Shock Wave

time, and they have adult evening classes, enrichment classes, and most of the adults in Butternut have been through there, at one time or another.”
    “I have a feeling that it’s not a casual acquaintance, it’s somebody who goes through there on a regular basis. Somebody who’s familiar with the working of the place. A staff member, a full-time student.”
    “Well, we’re still looking,” Barlow said.
     
     
    ANOTHER POSSIBILITY OCCURRED TO HIM: What if there were more than one thing going on? What if the first bomb was aimed at Pye himself, as the third one had been—and had been brought in by some desperate board member? Desperate, why? Virgil didn’t know, but he was sure that board members must get desperate from time to time. Pye was an older man, and there must be some kind of succession waiting in the wings. If you knew when the bomb was going to go off, then you could absent yourself.... Of course, if you knew when it was going to go off, you would have set it for later, after the board meeting was sure to be under way.
    Still, there might be something in it—someone desperate, or greedy, in Grand Rapids, hooking up with somebody desperate in Butternut Falls.
    As weird as it seemed, there was a history of crazy bombers getting together—9/11 of course, but also the Oklahoma City bombing. There’d been cases of serial killers finding each other, or recruiting accomplices.
    How would you do that? The Internet. He remembered Marie Chapman talking about anti-PyeMart sites. He’d forgotten to do anything about that.... Virgil got back on the phone and called the BCA researcher. “Sandy? This is Virgil. You got time to do some Internet research?”
    She said, “If Lucas approves it.”
    He outlined what he wanted: for her to go back in the archives of any anti-PyeMart sites she could find and see if it looked like a couple of the crazier posters seemed to be getting together . . . and then tracking down where they were from.
    “I can do all of that from home, so that’ll make it cheaper,” she said. Sandy worked on a part-time basis, and sometimes as a consultant. “I’ll talk to Lucas and get back to you.”

    ANOTHER IDEA POPPED UP. Would the bomber have taken all of the risks associated with building a bomb, and smuggling it into the Pinnacle, if he wasn’t sure it would work? Most likely, he’d rehearsed somewhere. That “somewhere” was most likely around Butternut. While the town was out in the countryside, it wasn’t a wilderness—if a bomb had gone off within a hundred miles of Butternut, somebody had heard it.
    How to find those people?
     
     
    VIRGIL WENT BACK to the fly rod, but his heart wasn’t in it, and after another ten minutes and one strike-and-miss, he motored back to the landing and yanked the boat out of the water. On the way back into the downtown, he called the sheriff, asked for the name and number of the local paper, which he couldn’t remember—the Clarion Call , as it turned out. He got the editor on the line and asked about the possibility of a public request-for-help on the next day’s front page.
    “Well, what do you need?”
    “I need a story that says the bomber probably rehearsed his bombings—he probably touched off a couple explosions within the last month or so. Probably not too far from Butternut—it’d be someplace familiar to him. You can attribute all those thoughts to me. I’d like to ask your readers if any of them heard an unexplained explosion. If they have, call the sheriff’s department.”
    “Sure, we can do that. Give it a good spot, too.”
    “I appreciate it,” Virgil said.

    THE DAY WAS STILL HOT, but the afternoon was wearing on, and he’d been up early. Nap time? If he could get an hour or two, he’d be good until midnight. Back at the Holiday Inn, he was headed for his room when the desk clerk came running out to the parking lot and called, “Hey, Virgil.”
    Virgil stopped. “Yeah?”
    The kid was waving a piece of paper. “You got a call. It’s important.”
    “A confession, I hope?”
    “Well, yeah, something like that.” He handed a piece of paper to Virgil. “It was kind of anonymous. I took it down word for word.”
    Virgil unfolded it. In the clerk’s neat handwriting, the note said: For Virgil Flowers of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Important. Pat Shepard’s wife Jeanne knows he took $25,000 from Pye but doesn’t know what he did with it. She thinks he used it to pay back taxes. He