Shock Wave

of the equipment yard. That one wasn’t quite right: he took a big risk, to do nothing more than slow down the process. In fact, he wouldn’t even slow down the construction or opening of the store—he’d just slow down the water and sewer connection by a couple of months. If done on schedule, the connection would have been made three or four months before the store was finished. Now, it’d only be two months.
    So why would that have been important to him? Important enough to make a couple of dozen bombs, or however many it was?
    Then, there was the bomb at Erikson’s. If he was fully rational, he had a reason for picking Erikson as the fall guy. He wasn’t just chosen at random. Why Erikson?
     
     
    HE THOUGHT ABOUT KLINE, the pharmacist he’d visited on his second day in town. He knew everything and everybody....
    Virgil rolled off the couch and went out to his car and drove downtown. Ed Kline, said the girl behind the pharmacy cash register, was on break.
    “Up on the roof?”
    “You know about the roof? Let me call him.”
    She took out her cell phone, made the call, mentioned Virgil’s name, then rang off and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”
    “I do.”
    Kline was sitting in a recliner, looking out at the lake, his feet up on a round metal lawn table, blowing smoke at the sky.
    “You find him?” he asked Virgil.
    “No. But I can refine the list. The bomber, I think, is working through some kind of logic. I think it most likely has to do with money. There also has to be a link with Henry Erikson, but I can’t see what it would be. And I think he’s probably on my list.”
    “And . . .”
    Virgil took the survey list out of his pocket. “So, I need you to look at my list and tell me who on the list would either make money, or save money, if PyeMart went down. I’ve already talked to a couple of the major possibilities, and sorta scratched them off. I really need an Erikson-money connection.”
    Kline worked his way through the cigarette as he studied the list, and finally shook his head and handed it back to Virgil. “I don’t see it. I see the usual suspects, people who lose when PyeMart comes in. Nothing that involves Erikson.”
    “Did Erikson ever serve on the city council? I mean, was he ever in a spot where he could have affected what happened with PyeMart?”
    Again, Kline shook his head. “No. Never ran for anything, far as I know.”
    “Sarah Erikson couldn’t point out any tight ties between Henry and anybody on the list.”
    “I really didn’t know him well enough to suggest any connections,” Kline said.

    THEY WERE SITTING AROUND, speculating, and Virgil took two calls, one after the other.
    The first came from a BCA agent named Jenkins, who said, “Me’n Shrake are in town. We’re busting the mayor, and then some guy named Arnold.”
    “God bless you,” Virgil said. “Are you staying at the AmericInn?”
    “We are. See you for dinner?”
    “If it’s not blown up.”
    A moment later, he took another call, this one originating at the BCA office itself.
    “Virgil? Gabriel Moss here. We loaded up your disk drives, and we got images.”
    “How good?”
    “The images are good enough, but you can’t see a face. He’s wearing a camo mask. We can tell you how tall he is, about what he weighs, and his shoe size, but there’s no face.”
    “Can you send it to me?”
    “Sure. I can e-mail it if you want. You’ll have it in five minutes.”
    “And send me the numbers—height, weight, and all that.”
    Virgil rang off and asked Kline, “Could you think about this? How many ways are there to squeeze money out of PyeMart? Out of the situation? There’s got to be something, and we’re just not seeing it.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Kline said. “I think you’re probably right, but I suspect I’ll be awful damn surprised when you catch the guy. You might have to catch him before I can see where the money’d be coming from.”

20
    V IRGIL HOOKED INTO THE SHERIFF’S WI-FI and downloaded the video-clip file, watched it once—a murky series of black-andwhite images of a man in camo moving around the inside of the trailer.
    A note with the file said that the man was six feet, three and one-half inches tall, in his boots, the brand of which was unknown, but had approximately a one-and-one-half-inch heel; that the boots were size eleven, D width, one of the most common sizes for men; that he probably weighed between one hundred and seventy-five and one