Demolition Angel

1

“Tell me about the thumb. I know what you told me on the phone, but tell me everything now.”

Starkey inhaled half an inch of cigarette, then flicked ash on the floor, not bothering with the ashtray. She did that every time she was annoyed with being here, which was always.

“Please use the ashtray, Carol.”

“I missed.”

“You didn’t miss.”

Detective-2 Carol Starkey took another deep pull on the cigarette, then crushed it out. When she first started seeing this therapist, Dana Williams wouldn’t let her smoke during session. That was three years and four therapists ago. In the time Starkey was working her way through the second and third therapists, Dana had gone back to the smokes herself, and now didn’t mind. Sometimes they both smoked and the goddamned room clouded up like the Imperial Valley capped by an inversion layer.

Starkey shrugged.

“No, I guess I didn’t miss. I’m just pissed off, is all. It’s been three years, and here I am back where I started.”

“With me.”

“Yeah. Like in three years I shouldn’t be over this shit.”

“So tell me what happened, Carol. Tell me about the little girl’s thumb.”

Starkey fired up another cigarette, then settled back to recall the little girl’s thumb. Starkey was down to three packs a day. The progress should have made her feel better, but didn’t.

“It was Fourth of July. This idiot down in Venice decides to make his own fireworks and give them away to the neighbors. A little girl ends up losing the thumb and index finger on her right hand, so we get the call from the emergency room.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Me and my partner that day, Beth Marzik.”

“Another woman?”

“Yeah. There’s two of us in CCS.”

“Okay.”

“By the time we get down there, the family’s gone home, so we go to the house. The father’s crying, saying how they found the finger, but not the thumb, and then he shows us these homemade firecrackers that are so damned big she’s lucky she didn’t lose the hand.”

“He made them?”

“No, a guy in the neighborhood made them, but the father won’t tell us. He says the man didn’t mean any harm. I say, your daughter has been maimed, sir, other children are at risk, sir, but the guy won’t cop. I ask the mother, but the guy says something in Spanish, and now she won’t talk, either.”

“Why won’t they tell you?”

“People are assholes.”

The world according to Carol Starkey, Detective-2 with LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section. Dana made a note of that in a leather-bound notebook, an act which Starkey never liked. The notes gave physical substance to her words, leaving Starkey feeling vulnerable because she thought of the notes as evidence.

Starkey had more of the cigarette, then shrugged and went on with it.

“These bombs are six inches long, right? We call’m Mexican Dynamite. So many of these things are going off, it sounds like the academy pistol range, so Marzik and I start a door-to-door. But the neighbors are just like the father — no one’s telling us anything, and I’m getting madder and madder. Marzik and I are walking back to the car when I look down and there’s the thumb. I just looked down and there it was, this beautiful little thumb, so I scooped it up and brought it back to the family.”

“On the phone, you told me you tried to make the father eat it.”

“I grabbed his collar and pushed it into his mouth. I did that.”

Dana shifted in her chair, Starkey reading from her body language that she was uncomfortable with the image. Starkey couldn’t blame her.

“It’s easy to understand why the family filed a complaint.”

Starkey finished the cigarette and crushed it out.

“The family didn’t complain.”

“Then why—?”

“Marzik. I guess I scared Marzik. She had a talk with my lieutenant, and Kelso threatened to send me to the bank for an evaluation.”

LAPD maintained its Behavorial Sciences Unit in the Far East Bank building on Broadway, in Chinatown. Most officers lived in abject fear of being ordered to the bank, correctly believing that it called into question their stability, and ended any hope of career advancement. They had an expression for it: “Overdrawn on the career account.”

“If I go to the bank, they’ll never let me back on the bomb squad.”

“And you keep asking to go back?”

“It’s all I’ve wanted since I got out of the hospital.”

Irritated now, Starkey stood and lit another cigarette. Dana studied her, which Starkey also didn’t like. It made her feel watched, as if Dana was waiting for her to do or say something more that she could write down. It was a valid interview technique which Starkey used herself. If you said nothing, people felt compelled to fill the silence.

“The job is all I have left, damnit.”

Starkey regretted the defensive edge in her voice and felt even more embarrassed when Dana again scribbled a note.

“So you told Lieutenant Kelso that you would seek help on your own?”

“Jesus, no. I kissed his ass to get out of it. I know I have a problem, Dana, but I’ll get help in a way that doesn’t fuck my career.”

“Because of the thumb?”

Starkey stared at Dana Williams with the same flat eyes she would use on Internal Affairs.

“Because I’m falling apart.”

Dana sighed, and a warmth came to her eyes that infuriated Starkey because she resented having to reveal herself in ways that made her feel vulnerable and weak. Carol Starkey did not do “weak” well, and never had.

“Carol, if you came back because you want me to fix you as if you were broken, I can’t do that. Therapy isn’t the same as setting a bone. It takes time.”

“It’s been three years. I should be over this by now.”

“There’s no ‘should’ here, Carol. Consider what happened to you. Consider what you survived.”

“I’ve had enough with considering it. I’ve considered it for three fucking years.”

A sharp pain began behind her eyes. Just from considering it.

“Why do you think you keep changing therapists, Carol?”

Starkey shook her head, then lied.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you still drinking?”

“I haven’t had a drink in over a year.”

“How’s your sleep?”

“A couple hours, then I’m wide awake.”

“Is it the dream?”

Carol felt herself go cold.

“No.”

“Anxiety attacks?”

Starkey was wondering how to answer when the pager clipped to her waist vibrated. She recognized the number as Kelso’s cell phone, followed by 911, the code the detectives in the Criminal Conspiracy Section used when they wanted an immediate response.

“Shit, Dana. I’ve gotta get this.”

“Would you like me to leave?”

“No. No, I’ll just step out.”

Starkey took her purse out into the waiting room where a middle-aged woman seated on the couch briefly met her eyes, then averted her face.

“Sorry.”

The woman nodded without looking.

Starkey dug through her purse for her cell phone, then punched the speed dial to return Kelso’s page. She could tell he was in his car when he answered.

“It’s me, Lieutenant. What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

Starkey stared at the woman.

“I was looking for shoes.”

“I didn’t ask what you were doing, Starkey. I asked where you were.”

She felt the flush of anger when he said it, and shame that she even gave a damn what he thought.

“The west side.”

“All right. The bomb squad had a call-out, and, um, I’m on my way there now. Carol, we lost Charlie Riggio. He was killed at the scene.”

Starkey’s fingers went cold. Her scalp tingled. It was called “going core.” The body’s way of protecting itself by drawing the blood inward to minimize bleeding. A response left over from our animal pasts when the threat would involve talons and fangs and something that wanted to rip you apart. In Starkey’s world, the threat often still did.

“Starkey?”

She turned away and lowered her voice so that the woman couldn’t hear.

“Sorry, Lieutenant. Was it a bomb? Was it a device that went off?”

“I don’t know the details yet, but, yes, there was an explosion.”

Sweat leaked from her skin, and her stomach clenched. Uncontrolled explosions were rare. A bomb squad officer dying on the job was even more rare. The last time it had happened was three years ago.

“Anyway, I’m on my way there now. Ah, Starkey, I could put someone else on this, if you’d rather I did that.”

“I’m up in the rotation, Lieutenant. It’s my case.”

“All right. I wanted to offer.”

He gave her the location, then broke the connection. The woman on the couch was watching her as if she could read Starkey’s pain. Starkey saw herself in the waiting room mirror, abruptly white beneath her tan. She felt herself breathing. Shallow, fast breaths.

Starkey put her phone away, then went back to tell Dana that she would have to end their session early.

“We’ve got a call-out, so I have to go. Ah, listen, I don’t want you to turn in any of this to the insurance, okay? I’ll pay out of my own pocket, like before.”

“No one can get access to your insurance records, Carol. Not without your permission. You truly don’t need to spend the money.”

“I’d rather pay.”

As Starkey wrote the check, Dana said, “You didn’t finish the story. Did you catch the man who made the firecrackers?”

“The little girl’s mother took us to a garage two blocks away where we found him with eight hundred pounds of smokeless gunpowder. Eight hundred pounds, and the whole place is reeking of gasoline because you know what this guy does for a living? He’s a gardener. If that place had gone up, it would’ve taken out the whole goddamned block.”

“My Lord.”

Starkey handed over the check, then said her good-byes and started for the door. She stopped with her hand on the knob because she remembered something that she had intended to ask Dana.

“There’s something about that guy I’ve been wondering about. Maybe you can shed some light.”

“In what way?”

“This guy we arrested, he tells us he’s been building fireworks his whole life. You know how we know it’s true? He’s only got three fingers on his left hand, and two on his right. He’s blown them off one by one.”

Dana paled.

“I’ve arrested a dozen guys like that. We call them chronics. Why do they do that, Dana? What do you say about people like that who keep going back to the bombs?”

Now Dana took out a cigarette of her own and struck it. She blew out a fog of smoke and stared at Starkey before answering.

“I think they want to destroy themselves.”

Starkey nodded.

“I’ll call you to reschedule, Dana. Thanks.”

Starkey went out to her car, keeping her head down as she passed the woman in the waiting room. She slid behind the wheel, but didn’t start the engine. Instead, she opened her briefcase and took out a slim silver flask of gin. She took a long drink, then opened the door and threw up in the parking lot.

When she finished heaving, she put away the gin and ate a Tagamet.

Then, doing her best to get a grip on herself, Carol Starkey drove across town to a place exactly like the one where she had died.

Helicopters marked ground zero the way vultures circle roadkill, orbiting over the crime scene in layers like a cake. Starkey saw them just as the traffic locked down, half a mile from the incident site. She used her bubble flasher to edge into an Aamco station, left her car, and walked the remaining eight blocks.

A dozen radio units were on the scene, along with two Bomb Squad Suburbans and a growing army of media people. Kelso was standing near the forward Suburban with the Bomb Squad commander, Dick Leyton, and three of the day-shift bomb techs. Kelso was a short man with a droopy mustache, in a black-checked sport coat. Kelso noticed Starkey, and waved to catch her eye, but Starkey pretended she didn’t see him.

Riggio’s body lay in a heap in the parking lot, midway between the forward Suburban and the building. A coroner investigator was leaning against his van, watching an LAPD criminalist named John Chen work the body. Starkey didn’t know the CI because she had never before worked a case where someone had died, but she knew Chen.

Starkey badged her way past the uniforms at the mouth of the parking lot. One of the uniforms, a younger guy she didn’t know, said, “Man, that dude got the shit blown out of himself. I wouldn’t go over there, I was you.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Not if I had a choice.”

Smoking at a crime scene was against LAPD policy, but Starkey fired up before crossing the parking lot to confront Charlie Riggio’s body. Starkey had known him from her days on the squad, so she expected this to be hard. It was.

Riggio’s helmet and chest protector had been stripped off by the paramedics who had worked to revive him. Shrapnel had cut through the suit, leaving bloody puckers across his chest and stomach that looked blue in the bright afternoon sun. A single hole had been punched in his face, just beneath the left eye. Starkey glanced over at the helmet and saw that the Lexan faceplate was shattered. They said that the Lexan could stop a bullet from a deer rifle. Then she looked back at his body and saw that his hands were missing.

Starkey ate a Tagamet, then turned away so that she wouldn’t have to see the body.

“Hey, John. What do we have here?”

“Hey, Starkey. You got the lead on this one?”

“Yeah. Kelso said that Buck Daggett was out, but I don’t see him.”

“They sent him to the hospital. He’s okay, but he’s pretty shook. Leyton wanted him checked.”

“Okay. So what did he say? You got anything I can use?”

Chen glanced back at the body, then pointed out the Dumpster.

“The device was over by that Dumpster. Buck says Riggio was over it with the Real Time when it went off.”

Starkey followed his nod to a large piece of the Real Time portable X-ray that had been blown out into the street. She considered the Dumpster again, and guessed that the Real Time had been kicked more than forty yards. Riggio himself lay almost thirty yards from the Dumpster.

“Did Daggett or the medics pull him over here?”

Anytime there was an explosion, bomb techs were trained to expect a secondary device. She figured that Daggett would have pulled Riggio away from the Dumpster for that reason.

“You’d have to ask Daggett. I think this is where he fell.”

“Jesus. We gotta be, what, thirty yards from the detonation point?”

“Buck said it was a helluva blast.”

She guesstimated the distance again, then toed the body armor to examine the blast pattern. The suit looked as if twenty shotguns had been fired into it point-blank. She’d seen similar suit damage when “dirty” bombs had gone off with a lot of fire and shrapnel, but this bomb had pushed the shrap through twelve layers of armor and had thrown a man thirty yards. The energy released must have been enormous.

Chen took a plastic bag from his evidence kit, pulling the plastic tight to show her a piece of blackened metal about the size of a postage stamp.

“This is kind of interesting, too. It’s a piece of the pipe frag I found stuck in his suit.”

Starkey looked close. A squiggly line had been etched into the metal.

“What is that, an S?”

Chen shrugged.

“Or some kind of symbol. Remember that bomb they found in San Diego last year, the one with dicks drawn all over it?”

Starkey ignored him. Chen liked to talk. If he got going about a bomb with dicks on it, she would never get her work done.

“John, do me a favor and swab some of the samples tonight, okay?”

Chen went sulky.

“It’s going to be really late when I finish here, Carol. I’ve got to work the Dumpster, and then there’s going to be whatever you guys find in the sweep. It’s going to take me two or three hours just to log everything.”

They would search for pieces of the device everywhere within a hundred-yard radius, combing nearby rooftops, the faces of the apartment buildings and houses across the street, cars, the Dumpster, and the wall behind the Dumpster. They would search for anything and everything that might help them reconstruct the bomb or give them a clue to its origins.

“Don’t whine, John. It’s not cool.”

“I’m just saying.”

“How long does it take to cook through the gas chrom?”

The sulk became sullen and put upon.

“Six hours.”

Residue from the explosive would be present on any fragments of the bomb they found, as well as in the blast crater and on Riggio’s suit. Chen would identify the substance by cooking it through a gas chromatograph, a process which took six hours. Starkey knew how long it would take when she asked, but asked anyway to make Chen feel guilty about it taking so long.

“Couldn’t you swab a couple of samples first, just to start a chrom, then log everything after? An explosive with this kind of energy potential could really narrow down the field of guys I’m looking at, John. You could give me a head start here.”

Chen hated to do anything that wasn’t methodical and by the book, but he couldn’t deny her point. He checked his watch, counting out the time.

“Let me see what time we finish here, okay? I’ll try, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”

Buck Daggett’s Suburban sat forty-eight paces from Riggio’s body. Starkey counted as she walked.

Kelso and Leyton saw her coming and moved away from the others to meet her. Kelso’s face was grim; Leyton’s tense and professional. Leyton had been off shift when he’d gotten the call and had rushed over in jeans and a polo shirt.

