Bushyhead thought about her question for a moment, then shook his head. “Not really. A couple of them got better offers from the State, a couple got long-term offers from a road crew, and a couple of them just couldn’t stomach plowing up good animal habitat for a stupid mall and went off to see if anyone else had a job opening. But I didn’t ever hear any of them badmouthing him; they all got other work, and I hang out with most of them, off and on.”

“So there were no threats against the company that you know of?” she asked.

“Threats?” His surprise was genuine. “Hell no, not that I ever heard of. Definitely not from the guys that quit.”

“What about outsiders?” she asked. “You know there were a lot of protests over the choice of site.”

He nodded. “I signed the petition. But once the county signed off, there was never anything seriously said or done. No threats, and that’s for sure, or I’d have heard about that, too.”

She gave him a skeptical look, and he grinned. “I sweet-talk the secretary; get her lunch sometimes so she’ll let me know when something’s up. She gets the mail first; if there were threats, I’d have known—these days, you can’t be too careful. I worked on a site that got bomb threats once, and once was enough for me. The wildlife people kept trying to post injunctions, but they never went through, and that is all I ever heard of. You know, what with some of the crazies that are out there, there’s a couple of us that’d think twice about working a site with somebody making threats around.”

He could be bluffing—he could simply be ignorant of what was going on. But she didn’t think so. He had no reason to lie, and every reason to tell the truth.

Besides, all of her instincts were telling her he was divulging everything he knew.

She decided to try a different angle. “Do you think you can remember exactly what happened just before all hell broke loose?” It had occurred to her that he might have noticed something that would tell her what kind of hand had been behind this.

“Yeah, I think so.” He nodded. “I went over this for the cops, though—”

“I’m not likely to get access to that,” she pointed out. “Was there anyone hanging around the site that you noticed?”

“No, and we kind of watch for that,” he told her. “We’ve had some problems with people pilfering stuff. In fact, the guys told me this afternoon that the dynamite inventory doesn’t match the stores—”

Bet that’s where the explosives came from. “Did anything odd happen that day?” she persisted.

“Uh—I didn’t tell the cops this, but, yeah.” He was frowning, and she asked why.