phrase, As you undoubtedly know… and the first name on the list, Andrew Lane, got a small black dot between the legs of the capital A in As. The second name on the list got a tiny dot in the o in you. The third name got a dot in the o of undoubtedly.
Because the letters had said the responses would be anonymous, it felt dishonest, but, he thought, it might be useful to know who nominated whom. He couldn’t think of a reason why it might be useful, but then, he’d never done anything like this.
He finished after one o’clock in the morning, left a stack of letters with the duty officer, for delivery the next day, and headed back to the hotel.
He spent a restless night in the over-soft bed; too much to think about. He didn’t have many new ideas about chasing the bomber, at least, not until the letters came back. That would give him as much work as he could handle.
In the meantime, he could look into the question of whether the city council had been bribed. That would not be fun-he would need to extort the necessary information, using marital infidelity as a wedge. He’d had a checkered past himself when it came to women-three divorces in three years, before he at least temporarily quit getting married. So you had some schoolteachers engaging in some bed-hopping-so what? Except, unfortunately for them, it might be tangled up with bribery.
He could also stay in bed, the pillow hard as a pumpkin, and spend the night brooding about Lee Coakley. Had she already been unfaithful? What about himself; was thinking about the honeyhaired Marie Chapman actually unfaithful? Taking her out to dinner? Jimmy Carter would have said… But, you know, fuck Jimmy Carter.
In the morning, he cleaned up and decided to head out to Country Kitchen for French toast and link sausage; and, he thought, since he didn’t know exactly what he’d be doing all day, he might as well take the boat, just in case.
He backed around, hooked up, and took off. At the street, he took the curb-cut too short and he felt the trailer’s right wheel bounce over the curb.
In an infinitesimally short space of time, the bomb in the trailer blew up and the world lurched and Virgil found himself on the street, crawling away from the truck, with the sense of blood in his nose and mouth, though when he wiped his face with his hand, there wasn’t any. He rolled onto his butt and looked back. The boat had been cut in half, but the truck itself seemed untouched; gasoline was pouring onto the street, and he thought, Fire.
He turned and continued crawling, then got to his feet and staggered away. He thought, How did I get in the street…?
He could hear sirens, then, and two people ran out of the Holiday Inn’s front door; he saw a window had blown out. The smell of gasoline was intense… He pulled himself together and realized that when the bomb went off, he’d instinctively jammed the truck’s gear shift into park, and had rolled out the door… Hadn’t thought about it- nothing had gone through his mind at all-he’d just done it.
More people were running toward him, and the truck and trailer, and he pointed at the two closest, the ones who’d come out of the Holiday Inn, and said, “Keep everybody away. Keep everybody back. There’s gasoline all over the place. One of you, get inside and call nine-one-one and tell them we need a fire truck here now. Go.”
A minute later, when the first deputy arrived, Virgil was already on the phone to Barlow: “The guy came after me. He blew up my boat.”
“I’m coming,” Barlow said.
The Deputy ran up and asked, “You okay?”
“Well, I’m scared shitless,” Virgil said.
“Man: you’re lucky to be alive. Anybody hurt inside?” He went running into the Holiday Inn.
Virgil let him go: he was feeling a little distant from events.
Gas had stopped pouring out of the boat, but was still trickling out. He had a twenty-gallon tank that ran under the floor, and it had been a miracle, he thought, that the gas hadn’t started burning. Staying well back, Virgil made a wide circle, checking the damage. The boat was gone: totaled. The blast had ripped the boat in half, right at the midsection. The bomb must have been in one of the rod-storage lockers down the right side of the boat, he thought.
He worked through it. The bomb would have been more certainly deadly, he thought, if it had been placed under the driver’s door of the truck. That would have done him for sure. But he’d parked the truck right out front, where it could be seen from both the Holiday Inn and the highway. Too much traffic to take the risk…
The boat, on the other hand, had been in the overflow lot, where Virgil had parked it to get it out of the way. There were lights, but it’d still be dim back there; and depending on how the bomb was rigged, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds to put it down inside the rod locker.
At least, he thought-still feeling a little distant-they hadn’t gotten his muskie rods. He hadn’t had them out yet. He’d lost a couple walleye rigs, and a nice little ultralight bass rod and reel…