Leyton smiled softly when their eyes met, and Starkey thought there was a sad quality to it. Leyton, the twelve-year commander of the Bomb Squad, had selected Carol Starkey for the squad, just as he’d selected Charlie Riggio and every other tech below the rank of sergeant-supervisor. He had sent her to the FBI’s Bomb School in Alabama and had been her boss for three years. When she had been in the hospital, he had come every day after his shift to visit her, fifty-four consecutive days, and when she had fought to stay on the job, he had lobbied on her behalf. There wasn’t anyone on the job she respected as much, or cared for as much.

Starkey said, “Dick, I want to walk the scene as soon as possible. Could we use as many of your people as you can get out?”

“Everyone not on duty is coming out. You’ve got us all.”

She turned to Kelso.

“Lieutenant, I’d like to talk to these Rampart guys to see if we can’t conscript some of their uniforms to help.”

Kelso was frowning at her.

“I’ve already arranged it with their supervisor. You shouldn’t be smoking here, Starkey.”

“Sorry. I’d better go talk to him, then, and get things organized.”

She made no move to put out her cigarette, and Kelso ignored the obvious rebellion.

“Before you do, you’ll be working with Marzik and Santos on this.”

Starkey felt another Tagamet craving.

“Does it have to be Marzik?”

“Yes, Starkey, it has to be Marzik. They’re inbound now. And something else. Lieutenant Leyton says we might have a break here before we get started: 911 got a call on this.”

She glanced at Leyton.

“Do we have a wit?”

“An Adam car took the call, but Buck told me they were responding to Emergency Services. If that’s the case, then we should have a tape and an address.”

That was a major break.

“Okay. I’ll get on it. Thanks.”

Kelso glanced toward the press again, frowning when he saw an LAPD media officer approaching them.

“I think we’d better go make a statement, Dick.”

“Be right there.”

Kelso scurried over to intercept the media officer while Leyton stayed with Starkey. They waited until the other man was gone, then Leyton considered her.

“How you doing, Carol?”

“I’m fine, Lieutenant. Kicking ass and taking names, like always. I’d still like to come back to the squad.”

Leyton found it within himself to nod. They had weathered that pounding three years ago, and both of them knew that the LAPD Personnel Unit would never allow it.

“You were always a tough girl. But you were lucky, too.”

“Sure. I shit luck in the morning.”

“You shouldn’t curse like that, Carol. It’s not attractive.”

“You’re right, Boss. I’ll straighten out as soon as I kick the smokes.”

She smiled at him, and Leyton smiled back, because they both knew that she would do neither.

Starkey watched him walk away to join the press conference, then noticed Marzik and Santos talking to a uniformed sergeant amid a group of people outside one of the apartment buildings across the street. Marzik was looking over at her, but Starkey walked around to the front of the Suburban and examined it. The Suburban had faced the blast at about sixty-five yards away. The telex cables and security line that Riggio had pulled out with him still trailed from the rear of the Suburban to Riggio’s armored suit, tangled now from the explosion.

The Suburban appeared undamaged, but on closer inspection she saw that the front right headlight was cracked. She squatted to look more closely. A piece of black metal shaped like the letter E was wedged in the glass. Starkey did not touch it. She stared until she recognized that it was part of a metal buckle from the straps that had held Riggio’s armor suit. She sighed deep and long, then stood and looked back at his body.

The coroner’s people were placing him into a body bag. John Chen had outlined the body’s location on the tarmac with white chalk and now stood back, watching with an expression of profound disinterest.

Starkey wiped her palms on her hips and forced herself to take deep breaths, stretching her ribs and her lungs. Doing this hurt because of the scars. Marzik, still across the street, was waving. Santos looked over, maybe wondering why Starkey was just standing there.

Starkey waved back, the wave saying that she would join them in a moment.

The mall was a small strip of discount clothing shops, a used-book store, a dentist who advertised “family prices” in Spanish, and a Cuban restaurant, all of which had been evacuated before Riggio approached the bomb.

Starkey forced herself toward the restaurant, moving on legs that were suddenly weak, as if she’d found herself on a tightrope and the only way off was that singular door. Marzik was forgotten. Charlie Riggio was forgotten. Starkey felt nothing but her own hammering heart; and knew that if she lost control of it now, and of herself, she would certainly fall to her death.

When Starkey stepped into the restaurant, she began to shake with a rage beyond all hope of control. She had to grip the counter to keep her feet. If Leyton or Kelso walked in now, her career would be finished. Kelso would order her in to the bank for sure, she would be forced to retire with the medical, and all that would be left of Carol Starkey’s life would be fear, and emptiness.

Starkey clawed open her purse for the silver flask, feeling the gin cut into her throat in the same moment she cursed her own weakness, and felt ashamed. She breathed deep, refusing to sit because she knew she would not be able to rise. She took a second long pull on the flask, and slowly the shaking subsided.

Starkey fought down the memories and the fear, telling herself she was only doing what she needed to do and that everything would be all right. She was too tough for it. She would beat it. She would win.

After a while, she had herself together.

Starkey put away the flask, sprayed her mouth with Binaca, then went back out to the crime scene.

She was always a tough girl.

Starkey found the two Adam car officers, who gave her the log time of their original dispatch call. She used her cell phone to call the day manager at Emergency Services, identified herself, provided an approximate time, and requested a tape of the call as well as an address of origin. What most people didn’t know was that all calls to 911 were automatically taped and recorded with the originating phone number and that phone number’s address. It had to be this way because people in an emergency situation, especially when threatened or dying, couldn’t be expected to provide their location. So the system took that into account and provided the address for them.

Starkey left her office number, and asked the manager to provide the information as quickly as she had it.

When Starkey was finished with Emergency Services, she walked across to the apartment buildings where Marzik and Santos were questioning the few residents who had been let back into the area. They saw her coming, and walked out to meet her by the street.

Jorge Santos was a short man with a quizzical expression who always looked as if he was trying to remember something that he’d forgotten. His name was pronounced “whore-hey,” which had earned him the dubious nickname of Hooker. Beth Marzik was divorced, with two kids who stayed with her mother when she was on the job. She sold Amway products for the extra money, but she pushed it so hard that half the detectives at Spring Street would duck when they saw her approaching.

Starkey said, “Good news. Leyton says the call-out was responding to a 911.”

Marzik smirked.

“This good citizen happen to leave a name?”

“I already put in a call to Emergency Services. They’ll run the tapes and have something for us as soon as they can.”

Marzik nudged Santos.

“Bet you a dollar to a blow job there’s no name.”

Santos darkened. He was a religious man, married with four children, and hated it when she talked like that.

Starkey interrupted her.

“I’ve gotta get the uniforms set up for the sweep. Dick says the Rampart detectives offered to help with the door-to-door.”

Marzik frowned as if she didn’t like that idea.

“Well, we’re not going to get to most of these people tonight. What I’m hearing is that a lot of the people who were evacuated went to relatives or friends after the damned thing blew.”

“You’re getting a list of residents from the managers, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

Marzik looked suspicious. Her attitude made Starkey tired.

“Get the managers to pull the rental apps, too. They should be on file. Most of the rental applications I used to fill out wanted the name of a relative or somebody to vouch for you. That’s probably where those people went.”

“Shit, that’ll take forever. I used to have a date tonight.”

Santos’s face grew longer than ever.

“I’ll do it, Carol.”

Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster, where Chen was now picking at something on the ground. She gestured back toward the apartment buildings behind them.

“Look, Beth, I’m not saying do everybody on the goddamned block. Just ask if they saw something. Ask if they’re the one who called 911. If they say they didn’t see anything, tell’m to think about it and we’ll get back to them in the next few days.”

Marzik still wasn’t happy, but Starkey didn’t give a damn.

She went back across the street to the Dumpster, leaving Marzik and Santos with the apartments. Chen was examining the wall behind the Dumpster for bomb fragments. Out in the parking lot, two of the Bomb Squad technicians were adjusting radial metal detectors that they would use when they walked the lawns out front of the surrounding apartment buildings. Two more off-duty bomb techs had arrived, and pretty soon everyone would be standing around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for her to tell them what to do.

Starkey ignored all of them and went to the crater. It was about three feet across and one foot deep, the black tarmac scorched white by the heat. Starkey wanted to place her hand on the surface, but didn’t because the explosive residue might be toxic.

She considered the chalk outline where Riggio’s body had fallen, then paced it off. Almost forty paces. The energy to kick him this far must have been incredible.

Starkey impulsively stepped into Riggio’s outline, standing exactly where his body had fallen, and gazed back at the crater.

She imagined a slow-motion flash that stretched through three years. She saw her own death as if it had been filmed and later shown to her on instant replay. Her shrink, Dana, had called these “manufactured memories.” She had taken the facts as they had later been presented to her, imagined the rest, then saw the events as if she remembered them. Dana believed that this was her mind’s way of trying to deal with what had happened, her mind’s way of removing her from the actual event by letting her step outside the moment, her mind’s way of giving the evil a face so that it could be dealt with.

Starkey sucked deep on the cigarette, then blew smoke angrily at the ground. If this was her mind’s way of making peace with what happened, it was doing a damned shitty job.

She went back across the street to find Marzik.

“Beth? I got another idea. Try to locate the people who own all these shops and see if anyone was threatened, or owed money, or whatever.”

Marzik nodded, still squinting at her.

“Carol, what is that?”

“What is what?”

Marzik stepped closer and sniffed.

“Is that Binaca?”

Starkey glared at Marzik, then went back across the street and spent the rest of the evening helping the search team look for pieces of the bomb.

In the dream, she dies.

She opens her eyes on the hard-packed trailer-park earth as the paramedics work over her, their latex hands red with blood. The hum in her ears makes her think of a Mixmaster set to a slow speed. Above her, the thin branches of winter gum trees overlap in a delicate lace still swaying from the pressure wave. A paramedic pushes on her chest, trying to restart her heart. Another inserts a long needle. Cold silver paddles press to her flesh.

A thousand miles beyond the hum, a voice yells, “Clear!” Her body lurches from the jolt of current.

Starkey finds the strength to say his name.

“Sugar?”

She is never certain if she says his name or only thinks that she says it.

Her head lolls, and she sees him. David “Sugar” Boudreaux, a Cajun long out of Louisiana but still with the soft French accent that she finds so sexy. Her sergeant-supervisor. Her secret lover. The man to whom she’s given her heart.

“Sugar?”

The faraway voices shout. “No pulse!” “Clear!” The horrible electric spasm.

She reaches toward Sugar, but he is too far away. It is not fair that he is so far. Two hearts that beat as one should not be so far apart. The distance saddens her.

“Shug?”

Two hearts that no longer beat.

The paramedics working on Sugar step away. He is gone.

Her body jolts again, but it does no good, and she is at peace with it.

She closes her eyes, and feels herself rise through the branches into the sky, and all she knows is relief.

Starkey woke from the dream just after three that morning, knowing that sleep was beyond her. She lit a cigarette, then lay in the dark, smoking. She had finished at the crime scene just before midnight, but didn’t get home until almost one. There, she showered, ate scrambled eggs, then drank a tumbler of Bombay Sapphire gin to knock herself out. Yet here she was, wide awake two hours later.

After another twenty minutes of blowing smoke at the ceiling, she got out of bed, then went through the house, turning on every light.

The bomb that took Starkey had been a package bomb delivered by a meth dealer to murder the family of an informant. It had been placed behind heavy bushes on the side of the informant’s double-wide, which meant Sugar and Starkey couldn’t use the robot to wheel in the X-ray or the de-armer. It was a dirty bomb, made of a paint can packed with smokeless powder and roofing tacks. Whoever had made the bomb was a mean sonofabitch who wanted to make sure he got the informant’s three children.

Because of the bushes, Starkey and Sugar both had to work the bomb, Starkey holding aside the brush so that Sugar could get close with the Real Time. When two uniformed patrol officers had called in the suspicious package, they had reported that the package was ticking. It was such a cliché that Starkey and Sugar had burst out laughing, though they weren’t laughing now because the package had stopped ticking. The Real Time showed them that the timer had malfunctioned; the builder had used a hand-wound alarm clock as his timing device, but for some inexplicable reason, the minute hand had frozen at one minute before reaching the lead that would detonate the bomb. It had just stopped.

Sugar made a joke of it.

“Guess he forgot to wind the damned thing.”

She was grinning at his joke when the earthquake struck. An event every bomb tech working in Southern California feared. It would later be reported as 3.2 on the Richter scale, hardly noticeable to the average Angeleno, but the minute hand released, contact was made, and the bomb went off.

The old techs had always told Starkey that the suit would not save her from the frag, and they were right. Sugar saved her. He leaned in front of her just as the bomb went off, so his body caught most of the tacks. But the Real Time was blown out of his hands, and that’s what got her. Two heavy, jagged pieces sliced through the suit, ripped along her right side, and dug a gaping furrow through her right breast. Sugar was knocked back into her, microseconds behind the Real Time. The force of him impacting into her felt as if she had been kicked by God. The shock was so enormous that her heart stopped.

For two minutes and forty seconds, Carol Starkey was dead.

Two teams of emergency medical personnel rushed forward even as pieces of the trailer and torn azalea bushes fell around them. The team that reached Starkey found her without a pulse, peeled away her suit, and injected epinephrine directly into her heart as they administered CPR. They worked for almost three minutes around the blood and gore that had been her chest, and finally — heroically — restarted her heart.

Her heart had started again; Dave “Sugar” Boudreaux’s had not.

Starkey sat at her dinette table, thinking about the dream, and Sugar, and smoking more cigarettes. Only three years, and the memories of Sugar were fading. It was harder to see his face, and harder still to hear his soft Cajun accent. More often than not, now, she returned to their pictures to refresh her memories, and hated herself for having to do that. As if she was betraying him by forgetting. As if the permanence she had once felt about their passion and love had all been a lie told by someone else to a woman who no longer lived.

Everything had changed.

Starkey had started drinking almost as soon as she got out of the hospital. One of her shrinks — she thought it was number two — had said that her issue was survivor’s guilt. Guilt that her heart had started, and Sugar’s had not; guilt that she had lived, and he had not; guilt that, down deep, down in the center of herself where our secret creatures live, she was thankful that she had lived, even at the price of Sugar’s life. Starkey had walked out of the therapist’s office that day and never went back. She had gone to a cop bar called the Shortstop, and drank until two Wilshire Division robbery detectives carried her out of the place.

Everything had changed.

Starkey pulled away from people. She grew cold. She protected herself with sarcasm and distance and the single-minded pursuit of her job until the job was all that she had. Another shrink — she thought it was number three — suggested that she had traded one armored suit for another, then asked if she thought she would ever be able to take it off.

Starkey did not return to answer.

Tired of thinking, Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to her bedroom to shower. She pulled off her T-shirt and looked at herself with an absence of feeling.

The right half of her abdomen from her breast to her hip was rilled and cratered from the sixteen bits of metal that had punched into her. Two long furrows roped along her side following her lower ribs. Once tanned a walnut brown, her skin was now as white as a table plate because Starkey hadn’t worn a bathing suit since it happened.

