John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Willard, I can’t talk,” Virgil said. “It’s not proper, and anyway, I gotta go. I’m coming up on Erikson’s.” He clicked off.

Word, he thought, was getting around. If Block didn’t crumble, they could have a problem getting to the mayor and Arnold Martin on Shepard’s testimony alone. And if the mayor didn’t crumble, they’d never get to the PyeMart expediter.

Virgil got on the phone to Ahlquist: “Could you get one of your smartest guys and put him in his private car and have him tag Willard Pye around? I’d be interested if he gets together with Geraldine Gore.”

“I can do that,” Ahlquist said. “I’ll call Pye and give him some bullshit, find out where he’s at.”

“Thanks. Talk to you later, Earl.”

The FEDs were taking the Erikson house apart. Virgil stopped to talk with Barlow, who said that things were just about where they were at when Virgil left. Barlow asked, “Were you around when this Shepard guy shot himself?”

“Across the street,” Virgil said. “Everybody in town knows about it, huh?”

“Well, I know about it, and nobody talks to me, much,” Barlow said.

Sarah Erikson was a brown-haired woman with a long nose and deep brown, almost black eyes, rimmed with red, where she’d been crying; she was dressed in a beige blouse and dark brown slacks and practical shoes, and sat alone in an easy chair, with her brother, her mother, and three female friends arrayed on the couch and a couple of chairs brought from the kitchen.

Her brother, whose name was Ron Mueller, told Virgil that his sister wasn’t in very good shape to talk to the police.

“I know that, but I need to talk to her anyway. There are some seriously urgent questions that just won’t wait.”

“We already told the police and the sheriff how ridiculous this whole idea is, that Henry is the bomber. He’s a good guy, he’s always around home, he doesn’t go sneaking off-”

“He’s got that workshop, and there was a half-made bomb,” Virgil said.

“The bomber planted it,” Mueller said. “Plain as the nose on your face.”

“I’m wiling to buy that-that’s why I need to talk to Sarah,” Virgil said. “Because if he’s innocent, there are a whole bunch of other questions that come up, and we need to get them answered. So: I need to talk to her. Now.”

“Be right back,” Mueller said.

Virgil was just inside the door; Mueller went over to Sarah and spoke to her quietly, and nodded, and she nodded, and Mueller turned back to Virgil and waved him over. One of the women got up and gave Virgil her chair and said, “I’ll get another one.”

Virgil sat and said, “Mrs. Erikson, I know you’re not in good shape to answer questions, but I do need some answers. You say your husband isn’t the bomber? Okay-but then, who is? You know him, whether you know it or not.”

That got her attention. She’d looked hazy-eyed when he sat down, but now her gaze sharpened up and she frowned.

“What?”

“If your husband is innocent, then the bomb was planted on him. It had to be planted by somebody who knew your husband had a workshop, knew which vehicle was his, knew he could get into your garage-or did you leave the door open last night? Could it have been random, the first open garage the guy saw?”

“No, no, the garage wasn’t open last night. Henry had a lot of tools, he kept the door down.”

“Then how’d the bomber get in?”

Erikson stared at him for a second, then looked over her shoulder, toward the kitchen, and said, “Well, uh, the garage door was down, but we mostly don’t lock the access door on the side. That’s behind the fence and so it’s open, most of the time.”

“Who’d know that?”

“Well… I guess maybe a lot of people would. I mean, we have backyard parties, barbeques, people coming and going. They’d know what was in the garage.”

“Could they count on that door being unlocked?” Virgil asked.

“Sometimes it’s locked,” she said. “Most of the time, it isn’t.”

“You ever have a key go missing?”

“No, not that I know of,” Erikson said. “But all our locks open with one key, and we’ve had a lot of those keys. I suppose somebody could have stolen one.”

Virgil thought it over, and shook his head. “It can’t just be the availability of a key. There has to be something… Is he involved in the PyeMart situation in any way?”

“No, except that he was against it,” Erikson said. “He thought the Butternut was such a great resource. He grew up back there, his family had a farm. He used to float down it on rafts, and then he got a canoe-”

“So he didn’t sell any of that land to PyeMart? Or his family?”

“No, they were way down to the south of there. They don’t own the land anymore, anyway. His folks sold it years ago.”

Virgil chewed that over for a moment, but couldn’t see how it would go anywhere. Maybe the bomber had simply seen the size of the workshop, and chose him because it would make bomb production look more credible? Maybe.

Before he left the sheriff’s office, he’d written down the names of the people who’d shown up more than once on his survey, plus the two who worked at the college. The kitchen was empty, and he said, “Mrs. Erikson, I’d like you to step into the kitchen with me for a moment. I want to show you something privately.”

She looked around at her friends for a moment, then shrugged and stood and led the way into the kitchen. At the far end, at a breakfast nook, Virgil quietly explained his survey, then said, “I want you to look at this list. How many of the people do you know?”

She took the list, scanned it, blinked a couple of times, then stepped back to the kitchen counter and took a pencil out of a cup, put the list on a magazine and the magazine on the countertop, and started checking them off. “I’ll put one check by the people I just know, and two checks by the ones who might know our house a little.”

“There are some?”

She bent over the list. “Three. There are three.”

“Do any of them seem to be the kind…”

She stared at the list for a long time, and then said, “I never liked Bill Barber. He’s a jerk and he’s angry, and I think he was once mixed up in some kind of assault.”

“Doesn’t have a record,” Virgil said.

“His uncle was on the police force, before it became part of the sheriff’s department. He might have hushed it up. Or maybe he was a juvenile or something. It was quite a while ago.”

Virgil had brought an annotated master list with him, and checked Barber’s name: he’d been mentioned four times. Interesting. “Why would Barber have been here?”

“Because he lives down the block. He bought a couple of cars from Henry, though that’s not a big deal: a lot of people have bought cars from Henry.”

“Is his house like this one?”

“Mmm, a little. They were all built by the same contractor,” she said.

“Okay. Okay… what about the other two?” Virgil asked.

“John Haden. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, he’s a nice enough man. I mean, Henry used to play guitar in a band. He was good. John used to build guitars, just as a hobby, electric guitars, and Henry got interested, and he started building some. They sort of got into it together. Henry was really good at the woodwork, and cutting the hollows in the back for the electronics, that kind of stuff. John did all the hand-finish work and the paint. They could sell the guitars for a thousand dollars each. They had a waiting list.”

Virgil was interested: Haden was one of the two men who worked at Butternut Tech. “How many? In a year?”

“Ten, maybe? Sometimes a couple more or less.”

“So Haden would have a reason to want to keep your husband alive, if anything.”