John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Did the feds go through the photography?”

“Yeah, they had a couple of guys working it, but it didn’t come to anything.”

“Let me think about it,” Virgil said.

“You got the plane if you want it,” Pye said. “I hope you take it.”

Virgil went out to the PyeMart site and found two deputies sitting on the same two folding chairs, and a patrol car, but no crime-scene technician. The senior cop told Virgil, “The one guy is helping Barlow at the car-bombing scene, and the other went out to the limo driver’s house, to see if there’s anything around where the car was parked. So, we’re just sitting here.”

“Nice day for it, anyway,” Virgil said. And it was. He went back to his truck, put on hiking boots, got a hat and his Nikon, and headed across the construction pad. Given the location of the trailer, and with the binocular flash coming from the southeast, the watcher, whoever he was, must have been in a fairly narrow piece of real estate to the left of the main building pad.

Virgil walked to the edge of the construction site-nobody working, construction had been halted until the ATF gave the go-ahead-and plunged into the brush. He hadn’t gone far, quartering back and forth through the scrub, before he found a game trail that led away to the south. Fifty yards south, a gopher mound that overlapped the trail showed the edge of a human footprint. Virgil stepped carefully around it, then took a photo, using a dollar bill for scale, and moved on south.

He’d looked at the site on a Google satellite photo: a loop of the Butternut cut a channel in the rising land to a point that the Google measuring tape said was about six hundred and fifty yards from the highway, and directly south of the PyeMart site. The game trail went that way, and Virgil followed it, looking for more prints. He found a couple of indentations, but nothing that would help identify a shoe.

He’d been walking for fifteen minutes or so, brush and weeds up higher than his head, following the game trail, slowly, when he broke into an open grassy slope that went down to the Butternut.

The river-creek-wasn’t much more than thirty or forty feet wide at that point, and shallow, with riffles showing where the water was running over stone. Both above and below the riffles, broad pools cut into the banks. A hundred yards upstream, a man in a weirdlooking white suit, broad-brimmed white hat, and waders was working deeper water with a fly-casting rod. Virgil went that way, and when he’d covered about half the ground, the man snapped the rod up, and Virgil saw that he had a fish on the line, and stopped to watch.

The man’s rod was long and slender and caramel-colored, and he played the fish with great delicacy. At some point, Virgil realized that the rod was made of bamboo-something you didn’t see much of-and the pale gold fishing line was probably silk.

The man brought in the trout, landing it with a small net that he unclipped from an equipment belt. He looked around, as if for witnesses, spotted Virgil, and held up the trout-it was perhaps a foot long, not a bad fish, for a trout, in the Butternut-and then slipped it back in the water.

Virgil continued toward him, and the man clambered out of the water and said, “Be nice if the water were about ten degrees warmer. Nice for me, if not the trout.”

Virgil said, “That was a nice little fish. I’ll have to bring my rod down.”

“I haven’t seen you around,” the man said. “Are you working over at the PyeMart?”

“Sort of,” Virgil said. “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m looking for this bomber.”

“Good luck with that,” the fisherman said.

As they were talking, Virgil was looking the guy over. He was tall and thin and large-nosed, his face weathered from sun exposure, like a golfer… or a fisherman. He was perhaps forty-five. Virgil had never seen a fishing outfit like the man was wearing: not quite white, more of a muslin color, and fitted like a suit coat, with lapels, and matching pleated pants.

The man said, “What? You’ve never seen a nineteenth-century fly-fishing outfit?”

“Uh, no,” Virgil said. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Not a lot of us traditionalists around,” the man said. “But a few.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Mmm. I’ve overstayed, I’m afraid.”

Virgil said, “Listen, have you seen a guy in camo hanging around here? A local guy? Maybe carrying a pair of binoculars?”

“Camouflage? No, no, I haven’t, but then, I don’t usually fish this low,” the man said. “I’m usually upstream, but things weren’t going so well up there, so I persisted, and here I am.”

“You know anybody who fishes down here?”

“I do,” the man said. “Cameron Smith. He likes these two pools, and two more down below. There’s an old mill dam, fallen down now, but there’s still a good deep pool behind it. He’s more of a wetfly man. I’m dry.”

“Cameron Smith… he’s in town here?”

“Yes. He’s the president of the Cold Stream Fishers, which is a local fly-fishing club. I’m also a member.”

“The club members pretty pissed about the PyeMart?”

“Shouldn’t they be? I’ll tell you what, this river is one of the western outposts of the trout in Minnesota. Everything south and west of here is too warm and too muddy. Too many farms, too much plowing, too much fertilizer. There’s a river fifteen miles south of here. In the middle of the summer it gets an algae bloom you could almost walk across, from the fertilizer runoff. Looks like a goddamned golf fairway. This creek is a jewel; it should have been a state park long ago. Nothing good can happen with this PyeMart. Nothing. Maybe nothing terrible will happen, but then, maybe something terrible will happen. That’s the way we look at it. There’s no upside, but there could be a huge downside. There are damn few things worth blowing up people for, but this creek might be one of them.”

“But you wouldn’t do that,” Virgil said.

“Of course not. I’d be chicken, for one thing. For another, I’m not that certain of the moralities involved. We do know one thing about the world, though, and that’s that we’ve got way too many people, and way too few trout. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ We’re not talking about trout qua trout, but trout as a symbol of everything that’s good for the environment.”

They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”

As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.

“You think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.

Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”

“Tell me,” Virgil said.

“Market research.”

“Market research?”

“Do an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your friends and tell you confidentially who is most likely to be the bomber. You set up some rules: tell people they aren’t to name old enemies, or people of color or other victims of prejudice. Then give them the clues you have, so far, tell them to think really hard: Who is he? If you put this in the paper, you’d have five thousand replies by tonight. You go through the replies, and you’d find probably ten suspects, coming up over and over. One of them will be the bomber.”