The worst of it was her breast. A two-inch piece of the Real Time had impacted on the front of her right breast just beneath the nipple, gouging out a furrow of tissue as it followed the line of her ribs before exiting her back. It had laid her open as if a river valley had been carved in her chest, and that is the way it healed. Her doctors had discussed removing the breast, but decided to save it. They had, but even after the reconstruction, it looked like a misshapen avocado. Her doctors had told her that further cosmetic surgeries could, in time, improve her appearance, but after four operations, Starkey had decided that enough was enough.

She had not been with another man since Sugar had left her bed that morning.

Starkey showered, dressed for the day, then called her office and found two messages.

“It’s me, Starkey, John Chen. I got a pretty good swab from the blast crater. I’ll set it up in the cooker, but that means I won’t be out of here until after three. We should have the chrom around nine. Gimme a call. You owe me.”

The Emergency Services manager had left the second message, saying that she’d duped the tape of the 911 call reporting the suspicious device.

“I left the tape at the security desk, so you can pick it up anytime you want. The call was placed from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard at one-fourteen, that would be yesterday afternoon. I’ve got a street address here.”

Starkey copied the information into a spiral casebook, then made a cup of instant coffee. She swallowed two Tagamet, then lit a cigarette before letting herself out into the sultry night air.

It was not quite five, and the world was quiet. A kid in a beat-up red hatchback was delivering the L.A. Times, weaving from side to side in the street as he tossed out the papers. An Alta-Dena dairy truck rumbled past.

Starkey decided to drive back to Silver Lake and walk the blast site again. It was better than listening to the silence in her still-beating heart.

Starkey parked in front of the Cuban restaurant next to a Rampart radio car watching over the scene. The mall’s parking lot was otherwise deserted, except for three civilian vehicles that she remembered from the night before.

Starkey held up her badge before she got out.

“Hey, guys, everything okay?”

They were a male/female team, the male officer a skinny guy behind the wheel, the female short and chunky with mannish blonde hair. They were sipping minimart coffee that probably hadn’t been hot for hours.

The female officer nodded.

“Yeah. We’re good, Detective. You need something?”

“I’ve got the case. I’m gonna be walking around.”

The female officer raised her eyebrows.

“We heard a bomb guy got creamed. That so?”

“Yeah.”

“Bummer.”

The male officer leaned past his partner.

“If you’re gonna be here a few, you mind if we Code Seven? There’s an In-’n-Out Burger a couple blocks over. We could bring you something.”

His partner winked at Starkey.

“Weak bladder.”

Starkey shrugged, secretly pleased to be rid of them.

“Take twenty, but you don’t have to bring me anything. I won’t be out of here before then.”

As the radio car pulled away, Starkey clipped her pistol to her right hip, then crossed Sunset to look for the address that the Emergency Services manager had provided. She brought her Maglite, but didn’t turn it on. The area was bright from surrounding security lights.

A pay phone was hanging on the side of a Guatemalan market directly across from the mall, but when Starkey compared it to the address, they didn’t match. From the Guatemalan market, she could look back across Sunset at the Dumpster. She figured out which way the numbers ran and followed them to find the pay phone. It was housed in one of the old glass booths that Pac Bell was discontinuing, one block east on the side of a laundry, across the street from a flower shop.

Starkey copied the name of the laundry and flower shop into her notebook, then walked back to the first phone and checked to see if it worked. It did. She wondered why the person who called 911 hadn’t done so from here. The Dumpster was in clear view, but wasn’t from the other phone. Starkey thought that the caller might’ve been worried that whoever set the bomb could see them, but she decided not to worry about it until she heard the tape.

Starkey was walking back across Sunset when she saw a piece of bent metal in the street. It was about an inch long and twisted like a piece of bow tie pasta, one side rimed with gray residue. She had picked up nine similar pieces of metal the night before.

She brought it to her car, bagged it in one of the spare evidence bags she kept in the trunk, then walked around the side of the building to the Dumpster. Starkey guessed that the bomb hadn’t been placed to damage the building, but wondered why it had been set beside the Dumpster. She knew that satisfying reasons for questions like this often couldn’t be found. Twice during her time with the Bomb Squad, she had rolled out on devices left on the side of the freeway, far away from overpasses or exits or anything else they might harm. It was as if the assholes who built these things didn’t know what else to do with them, so they just dropped them off on the side of the road.

Starkey walked the scene for another ten minutes and found one more small bit of metal. She was bagging it when the radio car returned to the lot, and the female officer got out with two cups.

“I know you said you didn’t want anything, but we brought a coffee in case you changed your mind.”

“That was nice. Thanks.”

The female officer wanted to chat, but Starkey closed the trunk and told her she needed to get into the office. When the officer went back to her unit, Starkey walked around the far side of her own car and poured out the coffee. She was heading back to the driver’s side when she decided to look over the civilian cars again.

Two of the cars had been pinged by bomb frag, the nearest of which had lost its rear window and suffered substantial damage. Parked closest to the blast, it belonged to the man who owned the bookshop. When the police let him back into the area, he had stared at his car, then kicked it and walked away without another word.

The third car, the one farthest away, was a ’68 Impala with bad paint and peeling vinyl top. The side windows were down and the rear window had been replaced by cloudy plastic that was brittle with sun damage. She looked beneath it first, found nothing, and was walking around the front of the car when she saw a starburst crack on the windshield. She flashed the Maglite inside and saw a round piece of metal on the dash. It looked like a disk with a single fine wire protruding. Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster and saw it was possible that a piece of frag had come through the open windows to crack the windshield. She fished it out, examined it more closely with no idea what it might be, then dropped it into her pocket.

Starkey climbed back into her car without looking at the uniformed officers, then headed downtown to pick up the audiotape before reporting to her office. The sun was rising in the east, filling the sky with a great red fireball.

John Michael Fowles leaned back on the bench across from the school, enjoying the sun and wondering if he had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Not an easy thing to do when they didn’t know who you were, but he’d been leaving clues. He thought he might stop in a Kinko’s later, or maybe the library, and use one of their computers to check the FBI’s web page for the standings.

The sun made him smile. He raised his face to it, letting the warmth soak into him, letting its radiation brown his skin, marveling at the enormity of its exploding gases. That’s the way he liked to think of it: one great monstrous explosion so large and bright that it could be seen from ninety-three million miles away, fueled so infinitely that it would take billions of years to consume itself, so fucking cool that the very fact of it spawned life here on this planet and would eventually consume that life when it gave a last flickering gasp and blew itself out billions of years from now.

John thought it would be seriously cool to build a bomb that big and set the sucker off. How cool it would be to see those first few nanoseconds of its birth. Way cool.

Thinking about it, John felt a hardening in his groin of a kind that had never been inspired by any living thing.

The voice said, “Are you Mr. Red?”

John opened his eyes. Even with his sunglasses, he had to shield his eyes. John flashed the big white teeth.

“I be him. Are you Mr. Karpov?”

Making like a Florida cracker talking street, even though John was neither from Florida, nor a cracker, nor the street. He enjoyed the misdirection.

“Yes.”

Karpov was an overweight man in his fifties, with a heavily lined face and graying widow’s peak. A Russian emigrant of dubious legality with several businesses in the area. He was clearly nervous, which John expected and enjoyed. Victor Karpov was a criminal.

John scooted to the side and patted the bench.

“Here. Sit. We’ll talk.”

Karpov dropped like a stone onto the bench. He clutched a nylon bag with both hands the way an older woman would hold a purse. In front, for protection.

Karpov said, “Thank you for doing this, sir. I have these awful problems that must be dealt with. These terrible enemies.”

John put his hand on the bag, gently trying to pry it away.

“I know all about your problems, Mr. Karpov. We don’t need to say another word about’m.”

“Yes. Yes, well, thank you for agreeing to do this. Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Mr. Karpov, you surely don’t.”

John would have never even spoken to the man, let alone agreed to do what he was about to do and meet Karpov like this, if he had not thoroughly researched Victor Karpov. John’s business was by referral only, and John had spoken with those who had referred him. Those men had in fact asked John’s permission to suggest his name to Karpov, and were in a position to assure Karpov’s character. John was big on character. He was big on secrecy, and covering one’s ass. Which is why these people did not know him by his real name or know anything about him at all except for his trade. Through them, John knew the complete details of Karpov’s problem, what would be required, and had already decided that he would take the job before their first contact.

That was how you stayed on the Most Wanted List, and out of prison.

“Leave go of the bag, Mr. Karpov.”

Karpov let go of the bag as if it were stinging him.

John laughed, taking the bag into his own lap.

“You don’t have to be nervous, Mr. Karpov. You’re among friends here, believe you me. It don’t get no friendlier than what I’m feeling for you right now. You know how friendly it gets?”

Karpov stared at him without comprehension.

“I think we’re such good friends, me and you, that I’m not even gonna look in this bag until later. That’s how such good friends we are. We’re so fuckin’ tight, you and me, that I know there is EXACTLY the right amount of cash in here, and I’m willing to bet your life on it. How’s that for friendly?”

Karpov’s eyes bulged large, and he swallowed.

“It is all there. It is exactly what you said, in fifties and twenties. Please count it now. Please count it so that you are satisfied.”

John shook his head and dropped the sack onto the bench opposite Karpov.

“Nope. We’ll just let this little scenario play out the way it will and hope you didn’t count wrong.”

Karpov reached across him for the sack.

“Please.”

John laughed and pushed Karpov back.

“Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Karpov. I’m just funnin’ with you.”

Funnin’. Like he was an idiot as well as a cracker.

“Here. I want to show you something.”

He took a small tube from his pocket and held it out. It used to be a dime-store flashlight, the kind with a push-button switch in the end opposite the bulb. It wasn’t a flashlight anymore.

“Go ahead and take it. The damned thing won’t bite.”

Karpov took it.

“What is this?”

John tipped his head toward the schoolyard across the street. It was lunchtime. The kids were running around, playing in the few minutes before they would have to troop back into class.

“Lookit those kids over there. I been watchin’m. Pretty little girls and boys. Man, look at how they’re just running around, got all the energy in the world, all that free spirit and potential. You’re that age, I guess everything’s still possible, ain’t it? Lookit that little boy in the blue shirt. Over there to the right, Karpov, Jesus, right there. Good-lookin’ little fella, blond, freckles. Christ, bet the little sonofabitch could grow up fuckin’ all the cheerleaders he wants, then be the goddamned President to boot. Shit like that can’t happen over there where you’re from, can it? But here, man, this is the fuckin’ U.S. of A., and you can do any goddamned thing you want until they start tellin’ you that you can’t.”

Karpov was staring at him, the tube in his hand forgotten.

“Right now, anything in that child’s head is possible, and it’ll stay possible till that fuckin’ cheerleader calls him a pizza-face and her retarded fullback boyfriend beats the shit out of him for talking to his girl. Right now, that boy is happy, Mr. Karpov, just look at how happy, but all that is gonna end just as soon as he realizes all those hopes and dreams he has ain’t never gonna work.”

John slowly let his eyes drift to the tube.

“You could save that poor child all that grief, Mr. Karpov. Somewhere very close to us there is a device. I have built that device, and placed it carefully, and you now control it.”

Karpov looked at the tube. His expression was as milky as if he were holding a rattlesnake.

“If you press that little silver button, maybe you can save that child the pain he’s gonna face. I’m not sayin’ the device is over there in that school, but I’m sayin’ maybe. Maybe that whole fuckin’ playground would erupt in a beautiful red firestorm. Maybe those babies would be hit so hard by the pressure wave that all their shoes would just be left scattered on the ground, and the clothes and skin would scorch right off their bones. I ain’t sayin’ that, but there it is right there in that silver button. You can end that boy’s pain. You have the power. You can turn the world to hell, you want, because you have the power right there in that little silver button. I have created it, and now I’ve given it to you. You. Right there in your hand.”

Karpov stood and thrust the tube at John.

“I want no part of this. Take it. Take it.”

John slowly took the tube. He fingered the silver button.

“When I do what you want me to do, Mr. Karpov, people are gonna die. What’s the fuckin’ difference?”

“The money is all there. Every dollar. All of it.”

Karpov walked away without another word. He crossed the street, walking so fast that his strides became a kind of hop, as if he expected the world around him to turn to flame.

John dropped the tube into the nylon bag with the money.

They never seemed to appreciate the gift he offered.

John settled back again, stretched his arms along the backrest to enjoy the sun and the sounds of the children playing. It was a beautiful day, and would grow even more beautiful when a second sun had risen.

After a while he got up and walked away to check the Most Wanted List. Last week he wasn’t on it.

This week he hoped to be.

2

The Criminal Conspiracy Section where Starkey worked is housed on the fifth floor of an eight-story office building on Spring Street, just a few blocks from the LAPD’s seat of power, Parker Center. LAPD’s Fugitive Section and Internal Affairs Group are also housed there, on the fourth and sixth floors. The building is known to have the most congested parking of any building in city government, with the detectives on each floor having to wedge their cars together with barely enough room to open their doors. The officers who work there nicknamed the building “Code Three” because, if they had to respond to an actual emergency, they would make better time running out of the building on foot to grab a cab.

Starkey parked on the third floor after ten minutes of maneuvering, then climbed the steps to the fifth floor. She noticed Marzik watching her as soon as she walked in, and decided to see if Marzik wanted to make something of the Binaca. Starkey went over, stopping in Marzik’s face.

“What?”

Marzik met her gaze without looking away.

“I got those rental apps, like you wanted. I figure most of those people will go home today, and we can talk to them first. If anyone doesn’t show, we can use the apps to find them.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Like whatever you need to say?”

“I’m fine.”

Starkey let it go. If Marzik confronted her about the drinking, she didn’t know what she could do except lie.

“Okay. I’ve got the 911 call. Is Hooker in?”

“Yeah. I saw him.”

“Let’s listen to the tape, then I want to get over to Glendale. Chen’s gonna have the chrom, and I want to see how they’re coming with the reconstruction.”

“They just started. How far could they be?”

“Far enough to know some of the components, Beth. We get some manufacturers, we get the chrom, we can get going here.”

“We got all these interviews to do.”

Marzik made her tired. It was a shitty way to start the day.

“You guys can start in with the interviews while I’m over there. Round up Jorge and come to the desk.”

“I think he’s in the crapper.”

“Knock on the door, Beth. Jesus Christ.”

Starkey borrowed a cassette player from the section sergeant, Leon Tooley, and brought it to her desk. Each CCS detective had a desk in a partitioned cubicle in the larger main room. There was the illusion of privacy, but the partitions were just low dividers, meaning that there was no real privacy. Everyone spoke in whispers unless they were showing off for Kelso, who spent most of his time hidden behind his office door. Rumor had it that he spent his day on the Internet, trading his stock portfolio.

Marzik and Santos showed up a few minutes later with coffee, Santos saying, “Did you see Kelso?”

“No. Should I?”

“He asked to see you this morning.”

Starkey glanced at Marzik, but Marzik’s face was unreadable.

“Well, Jesus, Jorge, nice of someone to tell me. Look, let’s listen to this before I see him.”

Santos and Marzik pulled up chairs as Starkey turned on the tape. The sound started with the Emergency Services operator, a black female, and was followed by a male voice with a heavy Spanish accent.

The line clicked when the man hung up. That was the end of the tape. Starkey turned off the machine.

