John Sandford - Shock Wave

“So Willard doesn’t know of any specific case of bribery, but at some level, has to know that it goes on,” Virgil said.

“Willard can be a very sweet man and he’s tremendously loyal to his employees-but he is a ferocious businessman. He does what he thinks he needs to do.” She hesitated, and rolled the bottom of her margarita glass on the tabletop, making a tracery out of a couple drops of water. “We’re now getting into an area that I want to reserve for my book.”

“So he knows.”

“I can’t say that. I can tell you that the man, the expediter, who went to jail in Indiana, served eight months of the one-year sentence. When he got out, he landed on his feet: he got a great job with a major paper company, a maker of all kinds of paper products, everything from notebooks to paper plates.”

“Yeah?”

“A major supplier to PyeMart,” she said.

“So the guy got taken care of.”

“That would be for somebody else to say,” she said. Then, “Are you investigating Willard?”

“I’m trying to find the bomber,” Virgil said. “But you know there’ve been accusations of bribery… you were at the press conference, almost a fistfight there.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Virgil, I’ve said about as much as I’m going to say,” Chapman said. “I won’t betray Willard, or go sneaking around to find information for you. If you’re going to investigate him, you’ll have to do it on your own.”

“Be a good thing for your book,” Virgil said. “You know, if Pye got pitched into some kind of crisis.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then laughed, a short, choppy sound, and said, “The snake crawls out from behind the surfer-boy smile.”

“Hey… I’m just telling you what’s going on,” Virgil said.

“We ought to talk about something else,” she said.

So they did.

They had a pleasant meal, talked about writing, and about police work, about where they grew up, and about Virgil’s cases-Chapman had access to an excellent news clipping service, and knew about Virgil’s major busts. She was, Virgil thought, an interesting woman, but something had fundamentally changed between them when the word “snake” came out of her mouth. He dropped her at the AmericInn at nine o’clock and, feeling a little melancholy, went on to the sheriff ’s department.

Of the fourteen letters sent out, they’d gotten back eleven-three people declined to participate. Virgil took two hours to work through the mass of names, entering them on his laptop, with addresses. After eliminating duplicates, he had a list of a hundred and seventy-eight people who’d be asked to nominate possible bombers.

Ahlquist had come through several times while Virgil was working out the list, and finally he said, “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s gonna cause a stink.”

“Yeah, it will, but it’s a whole new way of looking at an investigative problem,” Virgil said. “I’m almost as curious to see how it comes out as I am anxious to catch the bomber.”

When he had the list, and the addresses, he wrote a carefully worded cover letter, explaining the idea behind the nominations, asking that the lists be returned to the sheriff ’s department no later than the next evening. He left space at the bottom, with ten blank underlines, for the bomber nominees, and noted that the letter’s recipients didn’t need to sign the letter or identify themselves in making their nominations.

He was working through the letter, revising, when he took a call from Lee Coakley. He perked up as soon as he saw the incoming number, and heard her voice: “Virgil, how are you?”

“Aw, I’m in a mess of a case. I’m up in Butternut Falls.”

“David told me, I looked it up on the Star Tribune ’s website. Are you getting anywhere with it?”

“Well, I’m trying something new…” He explained about the letters. When he finished explaining, she started laughing, and after a minute, said, “Virgil, you have a different kind of mind.”

“ I didn’t think of it.”

“But you’re doing it. I hope Earl knows what you’re getting him into.”

“Earl’s gonna do just fine, if I pull this off. Anyway, what have you been up to?”

So she told him, a bunch of stuff he didn’t entirely understand about working through a gunfight on a TV show. “It’s about half real, and half movie. I tell them what’d really happen, they tell me what they need to have happen, for the movie. Then, we try to work something out that feels sorta real, but gets done what they need done.”

She went on for five minutes and sounded so enthusiastic about it that Virgil felt the melancholy coming back. Because, he thought, Lee probably wouldn’t be. When she said, “I gotta go, the boys are raising hell,” it was a notably friendly, and non-intimate, good-bye. A kind of good-bye he recognized, a good-bye from a friend, not from a lover. He wondered if she recognized it, and thought she probably did, since women were always a few steps ahead in such matters.

Which, when he thought about it, was how he lost his Tim Kaihatsu-signed Gibson guitar when his second wife moved out.

He went back to the letters, editing them, then printing them. Before stuffing them in envelopes, he numbered each of the one hundred and seventy-eight names on his list, and on each letter, carefully, with black ink, put a small dot in a word that corresponded, in number, to the number of each name on the list.

In other words, the letter began with the phrase, As you undoubtedly know… and the first name on the list, Andrew Lane, got a small black dot between the legs of the capital A in As. The second name on the list got a tiny dot in the o in you. The third name got a dot in the o of undoubtedly.

Because the letters had said the responses would be anonymous, it felt dishonest, but, he thought, it might be useful to know who nominated whom. He couldn’t think of a reason why it might be useful, but then, he’d never done anything like this.

He finished after one o’clock in the morning, left a stack of letters with the duty officer, for delivery the next day, and headed back to the hotel.

He spent a restless night in the over-soft bed; too much to think about. He didn’t have many new ideas about chasing the bomber, at least, not until the letters came back. That would give him as much work as he could handle.

In the meantime, he could look into the question of whether the city council had been bribed. That would not be fun-he would need to extort the necessary information, using marital infidelity as a wedge. He’d had a checkered past himself when it came to women-three divorces in three years, before he at least temporarily quit getting married. So you had some schoolteachers engaging in some bed-hopping-so what? Except, unfortunately for them, it might be tangled up with bribery.

He could also stay in bed, the pillow hard as a pumpkin, and spend the night brooding about Lee Coakley. Had she already been unfaithful? What about himself; was thinking about the honeyhaired Marie Chapman actually unfaithful? Taking her out to dinner? Jimmy Carter would have said… But, you know, fuck Jimmy Carter.

In the morning, he cleaned up and decided to head out to Country Kitchen for French toast and link sausage; and, he thought, since he didn’t know exactly what he’d be doing all day, he might as well take the boat, just in case.

He backed around, hooked up, and took off. At the street, he took the curb-cut too short and he felt the trailer’s right wheel bounce over the curb.

In an infinitesimally short space of time, the bomb in the trailer blew up and the world lurched and Virgil found himself on the street, crawling away from the truck, with the sense of blood in his nose and mouth, though when he wiped his face with his hand, there wasn’t any. He rolled onto his butt and looked back. The boat had been cut in half, but the truck itself seemed untouched; gasoline was pouring onto the street, and he thought, Fire.