And Virgil thought, Hey, wait a minute. What’d Davenport just say? Maybe the bomber wanted a whole storm of cops to come in? Why would he want that?
Virgil closed his eyes and thought about it, and came up with exactly one answer: the bomber wanted a bigger, wider investigation. Why would he want that? Because a bigger, wider investigation would probably get into the question of whether the city council was bribed, and if it had been, then… PyeMart was gone.
So maybe there was a good reason to try to kill him-nothing personal, not anger or revenge or because Virgil was a threat, but an effort to get as many cops as possible into town.
The guy might be nuts, but there was a logic buried in his craziness.
So why did he go after Pye first? Why weren’t there any warnings? Maybe because he was worried about heightened security around Pye, if he set the first one off in Butternut. So he went after Pye first-after the whole board of directors, but had failed. If he’d succeeded, what would he have done then?
Issued a warning, perhaps: quit building the PyeMart, or else.
But then, if the company didn’t do it, what would he do next?
Virgil thought about it, and decided that there wouldn’t have been a warning: he would have continued on to Butternut, and would have blown up the trailer even if he had been successful with the Pinnacle bomb.
The first bomb was an announcement of his seriousness; the second bomb was the beginning of the actual campaign.
The third bomb, at the equipment yard, would slow down the construction process, and make it more expensive.
The fourth one, another attack on Pye… keeping the pressure on.
Then the attack on Virgil, maybe to bring more pressure into town.
And finally, the bomb at Erikson’s.
He considered the list, and after a moment, focused on the bombing of the equipment yard. That one wasn’t quite right: he took a big risk, to do nothing more than slow down the process. In fact, he wouldn’t even slow down the construction or opening of the store-he’d just slow down the water and sewer connection by a couple of months. If done on schedule, the connection would have been made three or four months before the store was finished. Now, it’d only be two months.
So why would that have been important to him? Important enough to make a couple of dozen bombs, or however many it was?
Then, there was the bomb at Erikson’s. If he was fully rational, he had a reason for picking Erikson as the fall guy. He wasn’t just chosen at random. Why Erikson?
Hethought about Kline, the pharmacist he’d visited on his second day in town. He knew everything and everybody…
Virgil rolled off the couch and went out to his car and drove downtown. Ed Kline, said the girl behind the pharmacy cash register, was on break.
“Up on the roof?”
“You know about the roof? Let me call him.”
She took out her cell phone, made the call, mentioned Virgil’s name, then rang off and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”
“I do.”
Kline was sitting in a recliner, looking out at the lake, his feet up on a round metal lawn table, blowing smoke at the sky.
“You find him?” he asked Virgil.
“No. But I can refine the list. The bomber, I think, is working through some kind of logic. I think it most likely has to do with money. There also has to be a link with Henry Erikson, but I can’t see what it would be. And I think he’s probably on my list.”
“And…”
Virgil took the survey list out of his pocket. “So, I need you to look at my list and tell me who on the list would either make money, or save money, if PyeMart went down. I’ve already talked to a couple of the major possibilities, and sorta scratched them off. I really need an Erikson-money connection.”
Kline worked his way through the cigarette as he studied the list, and finally shook his head and handed it back to Virgil. “I don’t see it. I see the usual suspects, people who lose when PyeMart comes in. Nothing that involves Erikson.”
“Did Erikson ever serve on the city council? I mean, was he ever in a spot where he could have affected what happened with PyeMart?”
Again, Kline shook his head. “No. Never ran for anything, far as I know.”
“Sarah Erikson couldn’t point out any tight ties between Henry and anybody on the list.”
“I really didn’t know him well enough to suggest any connections,” Kline said.
They were sitting around, speculating, and Virgil took two calls, one after the other.
The first came from a BCA agent named Jenkins, who said, “Me’n Shrake are in town. We’re busting the mayor, and then some guy named Arnold.”
“God bless you,” Virgil said. “Are you staying at the AmericInn?”
“We are. See you for dinner?”
“If it’s not blown up.”
A moment later, he took another call, this one originating at the BCA office itself.
“Virgil? Gabriel Moss here. We loaded up your disk drives, and we got images.”
“How good?”
“The images are good enough, but you can’t see a face. He’s wearing a camo mask. We can tell you how tall he is, about what he weighs, and his shoe size, but there’s no face.”
“Can you send it to me?”
“Sure. I can e-mail it if you want. You’ll have it in five minutes.”
“And send me the numbers-height, weight, and all that.”
Virgil rang off and asked Kline, “Could you think about this? How many ways are there to squeeze money out of PyeMart? Out of the situation? There’s got to be something, and we’re just not seeing it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Kline said. “I think you’re probably right, but I suspect I’ll be awful damn surprised when you catch the guy. You might have to catch him before I can see where the money’d be coming from.”
20
Virgil hooked into the sheriff’s wi-fi and downloaded the video-clip file, watched it once-a murky series of black-andwhite images of a man in camo moving around the inside of the trailer.
A note with the file said that the man was six feet, three and one-half inches tall, in his boots, the brand of which was unknown, but had approximately a one-and-one-half-inch heel; that the boots were size eleven, D width, one of the most common sizes for men; that he probably weighed between one hundred and seventy-five and one hundred and eighty-five-that is, was slender to average weight, but not fat or husky-and that the camo was Realtree. The man wore a mask commonly worn by bow hunters.
Virgil found Ahlquist talking to a couple deputies, and ran the video for them to see if they could pick out anything else. Ahlquist shook his head and said, “It’s Realtree, all right, but hell, half the bow hunters in the state wear it.”
“Yeah, I got some myself,” Virgil said.
“So did Erikson, but Erikson was maybe five-eleven,” Virgil said. “I asked when I found out the lab guys had saved the video.”
“So it’s definitely not him.”
“I wouldn’t say definitely,” Virgil said. “The problem with labs, they come up with exact answers. Sometimes, they’re wrong, and it really screws you up.”
They all nodded.
He called Barlow and told him about the video, and about the size problem, and Barlow said, “So we’re down
