Jo hadn’t wanted him to come, but he’d made her understand there was no way she could keep him from it. She hadn’t said a word the whole way. Outside the gates of the mill, a few protestors still lingered. They sat comfortably on canvas chairs and talked, their protest signs lying in the long rye grass beside them. Cork recognized the kid who’d been at Sam’s Place and the woman with the cane who’d accompanied him. Isaiah Broom was there, too. They stopped their talk as Cork drove by, and they eyed him as if he were the enemy.
Gil Singer, the deputy at the gate, let them through easily. As he had earlier that day, Cork parked beside the Land Cruiser Wally Schanno drove. There were a few other vehicles, mostly county sheriff’s cars. The mill seemed pretty much deserted. Schanno stood near the burned-out cab of the logging rig. He was leaning a bit, and he reminded Cork of a stiff old tree in a hard wind. As Cork approached with Jo, he saw that, in fact, Schanno was bent to listen. From beneath the blackened chassis, two legs protruded.
Cork started toward the rig, but a voice behind him called him back.
“Can’t go there, O’Connor.” Karl Lindstrom was wearing the same clothes he’d worn that morning. He looked beat. His eyes were deep-sunk in their sockets. His stiff, military bearing had wilted visibly. “Nobody goes beyond this point except the police.”
Schanno looked up and, seeing the small gathering, came over. “Cork, Jo.”
“Long day, Wally,” Cork said.
“Yeah.” Schanno looked over the burned area in back of him. “Had my men out here most of it, and Alf Murray’s volunteers, doing a quadrant search.”
“Did you find anything?” Jo asked.
“Lots of pieces of things.”
“No other explosive devices?”
“No.”
“Thank God for that,” Lindstrom said. “But I’ve still got to shut the mill down for a couple of days at least until they’ve finished with the investigation and we can get this mess cleaned up.”
Cork turned back toward Schanno. “Quick ID on the body, Wally.”
Schanno poked a thumb north. “Found Charlie’s truck parked in the woods half a mile that way. I had the medical examiner compare his dental records with the victim’s teeth.”
“Do you have any idea why Charlie Warren would have been here, Mr. Lindstrom?” Jo asked.
“You mean besides blowing up my mill?”
“I wouldn’t make accusations at this point,” Jo cautioned. “You didn’t know Charlie Warren.”
“Right.” Lindstrom gave her a sour look. “The only time I ever spoke with him, he told me basically I was about to stick my financial dick into Grandmother Earth, and if I did, he would see to it that it got cut off.”
“Charlie Warren was outspoken,” Jo said, “but he wasn’t a violent man.”
“Then you tell me what he was doing out here, Ms. O’Connor.”
Cork asked Schanno, “Did you talk with the night watchman?”
“At length,” Schanno replied. “He makes his rounds every hour. Carries a key that has to be turned in alarm boxes at various locations. He was about halfway through, on the far side of the mill, when the blast occurred.”
Lindstrom said, “Harold Loomis’s job is to prevent vandalism and major theft. This is a big mill. It wouldn’t be hard for one man to climb the fence and hide himself.”
“Did you check the perimeter of the fence?” Cork asked.
Schanno nodded. “Nothing conclusive. Ground’s too hard for prints.”
Jo asked, “Has the medical examiner determined the cause of death?”
“Asphyxiation. Then he burned.”
“Trapped in the explosion,” Cork guessed.
Schanno gestured vaguely in the direction of the debris. “When that LP tank went, it demolished the shed instantly. Whatever he was doing inside, Charlie was caught.”
“For Christ’s sake, he was watching the truck where he’d planted his damn bomb,” Lindstrom said.
Cork gave him a hard stare. “I know it looks pretty bad, but anybody who knew Charlie Warren wouldn’t believe for an instant he’d do something like this.”
Jo changed the subject. “Have you told Charlie’s daughter, Wally?”
“I sent Marsha Dross out before I called you.”
“That brings up an interesting question, Sheriff,” Lindstrom said. “Why did you call Ms. O’Connor?”
