William Krueger - Purgatory Ridge

“Cork, Jo,” Schanno said, “this is Agent Mark Owen. He’s an expert on arson and explosives. Agent Owen, Cork and Jo O’Connor.”

“FBI?” Cork asked.

“BCA,” Agent Owen replied.

Cork glanced around. “I thought you guys were going to bring up your mobile crime lab.”

Owen pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his dirty palm before offering his hand in greeting, first to Jo, then to Cork. “Multiple homicide in Goodhue County last night. The last twenty-four hours in this state have been a bitch.”

Cork’s attention was grabbed by a man walking toward them from the shed where several deputies were still carefully sifting the blackened debris. Cork put him at just over sixty; he was of medium height and build and had gray hair. He wore a gray suit and tie, a neat figure amid all the chaos of the mill yard. He moved with the air of a man in no particular hurry.

“This is Agent David Earl,” Schanno said, when the man had reached them. “Agent Earl, Jo and Cork O’Connor.”

They shook hands.

“Are you BCA, too?” Cork asked.

“That’s right.” He took a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his suit coat and tapped out a cigarette that he lit with a silver lighter. He blew a flourish of smoke and considered Cork. “O’Connor. I knew a sheriff up here, must be nearly forty years ago. His name was O’Connor, too.”

“My father.”

“A good man, as I recall. You in law enforcement?”

“He used to have my job,” Schanno said.

Earl smiled and shrugged as if to say, Politics. “What do you do now?”

“I-uh-I run a hamburger stand.”

“And you’re here because?” He looked to Schanno for an answer.

“Chauffeur,” Cork replied quickly. “For my wife. She represents the Iron Lake Ojibwe.”

Earl shifted his gaze to Jo. “It must be the Warren fellow brings you here. Tragic business.”

“Do you have any idea how the explosion happened?” Jo asked.

“Some. Sheriff?”

“Go ahead,” Schanno said. “The whole county’ll know soon enough anyway.”

With the hand that held his cigarette, Earl gestured, giving his partner Owen the floor.

Owen finished wiping the soot from his hands, then stuffed the rag in the back pocket of his jeans. “We’re still gathering evidence, of course, but I’ll tell you what I suspect. It was a low-order explosive, smokeless powder, probably, encased in a steel pipe. The igniter was simple. A timer, probably a cheap clock, connected to a battery-my guess would be a nine-volt cell-wired to a camera flashbulb with the protective glass removed. The clock hits the right time, completes the circuit, battery fires up the flashbulb, the heat from the filament wire ignites the powder, and boom.” As he’d warmed to his subject, one he was obviously passionate about, his hands had begun to create pictures in the air to illustrate his words. “Now, normally a bomb of this kind would produce mostly fragmentation. But this bomb had something special. I think the pipe was coated with a chemical, a flammable gelatin or maybe even model airplane glue, which is quite flammable. The chemical ignited in the explosion so that the fragments, as they dispersed, were burning. At least one of these burning fragments sheared a valve on the LP tank, ignited the escaping gas, and that’s when the really destructive explosion occurred.”

“Don’t let Mark fool you,” Earl said with a slight smile. He tapped the ash from his cigarette. “He’s not as smart as he seems. Same MO’s been used in several other bombings recently in Vermont, Washington State, and California. Heavy equipment was the target in those incidents, as well.”

“You’re not saying it’s the same person?” Lindstrom said.

“Not necessarily,” Owen replied. “The device is simple enough, really, that a high school student with access to the materials and the Internet could have made it.”

“There’s someplace on the Internet that explains how to build bombs?” Jo asked.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Owen replied. “The Army of the Earth that the caller this morning mentioned. It’s the most militant of the environmental groups. It maintains a Web site with exactly the kind of information necessary to construct the device I’ve described.”

“Great,” Cork said. “It could be anyone from sixteen to sixty.”

Earl dropped his cigarette to the ground and used the toe of his shoe to put out the ember. He took in the destruction of the shed and mill yard. “I really hate the Internet.”

“The gelatin or airplane glue or whatever is a new addition,” Owen went on. “It’s got to make you wonder if part of the purpose here might have been to start some fires. This is, after all, a lumber mill. A lot could be destroyed. Still, I don’t think the device was meant to hurt anybody.”

“Why?” Jo asked.

“Look at the timing.”

“You mean detonation when Harold Loomis was farthest from the blast,” Jo said in clarification.

“Technically speaking, it wasn’t a detonation,” Owen said. “It was a deflagration. A slower form of explosion.”

“By a whole thousandth of a second,” Earl said. “Mark loves to show off.”

Owen smiled boyishly. “Just keeping the record straight, Dave. I wish we’d been able to question Mr. Loomis immediately. It would have been best to test his hands and clothing for residue.”

“You don’t suspect Loomis of doing this?!” Lindstrom seemed on the edge of outrage.

In a reasonable tone, Earl said, “It would have been good to be able to eliminate him completely as a suspect, that’s all.”

“Does that mean you don’t think Charlie Warren was responsible for this?” Jo asked.

Schanno answered, “It means we don’t really know what happened, and we’ve got to consider all the possibilities.”

“Not Harold Loomis,” Lindstrom insisted.

“Look, Karl,” Schanno said, “even taking into account his age, Loomis seems to have observed very little and remembered even less.”

Lindstrom looked as if he’d hit some kind of wall. “I don’t get it. I’m threatened. My mill is attacked. Outside that gate are a lot of people who aren’t sorry in the least that this has happened. But here you are, questioning my employees. Christ, is this the way justice works in Minnesota now?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned and stomped across the yard toward the mill offices.

“We should be going,” Jo said. “Wally, I appreciate the call.”

“We’ve all got to live together here, Jo,” Schanno replied.

It was nearing dark when they left. The protestors had called it a day. The road in front of the mill was empty. Cork and Jo were quiet for much of the drive into Aurora. As they neared the first traffic light, Jo asked, “What would Charlie Warren have been doing there?”

“Anyone’s guess at this point,” Cork replied.

“Karl Lindstrom seems so ready to believe it was Charlie who planted that bomb.”

“Given the way things look, if I didn’t know Charlie, I’d probably suspect him. Karl doesn’t know the Anishinaabe people except as someone on the other side of this logging issue. And he’s under a lot of pressure.”

The light turned green and Cork drove on. The street lamps were just starting to flicker on. In Knudsen Park, a game of softball was already being played under stadium lights.

“You grant Lindstrom a lot,” Jo observed.

“I don’t have any reason not to. I don’t represent anybody.”

Jo watched the softballers and said quietly, “Lindstrom was right about one thing. You shouldn’t be involved in this.”

“Aurora’s a small town. Everyone’s involved in this.”

“Not the way you are.” She looked at him. It was too dark for him to see her face clearly. “You shouldn’t have been there tonight. Even Wally Schanno couldn’t defend that one.”