Shock Wave

press conference, arms folded across her chest, watching. Barlow came in, wearing a suit and tie, a few minutes after Virgil got there. Barlow said he was mostly a prop. “I’ll just say that we’re making progress, and confirm the find up at BTC. What’s this thing about market research?”
    Virgil told him about George Peck’s suggestion, and Barlow scratched an ear and said, “I dunno. I never heard of anything like that.”
    Virgil said, “Can’t hurt. I mean, everybody in town knows we’re looking for the bomber, and most of them have some opinions. The sheriff already has a reserved website for natural disaster information and so on. We could use that.... Be kind of interesting, I think.”
    “But it’s not based on evidence—it’s just based on . . . nothing. A vote,” Barlow said.
    “No, it’s based on collective judgment,” said Virgil. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to have proof. We’d still have to prove that the bomber did it.”
    “Let me suggest something—think about it for a couple of days,” Barlow said. “It sounds goofy to me and it’ll sound goofy to the media. In fact, let me make an executive decision here: I’m gonna stay as far away from it as I can.”
    “So I’ll think about it,” Virgil said. “No big rush.”
    “What? Of course there’s a big rush,” Barlow said. “We can’t get this guy too soon, no matter how we do it.”
     
     
    THE PRESS CONFERENCE WAS HELD in a courtroom at the new county courthouse, a space that did its best to translate justice into laminated wood. A Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter stopped to chat, and when he drifted away in pursuit of Barlow, Pye walked over, trailed by Chapman and her steno pad, and asked, “You still thinking about the plane?”
    “I started thinking about it again,” Virgil said. “If I don’t come up with anything the rest of the day, I might go.”
    “If you can figure out how the bomber got in the building, I think you’ll know who he is,” Chapman said, over Pye’s head.
    “Why’s that?”
    She tipped her head toward the back of the courtroom, and the three of them found a pew and sat side by side, Pye in the middle, and Chapman spoke around him. “This all comes from my stenography, my reporting in following Willard around, talking to ATF guys.”
    The Pinnacle, she said, was deep in the countryside, all by itself, surrounded by a wide plaza that sat fifteen feet above the surrounding parking lots. The parking lots were a hundred and fifty feet across, and were, in turn, surrounded by farm fields.
    “You can’t see the bottom floor of the building from the fields, because the plaza is set up too high. That means you can’t do longterm surveillance from the cornfields, because you can’t see up on top of the plaza. And you can’t get close to the plaza without being in the open, where the security cameras would pick you up. The cameras never found anybody. Everybody who comes through, front and back, twenty-four hours a day, is on multiple cameras, and there are no gaps in the videos.”
    “Barlow said that the bomb had to be in there less than a day,” Virgil said.
    “The ATF found fragments of the clock used as a timer. The technicians say that it didn’t have a running time of more than twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. So the bomber had to be in the building less than twenty-four hours before the bomb went off. They checked everybody coming through the front and back—the loading dock is around back—and checked them off. Found them all. No obvious suspects,” Chapman said.
    Pye bobbed his head, and Chapman continued: “So then they thought that the bomb had been placed by an insider. They’d tracked down the probable origin of the explosives, up at that quarry—around here someplace, Cold Spring?—and decided that an insider had simply known about that quarry for some reason, and had come here to get the explosives. They also checked out people, insiders, who’d been out here for this construction project. There were about a dozen of them, and they were all eliminated by the ATF.”
    Pye jumped in: “So that was it: had to be an insider, who came out here by chance. Then the bomb went off here, and they were . . . confused. Because that made it seem like it might be an outsider again, and they didn’t think it could be an outsider. Now this second bomb—”
    “It wasn’t an insider,” Virgil said. “At least, it seems unlikely. We’ve located