John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Oh, sure. They were friends.”

“He works at the college, right?”

“Yeah. Math. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, though. Maybe because he’s a little odd. Kinda geeky, you know. Once you get to know him, he seems really nice. He likes cats, we’ve got cats.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Virgil said. He liked cats himself. “When you say geeky, do you mean ineffectual? Or is he one of those, you know, more-manic geeks? Some of them have really strong beliefs.”

“Oh, not like that. He has an off-the-wall sense of humor. Maybe you could ask one of his ex-wives.”

“More than one?” Virgil asked. “He has trouble with relationships?”

“I think he’s been married and divorced three times, hard as that is to believe,” she said. “Who in their right mind would make that kind of mistake three times? Anyway, Henry said that even though he’s geeky, women like him. Heck, I guess I like him.”

“Okay.” He looked at the checks on her list. “What about this Gordon Wilson?”

“Gordy… he’s another car salesman, he works over at the Ford dealer. He’s been in and out of this house, off and on, sometimes he and Henry would be working deals. I don’t know him that well, really. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, either.”

Virgil looked at the master list: Wilson had been named three times.

“You don’t know this William Wyatt?” Wyatt was the other teacher.

“I’ve heard the name. It’s a small town, in some ways.”

“But you know Dick Gates? You gave him one check.” Gates was another name with four checks after it, like Barber.

“I don’t think he’s ever been to the house, but we both know him, knew him. He’s a police officer, you know, a wildlife officer. He patrols the lakes in the summer.”

They went through the rest of the list; and when he asked her, she looked thoughtfully at the list and said, “I’m just guessing.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” Virgil said. “I’ll take it purely as a guess.”

“And it makes me feel kind of crappy… but if I had to pick one, I guess I’d pick Dick Gates. Henry didn’t like him, and he didn’t like Henry. Henry liked to fish, and it seemed like every time he went out, and Gates was out, he would pull Henry over and check to see what he’d caught, and how many. After fifteen times, you’d think he’d know Henry was an ethical fisherman, who usually didn’t keep anything.” The tears started again, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “But he just kept doing it. Because I think he liked the power. It got so, if Gates’s boat wasn’t at the dock, Henry’d just go up the Butternut and fish. Gates didn’t go up the river. Too easy to get stuck, and then, nobody would help him out.”

Virgil considered that. He knew lots of cops who liked the power-and that, he thought, was probably why Gates was on the list four times. If he didn’t like the power, he might well have never been on it at all. Not that he was excusing him, just because he was a cop …

“Did Henry ever say anything to you about seeing something odd, up the river? Somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or acted weird?”

She shook her head. “He had a lot of Butternut stories, but nothing like that. But, you know, if it was just a little odd, he might not have mentioned it.”

They talked for a while longer, then Virgil thanked her and excused himself, and went out to the garage and watched the ATF crime-scene guys for a few minutes, and finally asked Barlow, “You still think he’s the guy?”

“I’m saying sixty percent, and slowly dropping. We could be down to fifty-fifty by this evening. The thing is, we found all the bomb stuff at once-and then nothing else. It was right out in the open. And we don’t find any of the small stuff you’d expect-more detonators, more batteries, a bunch of clocks or old thermostats… Didn’t find any rolls of wire. We did find some really odd-looking electronics, but we can’t put them with any bomb-making techniques.”

“He made electric guitars as a hobby,” Virgil said.

“Okay. I’ll mark that down,” Barlow said. “The other thing is, I can think of good reasons he could be the bomber and at the same time, we’d only find one pipe, and one blasting cap.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like, he was limiting his exposure. He was planning to do two more bombs, and he kept the other stuff off-site to limit the possibility of detection.”

“Good thought, Jim,” Virgil said, not believing it.

“So anyway, I haven’t talked to Mrs. Erikson yet. I want to know exactly what to ask her, when I get to her,” Barlow said. “I want her to have an attorney.”

“Sure,” Virgil said. “Keep digging. And call me.”

The math professor interested him: not only because he’d been named on the list, but because he’d be a really bright guy, and he was a little odd, both of which the bomber apparently was, and because he might have some idea of how valid the survey might be.

Virgil looked at his watch, wondered how Shepard was doing-nothing he could do about that-wondered if Block had been arrested, then got on his phone and called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to find out where John Haden lived, and what his phone number was.

He had the information in five minutes, called Haden, and was surprised when Haden promptly picked up: a good sign.

“I’ve got some questions for you,” Virgil said, after introducing himself. “I wonder if I might stop by?”

“You think I’m the bomber?”

“I have no idea who the bomber is,” Virgil said. “I mostly want to talk to you about a survey I took.”

“Well, come on over. You can tell me about what happened with Henry.”

John Haden was a tall, slender, pale man with glasses and a mop of brown hair; he wore a T-shirt with a hand-painted yoga warrior pose, simple black and white, which Virgil envied the moment he saw it, and jeans and flip-flops.

He lived in a modest brick house with a neatly kept yard, and pulled open the door and peered nearsightedly at Virgil, and said, “You look like a stoner.”

“A flaw in your Vedic perception,” Virgil said; his first wife had been a yoga practitioner. “I am, in fact, a cop.”

Haden liked that and swung the door back, and said, “Well, bring your cop ass inside. You want a beer?”

“Sure. But no more than two.”

“We can sit out on the patio,” Haden said. He got a couple of Dos Equis from the refrigerator, popped the tops, and handed one cold sweaty bottle to Virgil.

On the way out to the patio, he said, “So why do you think I’m the bomber?”

“I don’t. Not the bomber, anyway. But, as Henry’s business partner, you might have had reason to get rid of him. Either because the business was doing badly, or doing well. Either way. You might be copycatting the real bomber.”

“Your theory’s basically screwed-the business wasn’t doing much of anything,” Haden said. He took a webbed chair, pointed Virgil at another one, and said, “I don’t want you to think I’m taking this thing lightly. I just don’t really know what to say. Henry was a heck of a nice guy. Smart, happy, good marriage-he enjoyed his job. I freaked out when I heard. I was amazed. I went over there, but his wife was in the Cities.”

“She’s back now.”

“She was in the Cities, anyway. So, I canceled my summer school class, and I’ve just been wandering around the house wondering what the fuck? Why?”

“Found some bomb stuff in the garage,” Virgil said. “The feds think he might be the bomber.”

Haden waved the thought away: “That’s absurd. If you knew Henry, you’d know how absurd it was. Somebody planted it there, which means, it has to be somebody who knows Henry.” Then, “Oh, wait-that’s why you’re here. You’re checking out his friends.”