Shock Wave

whether you know it or not.”
    That got her attention. She’d looked hazy-eyed when he sat down, but now her gaze sharpened up and she frowned.
    “What?”
    “If your husband is innocent, then the bomb was planted on him. It had to be planted by somebody who knew your husband had a workshop, knew which vehicle was his, knew he could get into your garage—or did you leave the door open last night? Could it have been random, the first open garage the guy saw?”
    “No, no, the garage wasn’t open last night. Henry had a lot of tools, he kept the door down.”
    “Then how’d the bomber get in?”
    Erikson stared at him for a second, then looked over her shoulder, toward the kitchen, and said, “Well, uh, the garage door was down, but we mostly don’t lock the access door on the side. That’s behind the fence and so it’s open, most of the time.”
    “Who’d know that?”
    “Well . . . I guess maybe a lot of people would. I mean, we have backyard parties, barbeques, people coming and going. They’d know what was in the garage.”
    “Could they count on that door being unlocked?” Virgil asked.
    “Sometimes it’s locked,” she said. “Most of the time, it isn’t.”
    “You ever have a key go missing?”
    “No, not that I know of,” Erikson said. “But all our locks open with one key, and we’ve had a lot of those keys. I suppose somebody could have stolen one.”
    Virgil thought it over, and shook his head. “It can’t just be the availability of a key. There has to be something . . . Is he involved in the PyeMart situation in any way?”
    “No, except that he was against it,” Erikson said. “He thought the Butternut was such a great resource. He grew up back there, his family had a farm. He used to float down it on rafts, and then he got a canoe—”
    “So he didn’t sell any of that land to PyeMart? Or his family?”
    “No, they were way down to the south of there. They don’t own the land anymore, anyway. His folks sold it years ago.”
    Virgil chewed that over for a moment, but couldn’t see how it would go anywhere. Maybe the bomber had simply seen the size of the workshop, and chose him because it would make bomb production look more credible? Maybe.
    Before he left the sheriff’s office, he’d written down the names of the people who’d shown up more than once on his survey, plus the two who worked at the college. The kitchen was empty, and he said, “Mrs. Erikson, I’d like you to step into the kitchen with me for a moment. I want to show you something privately.”
    She looked around at her friends for a moment, then shrugged and stood and led the way into the kitchen. At the far end, at a breakfast nook, Virgil quietly explained his survey, then said, “I want you to look at this list. How many of the people do you know?”
    She took the list, scanned it, blinked a couple of times, then stepped back to the kitchen counter and took a pencil out of a cup, put the list on a magazine and the magazine on the countertop, and started checking them off. “I’ll put one check by the people I just know, and two checks by the ones who might know our house a little.”
    “There are some?”
    She bent over the list. “Three. There are three.”
    “Do any of them seem to be the kind . . .”
    She stared at the list for a long time, and then said, “I never liked Bill Barber. He’s a jerk and he’s angry, and I think he was once mixed up in some kind of assault.”
    “Doesn’t have a record,” Virgil said.
    “His uncle was on the police force, before it became part of the sheriff’s department. He might have hushed it up. Or maybe he was a juvenile or something. It was quite a while ago.”
    Virgil had brought an annotated master list with him, and checked Barber’s name: he’d been mentioned four times. Interesting. “Why would Barber have been here?”
    “Because he lives down the block. He bought a couple of cars from Henry, though that’s not a big deal: a lot of people have bought cars from Henry.”
    “Is his house like this one?”
    “Mmm, a little. They were all built by the same contractor,” she said.
    “Okay. Okay . . . what about the other two?” Virgil asked.
    “John Haden. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, he’s a nice enough man. I mean, Henry used to play guitar in a band. He was good. John used to build guitars, just as a hobby, electric guitars, and Henry got interested, and he started building some. They sort of got into it