Shock Wave

grudges, and resentment, and whatever—but nothing like what you’d need to plant a bomb. At least, not that we’ve been able to detect.”
    McCullough, of the ATF, said, “We are, by the way, looking at all the video for the last month, after Barlow called us. He told us about the pipe, about finding that piece of pipe at the college, and the possibility that the bomb might have been detonated by cell phone.”
    “Huh,” Virgil said. “Let’s take that walk.”
     
     
    THEY WALKED AROUND THE BUILDING, looking at exterior doors, at the loading dock, at the outlets for a package sewage-treatment plant, at storm-water drains; all of it was lit by heavy exterior lighting, which, though designed to enhance the building’s aesthetics, also made it impossible to get close to the building unseen. When they were done, Virgil was ready to concede that the building would have been difficult to penetrate from the outside—as difficult as it would be to penetrate a prison. Even if it had been possible to penetrate the building because of some regular security lapse discovered by an intruder, he’d still be on the comprehensive video, and he wasn’t.
    “So you’re now where we’re at,” Brown said. “It’s an insider.”
    “Who must have some connection to a bomb maker in Butternut Falls,” Virgil said. “Has to be a tight relationship. Probably not a relative, now that I think about it. Probably an ideological connection.”
     
     
    DONE WITH THE INSPECTION of the building’s perimeter, the group took Virgil inside, through the front doors, past a guard desk with two guards, and through an electronic gate operated with a key card. Brown pointed out an array of cameras that covered the doors and the reception area, showed him how the elevators worked, and finally took him up to the fifty-fifth floor, where the bomb had been set off.
    The boardroom was still a mess, though sheets of Plexiglas had been fitted into the gaps left by blown-out windows, and the furniture pushed into a corner. “What about the woman who was killed?” Virgil asked.
    “Angela ‘Jelly’ Brown, Mr. Pye’s secretary,” Brown said. “What about her?”
    “Have you checked her out?”
    After a moment of silence, McCullough said, “Yeah, to a certain extent. Not much to check. Quiet, routine life. Husband works as a driver at a data-services place. No politics that we could find—registered Republicans, but not active. They live in Grand Rapids. We didn’t, uh, go through her apartment or anything.”
    Virgil said, “Huh.”
    McCullough said, “I suppose we could have done that, but to tell the truth, I’d bet my job on the idea that she’s innocent. That she had no connection with the bombing. She liked Pye, a lot, and she liked her coworkers, and they liked her . . . and if she placed the bomb, why in God’s name would she have been standing one foot away when it blew?”
    “Could she have been moving it?”
    “No. We’ve established that it was inside the credenza, on the upper shelf, above four reams of paper, when it blew. The credenza door was closed.”

    “OKAY,” VIRGIL SAID. The room still stank of death, though the carpet had been taken away. A bunch of thin waxy pink and blue birthday candles were scattered along the base of one wall. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “They were going to have a birthday party for Mr. Pye. The board was. Almost died at his own birthday party.”
     
     
    THERE WERE NO SECURITY CAMERAS on the fiftieth floor, the barrier floor, Brown said, because there were cameras at every access point.
    “Except the elevator . . . going up the elevator to sixty, and then coming down the stairs,” Chapman said.
    “And just climbing the stairs if you had a key card,” Virgil said. “If you had a card for the door at the fiftieth floor . . . right?”
    “Yeah, that’s right,” Brown said. “It’s like we said—we can see the possibility that an insider could have planted the bomb. The complication is, we don’t see any way an outsider could have done it, and everything you guys developed in Minnesota suggests that there’s an outsider involved. Whoever planted that bomb in Willard’s limo out there . . . he wasn’t from here. Whoever cut the pipe at the college, he wasn’t from here, either. We started checking as soon as we heard about it—where everybody was, who worked here. So it’s either a conspiracy, or we just don’t know what happened.”
    “Is there