John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Wait-wait-wait, let me get the last part of that… ‘to monitor the coming and going of cars to sensitive sites.’ Is that right?”

“That’s right. I have no information about any such plans.”

“By sensitive sites, you mean like the city hall, the county courthouse, the city councilmen’s houses, Willard Pye’s cars, the PyeMart site, and so on?”

“Those would be sensitive sites,” Virgil agreed.

“You’re not saying that there aren’t any plans, you’re saying that you don’t have any information about such plans.”

“That’s correct.”

“I’m not writing the story, but I’ll pass it on,” Ignace said.

“God bless you,” Virgil said. “And any children you may have spawned.”

Done with Ignace, he called Barlow to see if the ATF had come up with anything at the tech school. They had not. “It’s not a dead end, it’s a rats’ nest,” Barlow said. “There’re hundreds of people coming and going all the time, and they have adult evening classes, enrichment classes, and most of the adults in Butternut have been through there, at one time or another.”

“I have a feeling that it’s not a casual acquaintance, it’s somebody who goes through there on a regular basis. Somebody who’s familiar with the working of the place. A staff member, a full-time student.”

“Well, we’re still looking,” Barlow said.

Another possibility occurred to him: What if there were more than one thing going on? What if the first bomb was aimed at Pye himself, as the third one had been-and had been brought in by some desperate board member? Desperate, why? Virgil didn’t know, but he was sure that board members must get desperate from time to time. Pye was an older man, and there must be some kind of succession waiting in the wings. If you knew when the bomb was going to go off, then you could absent yourself… Of course, if you knew when it was going to go off, you would have set it for later, after the board meeting was sure to be under way.

Still, there might be something in it-someone desperate, or greedy, in Grand Rapids, hooking up with somebody desperate in Butternut Falls.

As weird as it seemed, there was a history of crazy bombers getting together-9/11 of course, but also the Oklahoma City bombing. There’d been cases of serial killers finding each other, or recruiting accomplices.

How would you do that? The Internet. He remembered Marie Chapman talking about anti-PyeMart sites. He’d forgotten to do anything about that… Virgil got back on the phone and called the BCA researcher. “Sandy? This is Virgil. You got time to do some Internet research?”

She said, “If Lucas approves it.”

He outlined what he wanted: for her to go back in the archives of any anti-PyeMart sites she could find and see if it looked like a couple of the crazier posters seemed to be getting together… and then tracking down where they were from.

“I can do all of that from home, so that’ll make it cheaper,” she said. Sandy worked on a part-time basis, and sometimes as a consultant. “I’ll talk to Lucas and get back to you.”

Another idea popped up. Would the bomber have taken all of the risks associated with building a bomb, and smuggling it into the Pinnacle, if he wasn’t sure it would work? Most likely, he’d rehearsed somewhere. That “somewhere” was most likely around Butternut. While the town was out in the countryside, it wasn’t a wilderness-if a bomb had gone off within a hundred miles of Butternut, somebody had heard it.

How to find those people?

Virgil went back to the fly rod, but his heart wasn’t in it, and after another ten minutes and one strike-and-miss, he motored back to the landing and yanked the boat out of the water. On the way back into the downtown, he called the sheriff, asked for the name and number of the local paper, which he couldn’t remember-the Clarion Call, as it turned out. He got the editor on the line and asked about the possibility of a public request-for-help on the next day’s front page.

“Well, what do you need?”

“I need a story that says the bomber probably rehearsed his bombings-he probably touched off a couple explosions within the last month or so. Probably not too far from Butternut-it’d be someplace familiar to him. You can attribute all those thoughts to me. I’d like to ask your readers if any of them heard an unexplained explosion. If they have, call the sheriff’s department.”

“Sure, we can do that. Give it a good spot, too.”

“I appreciate it,” Virgil said.

The day was still hot, but the afternoon was wearing on, and he’d been up early. Nap time? If he could get an hour or two, he’d be good until midnight. Back at the Holiday Inn, he was headed for his room when the desk clerk came running out to the parking lot and called, “Hey, Virgil.”

Virgil stopped. “Yeah?”

The kid was waving a piece of paper. “You got a call. It’s important.”

“A confession, I hope?”

“Well, yeah, something like that.” He handed a piece of paper to Virgil. “It was kind of anonymous. I took it down word for word.”

Virgil unfolded it. In the clerk’s neat handwriting, the note said: For Virgil Flowers of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Important. Pat Shepard’s wife Jeanne knows he took $25,000 from Pye but doesn’t know what he did with it. She thinks he used it to pay back taxes. He didn’t. He hid it so he could spend it on his girlfriend Marilyn Oaks (sp?). Jeanne doesn’t know about Marilyn.

Pat Shepard was one of the city councilmen who voted for the PyeMart. Virgil took a minute to digest the note. A cricket started chirping from the flower bed around the parking lot, an annoyance that brought him back. He asked the desk clerk what he thought. “I think Jeanne Shepard is the second-hottest woman in town.”

Virgil checked him out: a fairly good-looking blond jock-like kid of seventeen or eighteen, with big shiny white teeth; a kid who reminded him somewhat of himself, when he was that age. “How old is she?”

The kid shrugged: “I don’t know. Thirty-five?”

“What are you doing, thinking a thirty-five-year-old woman is hot?”

“Hey. If you’re hot, you’re hot,” the kid said. He was wearing a name tag that said Thor.

“Did you take the message?” Virgil asked.

“Yup. It was a man,” Thor said. “He refused to give his name, but it was Doug Mackey. Mr. Mackey.”

“Mr. Mackey?”

“He’s a teacher at the high school,” Thor said. “He was my golf coach for three years, and I took driver’s ed from him. I recognized his voice, but he didn’t recognize mine. Mr. and Mrs. Shepard are teachers, too. You want to know what I think?”

“Sure,” Virgil said.

“Mr. Mackey and Mr. Shepard are friends and they play a lot of golf together, at least once or twice a week. I think Mr. Shepard told Mr. Mackey that he’s nailing Marilyn Oaks. I don’t know Marilyn Oaks, but she must be the first-hottest in town, if Mr. Shepard is chasing her, instead of staying home. I’m telling you, Mrs. Shepard has got an ass like a couple of slow-pitch softballs. If it was me, I’d be-”

“Stick to the story,” Virgil said.

“Hey. I’m trying to get you fully informed. Anyway, I figure Mr. Mackey wants to nail Mrs. Shepard, or already is, and he’s trying to get Mr. Shepard out of the picture. He thinks you’ll go over there and tell her about Marilyn Oaks, and one way or another, Mr. Shepard is outa here and Mr. Mackey moves into Mrs. Shepard’s thong.”

“Mrs. Shepard wears a thong?”

“Better believe it,” Thor said. “Black in color, and just about the size of a pirate’s eye patch.”

“Eye patch?”

“She once wore a pair of tight white pants out to the country club-I was caddying at the time-and you could see it, right through the pants, when she started to sweat a little,” Thor said. “I want to tell you, I had a woody she could have putted with, and I was only fourteen. Another time, I was supposed to take some stuff for a school play over to her house, and she came out wearing a T-shirt and no bra, and she had nipples like the end of my little finger, and hard as marbles. Honest to God, I wish-”