Marzik frowned.

“If it’s legit, why wouldn’t he leave his name?”

Santos shrugged.

“You know how people are. Could be he’s illegal. He’s probably just some neighborhood guy, around there all the time.”

Starkey scrounged for something to write on. The best she could do was a copy of The Blue Line, the LAPD’s union newspaper. She drew a rough street map, showing the mall and the location of the phones.

“He says he looked in the bag. Okay. That means he’s here at the mall. He says it scared him, seeing the pipes like that, so why not just use the phone right here outside the Cuban place or over here across the street? Why walk another block east?”

Marzik crossed her arms again. Every time Marzik didn’t like something, she crossed her arms. Starkey could read her like the daily news.

“Maybe he wasn’t sure it was a bomb, and then he wasn’t sure he wanted to call. People have to talk themselves into things. Christ, sometimes I gotta talk myself into taking a shit.”

Santos frowned at Marzik’s mouth, then tapped the phone outside the laundry.

“If I found something I thought was a bomb, I’d want to get as far away from it as possible. I wouldn’t want to stand next to it. Maybe he was scared it would explode.”

Starkey considered that, and nodded. It made sense. She tossed The Blue Line into her wastebasket.

“Well, whatever. We’ve got the time of the call. Maybe someone around there saw something, and we can straighten this out.”

Santos nodded.

“Okay. You want to do that while we get the apartment houses?”

“One of you guys swing past, okay, Hook? I’ve gotta meet Chen over in Glendale.”

Starkey gave them the addresses, then went in to see Kelso. She walked in without knocking.

“Hooker said you wanted to see me.”

Kelso jerked away from his computer and swiveled around to peer at her. He had stopped telling her not to barge in over a year ago.

“Would you close the door, please, Carol, then come sit down.”

Starkey closed the door, then marched back across his office and stood at his desk. She was right about that cow Marzik. She didn’t sit.

Kelso squirmed behind his desk because he wasn’t sure how to come at what he wanted to say.

“I just want to make sure you’re okay with this.”

“With what, Barry?”

“You seemed just a little, ah, strained last night. And, ah, I just want to be sure you’re okay with being the lead here.”

“Are you replacing me?”

He began to rock, his body language revealing that that was exactly what he was thinking.

“Not at all, Carol. No. But this case strikes close to home with you, and we’ve had these, ah, episodes recently.”

He let it hang as if he didn’t know how to carry it further.

Starkey felt the shakes coming on, but fought them down. She was furious with Marzik and terrified that Kelso might reconsider ordering her to the bank.

“Did Marzik say that I was drinking?”

Kelso showed both palms.

“Let’s leave Marzik out of this.”

“You saw me at the crime scene, Barry. Did I act drunk or unprofessional to you?”

“That’s not what I’m asking. You’ve been wound a little on the tight side, Carol. We both know that because we’ve talked about it. Last night you were confronted with a situation very similar to one that you yourself barely survived. Perhaps you were unnerved.”

“You’re talking about replacing me.”

“I left our conversation last night thinking that I smelled gin. Did I?”

Starkey met his eyes.

“No, sir. You smelled Binaca. I ate Cuban for lunch, and I was blowing garlic all day. That’s what you and Marzik smelled.”

He showed his palms again.

“Let’s leave Marzik out of this. Marzik didn’t say anything to me.”

Starkey knew he was lying. If Kelso had smelled gin on her breath, he would’ve said something at the scene. He was running with Marzik’s complaint.

Starkey was very careful in how she stood. She knew he would be reading her body language the same way she read his. He would look for any sign of defensiveness.

Finally, he settled back, relieved that he’d said what he needed to say and had been the responsible commander.

“All right, Carol, this is your case. I just want you to know I’m here for you.”

“I need to get over to Glendale, Lieutenant. The quicker I can get hard news on the bomb, the faster we can bag this puke.”

Kelso leaned back, dismissing her.

“All right. If you need anything, you know I’m here. This is an important case, Carol. A human being died. More, an officer died, which makes it personal.”

“It’s personal to me and the guys on the Bomb Squad, Lieutenant. Believe it.”

“I imagine it would be. Just take it easy, Carol, and we’ll get through this all right.”

Starkey went back into the squad room, looking for Marzik, but she and Santos had already left. She gathered her things, then wrestled her car out of the parking lot jockeying spots with a fat IAG detective named Marley. It took her almost fifteen minutes to get out of the building, and then she pulled to the curb, so angry at Marzik that her hands were shaking.

The flask of gin was beneath her seat, but Starkey didn’t touch it. She thought about it, but she didn’t touch it.

Starkey lit another cigarette, then drove like a bat out of hell, blowing smoke like a furnace.

It was only eight-thirty when Starkey pulled into the Glendale PD parking lot. Chen had said he’d have the chromatograph by nine, but Starkey figured that he’d built a fuck-up and paperwork cushion into that estimate.

She sat in her car smoking for five minutes before using her cell phone to call SID.

“John, it’s Starkey. I’m out here in the lot. You have the results?”

“You’re outside right now?”

“Affirmative. I’m on my way in to see Leyton.”

Instead of giving her attitude or excuses, Chen said, “Give me two minutes and I’ll be right down. You’re gonna love this.”

The LAPD Bomb Squad is based in a low-slung modern building adjacent to the Glendale police substation and piggybacked with the Scientific Investigation Division. The building is built of red brick and snuggled behind a stand of rubber trees, most people would mistake it for a dental office, except that it is also snuggled behind a ten-foot fence topped with concertina wire. The parking lot is dotted with dark blue Bomb Squad Suburbans.

Starkey let herself into the Bomb Squad reception area and asked for Lieutenant Leyton. He’d stayed out with the others at the crime scene, walking the sweep like everyone else. Dark rings had set in around his eyes, making him look older than she’d ever seen him, even after Sugar Boudreaux died.

Starkey handed over the baggie.

“I walked the scene again this morning and found these. You got someone on the reconstruction yet?”

Leyton held up the baggie to look. All three bits would have to be logged into the evidence records, then tested to see if they were actually part of the device.

“Russ Daigle. He came in early to start sorting what we recovered last night.”

“Chen’s on his way down with the chrom. I was hoping to snatch whatever component manufacturers you have, so I can get rolling with this.”

“Sure. Let’s see what he has.”

She followed Leyton down a long hall past the ready room and the sergeants’ offices to the squad room. It didn’t look like any other squad room in the department; it looked like a high school science lab, all small cramped desks and black Formica workbenches.

Every surface in the squad room was covered with de-armed bombs or bomb facsimiles, from pipe bombs and dynamite bombs to canister bombs and large military ordnance. An air-to-air missile hung from the ceiling. Trade journals and reference books cluttered any surface not sporting a bomb. FBI Wanted posters were taped to the walls.

Russ Daigle was perched on a stool at one of the workbenches, sorting pieces of metal. Daigle was one of the squad’s three sergeant-supervisors, and the man who had the most time on the squad. He was a short, athletic man with a thick gray mustache and blunt fingers. He was wearing latex gloves.

He glanced up when he heard them, nodding toward a smudged computer at the end of his workbench. It was covered with Babylon 5 stickers.

“We got the snaps up. You wanna see?”

“You bet.”

She moved behind him to see the monitor.

“End and side view. We got others, but these are the best. It’s a classic goddamned pipe bomb. Betcha some turd built it in his garage.”

The digital snapshots that Riggio had taken were displayed on the screen. They showed the two pipes as impenetrable black shadows neatly taped together with a spool of wire fixed to the cleft between them. All four pipe ends were capped. Starkey studied the images, comparing them to the bits of jagged black metal that were spread on white butcher’s paper. One of the end caps was still intact, but the others were broken. Daigle had divided them by size and conformation, exactly the way you would the pieces in any other puzzle. He already had the major parts of all four caps separated and had made good progress with the tubes, but it was clear that forty or fifty percent of the pieces were still missing.

“What do we have, Sarge? Looks like typical galvanized iron pipe, two-inch diameter?”

He picked up a piece of end cap that showed a letter V cast into the iron.

“Yeah. See the V? Vanguard pipe company. Buy it anywhere in the country.”

Starkey made note of it in her pad. She would compile a list of components and characteristics, and feed them through the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System to the FBI’s Bomb Data Center and the ATF’s National Repository in Washington. The BDC and NR would search for signature matches with every bomb report in their systems.

Daigle ran his finger up under the edge of the cap, flaking off something brittle and white.

“See that? Plumber’s joint tape. We got us a neat boy, here. Very precise. Even taped the joints. What does that tell you?”

Starkey knew that the old sergeant had already drawn a conclusion and was testing her. He’d done the same thing a hundred times when she was on the squad.

“You’re plumbing your sink, you maybe want to tape the joints, but you sure as hell don’t need to tape a bomb.”

Daigle grinned, proud that she’d seen it.

“That’s right. No reason to tape it, so maybe he does it out of habit, you know? Could be he’s a plumber, or a building contractor of some kind.”

Another note for the feds.

“Both pipes are the same size, as near as I can measure from the snaps. He either cut or had’m cut to length, and he was particular. You see the tape shadow here, how careful he wrapped the tape? We got us a particular boy here, and he’s good with his hands. Very precise.”

Already Starkey was getting a picture of the builder. He might be a skilled tradesman or a machinist or a hobbyist who took pride in precision, like a model builder or woodworker.

“Did Chen show you the 5?”

“What 5?”

Daigle placed a piece of the tube frag under the glass. It was the S Chen had pulled from Riggio’s armor.

“It looks like an S.”

Leyton said, “We’re not sure what it is, an S, or a 5, or some kind of symbol.”

Daigle peered close at the glass.

“Whatever it is, he cut it in with a high-speed engraving tool.”

Chen came in while they were discussing the snaps. Like the others, he looked as if he hadn’t slept much, but he was excited when he handed Starkey the chrom results.

“I can tell you right now I’m cooking another sample to confirm, but the explosive was something called Modex Hybrid. He didn’t buy this at the local hardware store.”

They looked at him.

“The military uses it in artillery warheads and air-to-air missiles. We’re talking about a burn rate of twenty-eight thousand feet per second.”

Daigle grunted. The burn rate was a measure of how fast the explosive consumed itself and released energy. The more powerful the explosive, the faster the burn rate.

“TNT goes, what, twenty thousand feet per second?”

Starkey said, “Twenty, twenty-one, something like that.”

Leyton nodded.

“If we’re talking about a military explosive, that’s good for us. It should narrow the field, Carol. We see who’s missing some, then find out who had access.”

Chen cleared his throat.

“Well, it won’t be that simple. The chrom showed a lot of impurities in the chemical signature, so I phoned the manufacturer back in Pennsylvania. Modex comes in three forms: military grade, which is made under government contract, commercial grade, which is made for foreign export only — EPA won’t let anyone use it here — and homegrown.”

Daigle scowled.

“What’s that mean, homegrown?”

“The company rep thought a kitchen chemist might’ve cooked up this batch. It’s not that hard to do if you’ve got the components and the right pressure equipment. The guy says it’s about as hard as cooking up a batch of crystal meth.”

Starkey glanced over the chromatograph printout, but it didn’t tell her what she wanted to know.

“Okay. If you can make the stuff by hand, I need the component list and the recipe.”

“The rep’s going to put it together and fax it. I asked him for manufacturers, too. As soon as I get’m, they’re yours.”

Starkey folded the page and put it with her notes. A unique explosive was a plus for the investigation, but she didn’t like what it implied.

“If this stuff is a military explosive, or needs some kind of high-end lab work, it changes my picture of the builder. We can’t be talking about a guy who just wanted to see if he could do it. This is a serious bomb.”

Leyton frowned and leaned against the bench.

“Not necessarily. If the Modex turns out to be stolen, that’s true — a backyard nutcase wouldn’t know how to get his hands on something like that. But if he made it himself, he could’ve pulled the formula off the Internet. Maybe he figured that using a more powerful explosive like this was part of the challenge.”

Daigle crossed his arms, not liking it.

“Starkey’s right about this being a serious bomb. So tell me this: Why does he build a device like this and just leave it by a Dumpster? There’s gotta be more to it.”

“We talked to every one of the shop owners, Sarge. Nobody says they were threatened. The bomb didn’t damage the building.”

Daigle scowled deeper.

“One of those fuckers is lying. You don’t build a bomb this powerful just to play with yourself. You watch what I’m saying. One of those fuckers screwed somebody over and this thing is payback.”

Starkey shrugged, thinking maybe Daigle was right as she studied the snaps.

“Sarge, I’m looking at this thing, but I don’t see a detonator. No batteries. No power source. How did it go off?”

Daigle slid off the stool to stretch his back and tapped the picture on the screen.

“I got a theory. One pipe holds the explosive, the other the detonator. Look here.”

He picked up two of the larger pieces of pipe, holding them for her and Leyton to see.

“See the white residue here on the inside of the curve?”

“Yeah. From when the explosive burned off.”

“That’s right. Now look at this other piece. Nothing in here. Clean. Makes me think maybe he had the detonator in this pipe, along with a battery or whatever.”

“You think it was hooked to a timer?”

Daigle looked dubious.

“And the timer just happened to let go when Riggio was standing over it? I don’t buy that for a second. We haven’t found anything yet, but I’m thinking Riggio set off some kind of balance switch.”

“Buck said Charlie never touched the package.”

“Well, that’s what Buck saw, but Charlie must’ve done something. Bombs don’t just go off for no reason.”

Everyone suddenly grew silent, and Daigle flushed. Starkey realized it was because of her, then she flushed, too.

“Jesus, Carol. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Sarge. There was a reason. It’s called an earthquake.”

Starkey remembered the twisted disk she’d found, took it from the baggie, and showed it to the others.

“I found this at the crime scene this morning. I don’t know if it came from the bomb, but there’s a good chance. It could be part of the initiator.”

Daigle put it under a magnifying glass for a closer look, chewing his lower lip, squinting and puzzled.

“Something electrical. Looks like we got a circuit board in here.”

Chen crowded in and peered at it. He pulled on a pair of Daigle’s gloves, then selected a narrow screwdriver and pried open the disk like a clamshell.

“Sonofabitch. I know what this is.”

A single word was printed inside the disk, a word they all knew, that was so out of place it seemed absurd: MATTEL.

Chen put down the disk and stepped away. The others gathered closer for a better look, but Starkey was watching Chen. He looked stricken.

“What is it, John?”

“It’s a radio receiver like they put in those remote-control cars for kids.”

Now all of them stared at him because what John Chen was saying changed everything they’d been thinking about this bomb and the anonymity of its explosion.

“Charlie Riggio didn’t set off this device, and it didn’t just happen to explode. It was radio-controlled.”

Starkey knew what he was saying at the same time as everyone else, but she was the one who said it.

“The lunatic who built this bomb was right there. He waited until Charlie was over the bomb, and then he set it off.”

John Chen took another breath.

“Yes. He wanted to see someone die.”

3

Kelso tasted the coffee he had just poured, making a face as if he’d sipped Drano.

“You really think the bastard triggered the device from the scene?”

