Stanley said good night and left.
“Stanley’s wife is not well,” the Bohemian said. “Some minor neuroses and a couple of dependencies. They lost their son a year and a half ago. They have a neighbor who stops in when Stanley is at work, but the neighbor works nights, and Stanley must be home with his wife.”
I wondered if there was anything that pulsed in Gateville that the Bohemian did not know about.
We worked through my expanded contractor list, highlighting with yellow marker the ones we guessed might have had the opportunity to plant explosives at the guardhouse, the Farraday home, and the bus shelter lamppost. Our prime candidates were contractors that had reason to be working in the ground-road installers, cement workers, landscapers, electricians, plumbers and sewer outfits-but there were dozens of other potentials as well.
I stood up to stretch. It was eleven o’clock, and I was starting to suspect the kitchen hardware installers and the interior decorators. “According to the dates on these records, Crystal Waters must have been one huge beehive, crawling with workers.”
The Bohemian set down his fountain pen. “It was. Because all the houses went up at the same time, only contractors large enough to handle several structures at once were used.”
“Why was that? Why didn’t the developer treat the project like other residential projects: sell the lots individually and build the houses one at a time, according to the purchaser’s specifications?”
The Bohemian smiled, but it didn’t reach to his eyes. “Security. Crystal Waters was always about security. The plan was to build thehouses all at once, then lock out the world. If the houses were built one after another, the project would have gone on much longer. Workmen would have been coming and going for years, and there would be no chance for tight control until the last house was finished.” He shrugged at the irony of it.
We finished the revised contractor list at midnight. By our estimate, at least one hundred and six contractors had had opportunities to plant multiple bombs at Gateville. The Bohemian said he’d have the list researched for current addresses by the following morning.
He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingertips together behind his head. “Let’s say we get lucky and we find a just-paroled ex-Crystal Waters worker and the police capture him with D.X.12 dust on his fingers. Say he confesses and tells us where he buried all the D.X.12, and we go and dig it up. Could we be sure we’re safe then?”
I shook my head.
Thirteen
As arranged, we were back in the Bohemian’s conference room the next morning at eight. As I’d come in, I passed a young man leaving the office, carrying a cardboard box filled with desk items and pictures in frames.
The Bohemian wore a crisp, muted glen plaid suit with a soft beige shirt and a perfectly knotted, tiny-figured maroon tie. With his silver hair, glowing tan, and sparkling teeth, he was burnished and polished like a man who’d won the lottery for the second time. Except for his eyes. They looked haunted.
Sitting next to him, Stanley fidgeted in his rumpled security uniform like he’d slept in it. I’d been on the roof all night. I felt like Stanley looked.
The Bohemian tapped a thin stack of stapled papers with a different fountain pen than the one he’d used the day before. Today’s pen was fat, like a torpedo, with an iridescent blue barrel and a cap that looked like solid gold.
“I had Buffy come in early to run these contractor names against the State of Illinois active database. She also searched nearby states for the same names, in case any had moved.”
“Who’s Buffy?” I asked.
“My secretary.”
Startled, I laughed, and then said, “Fatigue,” to cover it. That the dour Griselda was named Buffy went beyond misnomer; if she’d been a product, it would have been felonious false advertising. I needed sleep.
The Bohemian slid one set of the stapled copies across the table to Stanley, the other to me. “Of the one hundred and six contractors we deem to be candidates, fifty-eight are out of business. The forty-eight actives are asterisked, split twenty-four to a page.”
Each of the two pages had a double column of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Stanley scanned both pages. “I’ll check out the second page, you take the first,” he said to me.
“Will you have time?”
“Stanley will have to make the time,” the Bohemian answered sharply, then forced a smile. “Excuse me, I’m beginning to agree with you, Vlodek. This looks hopeless. Too many of the contractors have gone out of business, their worker rosters forever lost to us. Of the ones still operating”-he tapped his set of the copies-“you can bet most of their records will be long gone as well. All of which makes finding our man, assuming he even was one of the workers at Crystal Waters, almost impossible.”
“You’ve just made the argument for turning this over to the Feds right now,” I said.
The Bohemian nodded.
Stanley looked up from his list. “Where’s the harm in checking these first?” He turned to the Bohemian. “If we get nowhere, we’ll go to the Feds.”
“Nowhere or not, we go to the Feds tomorrow, Friday, at four,” I said.
“Agreed,” the Bohemian said.
“What about that list of parolees?” I asked Stanley.
“Chief Morris said he’d fax it here this morning.”
The Bohemian leaned toward Stanley. “What did you tell him?”
“Like you said, that we were receiving minor threats, and we suspect a worker from long ago.”
“He didn’t make the connection to the Farraday explosion?”
“He doesn’t want to make that connection, Mr. Chernek. Chief Morris is very appreciative of Crystal Waters’s past support. If he has questions, he won’t risk asking them if he doesn’t have to.” Stanley went out to check on the list of parolees.
The Bohemian and I sat for a few minutes, listening to each other breathe. It was like straining to hear water drip. After a few minutes, I said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky, find somebody who remembers something.”
The Bohemian looked at me. “Do you really think so, Vlodek?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
We went back to silence.
Stanley came back with a stack of photocopies. “I had Buffy make a dozen sets for each of us. That way, we can leave the list at the companies if needed.” He handed one stack of sets to me.
I scanned the list. The parolees were listed alphabetically, along with their ages.
“I masked out the names of the releasing institutions, so nobody can tell this is a parolee list,” Stanley said.
“We’re only interested in men old enough to have been at Crystal Waters.” I flipped through the pages. Ignoring the younger parolees still left a few hundred candidates. It looked futile. I stood up, anxious for the next day and a half to be over, and looked at the Bohemian. “Tomorrow at four o’clock.”
He met my eyes and nodded.
Stanley followed me out the door, and we rode down in the elevator together. We walked to my Jeep.
“We can’t give up on this, Mr. Elstrom.”
I leaned against the fender. “You don’t think we need the Feds?”
“Maybe. But they won’t come running. They’re being pulledevery which way in these times. Better we do the spadework and bring them something they can get their teeth into quickly.”
He was probably right; suddenly I was too tired to know. There had been too many nights of too little sleep, even before the mess at Gateville started. I unlocked the Jeep and sat with the key in my hand, watching him as he walked across the parking lot to the baby blue Crystal Waters station wagon. His head was down and his shoulders sagged. He looked like a fat, balding child, about to cry.
Of the twenty-four contractors on my list that were still in business, two were pavers, two were landscapers, three were plumbers, and one was an electrician. The remaining sixteen were a hodgepodge of other things. All had been paid at least five hundred dollars at Gateville, which meant, by our guess, they’d been there long enough to plant explosives in multiple locations.