Shock Wave

man clambered out of the water and said, “Be nice if the water were about ten degrees warmer. Nice for me, if not the trout.”
    Virgil said, “That was a nice little fish. I’ll have to bring my rod down.”
    “I haven’t seen you around,” the man said. “Are you working over at the PyeMart?”
    “Sort of,” Virgil said. “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m looking for this bomber.”
    “Good luck with that,” the fisherman said.
    As they were talking, Virgil was looking the guy over. He was tall and thin and large-nosed, his face weathered from sun exposure, like a golfer . . . or a fisherman. He was perhaps forty-five. Virgil had never seen a fishing outfit like the man was wearing: not quite white, more of a muslin color, and fitted like a suit coat, with lapels, and matching pleated pants.
    The man said, “What? You’ve never seen a nineteenth-century fly-fishing outfit?”
    “Uh, no,” Virgil said. “Can’t say that I have.”
    “Not a lot of us traditionalists around,” the man said. “But a few.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Mmm. I’ve overstayed, I’m afraid.”
    Virgil said, “Listen, have you seen a guy in camo hanging around here? A local guy? Maybe carrying a pair of binoculars?”
    “Camouflage? No, no, I haven’t, but then, I don’t usually fish this low,” the man said. “I’m usually upstream, but things weren’t going so well up there, so I persisted, and here I am.”
    “You know anybody who fishes down here?”
    “I do,” the man said. “Cameron Smith. He likes these two pools, and two more down below. There’s an old mill dam, fallen down now, but there’s still a good deep pool behind it. He’s more of a wetfly man. I’m dry.”
    “Cameron Smith . . . he’s in town here?”
    “Yes. He’s the president of the Cold Stream Fishers, which is a local fly-fishing club. I’m also a member.”
    “The club members pretty pissed about the PyeMart?”
    “Shouldn’t they be? I’ll tell you what, this river is one of the western outposts of the trout in Minnesota. Everything south and west of here is too warm and too muddy. Too many farms, too much plowing, too much fertilizer. There’s a river fifteen miles south of here. In the middle of the summer it gets an algae bloom you could almost walk across, from the fertilizer runoff. Looks like a goddamned golf fairway. This creek is a jewel; it should have been a state park long ago. Nothing good can happen with this PyeMart. Nothing. Maybe nothing terrible will happen, but then, maybe something terrible will happen. That’s the way we look at it. There’s no upside, but there could be a huge downside. There are damn few things worth blowing up people for, but this creek might be one of them.”
    “But you wouldn’t do that,” Virgil said.
    “Of course not. I’d be chicken, for one thing. For another, I’m not that certain of the moralities involved. We do know one thing about the world, though, and that’s that we’ve got way too many people, and way too few trout. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ We’re not talking about trout qua trout, but trout as a symbol of everything that’s good for the environment.”
    They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”
    As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.
    “You think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.
    Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”
    “Tell me,” Virgil said.
    “Market research.”
    “Market research?”
    “Do an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your