Shock Wave

other members of this conspiracy?”
    “If you said that you could keep him out of prison if he ran over our daughter with the car, he’d do it,” she said. “He is a coward and a rat. And he cheats at golf.”
    Good Thunder: “Do you know a woman named Marilyn Oaks?”
    Shepard stared at her for a moment, then closed her eyes and leaned back: “I knew it. That sonofabitch.”
    When they were all done, and the stenographer had folded up her machine, Shepard said, “The thing that defeats me is, Pat is a jerk, and his hair is falling out, and he’s got a little potbelly. . . . How does he have two mistresses? That we know of?”
    “Lonely people,” Virgil said.
    “I’m lonely,” she said.
    “Yeah, but Pat apparently can’t fix that for you.”
    She shook her head, then looked at Good Thunder and said, “I’m not sure I can act with discretion.”
     
     
    OUT IN THE PARKING LOT, Good Thunder asked Virgil, “Can you guys give us some technical support? Now that we’ve got Mrs. Shepard nailed down, I’m going to pull in Pat Shepard. You won’t have to be there for that—I can handle it with an investigator—but if Shepard agrees to flip, I’ll need a wire and support.”
    “Count on it,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to my boss tonight, and he’ll call you tomorrow.”
    “Deal,” she said.

    AT THE COURTHOUSE, the duty officer had another stack of letters for him, and Virgil asked the officer to find George Peck’s phone number. He waited, got the number, and dialed. Peck picked up, saying, “Peck.”
    Virgil suppressed the urge to tell him he sounded like a chicken, and instead, said, “George? Virgil. Listen, I’m over at the courthouse, compiling those names. If you’ve got time, you could come over and take a look.”
    “As a matter of fact, I do have time,” Peck said. “I was just about to get in the bathtub. I’ll be an hour or so, if that’s okay.”
    “See you then.”
     
     
    VIRGIL HAD SET UP the spreadsheet to rank the names by the number of entries in each name-cell; McLachlan had one hundred and eight nominations. The second most, a man named Greg Sawyer, had seventy-four. After that, the numbers dropped sharply. There were four ties with eight, five with seven, eight with six nominations, lots of names with five, four, three, or two nominations, and the rest were scattered, with one each; a total of more than five hundred names.
    When he finished, he went out and found two more letters, entered those, with no change in the standings; he was just finishing when Peck showed up.
    Virgil asked, “Why the hell did you nominate yourself, George?”
    “IQ test,” Peck said. “I wondered if you were smart enough to keep a secret list of which letter went to who. What’d you use, something that shows up under ultraviolet?”
    “Nope. Just added a dot in one of the letters on the rightnumbered word in the letter.”
    Peck was pleased. “Excellent. So even if somebody sent back a non-original copy, a Xerox, you’d still know who it was.”
    “Yeah, I guess, but I didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “Hey—here’s the list. Take a look.”
    Peck settled in front of Virgil’s laptop. Looked at the list, his lower lip stuck out, stroked his left cheek with an index finger, then muttered, “What a fascinating list. McLachlan is a moron, there’s no way he did these bombings. Throw him out, and you’ve got eighty people with two or more nominations. I know most of them, and I wouldn’t have nominated several of them, but I’d still say, ‘Yes, I can see that.’ Fascinating.”
    “You think the bomber’s on the list?”
    “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars he is—that he’s among those eighty, for sure. He’s probably among the top ten or twelve, once you throw out McLachlan and a couple more.”
    “You know this Greg Sawyer?”
    “Yeah, he’s another semi-professional criminal. I mean, he’s a big rough redneck bully who steals stuff when he can, usually pigs and calves, and usually gets caught. He’s not the guy.”
     
     
    AHLQUIST CAME IN, saw Peck, frowned, but then said to Virgil, “On that other thing. We’re going to let you guys handle it. You want me to call Davenport?”
    “You can do it, if you want,” Virgil said. He said to Peck, “George, keep thinking. I’ve got to go talk to Earl in secret, where you can’t hear.”
    Peck waved them off: “Go ahead. Ignore my feelings.”
     
     
    DOWN IN AHLQUIST’S OFFICE, Virgil called