“Sometimes it’s locked,” she said. “Most of the time, it isn’t.”
“You ever have a key go missing?”
“No, not that I know of,” Erikson said. “But all our locks open with one key, and we’ve had a lot of those keys. I suppose somebody could have stolen one.”
Virgil thought it over, and shook his head. “It can’t just be the availability of a key. There has to be something… Is he involved in the PyeMart situation in any way?”
“No, except that he was against it,” Erikson said. “He thought the Butternut was such a great resource. He grew up back there, his family had a farm. He used to float down it on rafts, and then he got a canoe-”
“So he didn’t sell any of that land to PyeMart? Or his family?”
“No, they were way down to the south of there. They don’t own the land anymore, anyway. His folks sold it years ago.”
Virgil chewed that over for a moment, but couldn’t see how it would go anywhere. Maybe the bomber had simply seen the size of the workshop, and chose him because it would make bomb production look more credible? Maybe.
Before he left the sheriff’s office, he’d written down the names of the people who’d shown up more than once on his survey, plus the two who worked at the college. The kitchen was empty, and he said, “Mrs. Erikson, I’d like you to step into the kitchen with me for a moment. I want to show you something privately.”
She looked around at her friends for a moment, then shrugged and stood and led the way into the kitchen. At the far end, at a breakfast nook, Virgil quietly explained his survey, then said, “I want you to look at this list. How many of the people do you know?”
She took the list, scanned it, blinked a couple of times, then stepped back to the kitchen counter and took a pencil out of a cup, put the list on a magazine and the magazine on the countertop, and started checking them off. “I’ll put one check by the people I just know, and two checks by the ones who might know our house a little.”
“There are some?”
She bent over the list. “Three. There are three.”
“Do any of them seem to be the kind…”
She stared at the list for a long time, and then said, “I never liked Bill Barber. He’s a jerk and he’s angry, and I think he was once mixed up in some kind of assault.”
“Doesn’t have a record,” Virgil said.
“His uncle was on the police force, before it became part of the sheriff’s department. He might have hushed it up. Or maybe he was a juvenile or something. It was quite a while ago.”
Virgil had brought an annotated master list with him, and checked Barber’s name: he’d been mentioned four times. Interesting. “Why would Barber have been here?”
“Because he lives down the block. He bought a couple of cars from Henry, though that’s not a big deal: a lot of people have bought cars from Henry.”
“Is his house like this one?”
“Mmm, a little. They were all built by the same contractor,” she said.
“Okay. Okay… what about the other two?” Virgil asked.
“John Haden. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, he’s a nice enough man. I mean, Henry used to play guitar in a band. He was good. John used to build guitars, just as a hobby, electric guitars, and Henry got interested, and he started building some. They sort of got into it together. Henry was really good at the woodwork, and cutting the hollows in the back for the electronics, that kind of stuff. John did all the hand-finish work and the paint. They could sell the guitars for a thousand dollars each. They had a waiting list.”
Virgil was interested: Haden was one of the two men who worked at Butternut Tech. “How many? In a year?”
“Ten, maybe? Sometimes a couple more or less.”
“So Haden would have a reason to want to keep your husband alive, if anything.”
“Oh, sure. They were friends.”
“He works at the college, right?”
“Yeah. Math. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, though. Maybe because he’s a little odd. Kinda geeky, you know. Once you get to know him, he seems really nice. He likes cats, we’ve got cats.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Virgil said. He liked cats himself. “When you say geeky, do you mean ineffectual? Or is he one of those, you know, more-manic geeks? Some of them have really strong beliefs.”
“Oh, not like that. He has an off-the-wall sense of humor. Maybe you could ask one of his ex-wives.”
“More than one?” Virgil asked. “He has trouble with relationships?”
“I think he’s been married and divorced three times, hard as that is to believe,” she said. “Who in their right mind would make that kind of mistake three times? Anyway, Henry said that even though he’s geeky, women like him. Heck, I guess I like him.”
“Okay.” He looked at the checks on her list. “What about this Gordon Wilson?”
“Gordy… he’s another car salesman, he works over at the Ford dealer. He’s been in and out of this house, off and on, sometimes he and Henry would be working deals. I don’t know him that well, really. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, either.”
Virgil looked at the master list: Wilson had been named three times.
“You don’t know this William Wyatt?” Wyatt was the other teacher.
“I’ve heard the name. It’s a small town, in some ways.”
“But you know Dick Gates? You gave him one check.” Gates was another name with four checks after it, like Barber.
“I don’t think he’s ever been to the house, but we both know him, knew him. He’s a police officer, you know, a wildlife officer. He patrols the lakes in the summer.”
They went through the rest of the list; and when he asked her, she looked thoughtfully at the list and said, “I’m just guessing.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” Virgil said. “I’ll take it purely as a guess.”
“And it makes me feel kind of crappy… but if I had to pick one, I guess I’d pick Dick Gates. Henry didn’t like him, and he didn’t like Henry. Henry liked to fish, and it seemed like every time he went out, and Gates was out, he would pull Henry over and check to see what he’d caught, and how many. After fifteen times, you’d think he’d know Henry was an ethical fisherman, who usually didn’t keep anything.” The tears started again, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “But he just kept doing it. Because I think he liked the power. It got so, if Gates’s boat wasn’t at the dock, Henry’d just go up the Butternut and fish. Gates didn’t go up the river. Too easy to get stuck, and then, nobody would help him out.”
Virgil considered that. He knew lots of cops who liked the power-and that, he thought, was probably why Gates was on the list four times. If he didn’t like the power, he might well have never been on it at all. Not that he was excusing him, just because he was a cop …
“Did Henry ever say anything to you about seeing something odd, up the river? Somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or acted weird?”
She shook her head. “He had a lot of Butternut stories, but nothing like that. But, you know, if it was just a little odd, he might not have mentioned it.”
They talked for a while longer, then Virgil thanked her and excused himself, and went out to the garage and watched the ATF crime-scene guys for a few minutes, and finally asked Barlow, “You still think he’s the guy?”
“I’m saying sixty percent, and slowly dropping. We could be down to fifty-fifty by this evening. The thing is, we found all the bomb stuff at once-and then nothing else. It was right out in the open. And we don’t find any of the small stuff you’d expect-more detonators, more batteries, a bunch of clocks or old thermostats… Didn’t find any rolls of wire. We did find some really odd-looking electronics, but we can’t put them with any bomb-making techniques.”
“He made electric guitars as a hobby,” Virgil said.
“Okay. I’ll mark that down,” Barlow said. “The other thing is, I can think of good reasons he could be the bomber and at the same time, we’d only find one pipe, and one blasting cap.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Like, he was limiting his exposure. He was planning to do two more bombs, and he kept the other stuff off-site to limit the possibility of detection.”