Starkey showed him a fax she had received from a sales rep working for the radio control’s manufacturer. It listed the receiver’s performance specs and operating requirements.

“These little receivers operate on such low voltage that they’re only tested out to sixty yards. The guy I spoke with gives us a ballpark maximum distance between transmitter and receiver of about a hundred yards. That’s a line-of-sight distance, Barry. That puts our guy in open view.”

“Okay. So what’s your idea?”

“Every TV station in town had a helicopter overhead, broadcasting the scene. They had cameras on the ground, too. Maybe one of those tapes caught this mutt at the scene.”

Kelso nodded, pleased.

“Okay, I like that. That’s good thinking, Starkey. I’ll talk to Media Relations. I don’t see why there’d be a problem with that.”

“One other thing. I had to split up Marzik and Hooker. Marzik is interviewing the residents, and Hooker is talking to the police and fire personnel who were at the scene. It would help if I could get more people to help with the field interviews.”

He made the sour face again.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Kelso started away, but turned back.

“You’re still okay with this, right? You can handle it?”

Starkey felt herself flush.

“Asking for more bodies isn’t a sign of weakness, Barry. We’re making progress.”

Kelso stared at her for a moment, then nodded.

“Yes. You are. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

That surprised Starkey and pleased her.

“Did you talk with Sergeant Daggett yet?”

“No, sir.”

“You should talk to him. Get him to thinking about the people he might’ve seen in that parking lot. When we get these tapes, you’re going to want him to look at them.”

When Kelso closed his door, Starkey went back to her cubicle with her stomach in knots. Daggett would be confused and angry. He would be shaken because of what happened; second-guessing every decision that he’d made, every action, and every movement. Starkey knew he would be feeling these things because she had felt them, too, and didn’t want to revisit them.

Starkey sat in her cubicle for twenty minutes without moving, thinking about the flask in her purse and staring at Buck Daggett’s address in her Rolodex. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and stalked down to her car.

Daggett lived in a cramped Mediterranean-style home in the San Gabriel Valley, identical with its beige stucco and tile roof to a hundred others in the low-cost housing development just east of Monterey Park. Starkey had been there once, for a Bomb Squad cookout three months before Sugar died. It wasn’t much of a house. A sergeant-supervisor’s pay would cover something nicer, but Starkey knew that Daggett had been divorced three times. The alimony and child support probably ate him alive.

Five minutes after she left the freeway, Starkey pulled into Daggett’s drive and went to the door. A black ribbon had been tied to the knocker.

Daggett’s fourth and current wife answered. She was twenty years younger than Buck and attractive, though today she seemed vague and distracted. Starkey showed her badge.

“Carol Starkey, Mrs. Daggett. I used to work with Buck on the squad. You and I have met, haven’t we? I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”

“Natalie.”

“Natalie. Sure. Could I see Buck, please?”

“I had to stay home from work, you know? Buck’s so upset.”

“That’s right, Natalie. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Now, is Buck home?”

Natalie Daggett led Starkey through the house to their backyard where Buck was adding oil to his Lawn-Boy. As soon as Starkey stepped out into the yard, Natalie vanished back into her house.

“Hey, Buck.”

Daggett glanced up like he was surprised to see her, then scrambled to his feet. Just looking at him caused an ache in Starkey’s chest.

He shrugged at the Lawn-Boy and seemed embarrassed.

“I’m trying to keep busy. I’d hug you, but I’m all sweaty.”

“Busy is good, Buck. That’s okay.”

“You want a soda or something? Didn’t Natalie offer you anything?”

He came over, wiping his hands on a greasy orange cloth that soiled his hands as much as cleaned them. It was hot in the tiny backyard. Sweat dripped from his hair.

“I don’t have much time. We’re running short.”

He nodded, disappointed, then opened a couple of lawn chairs that had been leaning against the house.

“I heard you caught the case. You doing okay over there on CCS?”

“I’d rather be back on the squad.”

Daggett nodded without looking at her. She suddenly thought that if she was still on the squad that it might’ve been her down in Silver Lake instead of Riggio. Maybe he was thinking that, too.

“Buck, I’ve got to ask you some questions about what happened.”

“I know that. Sure. Hey, I don’t think I ever told you, but the guys in the squad are really proud you made the move to become a detective. That’s real police work.”

“Thanks, Buck. I appreciate that.”

“What are you, a D-3 now?”

“A D-2. I don’t have enough time in grade for the promotion.”

Buck shrugged.

“You’ll get there. Here you are with the lead, and only a D-2.”

Starkey worried he might be wondering if she was up to the job. She liked Buck, and didn’t want him to doubt her. She got enough doubt from Kelso.

“Anyone call you about the bomb? You hear about that?”

“No. Hear about what?”

He was searching her face, and it took all of her strength not to look away. He knew it was going to be bad. She could see the fear of it blossom in his eyes.

“What about the bomb, Carol?”

“It was detonated by remote control.”

He stared at her without expression for a time, then shook his head, something like desperation edging into his voice.

“That can’t be. Charlie made some good snaps with the Real Time. We didn’t see a radio device. We didn’t see any kind of detonator. If we’d seen anything like that, I would’ve yanked Charlie out of there. He would’ve come running.”

“You couldn’t have seen it, Buck. The power pack and initiator were inside one of the pipes. The explosive was in the other. Something called Modex Hybrid.”

He blinked hard to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. Starkey felt her own eyes fill and put a hand on his arm.

“I’m okay.”

She let go of his arm, thinking the two of them were a fine pair.

Buck cleared his throat, took a breath and let it out.

“Modex. That’s military, right? I know that name.”

“They use it in warheads. Almost ten thousand feet faster than TNT. But we’re thinking maybe this batch was homemade.”

“Jesus. You’re sure about the remote? You’re sure it was radio-controlled?”

“We found the receiver. The person who set it off was somewhere in the area. He could’ve set it off anytime he wanted, but he waited until Charlie was right over the bomb. We think he was watching.”

He rubbed at his face and shook his head as if all of this was too much to bear.

She told him about the videotapes.

“Listen, Buck, I’m getting together the videos that the TV stations took. When we have everything together, I’d like you to come in and take a look. Maybe you’ll see someone in the crowd.”

“I don’t know, Carol. My head was on the bomb. I was worried about Charlie’s body temp and about getting good snaps. We thought we had some gangbanger over there, you know? A pachuco showing off for the homeboys. It was just a couple of goddamned pipes, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’ll be another day or two before we get all the tapes. I want you to think about it, okay? Try to recall anyone or anything that stood out.”

“Sure. I got nothing else to do. Dick made me take three days.”

“It’s good for you, Buck. Hey, you can take care of the weeds here in your yard. The place looks like shit.”

Daggett grudged a wan smile, and the two of them fell into silence.

After a time, he said, “You know what they’re making me do?”

“What?”

“I gotta go to the bank. Shit, I don’t want to talk to those people.”

Starkey didn’t know what to say.

“They call it ‘trauma counseling.’ We got all these new rules now. You’re in a shooting, you gotta go in. You get in a car wreck, you gotta go in. Now I guess I’ve got to tell some headshrinker what it feels like seeing my partner get blown to shit.”

Starkey was still trying to think of something to say when she felt her pager vibrate. It was Marzik’s number, followed by 911.

Starkey wanted to return the call, but she didn’t want to leave Buck Daggett so quickly, or like this.

“Don’t worry about the bank. It’s not like you’re being ordered in.”

“I just don’t want to talk to those people. What’s there to say about something like this? What did you say?”

“Nothing, Buck. There’s nothing to say. Just tell’m that. There’s nothing to say. Listen, I’ve got to return this call. It’s Marzik.”

“Sure. I understand.”

Daggett walked her out through the house and to the front door. His wife was nowhere around.

“Natalie’s upset, too. I’m sorry she didn’t offer you anything.”

“Don’t worry about it, Buck. I didn’t want anything anyway.”

“We were pretty tight, the three of us. She liked Charlie a lot.”

“I’ll call you about the videos. Think about it, okay?”

She was stepping through the door when Buck stopped her.

“Detective?”

She looked back at him, smiling at his use of her title.

“Thanks for not asking. You know what I mean? Everyone asks you how you are, and there’s nothing to say to that, either.”

“I know, Buck. It used to drive me crazy, everyone asking that.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess we’re a pretty small club, me and you.”

Starkey nodded at him, and then Buck Daggett closed the door.

Starkey was paged a second time as she walked out to her car. This time it was Hooker. She called Marzik first because of the 911, using her cell phone as she sat in Daggett’s drive.

Marzik got it on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting.

“Beth Marzik.”

“It’s Starkey. What’s up?”

Marzik’s voice was excited.

“I got something here, Starkey. I’m down by that flower shop, the one across from the phone? 911 gets the call from the phone at one-fourteen, right? Well, the owner’s kid is out front, getting ready to deliver some flowers, and he sees a guy on the phone.”

Starkey’s pulse quickened.

“Tell me he saw a car, Beth. Say we’ve got a license plate.”

“Carol, listen to this. It’s even better. He said it was an Anglo guy.” “The caller was Latino.”

“Listen to me, Starkey. This kid is solid. He’s sitting in his truck, listening to the fuckin’ Gipsy Kings while they load the flowers. He’s there from a little after one to exactly one-twenty. I know he was there during the call because they logged his departure time. He says it was a white guy.”

Starkey tried not to let herself get excited, but it was hard.

Marzik said, “Why would a white guy pretend to be Latino unless it was the guy who set the bomb, Carol? If it was some white guy pretending to be Latino, then he was trying to hide, for Christ’s sake. We could have an eye-wit to the fuckin’ asshole who set the bomb.”

Starkey saw the possibilities, too, but she knew that investigations often took turns that seemed to be sure things only to have them fall apart.

“Let’s take it a step at a time, Beth. I think this is a good thing, and we’re going to go with it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Your wit only thinks the guy he saw was Anglo. Maybe the guy was Anglo, but maybe he only looked Anglo to the kid. We’ll just have to see.”

“Okay. That’s right. I know you’re right, but the kid comes across solid. You need to come talk to him.”

“Is he there now, Beth?”

“Well, for a while. He’s got more deliveries to make and it’s getting late.”

“Okay. Keep him there. I’m coming down.”

“I can’t just keep him here. If they get an order, he’s got to make the delivery.”

“Ask him, Beth. Say pretty please.”

“What do you want me to do, suck his dick?”

“Yeah. Try that.”

Starkey broke the connection, then punched in Santos’s number. When he answered, his voice was so soft that she could barely understand him.

“What are you whispering for?”

“Carol, is that you?”

“I can barely hear you. Speak up.”

“I’m at the office. An agent from the ATF is here. He flew in from Washington this morning.”

Starkey felt a burst of tension in her stomach and reached into her purse for a Tagamet.

“You’re sure it’s Washington? He didn’t just drive over from the L.A. field office?”

She had submitted the preliminary bomb component information through the NLETS only yesterday. If this guy came from Washington, he must have hopped the first jet.

“He’s from Washington, Carol. He went in there with Kelso, and now Kelso wants to see you. He’s been asking for our reports. I think they’re going to take over our case. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ve been stalling, but Kelso wants me to give him what we have.”

“Waitaminute, Jorge, did the guy say that? Did he say he wanted the case?”

“I’ve got to go, Carol. Kelso just stuck his head out. He’s looking at me.”

“Stall longer, Jorge. I’m coming in. Marzik turned up something good for us.”

“From the looks of the guy in with Kelso, it’s going to be something good for him.”

Starkey ate a Tagamet, then drove back to Spring Street with her dash bubble flashing.

Starkey made it back to her office in twenty-five minutes. Santos caught her eye from the coffee machine and nodded toward Kelso’s door. It was closed.

“Did you give him the reports?”

Her look made him cringe.

“What could I do, tell Kelso no?”

Starkey set her jaw and stalked to Kelso’s door. She knocked hard three times, then opened the door without waiting.

Kelso gestured wearily toward her as he spoke to the man seated across from his desk.

“This is Detective Starkey. She comes in whenever she wants. Starkey, this is Special Agent Jack Pell from—”

“The ATF. I know. Is he taking over this case?”

Pell was leaning forward with elbows on knees as if he were about to leap forward. Starkey guessed him to be in his mid-thirties, but if he was older, it wouldn’t have surprised her. He had pale skin and intense gray eyes. She tried to read the eyes, but couldn’t; they seemed guarded.

Pell turned to Kelso without acknowledging her.

“I need a few more minutes with you, Lieutenant. Have her wait outside until we’re ready.”

Her. Like she wasn’t standing there.

“Out, Starkey. We’ll call you.”

“This is my case, Lieutenant. It’s our case. One of our people died.”

“Wait outside, Detective. We’ll call you when we want you.”

Starkey waited outside his door, fuming. Santos started over, saw her scowl, and veered away. She was cursing Kelso for giving away the CCS investigation when her pager buzzed on her hip.

“Oh, shit. Marzik.”

Starkey phoned Marzik from her cubicle.

“Carol, I’m standing here with this kid and he’s got deliveries to make. Where in hell are you?”

Starkey kept her voice low, so the other detectives couldn’t hear.

“Back at the office. The ATF is coming in.”

“You’re shitting me? What’s happening?”

“All I know is that an agent is in there with Kelso now. Look, I’ll talk with the kid when I’m done here. Tell him to make his damned deliveries.”

“It’s almost five, Carol. He’s got deliveries, then he’s going home. We can catch him tomorrow.”

Starkey checked her watch and thought it through. She wanted to talk to the kid now because she knew that time was a witness’s enemy; people forgot details, people grew confused, people had second thoughts about cooperating with the police. Starkey finally decided that she was getting ahead of herself and pressing too hard. She wouldn’t help herself with this kid by making him wait around for another couple of hours.

“Okay, Beth. Set it up. Is he working tomorrow morning?”

Marzik told her to hang on. The kid must have been standing there with her.

“He’s in at eight. His father owns the store.”

“Okay. We’ll get him tomorrow morning.”

“Us or the ATF?”

“I’m about to find out.”

Kelso stuck his head out, looking for her. Starkey put down the phone, wishing she’d used the time to eat more Tagamet. Sometimes she thought she should buy stock in that company.

When she reached Kelso, he whispered, “Just relax, Carol. He’s here to help us.”

“My ass he is.”

Kelso closed the door behind them. Pell was still poised forward in the chair, so Starkey gave him her best scowl. Those damned gray eyes were the coldest eyes she’d ever seen, and she had to fight the urge to look away.

Kelso returned to his desk.

“Agent Pell flew in from D.C. this morning. The information you fed into the system raised some eyebrows back there.”

Pell nodded.

“I don’t have an interest in taking over your investigation, Detective. This is your town, not mine, but I do think I can help you. I flew out because we flagged some similarities between your bomb and some others we’ve seen.”

“Like what?”

“The Modex is his explosive of choice: fast, sexy, and elite. He also likes to use this particular type of radio detonator, hiding it in one of the pipes so you can’t see it with the X-ray.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“If your guy is our guy, he uses the name Mr. Red. We don’t know his true name.”

