John Sandford - Shock Wave

He considered the thought, and drunk as he was, it was a slippery thing to hang onto. The problem was, the local cops couldn’t be counted on to cooperate with the city council. Basically, they couldn’t find their own balls with both hands and a radar unit. A serious investigation was unlikely.

The ideal thing would be to bring in the state cops, or the FBI. The ATF was in town, but the ATF wouldn’t be much interested in doing a political corruption investigation.

Stray thought: somebody had been distributing a bumper sticker in town-he’d seen three or four of them-that said: “Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms… What’s not to like?”

Anyhoo…

Whoa, really drunk now. He struggled to stay on track.

The state cops were in town; state cop, that is. One guy, and all he apparently was thinking about was finding the bomber.

What you really needed, the bomber thought, was a whole bunch of cops, pulling the whole town apart. If that happened, they’d eventually get around to the city council.

The Bomber sat on his deck, drunk and plotting, and at some point well into his last martini, too drunk to even consider getting up and making more, an out-of-the-box plan began to form.

Take brass balls, but he had brass balls. No question about that. Not anymore.

He needed to think about it sober; couldn’t do it tonight, anyway. There was too much action right now, too many people with an eye out. Paranoia was a good thing, in the bombing business. So tonight he’d sleep it off, and tomorrow, he’d make the bomb. Make the bomb, and plant it tomorrow night.

Bring in a whole swarm of cops.

Guaranteed.

Or was that just the alcohol talking?

Billions and billions of stars shone down at him, twinkling their asses off, but they didn’t say shit.

The bomber fell asleep in his deck chair, and slept the sleep of the innocent.

Virgil dropped Chapman at her motel and called Davenport to report on the trip out to Michigan. He was sitting in the truck, talking to Davenport, when he saw George Peck, the traditionalist fly fisherman, walking along the street, looking into store windows.

“I just saw a clue,” Virgil said. “I gotta go.”

He hung up and waited until Peck got even with him, then rolled down the passenger-side window and yelled, “Hey, George.”

Peck turned, a frown on his face, saw Virgil in the truck, and walked over. “You shouted?”

“Yeah. I need to talk to you. Come on, get in.”

Peck paused for a moment, as if thinking about it, then nodded and popped the door and climbed in. He pulled the door shut, tilted his head up, sniffed, and said, “This truck smells like McDonald’s french fries.”

“It should-french fries are about eighty-five percent of my diet when I’m traveling,” Virgil said. “Listen, I’ve talked to a few guys about your whole market research idea. They don’t like it. I kinda do-but then, I might not be as smart as they are. There’s talk of lynch mobs.”

“I doubt you’d get a lynch mob,” Peck said.

“That’s not real reassuring-if you only doubt that I’d get one.”

“Not my problem,” Peck said. “But, consensus-seeking research seems to work with problems like yours. Of course, they’re usually asking about stock market moves, or some such. There’s usually no lynching involved. Or bombs.”

Virgil said, “What if instead of putting up a website, I got twenty very knowledgeable people…”

Peck was shaking his head. “That might not be enough. You need lots and lots of people. You could ask twenty people and just out of coincidence, because of social-class acquaintance problems, maybe none of them know the bomber… so they can’t nominate him. You need not just one set of smart people, but a whole spectrum of people.”

“But the bomber has to come from a class of people who object to PyeMart. So if I come up with a long list of people who don’t like PyeMart, they’d almost certainly know him.”

Peck thought about it for a minute, then said, “Unless… hmmm.” And he thought some more.

“Say it,” Virgil said.

“I was going to say, ‘Unless he was acting on an impulse.’ I was thinking, what if it’s, say, a college kid, and these opinions are new and he got swept up in them, but doesn’t have a history in town politics or issues arguments. He’s simply crazy, and looking for an outlet. Then, you might never see him, if you only surveyed people who were familiar with PyeMart opponents. But… on second thought.. . from what I know, that doesn’t seem likely. It seems more likely to be the work of a mature man. A planner. Somebody who thinks things through. Somebody more like me. So I’d probably know him. So…”

“So…?”

“So if you made a list based on your investigation, and on the federal investigation, of the bomber’s characteristics, and if you gave that list to me and, say, ten other people I might suggest… I think those ten people might be able to come up with a second list of a couple hundred people you could survey. Then, I think you would get your man.”

Virgil turned and pulled his briefcase out of the backseat. “Let’s make a list of characteristics right now. Then you can give me your list of names, and I’ll get the list around.”

Peck said, “Why don’t we go down to McDonald’s and work through this. It’s right around the corner.”

“Good with me. I could use some fries,” Virgil said.

They got a booth at McDonald’s, and soft drinks and fries, and Virgil laid out what he’d found to that point. Peck listened carefully, and they began their list.

The bomber, they thought: • was almost certainly male (because bombers almost always were). • was willing to take serious, but calculated, risks, both in building bombs and in planting them. • was intelligent. Was building bombs and detonators from first principles. Knew something about switches and electricity. • had hard opinions and was willing to act on them, even to the point of killing people. A streak of fanaticism. The bomber is crazy. • was acting out of an economic or environmentalist impulse. • probably had some close connection with Butternut Tech. • was intimately familiar with Butternut environs and personalities, down to limousine drivers. • could have close relatives or friends in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area.

“In the letter you write to the survey people, you have to say that they need to consider all the points,” Peck said. “But in the end, you’re also looking for gut feelings.”

Virgil wrote gut feelings at the bottom of the list.

“And you’ll have to say that nobody will see the answers except you, and that you’ll destroy the lists. Or, better yet, that it’ll all be anonymous, and nobody will know who answered what, not even you. Or even, who answered. Because not everybody will.”

“George, you’re a big help,” Virgil said. “Give me the list of ten names that’ll get me the list of two hundred.”

Getting Peck to produce ten names took a while, but when he got them, Virgil drove over to the county courthouse and began putting together a letter to the ten people recommended by Peck. The sheriff came by to see what he was up to, and Virgil showed him Peck’s list.

The sheriff agreed that the ten names had been well chosen, added two more names, plus his own and his wife’s, for a total of fourteen. He had a deputy get together a list of home and business addresses.

In his letter to the first, smaller group, Virgil asked that their lists be returned to the sheriff ’s department that afternoon or evening.

Time is of the essence, he wrote. We hope to begin distributing the survey tomorrow morning.

The Sheriff got two Deputies and told them to chase down the twelve people on Virgil’s list; he would take his own letter and his wife’s. “This is gonna be weird,” Ahlquist said. “Never heard anything like it being done. Could freak people out.”