Shock Wave by John Sandford

environment.”
    They talked for a few more minutes, as the man pulled off his waders and packed up his fishing gear, and Virgil learned that his name was George Peck. “Of course people are angry about this silly damn PyeMart. We don’t need that store. It won’t do anything good for anybody, except maybe Pye. And he’s got enough money that he doesn’t need any more, so what the heck is he doing?”
    As he talked, he was stripping the line out of the rod, pulled the reel and dropped it in one of his pockets. That done, he pulled the rod apart, in three sections, and slipped each one into a separate section of a long cloth sleeve, which he bound up neatly with cloth ties sewn onto the edges of the sleeve.
    â€œYou think anybody in the club is crazy enough to try to blow up Pye?” Virgil asked.
    Peck didn’t answer, but said, instead, “You police officers are investigating this whole thing in the wrong way. You’re old-fashioned, stuck in the past. You know what you ought to be doing? Two words?”
    â€œTell me,” Virgil said.
    â€œMarket research.”
    â€œMarket research?”
    â€œDo an interview with the newspaper. Tell the paper that you’re setting up a Facebook page, and you want everybody in town to sign on as your friends and tell you confidentially who is most likely to be the bomber. You set up some rules: tell people they aren’t to name old enemies, or people of color or other victims of prejudice. Then give them the clues you have, so far, tell them to think really hard: Who is he? If you put this in the paper, you’d have five thousand replies by tonight. You go through the replies, and you’d find probably ten suspects, coming up over and over. One of them will be the bomber.”
    â€œYou think?”
    â€œI’d bet you a thousand American dollars,” Peck said. He finished putting the last fly in a fly case, put it in another pocket.
    â€œYou got a thousand dollars?” Virgil asked.
    â€œI do.”
    Virgil said, “I like the concept, but it’d be pretty unorthodox. My boss would have a hernia.”
    Peck said, “Because he’s stuck in the past.” He nodded to Virgil and said, “Don’t fall in,” and went on his way, back upstream.
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    VIRGIL WENT DOWNSTREAM, for a quarter mile, then back up, ambling along the bank, looking for anything, not finding much. The riverbanks saw quite a bit of foot traffic, Virgil thought, judging from the beaten-down brush. He got back to the spot where he’d met Peck, and continued upstream after him, but never saw him again.
    Fifty yards above the place where they’d talked, he saw another trail cutting into the brush toward the PyeMart, and he followed it. Toward the end of it, fifteen yards from the edge of the raw earth of the construction zone, he found a nest beaten down in the weeds—a spot were somebody, or something, had spent some time. It could have been a deer bed, he thought, although it might be a little short for that, and he’d seen none of the liver-colored deer poop he would have expected around a bedding area.
    On the other hand, even if it wasn’t a deer bed, there wasn’t anything about it that would point toward a particular human being. He walked along the edge of the construction line, back to the point where he’d first stepped into the brush, but saw nothing else that looked like a bed, or a nest.
    If somebody were still watching the PyeMart, would he be coming back? Might it be worthwhile to ask the sheriff to have a deputy camp out here for a while? Get a sleeping bag and a book or two, and simply lie back in the weeds and see who came along?
    He’d think about that.
    He’d also think about market research; and about the man who suggested profiling. Wouldn’t market research just be a mass profiling? Didn’t the FBI believe in profiling, even if the ATF didn’t?
    In