Shock Wave

together. Henry was really good at the woodwork, and cutting the hollows in the back for the electronics, that kind of stuff. John did all the hand-finish work and the paint. They could sell the guitars for a thousand dollars each. They had a waiting list.”
    Virgil was interested: Haden was one of the two men who worked at Butternut Tech. “How many? In a year?”
    “Ten, maybe? Sometimes a couple more or less.”
    “So Haden would have a reason to want to keep your husband alive, if anything.”
    “Oh, sure. They were friends.”
    “He works at the college, right?”
    “Yeah. Math. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, though. Maybe because he’s a little odd. Kinda geeky, you know. Once you get to know him, he seems really nice. He likes cats, we’ve got cats.”
    “Nothing wrong with that,” Virgil said. He liked cats himself. “When you say geeky, do you mean ineffectual? Or is he one of those, you know, more-manic geeks? Some of them have really strong beliefs.”
    “Oh, not like that. He has an off-the-wall sense of humor. Maybe you could ask one of his ex-wives.”
    “More than one?” Virgil asked. “He has trouble with relationships?”
    “I think he’s been married and divorced three times, hard as that is to believe,” she said. “Who in their right mind would make that kind of mistake three times? Anyway, Henry said that even though he’s geeky, women like him. Heck, I guess I like him.”
    “Okay.” He looked at the checks on her list. “What about this Gordon Wilson?”
    “Gordy . . . he’s another car salesman, he works over at the Ford dealer. He’s been in and out of this house, off and on, sometimes he and Henry would be working deals. I don’t know him that well, really. I don’t know why he’d be on your list, either.”
    Virgil looked at the master list: Wilson had been named three times.
    “You don’t know this William Wyatt?” Wyatt was the other teacher.
    “I’ve heard the name. It’s a small town, in some ways.”
    “But you know Dick Gates? You gave him one check.” Gates was another name with four checks after it, like Barber.
    “I don’t think he’s ever been to the house, but we both know him, knew him. He’s a police officer, you know, a wildlife officer. He patrols the lakes in the summer.”
    They went through the rest of the list; and when he asked her, she looked thoughtfully at the list and said, “I’m just guessing.”
    “That’s all I’m asking,” Virgil said. “I’ll take it purely as a guess.”
    “And it makes me feel kind of crappy . . . but if I had to pick one, I guess I’d pick Dick Gates. Henry didn’t like him, and he didn’t like Henry. Henry liked to fish, and it seemed like every time he went out, and Gates was out, he would pull Henry over and check to see what he’d caught, and how many. After fifteen times, you’d think he’d know Henry was an ethical fisherman, who usually didn’t keep anything.” The tears started again, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “But he just kept doing it. Because I think he liked the power. It got so, if Gates’s boat wasn’t at the dock, Henry’d just go up the Butternut and fish. Gates didn’t go up the river. Too easy to get stuck, and then, nobody would help him out.”
    Virgil considered that. He knew lots of cops who liked the power—and that, he thought, was probably why Gates was on the list four times. If he didn’t like the power, he might well have never been on it at all. Not that he was excusing him, just because he was a cop . . .
    “Did Henry ever say anything to you about seeing something odd, up the river? Somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or acted weird?”
    She shook her head. “He had a lot of Butternut stories, but nothing like that. But, you know, if it was just a little odd, he might not have mentioned it.”
     
     
    THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE LONGER, then Virgil thanked her and excused himself, and went out to the garage and watched the ATF crime-scene guys for a few minutes, and finally asked Barlow, “You still think he’s the guy?”
    “I’m saying sixty percent, and slowly dropping. We could be down to fifty-fifty by this evening. The thing is, we found all the bomb stuff at once—and then nothing else. It was right out in the open. And we don’t find any of the small stuff you’d expect—more detonators, more batteries, a bunch of clocks or old thermostats.... Didn’t find any rolls of wire. We did find some