Virgil went to Ahlquist, who was talking to another one of the neighbors. “I want to talk to Erikson’s wife as soon as we find her,” Virgil said. “Give me a call?”
Ahlquist nodded. “She’s on the way, but she’ll be another hour yet.”
As Virgil was walking back to his truck, Pye showed up, with Marie Chapman. Virgil walked them across the police tape, and Pye asked, “Is this the guy? The bomber?”
“The ATF is leaning that way, and they could be right,” Virgil said. “I have some doubts.”
“Like what?”
“Like he couldn’t have put the bomb in the Pinnacle. He would have needed an accomplice to plant it. I don’t like the idea of two killers, linking up over that big of a space.”
Pye peered at the garage, grunted, and said, “You know what? Neither do I. I’m not kissing your ass at this point.”
Chapman wrote it all down, then said, “Mike Sullivan got out of the hospital. He’s back at the AmericInn, but I think he’s headed home to Wichita tomorrow morning, if you need to talk to him again.”
Virgil shook his head. “I can’t think of anything more. You guys gonna give up on the store?”
“Absolutely not,” Pye said. “We’ve already replaced him, and we’ve got another guy coming up to take Kingsley’s spot. Volunteers. I’m paying them triple time, forty hours a week. By the time the store’s up, they’ll have an extra year’s pay in their pockets.”
Barlow came over. “Mr. Pye. You want to take a look? This may be the guy…”
Virgil left the scene, headed back to the county courthouse. He was halfway back when he saw the AmericInn, and that tripped off a thought about Sullivan, and that tripped off an entirely new thought, about the security cameras at the construction trailer.
He swerved into the AmericInn parking lot, parked, identified himself to the desk clerk, got Sullivan’s room number. Sullivan’s wife answered the door and said, “Virgil. We heard something happened.”
“Another bomb.”
She shivered and said, “I’m glad we’re leaving. Was the man… ?”
“He was killed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to Mike, just for a second.”
She stepped back and let him in. Sullivan was lying on the bed, half asleep. When his wife called him, he dragged open his eyelids, saw Virgil, and asked, “Everybody okay?”
“No.” Virgil told the story again, then asked his question: “That recorder for the security camera at the trailer-how big was it?”
Sullivan held his hands eighteen inches apart. “I dunno… about like this. It looked like a stereo receiver, or a DVD player, I guess.”
“Was the camera big or small?”
“Oh, you know, it was like the cameras you see in stores,” Sullivan said. “Not very big. It was round, white, had some LEDs in it.”
“Was it in a place where the guy would see it right away?” Virgil asked. “Or was it out of sight?”
“It was up in a corner over Gil’s desk, where it could see the door. It didn’t jump right out at you, but if you looked around, you wouldn’t have any trouble finding it… But after you found it, it’d take a while to find the recorder. That was in a cabinet on the floor, and it was locked shut.”
“But he found it.”
“I guess. The ATF guys say it wasn’t there.”
“I wonder if he’d been inside the trailer? You know, at some earlier date?” Virgil asked.
“Mm, there were guys in and out-city inspectors and stuff-but it wasn’t really a place to hang out. It was too small. Mostly a place where you had some power, and you could get out of the dirt and noise and make phone calls and run your laptop.”
“Is this going someplace?” Sullivan’s wife asked.
“I don’t know,” Virgil said.
Sullivan said, “Well, if you want to look at the whole video setup, there’s a new trailer on-site, brought up from one of our construction centers in Omaha. Donny Clark, he’s my replacement, he’ll be out there, he could show you.”
“Don Clark… good luck to him, and God bless him,” Sullivan’s wife said.
Virgil drove out to the construction site and found Don Clark sitting in the new trailer, working on a laptop. A burly blond man with a curly blond mustache, he was as tall as Virgil but twice as wide. He took Virgil down the length of the new construction trailer and popped open a cabinet door. “There it is,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
The server was an aluminum box with a couple of switches and an LCD panel. Virgil picked it up: four to six pounds, he thought. The camera was mostly plastic, and maybe weighed two pounds.
He left Clark and repeated his walk across the construction site and down through the brush and weeds to the river. The most obvious path came out at one of the pools where Peck had been fishing; nobody fishing at the moment. He got right down by the black water, startled a green heron out of a tangle of weeds, probably a nest. Couldn’t see anything.
Thought about it.
Cameron Smith had said that there was a bridge to the west, and not too far. Virgil followed the riverside trail, a dusty rut off a gravel county road. There were two more pools between the first one he’d visited and the bridge. He stood on the bridge looking into the water, then got on his cell phone and called Ahlquist.
“You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn’t come up?”
“Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There’s a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they’ve got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”
“How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.
“Go to Butternut Scuba-they’re open every day. What’re you up to?”
“Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”
“What?”
“Talk to you later,” Virgil said.
17
Butternut Scuba was a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.
When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank-I’m back here.”
Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”
“That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”
Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he’d gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the habits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice In-Fisherman article out of that, but he hadn’t had a tank on since the summer before.
“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said Gretchen.
“Actually, I need some divers. I’m a cop and I’d like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”
“You don’t look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.