Starkey glanced at Kelso, but his expression told her nothing. She figured he would be relieved to hand over the case to the feds, so he wouldn’t have to worry about clearing it.

“What are we talking about here? Mr. Red? Is this guy some kind of serial bomber? Is he a terrorist? What?”

“No, Detective, this mutt isn’t a terrorist. As far as we know, he doesn’t care about politics or abortion or any of that. Over the past two years, we’ve had seven bombings that show Modex Hybrid and a radio-triggering device similar to the one used here. Because of the nature of the targets and the people involved, we believe that four of them were done for criminal profit. He blows up something or someone probably because he’s being paid to do it. This is how he makes his money, Starkey, blowing up things. He’s a hit man with a bomb. But he also has a hobby.”

“I’m dying to know.”

Kelso snapped, surprising the hell out of her.

“Shut up, goddamnit, and listen.”

Starkey turned back to Pell, and the gray eyes were as depthless as stillwater pools. She found herself wondering why they might be so tired.

“He hunts bomb technicians, Starkey. He baits them, then he murders them. He’s killed three so far, if we count your man, all with identical devices.”

Starkey watched the gray eyes. They did not blink.

“That’s insane.”

“The profilers say it’s a dominance game; I think he sees it as a competition. He makes bombs, bomb techs like you de-arm them, so he tries to beat you.”

Starkey felt a chill; Pell clearly read it.

“I know what happened to you. I looked you up before I flew out.”

Starkey felt invaded, and the invasion angered her. She wondered what he knew about her injuries and suddenly felt embarrassed that this man might know those things. She made her voice cool.

“Who and what I am is none of your business except for this: I am the lead investigator on this case.”

Pell shrugged.

“You signed the NLETS request. I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

Thinking about it now, Starkey had a recollection of reading an ATF flyer on an unknown suspect who might have been identified as Mr. Red. It was the kind of flyer that passed through their office on a routine basis, but bore little relevance, as the subject was operating in other parts of the country.

“I would have remembered this, Pell, some nut murdering bomb technicians. No one here has heard of this asshole.”

Kelso shifted.

“They’ve kept that part of his activities on a need-to-know basis.”

“We don’t want copycats, Starkey. We’ve kept all the details of his M.O. and bomb designs classified except the components that we list through NLETS.”

“So you’re saying that your guy is our guy on the strength of a components list?”

“I’m not saying anything yet, but the Modex and the radio receiver are persuasive. The other design signatures are distinctive. And you have this letter you’ve found.”

Starkey was confused.

“What letter? What are you talking about?”

Kelso said, “The number we found etched into the frag. The 5. Agent Pell thinks it might be the letter S.”

“Why do you think it’s a letter?”

Pell hesitated, leaving Starkey to wonder what he was thinking.

“We’ve found etchings in Mr. Red’s work before. What I’ll need to do is read your reports and compare your reconstruction with what we know. Then I’ll make a determination whether or not your bomber is Mr. Red.”

Starkey could see her case slipping away.

“Pardon me if I make up my own mind. But if you get to see mine, then I want to see yours. I want to compare whatever you have with what we find here.”

Kelso showed his palms.

“Now, Starkey, we don’t need to be adversaries here.”

She wanted to kick him. That was just the kind of mealy-mouthed thing Kelso would say.

Pell gathered together a short stack of papers and gestured with them.

“That’s not a problem, Detective. Lieutenant Kelso was kind enough to share your case reports; I’ll be happy to give you copies of mine. They’re at my hotel now, but I’ll get them to you.”

Pell rolled the reports that Kelso had given him into a tube, then stood.

“I skimmed through these. They look pretty good, but I want to read them more carefully now.”

Pell turned to Kelso and gestured with the reports.

“Could you set me up with a place to read these, Lieutenant? I’d like to cover as much ground this evening as I can before Detective Starkey and I get down to business.”

Starkey blinked hard twice, then also faced Kelso.

“What does that mean? I’ve got my hands full with this investigation.”

Kelso came around his desk to open the door.

“Just relax, Carol. We’re all on the same side here.”

As Pell walked past with the reports, he stopped beside Starkey, well into her personal space. She would have bet a thousand dollars that he did it on purpose.

“I won’t bite, Detective. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of anything.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

Kelso called Santos to take care of Pell, then came back into his office and closed the door. He wasn’t happy, but Starkey didn’t give a damn. Her hands were shaking so badly that she put them in her pockets so that he wouldn’t see.

“You couldn’t have been any less helpful.”

“I’m not here to be helpful. I’m here to find whoever killed Riggio, and now I’ve got to worry about the ATF second-guessing what I do and stealing my case.”

“Try to remember that it’s a team effort, Detective. It can’t hurt to let him look. If he can’t tie our bomb to his man, he’ll go back to Washington and be out of our hair. If our bomber and his bomber are one and the same, we might be damned lucky to have his help. I’ve already spoken to Assistant Chief Morgan about this. He wants us to extend our full cooperation.”

Starkey thought that was just like Kelso, call the brass and cover his ass.

“Marzik found a wit who might’ve seen our guy make the 911 call. He says that the person making the call was an Anglo guy.”

That stopped Kelso, who fidgeted with his pencil as he considered it.

“I thought the caller was Hispanic.”

“So did I.”

Starkey didn’t add anything more. She figured that even Kelso was smart enough to see the implication.

“Well, I guess you’d better see to it. Call me at home to tell me what develops.”

“I was going to go see about it, Lieutenant, but I had to come meet Mr. Pell instead. Now it has to keep until tomorrow. The witness had plans.”

Kelso looked disappointed.

“It couldn’t be helped, then. See about it tomorrow and keep me informed. You’re going to close this case, Starkey. I have every faith in that. So does the A-chief.”

Starkey didn’t answer. She wanted to get out of there, but Kelso looked nervous.

“You’re doing okay with this, aren’t you, Carol? You’re okay?”

Kelso came around his desk again, getting close to her, as if he was trying to smell her breath.

“I’m fine.”

“Good. Go home and get a good night’s sleep. Rest is important to keep your mind sharp.”

Starkey let herself out, hoping that she wouldn’t see Pell when she left. It was after six when she pulled out into the downtown traffic, but she didn’t head home. She turned her car west toward a bar called Barrigan’s in the Wilshire Division.

Less than twelve hours ago she had emptied her flask and promised herself that she would ease up on the drinking, but to hell with that. She ate two Tagamet and cursed her rotten luck that the ATF was involved.

Pell sat in a small white room not much bigger than a coffin to read the reports. He had been provided with the initial findings from the Bomb Squad, SID, and the autopsy of the deceased officer.

After reading them, he felt that LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division and Bomb Squad had done an excellent job of forensics and analysis, though he was disappointed that only a single letter — the S—had been recovered. Pell was certain there would be more, but had a high degree of confidence that the criminalist over there, Chen, would not have overlooked anything. Pell wasn’t so certain about the Medical Examiner’s office. An important step had not been noted in the autopsy protocol.

He brought the reports into the hall and found Santos waiting.

“Do you know if the medical examiner took a full X-ray of Riggio’s body?”

“I don’t know. If it’s not in the protocol, they probably didn’t do it.”

“It’s not, but it should be.”

Pell paged open the autopsy protocol and found the attending medical examiner’s name. Lee Richards.

“Is Starkey still here?”

“She’s gone.”

“I’d better see Lieutenant Kelso.”

Twenty minutes later, after Kelso had made two phone calls to locate Richards, Santos drove Pell around behind the rear of the County-USC Medical Center to the Medical Examiner’s building.

When Santos started to get out with him, Pell said, “Take five and grab a smoke.”

“Don’t smoke.”

“You’re not coming in there with me.”

Pell could tell that Santos was bothered by that, but Pell didn’t care.

“You think I wanna watch an M.E. dig around in a friend of mine? I’ll grab a cup of coffee and wait in the lobby.”

Pell couldn’t object to that, so they crunched across the gravel toward the door.

Inside, Santos identified them to the security guard, then went for his coffee. Richards appeared a few minutes later, Pell following him into a cold tile X-ray room where they waited while two technicians wheeled in Riggio’s body. The body was zipped into an opaque plastic bag. Pell and Richards stood silently as the technicians took the body from the bag and positioned it on the X-ray table. The great Y incision down the chest and abdomen that Richards had made during the autopsy was stitched closed, as were the wounds where the frags had done their worst damage.

Richards eyed the body as if he was assessing his work and liking it.

“The entry wounds were fairly obvious, as you can see. We took area X-rays wherever the entries appeared to be of a significant nature, and that’s where we removed the fragments.”

Pell said, “That’s the problem. If you only look where you see an entry wound, you’ll miss something. I’ve seen cases where shrapnel bounced off a pelvis and followed the femur down to a knee.”

Richards looked dubious.

“I guess it’s possible.”

“I know it’s possible. Where are his hands?”

Richards frowned.

“Hm?”

“Were his hands recovered?”

“Oh, yes. I examined them. I know I examined them.”

Richards peered at the bony stubs of the wrists, then squinted at the technicians.

“Where are the goddamned hands?”

The technicians fished around in the bag and came out with the hands. Scorched from the heat flash and macerated by the pressure wave. Richards looked relieved.

“See? We’ve got the hands. It’s all here.”

Like he was proud of himself that all the body parts were accounted for.

Richards said, “What we’ll do is look over the body with the scope first. We see anything, we’ll mark it, okay? That’ll be faster than screwing around with the X-ray.”

“Fine.”

“I don’t like the X-ray. Even with all the shielding, I worry about the cancer.”

“Fine.”

Pell was given a pair of yellow goggles to wear. He felt nothing as he watched them wheel Riggio’s body behind a chromatic fluoroscope. The fluoroscope looked like an opaque flat-screen television, but when Richards turned it on, it was suddenly transparent. As the body disappeared behind the screen, its flesh was no longer flesh but transparent lime Jell-O, the bones impenetrable green shadows. Richards adjusted the screen.

“Pretty cool, huh? This won’t scramble your ’nads the way an X-ray will. No cancer.”

At Richards’ direction, the techs pushed the body slowly past the screen, revealing three sharply defined shadows below the knee, two in the left leg, one in the right, all smaller than a BB.

Richards said, “Sonofabitch, here you go. Right here.”

Pell had expected to find even more, but the armored suit had done its work well. Only those fragments with a significant mass had carried enough inertia to punch through the Kevlar.

Richards peered at him.

“You want these?”

“I want it all, Doc.”

Richards marked the spots on the body with a felt-tipped pen.

By the time they finished scanning the body, they had found eighteen metal fragments, only two of which had any real size: one, an inch-long piece of twisted metal that had lodged in Riggio’s hip joint; the other, a half-inch rectangular fragment that Richards had overlooked when he’d removed a cluster of fragments from the soft tissue of Riggio’s right shoulder.

As Richards removed them, the taller technician rinsed them of clotted blood and placed them in a glass tray. Pell inspected each bit of metal, but he found no etches or markings.

Finally, Richards turned off the light screen, and lifted his goggles.

“That’s it.”

Pell didn’t say anything until the last of the fragments had been rinsed. It was the largest piece, and he wanted there to be something so badly that his heart was hammering, but when he examined it, he saw that there was nothing.

“Does any of this help, you think?”

Pell didn’t answer.

“Agent?”

“I appreciate your staying, Doc. Thanks.”

Richards peeled off his gloves to glance at his watch. It was a Mickey Mouse watch.

“We’ll send these over to SID in the morning. We have to deliver them under seal to maintain the chain of evidence.”

“I know. That’ll be fine, thanks.”

It wasn’t fine and Pell didn’t like it. A cold rage of frustration threatened to spill out of him.

Pell was already thinking that he was too late, that Mr. Red might have come and gone and be on to another city or maybe had never been here at all, when the taller technician mentioned the hands.

“Doc, you gonna scope the hands, or should I bag this stuff and get out of here?”

Richards grunted like they might as well, then brought over the hands and placed them under the scope. Two bright green shadows were wedged among the metacarpal bones in the left hand.

“Shit. Looks like we missed a couple.”

Richards removed them with the forceps, passing them to the tech, who rinsed them and put them with the others.

Pell inspected them as he had done the others, turning over both pieces without hope when he felt an adrenaline jolt of rage surge through his body.

The larger piece had five tiny letters etched into its surface, part of a sixth, and what he saw there stunned him. It wasn’t what he expected. It wasn’t anything that he had expected. His heart was beating so hard that it seemed to echo off the walls.

Behind him, Richards said, “Find anything?”

“No. Just more of the same stuff, Doc.”

Pell palmed the shard with the letters and returned the remaining piece to the tray with the other recovered fragments. The lab technician did not notice that he had returned one piece and not two.

Richards must’ve read something in his eyes.

“Are you all right, Agent Pell? You need a drink of water or something?”

Pell put away those things he felt and carefully blanked his face.

“I’m fine, Doc. Thanks for your time.”

Special Agent Jack Pell walked back into the outer hall, where the security guard stared at him with goldfish eyes.

“You looking for Santos?”

“Yeah.”

“He took his coffee out to the car.”

Pell turned toward the door and was halfway down the hall when crimson starbursts appeared in the air before him, followed by a sharp wave of nausea. The air around the starbursts darkened and was suddenly alive with wormy shapes that writhed and twisted.

Pell said, “Shit, not now. Not now.”

Behind him, the guard said, “What?”

Pell remembered a bathroom. A men’s room off the hall. He blinked hard against the darkening stars and shoved his way through the door. A cold sweat sprouted over his back and chest.

The dizziness hit him as he reached the sink, and then his stomach clenched and he barfed into the sink. The room felt as cold as a meat locker.

Closing his eyes didn’t stop him from seeing the shapes. They floated in the air on a field of black, rising and twisting in slow motion as if filled with helium. He turned on the cold water and vomited again, spitting out the foul taste as he splashed water into his eyes. His stomach heaved a third time, and the nausea passed.

He heard voices in the hall and thought one of them might be Santos.

Pell clawed a towel from the rack, wet it with cold water, and staggered into the stall. When he straightened, his head spun.

He slumped onto the toilet and pressed the towel hard to his eyes, waiting.

He had done this before. He had done it many times and was scared because the time between bouts was shrinking. He knew what that meant, and it scared him more than anything in his life had ever scared him.

He sat on the floor, breathing through the wet towel until the floating monsters that haunted him vanished. When they were gone, he took out the piece of metal he had stolen and read the letters there, squinting to make his eyes work.

Pell hadn’t told Kelso and Starkey everything about Mr. Red. He hadn’t told them that Mr. Red didn’t just kill random bomb techs. He chose his targets, usually senior techs with headline cases under their belts. He didn’t kill just anyone; he killed only the very best.

When Pell learned of the S, he thought it would be from CHARLES.

It wasn’t.

Pell read the fragment again.

TARKEY

John Michael Fowles was disappointed that the article was on page three, but decided not to show it. He was also pissed off that there was no mention of Mr. Red, nor of the fine work he had done in destroying the building. He folded the newspaper and handed it back to Angelo Rossi, the man who had put him in touch with Victor Karpov.

Rossi looked surprised when John returned the paper.

