Shock Wave

“Hmm. There weren’t any bits and pieces left over?”
    “There were, unless somebody took them. Come over this way.”
    Virgil followed him across the shop to a metal bin, which was half full of pieces of steel and iron. An adjacent bin contained a bucketful of copper pieces.
    “This is where we throw metal debris,” Card said. “A guy from the local junkyard picks it up when it gets full, and we get a few bucks for it. So after this incident with the mess by the saw, I was throwing some stuff in here—the bin was almost empty—and I noticed this piece of three-inch galvanized pipe in there. We don’t use anything like that, we’re not a plumbing shop. It occurred to me right then that this might be where the filings came from. I didn’t do anything about it, I just noticed it, and it popped right up in my mind when Lawrence called.”
    Virgil peered into the bin: “You think it’s still in there?”
    “I believe so. Unless, like I said, somebody took it.”
    Virgil said, “Okay, this is good. I’m bringing the ATF in.”
    He got on the phone to Barlow and told him about it. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Barlow said. “Don’t go anywhere. Keep an eye on the saw, too.”

    WHILE THEY WAITED FOR BARLOW to show up, Virgil and Card sat on a couple of stools and talked about who’d have a key, or access to the shop. Card said the shop was unlocked from about seven o’clock in the morning, when he got there, until about ten o’clock at night, when the night adult class ended and the instructor locked up.
    Sometimes, he said, the door didn’t get locked—“I run into that a few times every year. Then, there are quite a few keys around, janitors and administrators. The local firefighters have a master set.... What I think happened was, it was a guy with a key. He came in late . . . The pipe would be heavy, so he’d have to park right outside and carry the pipe in. Wouldn’t have to worry about turning on the lights, because there are no windows. He cuts his pipe and gets out. He doesn’t take the time to clean up, because he’s in a hurry, but he does know enough to throw the waste piece in the bin.”
    “So then . . . It’d have to be a guy who works here,” Virgil said.
    “Well, a guy who has a key for here. Could be a firefighter. And then, this place has been here since the fifties. I bet there are a hundred keys for these doors. Maybe more. We don’t know where most of them are at. If you had somebody come through here as a student . . .”
    “Okay.”
    They thought about it together, and then Virgil asked, “Why wouldn’t he just buy a saw? He could do it in his basement with a ten-dollar hacksaw. Buy the hacksaw in the Cities, nobody would remember.”
    “It’s a hell of a lot of work, that’s why. This is steel we’re talking about, and it’s pretty thick,” Card said. “If he wanted to make a lot of cuts, he could wear himself out doing it. And maybe he doesn’t think that way. Maybe he gets the pipe and thinks, How do I cut this stuff? And he thinks, Hmm, there’s my old shop. . . .”
    “That could happen,” Virgil said.
    “One more thing,” Card said. “This is a tech school. When people who work here upgrade their homes, they tend to do it themselves. Put in a new bathroom or finish a basement, most of us would think nothing of it. A lot of guys here look at the school as a resource. Need to cut some pipe, go on down to the shop and do it. Technically, you’re not supposed to, but almost everybody does. And why not?”
    “So it could be an instructor.”
    “It could be. It’s a logical possibility,” Card said. “We got a lot of instructors—a couple hundred, when you include outsiders.”
    “You’ve given me something to think about, Jesse,” Virgil said.
     
     
    BARLOW ARRIVED, bringing one of the techs with him. Card ran through the whole explanation again, and they went over and peered in the metal debris bin, and after taking a photograph, the tech started digging through it, throwing non-relevant bits and pieces into a trash can that Card wheeled over. After two or three minutes, he said, “There it is.”
    He was wearing yellow plastic evidence gloves, and he stripped them off, pulled on a fresh one, then reached down and slipped two fingers inside a three-inch length of pipe and lifted it out. The pipe had been crushed at one end; the other end showed bright steel where the blade had gone through it.
    Card said, “That’s