3rd Degree

Chapter 81

THERE WAS A LOUD SHOUT in the Emergency Command Center. One of the guys manning the police frequency yanked off his headset. “A bomb just went off at the Rincon Center!”

I turned to Claire and felt the life deflate out of me. The Rincon Center was one of the city's most spectacular settings, in the heart of the Financial District, home to government agencies, business offices, and hundreds of apartments. This time of day, it would be jammed. How many people had just died?

I wasn't waiting around for police reports to call in the damage or casualties. I ran out of the Emergency Command Center with Claire a step behind. We hopped in her medical examiner's van. It took about fifteen minutes for us to race downtown and fight our way through the maze of traffic, fire vehicles, and bystanders crowded around the stricken area.

Reports coming over the radio said the bomb had gone off in the atrium, where it would be busiest at noon.

We ditched the van at the corner of Beale and Folsom and started to run. We could see smoke rising from the Rincon a couple of blocks away. We had to go to the Steuart Street entrance, running past the Red Herring, Harbor Court Hotel, the Y.

“Lindsay, this is so bad, so bad,” Claire moaned.

The first thing that hit me was the blunt cordite smell. The outside glass doors were completely blown away. People sat on the sidewalk, coughing, bleeding, slashed by explod-ing glass, expelling smoke out of their lungs. Survivors were still being evacuated left and right. That meant the worst was inside.

I took a deep breath. “Let's go. Be careful, Claire.”

Everything was covered with hot black soot. Smoke stabbed at my lungs. The police were trying to clear some space. Fire crews were dousing sporadic blazes.

Claire knelt next to a woman whose face was burned and who was shouting that she couldn't see. I pushed past them, farther in. A couple of bodies were crumpled in the center of the atrium near the Rain Column, which continued to pour water into a pond built into the floor. What have these people done? Is this their idea of war?

Experienced cops were barking into handheld radios, but I saw younger ones just standing around, blinking back tears.

In the center of the atrium, my eye fell on a mangle of twisted wood and melted wire - the remains of what looked like a piano. I spotted Niko Magitakos from the Bomb Squad crouched next to it. He had a look on his face that I will never forget. Something terrible like this, you pray it will never come.

I pushed my way over to Niko.

“The blast site,” he said, tossing a piece of charred wood in the piano pile. “Those bastards, those bastards, Lindsay. People were just having lunch here.”

I was no bomb expert, but I could see a ring of devasta-tion - benches, trees, burn smears - the location of the casualties blasted out from the center of the atrium.

“Two witnesses say they saw a well-dressed black male. He left a briefcase under the piano and then split. My guess, it's the same work as the Marina case. C-4, detonated elec-tronically. Maybe by phone.”

A woman in a Bomb Squad jacket came running up, hold-ing what looked like a fragment from a blown-apart leather case.

“Mark it,” Niko instructed her. “If we can find the handle, maybe there'll even be a print.”

“Wait,” I said as she started to walk away. What she had found was a wide leather strap, the piece that closed over the top of a briefcase and buckled into the clasp. Two gold letters were monogrammed into the strap. AS.

A sickening feeling rose up inside me. They were fucking with us. They were mocking us. I knew what the letters stood for, of course.

A.S. August Spies. My cell phone went off and I grabbed it. Cindy was on

the line. “Are you there, Lindsay?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I'm here. What's up?”

“They took credit for the bombing,” she told me. “Some-body called it in to the paper. The caller said he was August Spies. He said, `Three more days, then watch out!' He said this was just practice.”