“I knew that,” Virgil said. “I’m a professional detective.”
“But you might be outsmarting yourself. Go back to the fundamentals of detecting. If there is such a thing. Another beer? I’ve only got two left, and it seems a shame just to leave them sitting there by themselves.”
Go back to fundamentals, Virgil thought, when he finally left.
Shoe leather. Compile facts. Throw out whatever was impossible.. .
Whatever. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where to start walking, and while he had a lot of facts, they were mostly irrelevant. What about motive? The fundamentals would say that murder is committed because of greed and sex, to which Virgil added craziness, druginduced or otherwise.
There was craziness here, but also a method: it wasn’t the kind of compulsive, uncontrolled murder that’s done by what psychiatrists referred to as nut jobs. This was craziness on a mission, and the mission probably involved greed or sex.
But not trout.
Virgil realized that he’d psychologically eliminated about half the people nominated for the bombings: the trout fishermen.
Trout fishermen, he thought, were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn’t even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.
As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you’d lose your fuckin’ lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.
Anyhoo… the trout fishermen were out.
Which made him feel better.
Sex and greed.
He’d made some progress, fueled by three beers.
Back at the county courthouse, he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they’ve got Block upstairs, and they’re squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”
“Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.
“Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he’s on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he’s got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn’t cooperate, he was going for twenty years. Twenty years. You can kill somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies’ can, and she said he’s serious… So, I wanted you to know.”
“Okay.”
“Now what’s this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.
“The bomber’s blowing stuff up because of greed or sex-I’ve eliminated trout-and I don’t see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it’s greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”
“The guy isn’t here,” Ahlquist said. “He’s long gone. Last I heard, he’s down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”
“We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye-maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”
“Did somebody say that? The money thing?”
“Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”
“Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I’ll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block’s balls.”
Virgil decided he had to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”
Virgil went in and lay on the couch, his feet up on one arm. Lot of stuff going on. Had to think about it. After five minutes, he hadn’t thought of anything, so he called Davenport and told him what was going on. Davenport summarized it: “So you cleaned up the town, but you don’t have the bomber.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, let me know when you do. I gotta go.”
“Why’d he try to kill me? That’s what I want to know. If he’d killed me, he would have gotten a whole storm of cops in here.”
“Maybe he was making a point of some kind, about resistance,” Davenport said. “Or maybe he wanted a whole storm of cops in there.”
NO HELP THERE.
He was still on the couch when the governor called. “Hey, Virgil, I talked to State Farm, and you’re good to go. You haul the boat to the State Farm place up there, and they’ll resell what they can-scrap, I guess-and you get a check for the boat and motor and a thousand in personal property.”
“Ah, jeez, Governor. Thanks, I guess. There’s nothing criminal in this, is there?”
“Criminal? This is the least criminal thing I’ve done this week,” the governor said. “The second-least-criminal thing I’ve done is, I talked to an old buddy up at East Coast Marine in Stillwater. He’s got a Ranger, there, a beauty, used, but not hard, owned by some rich guy who went out about once a year… Anyway, your check exactly matches the asking price, including sales tax. You gotta go look at it.”
“A Ranger?” Virgil’s mouth started to water. “Jeez, Governor, I don’t know-”
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the governor said. “Everything’s totally on the up-and-up. Well, as much on the up-and-up as these things get. Anyway, I gotta go violate somebody’s civil rights. Talk to you later. It’s Andy at East Coast Marine. He’s making out the papers right now.”
“Well… thanks,” he said, but he was thinking, Holy shit, a Ranger. He had the urge to drop the entire bomb case and get the hell over to Stillwater before Andy died…
“So Davenport said you’d been out to Michigan, to the Pinnacle. I didn’t hear about that. What’s going on there?”
Virgil explained the problem of planting the bomb, and his thoughts, and the governor said, “Any way he could climb it? Or come down? Parachute, maybe?”
Virgil thought back to the conversation he’d had with the guys at the Pye Pinnacle and said, “Someone would’ve seen a plane, or heard it at least. I thought maybe a helicopter, but you couldn’t land one there without someone noticing. A hang glider, maybe, but the Pinnacle’s the tallest thing out there. There’d be nowhere to launch it from.”
The governor rang off, and Virgil closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch. The word “glider” floated through his mind, and he thought, Hey, wait a minute. Did somebody say something about Peck flying a glider? The guy at Butternut Tech. Huh. Could you land a glider on top of a building?
He didn’t know anyone else who could answer that question, so he called Peck.
“Hey, George-could you land a glider on top of a building?”
After a moment of silence, Peck said, “A glider? Somebody told you I used to fly gliders?”
“Yeah, somebody did, but I’ll be damned if I can remember who. So, could you?”
“Well, not me, personally, because I’d be too chicken. But I guess if you had a big enough roof, without any obstructions, you could.”
“How big a roof?”
“Maybe… three hundred yards at the absolute minimum. But that would be scary as hell, even with perfect wind and good visibility. The problem is, you’d have to come in high enough to make sure you got on the roof-you don’t want to crash into the side of the building. Then you’d have to stop before you got to the far parapet, because if you didn’t, and hit it, you’d either get squashed like an eggshell hitting a wall, or if the parapet was low enough, it’d trip the glider and you’d go right over the edge and drop like a stone. Or both.”
“You had me at three hundred yards,” Virgil said. “The roof of the Pye Pinnacle is probably fifty yards across. Maybe less. It’s got all kinds of pipes and chimneys and air-conditioning ducts up there.”
“No way you’re gonna land a glider on that. That’s just not going to work.”
