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unhappy right now, since the housing bust,” Ahlquist said. He wrote a couple names in his notebook. “She can find people who want to buy, and people who want to sell, but the buyers are having a hell of a time getting loans. Goddamn banks.”
    “Maybe she could just find a place to sit down and chill out for a while,” Virgil suggested. He’d eaten several partial dinners with Ahlquist’s wife; she was eternally on her way to somewhere else.
    Ahlquist snorted: “Like that’s going to happen. Woman hasn’t sat down for fifteen minutes since she got her real estate license. Five years ago, it was glory days. You could sell a shack on the lake for the price of a castle. Now you can’t sell a castle on the lake for the price of a shack.”
    “Somebody’s going to make money out of that situation,” Virgil said.
    “You’re right,” Ahlquist said. “Just not none of us.”
    They spent the rest of the meal chatting about life, speculating about the bomber and the nuts Ahlquist knew, and which of them had both the brains and the motive to get into, and then blow up, the boardroom at the Pye Pinnacle. “That there’s a tough question,” Ahlquist said. “I was talking to Barlow about that, and he said that penetrating that building took time, planning, and maybe an insider.”
    “You give a list like this to Barlow?” Virgil asked.
    “No, and he hasn’t actually asked for one. He’s more of a technical guy, going at it from the computer end. He cross-references stuff. That could work; and maybe not. He’s not so much of a social investigator, like you,” Ahlquist said.
    “I didn’t even know that’s what I was,” Virgil said.
     
     
    VIRGIL GOT BACK to the Holiday Inn after dark. He unloaded the loose stuff in his boat, locked it in the back of the truck, dug his pistol out of his gun safe, and carried both the pistol and the shotgun into the motel room. A pistol was as good as money on the street; he was determined not to contribute.
    When he was settled in, he looked at the clock—nearly ten—and called Lee Coakley, in Los Angeles. He and Coakley had been conducting a romance for six months or so, until a production company began making a TV movie about Coakley’s part in breaking up a huge, multi-generational child-abuse ring in southern Minnesota. Coakley, as the local sheriff, had been the media face on the whole episode.
    The production company had rented an apartment for her in West Hollywood, for the duration of the shoot. The duration had recently lengthened, and Coakley had grown evasive on the exact time of her return.
    So Virgil called, and her oldest son, David, answered the phone. “Uh, hi, Virg, Mom’s, uh, at a meeting of some kind. I don’t know when she’s getting home.”
    He was lying through his teeth, Virgil thought; he was not a good liar. Mom was somewhere with somebody, and you probably wouldn’t go too far wrong if you called it a date. “Okay. I’ve got a deal I’m working on, out of town—a bomb thing. I’m going to bed. Tell her I’ll try to give her a call tomorrow.”
    “Yeah, uh, okay.”
    Virgil hung up. Little rat. Of course, she was his mother. If you wouldn’t lie for your mom, who would you lie for?
     
     
    VIRGIL TOOK OFF HIS BOOTS, shut off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, lay on his bed, and thought about his conversation with Ahlquist. The bomber almost certainly had a direct tie to some of the protesters—either the people whose livelihoods were threatened by the PyeMart, or the trout freaks.
    Of the two, he thought the businessmen were more likely to produce a killer. Some of the people who’d lose out to PyeMart would move from prosperity to poverty, and virtually overnight. Businesses, homes, college plans, comfortable retirements, all gone. How far would somebody go to protect his family? Most people wouldn’t even shoplift, much less kill. But to protect his family . . . and all you needed was one.
    And then the