Shock Wave

eleven—three people declined to participate. Virgil took two hours to work through the mass of names, entering them on his laptop, with addresses. After eliminating duplicates, he had a list of a hundred and seventy-eight people who’d be asked to nominate possible bombers.
    Ahlquist had come through several times while Virgil was working out the list, and finally he said, “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s gonna cause a stink.”
    “Yeah, it will, but it’s a whole new way of looking at an investigative problem,” Virgil said. “I’m almost as curious to see how it comes out as I am anxious to catch the bomber.”
    When he had the list, and the addresses, he wrote a carefully worded cover letter, explaining the idea behind the nominations, asking that the lists be returned to the sheriff's department no later than the next evening. He left space at the bottom, with ten blank underlines, for the bomber nominees, and noted that the letter’s recipients didn’t need to sign the letter or identify themselves in making their nominations.
    He was working through the letter, revising, when he took a call from Lee Coakley. He perked up as soon as he saw the incoming number, and heard her voice: “Virgil, how are you?”
    “Aw, I’m in a mess of a case. I’m up in Butternut Falls.”
    “David told me, I looked it up on the Star Tribune ’s website. Are you getting anywhere with it?”
    “Well, I’m trying something new. . . .” He explained about the letters. When he finished explaining, she started laughing, and after a minute, said, “Virgil, you have a different kind of mind.”
    “ I didn’t think of it.”
    “But you’re doing it. I hope Earl knows what you’re getting him into.”
    “Earl’s gonna do just fine, if I pull this off. Anyway, what have you been up to?”
    So she told him, a bunch of stuff he didn’t entirely understand about working through a gunfight on a TV show. “It’s about half real, and half movie. I tell them what’d really happen, they tell me what they need to have happen, for the movie. Then, we try to work something out that feels sorta real, but gets done what they need done.”
    She went on for five minutes and sounded so enthusiastic about it that Virgil felt the melancholy coming back. Because, he thought, Lee probably wouldn’t be. When she said, “I gotta go, the boys are raising hell,” it was a notably friendly, and non-intimate, good-bye. A kind of good-bye he recognized, a good-bye from a friend, not from a lover. He wondered if she recognized it, and thought she probably did, since women were always a few steps ahead in such matters.
    Which, when he thought about it, was how he lost his Tim Kaihatsu–signed Gibson guitar when his second wife moved out.
     
     
    HE WENT BACK to the letters, editing them, then printing them. Before stuffing them in envelopes, he numbered each of the one hundred and seventy-eight names on his list, and on each letter, carefully, with black ink, put a small dot in a word that corresponded, in number, to the number of each name on the list.
    In other words, the letter began with the phrase, As you undoubtedly know . . . and the first name on the list, Andrew Lane, got a small black dot between the legs of the capital A in As . The second name on the list got a tiny dot in the o in you . The third name got a dot in the o of undoubtedly .
    Because the letters had said the responses would be anonymous, it felt dishonest, but, he thought, it might be useful to know who nominated whom. He couldn’t think of a reason why it might be useful, but then, he’d never done anything like this.
    He finished after one o’clock in the morning, left a stack of letters with the duty officer, for delivery the next day, and headed back to the hotel.

    HE SPENT A RESTLESS NIGHT in the over-soft bed; too much to think about. He didn’t have many new ideas about chasing the bomber, at least, not until the letters came back. That would give him as much work as he could handle.
    In the meantime, he could look into the question of whether the city council had been bribed. That would not be fun—he would need to extort the necessary information, using marital infidelity as a wedge. He’d had a checkered past himself when it came to women—three divorces in three years, before he at least temporarily quit getting married. So you had some schoolteachers engaging in some bed-hopping—so what? Except, unfortunately for them,