“There’s more on the next page.”

“It’s just an article, Mr. Rossi. I’d rather be readin’ the papers you got in that bag, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, sure.”

Rossi nervously handed over the bag with the money Karpov owed John. Karpov himself had refused to come meet John here at the library. He claimed illness, like a kid cutting class, but John knew the real reason: He was scared.

As before, John didn’t bother to count it, or even open the bag. He put the money into his backpack, and lowered the pack to the floor. When John had told Rossi to meet him here in the periodicals section of the West Palm Beach Public Library, he had had to explain what “periodicals” were.

John gave Rossi the cracker’s hayseed grin as he leaned back against the reading table.

“Take it easy, Mr. Rossi. We’re okay. You don’t have an overdue book, do ya?”

Rossi glanced over his shoulder as if the book police were hot on his trail, clearly nervous and out of place. John wondered if the fat bastard had even been in a library except when he’d been sent there on high school detention.

“This is foolish, Red, meeting in a library like this. What kinda mook talks about shit like this in a library?”

“A mook like me, I guess. I like the order you find in a library, Angelo. It’s the last place left where people behave with manners, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Why’d you do your hair like that?”

“So people will remember it.”

Rossi’s eyes narrowed. John pictured rusty gears turning in Rossi’s head, and had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing, though he knew Rossi to be a smart man.

“Don’t you worry about it, partner. Mr. Red has his reasons.”

“Oh, I get it. Mr. Red. The red hair.”

“There you go.”

Today, John’s hair was cut way short and dyed a vivid red the colorist had called Promise of Passion. Contact lenses gave him green eyes. His sideburns were long and pointed, and he’d fit cotton wads into his lower cheeks to make his jaw appear more square. He was also wearing lifts that made him three inches taller.

If Rossi knew the real reason John had made himself up this way, the man would shit a Buick.

“Listen, my friends up in Jersey got another job I wanna talk to you about.”

“Down here or up there?”

“We got a fuckass Cuban pirate knocking over our ganja boats down off Key West.”

John shook his head before Rossi finished.

“No can do, Mr. Rossi. I’d like to oblige, but things are gonna be heating up for me around here now, so I’ve gotta split.”

“Just listen a minute, okay, Red? What I’m talking about here won’t take long at all. We just wanna kill a nigger, is all.”

“So go shoot him. You done it before.”

Rossi seemed agitated, and John wondered about that. He hadn’t expected Rossi to pitch him another gig, and he was growing concerned with all the time he was wasting. He wanted Rossi to leave so that he could get on with his business. The real reason he had come to the library.

“Well, it’s more than just walking up to some nigger and shooting him. I could get one’a these kids around here to do that. We wanna get him, his family, the whole damned nest of’m, you know. Kinda send a message, the way you’re good at doing.”

“Can’t help you, Mr. Rossi. You had a job in another state, we could talk about it. But not here. I got some personal business I wanna take care of.”

Rossi nervously glanced around again, then scooted his chair closer. He wasn’t taking the hint to leave, which made John figure that he’d probably already told the Jersey people that Mr. Red would go along.

“Shit, the cops got nothing on you, and no way to connect you to that bastard Vega. You saw the paper. They don’t know shit yet.”

“Don’t believe everything you read, Angelo. Now I got other stuff I need to do, so if you’ll excuse me, get the fuck outta here.”

In fact, John knew far more than Rossi or the press about what the blast investigators had gathered. At some time around eleven P.M. the night before, the Broward County Sheriff’s laboratory had found his little calling card. They had entered their preliminary lab results and materials findings into the FBI’s Bomb Data Center computer system. The BDC’s computer had matched these findings with other known explosive devices that had been used around the country, and an alert had been kicked back to the sheriff and the local ATF office, as well as to the national FBI and ATF offices in Washington. John did not know, but he surmised, that while he and Angelo Rossi sat here in the coolness of the air-conditioned library, agents from the local ATF field office were scrambling to act on this information. Which was exactly what he wanted them to do.

“Look, Red, please. I’m telling you you can make a sweet buck here. How’s twice what Karpov paid you sound?”

“Sorry, sir. Just can’t.”

“You got us over a barrel.”

“Nah. I think you’re the one over a barrel, right? You shot off your mouth to those wops up north, and now you can’t deliver.”

Rossi glanced around again.

“Do me this as a favor, okay? I can give you everything you need to know about this nigger right now. Shit, I’ll drive you there myself, you want.”

“Nope. No niggers on the menu today. Now get the fuck outta here, okay?”

Rossi’s nostrils flared and his hand slipped beneath his jacket. Ninety degrees and a hundred percent humidity, and this dumb guinea was wearing a sport coat like he just came out of a double bill of GoodFellas.

John rolled his eyes.

“Oh, please, Mr. Rossi. Let’s not be small. What the fuck you think you’re gonna do with that here in the library? Here in ‘periodicals’? Jesus Christ, you’re so dumb you think ‘periodicals’ is something a whore gets.”

Rossi’s jaw worked as if he was chewing gum.

John grinned wider, then let the smile fall away and leaned toward Angelo Rossi. He knew Rossi feared him. He knew Rossi was about to fear him more.

“Here’s a tip, Angelo: Pretend that you dropped something on the floor and bend down to pick it up. When you’re down there, you look up under the bottom of this table.”

Rossi’s eyes flickered.

“What you got down there?”

“You look, Angelo. You won’t get bit.”

John took the newspaper from the table and let it slip to the floor.

“You go on and look now, okay? You just look.”

Rossi didn’t bend down for the paper. Slowly, never taking his eyes from John, he slipped from the chair and squatted to the floor. When he rose again, Rossi’s face was white.

“You crazy fuck.”

“That might be, Angelo. Now you go on and kill your own damned nigger. Me and you will work together again another time.”

Rossi showed his palms and backed away, bumping into two teenage girls who were trying to figure out how to use a reference computer.

When Rossi was gone, John considered the people at the surrounding tables. Mostly old people, reading newspapers and magazines. A group of preschool kids here on some kind of kindergarten field trip. A soft-looking man behind the research desk, reading a Dean Koontz novel. All of them just going along with their lives, oblivious.

John swung around to face the library’s Internet research computer and tapped in the address for the FBI’s web site: www.fbi.gov.

When the home page came up, he clicked on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives icon and watched the page load.

Ten small pictures appeared, each with a link to its own page. John had checked the site before Rossi arrived, hoping to find his picture there. It wasn’t then, and still wasn’t.

A perfect example, John felt, of government inefficiency.

Disappointed, John went back to the home page, and clicked on the Unknown Suspects icon. Nine pictures appeared, three of which were artists’ sketches. One of the sketches showed a studious young man with a balding pate, rim of brown hair, brown eyes, and dorky glasses. John had starved himself for two weeks before letting himself be seen that time, and the witnesses had certainly noticed: The sketch showed him to be gaunt and undernourished. He was also shown wearing a white button-down shirt and thin dark tie. It was a sketch that looked nothing like his true self, just as today he looked nothing like his true self.

He clicked on the sketch, which brought him to a page showing a brief (though inaccurate) description of himself, along with a catalog of the crimes he was suspected of committing. These charges included multiple counts of criminal bombing and murder. John was pleased to note that the feds considered him extremely dangerous, and that he used “sophisticated explosive devices for criminal gain.” It wasn’t as cool as being in the Top Ten, but it was better than getting piss on your shoe.

John felt that the FBI’s refusal to include him on the Ten Most Wanted List was both cheesy and disrespectful. And lazy. The Top Ten was loaded with raghead terrorists, right-wing political kooks, and drug addicts who had murdered police officers. John had killed far more people than most of them. He believed himself to be the most dangerous man walking free in open daylight, and expected to be treated as such.

John guessed he would just have to up the stakes.

Beneath the table was a small device he had built for this library, specifically to be used as a message. It was simple, elegant, and, like every device he built, bore his signature. The local authorities would know within hours that Mr. Red had come to call.

“Excuse me. Are you finished using that?”

An older woman with a body like a squash stood behind him. She was holding a spiral notebook.

“You want to use the computer?”

“Yes. If you’re finished with it.”

John flashed the big grin, then scooped up his backpack and held the chair for her. Just before he stood, he reached beneath the table and turned on the timer.

“Yes, ma’am, I am. You sit right here. This chair’s so comfy it’ll make your butt smile.”

The older woman laughed.

John left her there and walked out into the sun.

4

Starkey woke the next morning on the couch, her body clenched into a fist. Her neck was stiff, and her mouth tasted as if it were lined with sheep’s wool seat covers. It was four-twenty in the morning. She had gotten two hours sleep.

Starkey felt disquieted by the dreams. A different quality had been added. Pell. In her dreams, he chased her. She had run as hard as she could, but her movements were sluggish and slow, while his were not. Starkey didn’t like that. In the dream, his fingers were bony and sharp, like claws. She didn’t like that, either. Starkey’s dreams had been a constant since her injury, but she found herself feeling resentful of this addition. It was bad enough that the sonofabitch was invading her investigation; she didn’t need him in her nightmares.

Starkey lit a cigarette, then gimped into the kitchen, where she found a small amount of orange juice that didn’t smell sour. She tried to remember the last time that she’d been to the market, but couldn’t. The only things she bought in quantity were gin and cigarettes.

Starkey downed the juice, then a glass of water, then got herself together for the day. Breakfast was two aspirin and a Tagamet.

Marzik had left word on her voice mail that they could meet the wit, a kid named Lester Ybarra, at the flower shop when it opened at nine. By five-thirty, Starkey was at Spring Street, climbing the stairs to her office. Spring Street was quiet. Neither CCS, Fugitive Section, nor IAG maintained a night shift. Their commanders and sergeant-supervisors were on pagers. They, in turn, would contact the officers and detectives in their commands on an as-needed basis. Fugitive Section, by the nature of their work as manhunters, often started their days as early as three A.M. in order to bag their mutts in bed. But today the stairs were empty, and her steps echoed in the silent altar of the stairwell.

Starkey liked that.

She had once told Dana that she enjoyed being awake before everyone else because it gave her an edge, but that had been a lie. Starkey enjoyed the solitude because it was easier. No one intruded. No one stared behind her back, thinking that she was the one, the tech who’d been blown apart and stitched back together like Frankenstein’s monster, the one who had lost her partner, the one who had escaped, the one who had died. Dana had called her on it, offering Starkey the truth by asking if Carol ever felt the weight of their stares or imagined that she could hear their thoughts. Starkey, of course, denied all of it, but she thought about it later and admitted that Dana was right. Solitude was a spell that freed her.

Starkey opened the CCS office, then put on the Mr. Coffee. As the coffee dripped, she went back to her desk. Like all the CCS detectives, she kept reference manuals and sourcebooks for explosives manufacturers, but, unlike the others, Starkey also had her texts and manuals from the FBI’s Redstone Arsenal Bomb School, and the technical catalogs that she had collected during her days as a bomb technician.

Starkey brought a cup of coffee back to her desk, lit a fresh cigarette, then searched through her books.

Modex Hybrid was a trinary explosive used as a bursting charge in air-to-air missles. Hot, fast, and dangerous. Trinary meant that it was a mixture of three primary explosives, combined together to form a compound more powerful and stable than any of the three alone. Starkey took out her case notebook and copied the components: RDX, TNT, ammonium picrate, powdered aluminum, wax, and calcium chloride. RDX, TNT, and ammonium picrate were high explosives. The powdered aluminum was used to enhance the power of the explosion. The wax and calcium chloride were used as stabilizers.

Chen had found contaminants in the Modex, and, after consulting with the manufacturer, had concluded that the Modex used in Riggio’s bomb wasn’t part of a government production. It was homemade, and therefore untraceable.

Starkey considered that, then searched through her books for information on the primary components.

TNT and ammonium picrate were available to the civilian population. You could get it damned near anywhere. RDX was different. Like the Modex, it was manufactured for the military only under government contract, but, unlike the Modex, it was too complicated to produce without industrial refining equipment. You couldn’t cook up a batch in your microwave. This was the kind of break Starkey was hoping to find in her manuals. Someone could make Modex if they had the components, but they couldn’t make the components. They would have to acquire the RDX, which meant that the RDX could be traced back to its source.

Starkey decided that this was a good angle to work.

She brought her notes to the NLETS computer, poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, then punched up a request form asking for matches with RDX. By the time she finished typing the form and entering the request, a few of the other detectives had begun to drift in for the start of the shift. The silence was gone. The spell was broken.

Starkey gathered her things and left.

Marzik was loading Amway products into her trunk when Starkey parked behind her outside the flower shop. Marzik carried the damned stuff everywhere and would make her pitch at the most inappropriate times, even when interviewing witnesses and, twice, when questioning potential suspects.

Starkey felt her stomach tighten. She had decided not to call Marzik on ratting her out to Kelso, but she now felt a wave of irritation.

They met on the sidewalk, Marzik saying, “Is the ATF going to take over the case?”

“He says no, but we’ll see. Beth, tell me you weren’t in there with the Amway.”

Marzik slammed the trunk and looked annoyed.

“Why shouldn’t I? They didn’t mind. I made a good sale.”

“Do me a favor and leave it in the trunk. I don’t want to see that again on this case.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I got two children to feed.”

Starkey was going to say more when a short, thin Latino teenager stepped out of the flower shop and looked at Marzik. “Detective? My dad says I got to get going soon. We got morning deliveries.”

Marzik introduced her to Lester Ybarra as the lead investigator on the case.

Starkey offered her hand. Lester’s felt clammy from being inside the flower shop. He smelled of chemicals and baby’s breath.

“Hi, Lester. I really appreciate your helping us out like this.”

Lester glanced at Marzik, flashing a shy smile.

“’s no pro’lem.”

Marzik said, “Lester saw someone using the phone across the street between one and one-fifteen the day the bomb went off, right, Lester?”

Lester nodded, and Marzik nodded with him.

“Can you describe that person to Detective Starkey?”

Lester glanced at Starkey, then snuck a quick peek back at Marzik. His eyes went to Marzik so much that Starkey figured he had probably developed a crush on her, which made Starkey wonder if he had fabricated parts of his story to impress her.

Starkey said, “Before we get to that, Lester, how about helping me set the scene, okay? So I can picture it?”

“’s no pro’lem.”

“Your van was where? About here where my car is?”

“Yeah.”

Starkey was parked directly outside the florist’s front door in a red No Parking zone about fifteen feet from the corner.

“You always load the van out here in the street, bringing the flowers through the front door?”

“We got three vans. The other two was using the alley, so I had to be out here. I was supposed to leave by twelve-thirty, but we got this big order right when I was set to go. A funeral set, you know? Twelve sprays. We make a lotta money from funerals. My dad said I hadda wait, so I brought the van around front here.”

“You were sitting in the van, waiting, or you were loading flowers?”

“When I saw the guy, I was sitting there behind the wheel. Nothing to do, you know? My sisters hadda make the sprays. So I was just sitting there in case the cops come and I hadda move.”

Marzik said, “He was in the red zone.”