“Jo’s the attorney for the Iron Lake Ojibwe,” Schanno answered with an obvious effort at patience. “I also called George LeDuc. I believed these people had a right to know this particular development.”
“Okay.” Lindstrom seemed to accept it, although not happily. “Then what about him?” He jabbed a finger at Cork. “What’s he doing here? Unless you’re allowing him privileges in some ex officio capacity, he’s got no business here.”
Schanno didn’t seem to have an answer for that one. He said, “Look, Karl, it’s been a long day for you. I suggest you head on home and get some rest.”
“I’ve got a cot in my office. I have no intention of leaving here tonight.”
Schanno looked at Cork and Jo. “Maybe it’s time you left.”
For the moment, Cork ignored him and watched the legs under the burned chassis grow into the whole body of a man who stood up and came toward them. He was a lanky fellow with an affable smile and a dark, receding hairline. He wore a short-sleeved denim shirt and jeans, both smudged heavily by soot.
“Cork, Jo,” Schanno said, “this is Agent Mark Owen. He’s an expert on arson and explosives. Agent Owen, Cork and Jo O’Connor.”
“FBI?” Cork asked.
“BCA,” Agent Owen replied.
Cork glanced around. “I thought you guys were going to bring up your mobile crime lab.”
Owen pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his dirty palm before offering his hand in greeting, first to Jo, then to Cork. “Multiple homicide in Goodhue County last night. The last twenty-four hours in this state have been a bitch.”
Cork’s attention was grabbed by a man walking toward them from the shed where several deputies were still carefully sifting the blackened debris. Cork put him at just over sixty; he was of medium height and build and had gray hair. He wore a gray suit and tie, a neat figure amid all the chaos of the mill yard. He moved with the air of a man in no particular hurry.
“This is Agent David Earl,” Schanno said, when the man had reached them. “Agent Earl, Jo and Cork O’Connor.”
They shook hands.
“Are you BCA, too?” Cork asked.
“That’s right.” He took a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his suit coat and tapped out a cigarette that he lit with a silver lighter. He blew a flourish of smoke and considered Cork. “O’Connor. I knew a sheriff up here, must be nearly forty years ago. His name was O’Connor, too.”
“My father.”
“A good man, as I recall. You in law enforcement?”
“He used to have my job,” Schanno said.
Earl smiled and shrugged as if to say, Politics. “What do you do now?”
“I-uh-I run a hamburger stand.”
“And you’re here because?” He looked to Schanno for an answer.
“Chauffeur,” Cork replied quickly. “For my wife. She represents the Iron Lake Ojibwe.”
Earl shifted his gaze to Jo. “It must be the Warren fellow brings you here. Tragic business.”
“Do you have any idea how the explosion happened?” Jo asked.
“Some. Sheriff?”
“Go ahead,” Schanno said. “The whole county’ll know soon enough anyway.”
With the hand that held his cigarette, Earl gestured, giving his partner Owen the floor.
Owen finished wiping the soot from his hands, then stuffed the rag in the back pocket of his jeans. “We’re still gathering evidence, of course, but I’ll tell you what I suspect. It was a low-order explosive, smokeless powder, probably, encased in a steel pipe. The igniter was simple. A timer, probably a cheap clock, connected to a battery-my guess would be a nine-volt cell-wired to a camera flashbulb with the protective glass removed. The clock hits the right time, completes the circuit, battery fires up the flashbulb, the heat from the filament wire ignites the powder, and boom.” As he’d warmed to his subject, one he was obviously passionate about, his hands had begun to create pictures in the air to illustrate his words. “Now, normally a bomb of this kind would produce mostly fragmentation. But this bomb had something special. I think the pipe was coated with a chemical, a flammable gelatin or maybe even model airplane glue, which is quite flammable. The chemical ignited in the explosion so that the fragments, as they dispersed, were burning. At least one of these burning fragments sheared a valve on the LP tank, ignited the escaping gas, and that’s when the really destructive explosion occurred.”