John Sandford - Shock Wave

“That, too,” Virgil said. He took a hit on the beer, which tasted good in the hot afternoon, looked around the small backyard, and said, “You’re a marigold enthusiast.”

“They keep moles out of your yard,” Haden said.

“You got moles?” Virgil asked.

“No, because I plant marigolds.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Virgil said. “I got moles.”

Virgil said, “I was told you’ve been divorced three times.”

“That’s true,” Haden said.

“Do you still think about the exes?”

“All the time. Especially when I’m not in a relationship,” Haden said. “The thing about three exes is, there are always some good memories.”

“True,” Virgil said. He thought of Janey, and her ass.

“You’d know?” Haden asked.

“Yeah, I got three down myself,” Virgil said. “I’ve given it up for the time being. I’ve got a girlfriend, but I think she’s about to break it off with me.”

“You want her to go?” Haden asked.

Virgil considered. He hadn’t actually thought about it that way. Finally, he said, “Maybe.”

“Ah. So you’ve maneuvered her into breaking it off with you, so you won’t have to deal with the guilt,” Haden said.

“That’s a facile bit of pseudo-psychology,” Virgil said.

“Facile. A subtle word for a cop. One bit of advice. If she breaks it off with you, don’t sleep with her again for at least a year.”

“A year?”

“Okay, six months.”

“Is that your practice?”

“No, I won’t sleep with them for at least three weeks, but then, I think I have a more resilient personality than you. You look like a kinder soul than I am.”

They sat and bullshitted for a while, then Haden got a second beer for each of them, and Virgil passed over the list of names, and told him how he’d acquired it. He scanned the list and said, “There I am. .. Probably my department chairman. Somebody told him once that I smoke dope.”

“He’s a non-smoker?”

“Oh, yeah… Weird for a college professor, huh? So let me see if I get this right. You made this list with no real mathematical or statistical basis. It’s a back-of-the-envelope guess by a bunch of hosers who are getting even with enemies, and may have a few good ideas as well.”

Virgil considered again, then nodded: “I think that’s fair.”

Haden handed the list back, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Thought about it. Then, “I’d say there’s a better than even chance that he’s on the list. You can probably strike several people off right away.”

“We have.”

Haden nodded. “From what I know about the bombs, I have no alibis, except that I couldn’t have done the one in Michigan, if it was, in fact, a simple time bomb, as the newspaper said. I have a lady friend who’ll tell you that, since I spent that night pounding her like a jackhammer. During the day, I was doing finals.”

“I’ll check, if I need to,” Virgil said. “Give her my name. I’m not fooling around about this, John.”

“I know that. I looked you up on the Net while you were on the way over,” Haden said. Then he said, “I’ve been toying with the possibility that Henry was simply killed at random, but I don’t think so. There’s something in Henry’s killing that’s important to the bomber, and it’s not just that Henry was somebody to frame. You gotta go pull Sarah apart. She must know what it is, even if she doesn’t know that she knows.”

“Mmmm.” Virgil closed his eyes. “Nice out here. I need a patio.”

“I’m serious. You know what Sherlock Holmes used to say.”

“Sherlock Holmes actually didn’t say anything,” Virgil said. “He’s a fictional character, invented by Theodore Roosevelt, or some other Boy Scout just like him.”

“He said, and I quote, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

“I knew that,” Virgil said. “I’m a professional detective.”

“But you might be outsmarting yourself. Go back to the fundamentals of detecting. If there is such a thing. Another beer? I’ve only got two left, and it seems a shame just to leave them sitting there by themselves.”

Go back to fundamentals, Virgil thought, when he finally left.

Shoe leather. Compile facts. Throw out whatever was impossible.. .

Whatever. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where to start walking, and while he had a lot of facts, they were mostly irrelevant. What about motive? The fundamentals would say that murder is committed because of greed and sex, to which Virgil added craziness, druginduced or otherwise.

There was craziness here, but also a method: it wasn’t the kind of compulsive, uncontrolled murder that’s done by what psychiatrists referred to as nut jobs. This was craziness on a mission, and the mission probably involved greed or sex.

But not trout.

Virgil realized that he’d psychologically eliminated about half the people nominated for the bombings: the trout fishermen.

Trout fishermen, he thought, were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn’t even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.

As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you’d lose your fuckin’ lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.

Anyhoo… the trout fishermen were out.

Which made him feel better.

Sex and greed.

He’d made some progress, fueled by three beers.

Back at the county courthouse, he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they’ve got Block upstairs, and they’re squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”

“Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.

“Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he’s on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he’s got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn’t cooperate, he was going for twenty years. Twenty years. You can kill somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies’ can, and she said he’s serious… So, I wanted you to know.”

“Okay.”

“Now what’s this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.

“The bomber’s blowing stuff up because of greed or sex-I’ve eliminated trout-and I don’t see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it’s greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”

“The guy isn’t here,” Ahlquist said. “He’s long gone. Last I heard, he’s down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”

“We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye-maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”

“Did somebody say that? The money thing?”

“Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”

“Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I’ll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block’s balls.”

Virgil decided he had to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”