Starkey nodded. Standing there listening, she had noticed that very few cars turned off Sunset onto the little side street. Lester would have an easy, unobstructed view of the pay phone hanging on the laundry across the street. She watched an older couple emerge from the laundry with a pink box and made a note to herself to mention it to Marzik.

“Okay, Lester, would you describe him for me? I know you described him for Detective Marzik, but now for me.”

Starkey and Marzik locked eyes. They were getting down to it now. Whether the caller was Anglo or Latino.

Lester launched into his description, describing an Anglo man of medium height and build, wearing a faded blue baseball cap, sunglasses (probably Wayfarers), dark blue trousers, and a lighter blue work shirt. Lester’s impression was that the man was wearing some kind of a uniform, such as a gas station attendant or bus driver. Starkey took notes, not reacting to Lester’s statement that the caller was an Anglo. Lester had not heard the man’s voice. He thought the guy had to be in his forties, but admitted to being a lousy judge of age. As Lester spoke, Starkey felt the pager at her hip vibrate, and checked the number. Hooker.

When Lester finished, Starkey folded her pad on a finger.

“If you saw this guy again, you think you’d recognize him?”

Lester shrugged.

“I don’t think so. Maybe. I didn’t really look at him, you know? Just for a couple seconds.”

“Did you see which way the man came from when he went to the phone?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“How about when he left? You see where he went?”

“I wasn’t paying attention, you know? He was just some guy.”

“He get out of or into a car?”

Lester shrugged.

Starkey put away the pad.

“Okay, Lester, I’ve got just one problem with this. We have reason to believe that the person making the call was Latino. You sure this guy was Anglo?”

“I’m pretty sure. His hair was light, you know? Not gray, but light.”

Starkey and Marzik traded another look, neither as enthusiastic as they had been yesterday. “Pretty sure” was an equivocation.

“Light brown?”

“Yeah. A light brown. Kinda sandy.”

Marzik frowned. “You could tell that with the cap?”

Lester touched his own ears.

“The part I could see down here, you know?”

That made sense to Starkey. She brought out the pad again and made another note. As she wrote, she had another thought.

“Okay. One more thing. Do you recall any identifying characteristics? A scar, maybe? A tattoo on his arm?”

“He was wearing long sleeves.”

“He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt?”

“Yeah. That’s why I couldn’t see his arms. I remember it was greasy and old, like he’d been working on a car or something.”

Starkey glanced at Marzik, and found her staring. Marzik was clearly unhappy with Lester’s uncertainty. When Starkey glanced back at Lester, he was watching Marzik.

“One last thing. You were out here, about, what? Fifteen minutes?”

“You keep sayin’ that, one last thing. My old man’s gonna kick my ass. I gotta go make these deliveries.”

“I mean it this time, Lester. Just this last question. Anyone else make a call from that phone while you were out here?”

Starkey already knew that no other calls had been made from that phone. She wanted to see if he would lie about it to impress Marzik or to make himself more important.

“I didn’t see anyone else. No.”

Starkey put away her pad.

“Okay, Lester, thanks. I want you to come in with Detective Marzik and work with a sketch artist, see if we can’t build a picture of this guy, okay?”

“That sounds pretty cool to me. My dad ain’t gonna like it, though. He gonna raise hell.”

“You go take care of your deliveries, and we’ll square it with your father, maybe get you down there later this morning. Detective Marzik will buy you lunch.”

Lester nodded his head like a collie.

“Okay. Sure.”

Lester vanished into the flower shop, but Marzik and Starkey stayed on the sidewalk.

“Why’d you have to tell him that, for Christ’s sake? I don’t want to spend all day with him.”

“Somebody has to be with him. You’ve set up the rapport.”

“It’s not going to do any good. You hear that, ‘pretty sure’? The guy’s wearing a cap, sunglasses, and a long-sleeved shirt on a day it’s ninety-five fuckin’ degrees. If it’s our guy, he’s wearing a goddamned disguise. If he’s not, he’s just some asshole.”

Starkey felt the urge for more antacid.

“Why do you always have to be so negative?”

“I’m not being negative. I’m just stating what’s obvious.”

“Okay, then try this for obvious: If he’s our guy, and if he’s wearing the same clothes when he set off the bomb, and if he’s on the news tape, the goddamned hat and sunglasses and long-sleeved shirt should make him easier to spot.”

“Whatever. I’ll go talk to the kid’s father. He’s a bastard.”

Marzik stalked into the shop without another word. Starkey shook out a cigarette, lit it, and went to her car. She was so angry that she was trembling. First Pell, now this. She was trying to get past it because she had a job to do, and she knew the anger was getting in her way. She tried to remember some of the techniques that Dana had told her for setting aside her anger, but couldn’t remember any of them. Three years in therapy, and she couldn’t remember a goddamned thing.

Just as Marzik reappeared, Starkey was considering the people coming and going from the laundry, and how many of them passed the pay phone. She took a breath, calming herself.

“Beth, you talked to the people at the laundry, right?”

Marzik answered without looking at her. Sulking.

“I told you I did.”

“Did you run the time and description by them? I’m thinking that one of their customers might’ve seen our guy.”

Marzik pulled her pad from her purse, opened it to a list of names, then held it out with the same sulky indifference.

“I asked them for any customers they recalled between noon and two. I’m not stupid, Carol.”

Starkey stared at Marzik, then dropped her cigarette and crushed it.

“Okay. I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but I think you and I need to clear the air.”

“About what? Your busting my balls about the Amway or because the kid isn’t as solid as I thought he was?”

“You told Kelso that you thought I was drinking on the job.”

Marzik went a bright crimson, confirming Starkey’s suspicion.

“No, I didn’t. Did Kelso say that?”

“Beth, this is hard enough. If you’re going to lie to me, do me the kindness of not saying anything and just listen.”

“I don’t like being accused.”

“If you don’t want to work with me, let’s go to Kelso and tell him we can’t work together. I’ll tell him it’s mutual, and neither of us will lose points.”

Marzik crossed her arms, then uncrossed them and squared herself in Starkey’s face.

“If you want to talk about this straight-up, then let’s get straight-up. Everyone on the squad knows you have a drinking problem. Jesus Christ, we can smell it. If you don’t reek of gin, you’re blowing Altoids to cover it.”

Starkey felt herself redden and fought the urge to step away.

“Everybody feels sorry for you because of what happened. They set you up over here in CCS and took care to bring you along, but you know what? That shit doesn’t cut any ice with me. No one set me up, and no one is looking out for me, and I got two kids to raise.”

“No one’s looking out for me.”

Starkey felt as if she was suddenly on the spot, and defensive.

“My ass there isn’t. Everybody knows that Dick Leyton used his clout at Parker to make Kelso take you, and he’s still watching out for you. I’ve got these two kids to raise, and I gotta have this job. That job isn’t babysitting you, and it sure as hell doesn’t include taking a career fall to cover your bad habits.”

“I’m not asking you to cover for me.”

“Good, because I won’t. I also won’t ask off this case because this is the kind of case that leads to a promotion. If this thing about the guy being Anglo turns out to be real, I want the credit. I’ve been a D-2 for too damned long. I need the bump to D-3. I need the money. If you can’t handle it, then you ask off, because I need the money.”

Starkey felt her pager vibrate again, and, again, it was Hooker. She went into her car for her cell phone, thankful for the excuse, and berating herself for bringing up the business about the drinking. She knew that Marzik would deny ratting to Kelso, and as long as Marzik denied it, it was a no-winner. Now Marzik was openly hostile.

“Hook, it’s me.”

“You and Marzik get anything from the flower kid?”

“Marzik’s going to bring him in to work with an artist. Can you get that set up?”

“Right away. Listen, we got the news tapes you wanted. From three of the stations, anyway. You want me to set up the room for us to watch?”

“It’s the tape they shot from the helicopters over the parking lot?”

“Yeah. There are a lot of tapes here. You want me to set the room?”

Starkey flashed on the images trapped on the tape. She would see the bomb explode. She would see Charlie Riggio die.

“Set up the room, Jorge. I want the kid to look at them, too, but only after he’s done with the artist, okay? I don’t want him seeing the videos first, then describing someone he’s seen just because he thinks they look suspicious.”

“I’ll get it set up.”

“One more thing. What happened with Pell last night?”

“He didn’t like something in the coroner’s report. Kelso had me take him over there.”

Starkey felt her stomach knot.

“What didn’t he like?”

“The M.E. hadn’t done a full body X-ray, so Pell made him do it.”

“Jesus, Kelso’s letting him work the case like he’s local?”

“I can’t talk, Carol. You know?”

“Did he find anything?”

“They found some more frag, but he said it didn’t amount to very much.”

Starkey felt herself breathe easier. Maybe Pell would lose interest and go back to Washington.

“Okay, arrange for the artist and lock down the room for the tapes. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She ended the call, then went back to Marzik. She had decided that she needed to smooth over things.

“Beth? We’ve got the videotape. Jorge’s going to set up the artist for you. After that, how about you bring Lester back to watch the tapes? Maybe he’ll pick out the hat man.”

“Whatever.”

“Look, I didn’t mean to step on your toes about the laundry people. That was good thinking, getting the customer names.”

“Thank you too much.”

If that’s the way she wanted it, Starkey thought, fine.

She got into her car and left Marzik waiting in the heat for Lester Ybarra.

Starkey intended to drive back to Spring Street, but as she passed the site where Riggio died, she slowed and turned into the parking lot.

Hearing that the videotapes had arrived had gotten her thinking. The remote-control manufacturer had told her that the maximum possible range for the transmitter was one hundred yards. Per Bomb Squad policy, the area had been cleared out to one hundred yards, which meant that whoever had the transmitter would have to be right at the edge of the boundary. Starkey thought that maybe the news tape would show the crowd where someone had been close enough to pull the trigger.

The parking lot had been released as a crime scene, and all of the shops except for the bookstore were once more open for business. Two young Latinos were painting the damaged wall, the Dumpster had been replaced, and the blast crater was now a black patch against gray tarmac. Life was moving on.

Starkey parked on the street, then walked over to the patch. She stared across Sunset Boulevard, trying to figure how far one hundred yards was, then looked south up the little side street past the apartment buildings, trying to gauge the distance. The sun beat down on her dark gray pants suit, making the fabric hot and uncomfortable. She took off her jacket and folded it across her arm. The painters stared at the pistol on her hip, so she unclipped it and held it in the fold of her jacket.

Starkey crossed Sunset at the light, then continued north past the Guatemalan market, counting paces until she reached one hundred and thirty. She figured this to be about a hundred yards. She was standing six parking meters north of Sunset Boulevard, about a car length north of a telephone pole. She noted the telephone pole in her casebook, figuring it would be easy to spot on the news video, then went back to the patch and counted the same number of paces south. She found herself beside a tall, spindly palm tree. With so many palms in the area, it would be hard to spot the right one. The apartment building across the street had a blue tile roof, so she noted that in her book. Starkey returned to ground zero twice more, counting paces east and west to fix obvious landmarks. When she was done, she lit a cigarette, then sat in her car, smoking.

She thought that somewhere within these boundaries the killer had watched, and waited, and murdered a man.

She wondered if he was the man that Lester Ybarra had described, if it was Pell’s Mr. Red, or if it was someone else.

Hooker was sorting through the tapes in a cardboard box when Starkey reached CCS.

First thing he said was, “The ATF guy called.”

“Pell called?”

“Yeah. I put it on your desk.”

“Screw’m. Did you get Marzik set up with the sketch artist?”

“They didn’t have a computer free until later. She wanted me to ask if they can’t come here and start on the tapes while they wait.”

“No, I told her why not. I want the kid to describe who he saw before we show him any faces. Marzik knows better than that.”

“I told her you’d say that. She wasn’t happy about it.”

“Marzik complains about everything.”

Starkey saw a short stack of pink message slips as she dropped her purse into her file drawer. Chester Riggs, who was working out of Organized Crime, and Warren Perez, a D-3 in Rampart Bunco, were both returning her calls. Riggs and Perez were profiling the minimall shopkeepers to look for motives behind the bomb. Neither of them expected to find a link, and neither did Starkey. She didn’t bother to read the message from Pell.

Starkey returned to Santos and fingered through the cassettes. They were in two sizes, big three-quarter-inch master tapes and half-inch VHS dubs that could be played on home machines.

Santos saw her frowning.

“These are only from three of the stations, Carol. We got more coming in. Man, it’s hours. The running times are written on the outside, along with whether it’s a close-up or the wide-angle.”

Starkey turned the tapes so that she could see what he was talking about. The shortest tape showed a recorded time of seventy-four minutes. The longest, one hundred twenty-six minutes. Each tape was also marked CLOSE or WIDE.

“What does that mean, close or wide?”

“Some of the helicopters carry two cameras mounted on a swivel that pokes out the bottom of the nose, just like a couple of guns. Both cameras focus on the same thing, but one of the cameras is zoomed in close, and the other is pulled back for a wider field of view. They record both cameras up in the chopper and also back at the studio.”

“I thought they show this stuff live.”

“They do, but they record it at the same time. We’ve got both the wide shots and the close shots, so that means there’s twice as much to watch.”

Starkey was already thinking that the close shots wouldn’t give her what she wanted. She pulled out the wide-angle VHS cassettes and brought them to her desk. She considered calling Buck Daggett, but decided that she should review the tapes first.

Behind her, Santos said, “I’ve got us set up in the TV room upstairs. We can go up as soon as I’m done.”

Spring Street had one room that contained a television and VCR. CCS and Fugitive Section rarely needed or used it; much of the time it was used by IAG investigators watching spy tapes of other cops, and most of the time the VCR was vandalized because of that. Chewing gum, tobacco, and other substances were found jammed into the tape heads, even though the room was kept locked. Once, the hindquarters of a rat were found wedged in the machine. Cops were creative vandals.

“You sure the machine up there is working?”

“Yeah. I checked less than an hour ago.”

Starkey considered the tapes. Three different views of Charlie Riggio being killed. Anytime there was a bomb call-out, the newspeople got word fast and swarmed the area with cameras. Camera crews and newspeople had been at the trailer park the day she and Sugar had rolled out. She suddenly recalled joking with Sugar about putting on a good show for the six o’clock. She had forgotten that moment until now.

Starkey took a cigarette from her purse and lit up.

“Carol! Do you want Kelso to send you home?”

She glanced over at Hooker, not understanding.

“The cigarette.”

Starkey crushed it with her foot as she fanned the air. She felt herself flush.

“Didn’t even realize I was doing it.”

Hooker was watching her with an expression she read as concern.

Starkey felt a stab of fear that he might be wondering if she was drunk, so she went over to his desk and squatted beside him so that he could smell her breath. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t blowing gin.

“I’m worried about this ATF guy, is all. Did he say anything last night when he finished with the medical examiner?”

“Nothing. I asked him if he found what he was looking for, but all he said was that they found some more frag.”

“He didn’t say anything else?”

“Nothing. He spent today over in Glendale, looking at the reconstruction.”

Starkey went back to her desk, making a mental note to phone the medical examiner to see what they’d found and also to call John Chen. Whatever evidence was recovered would be sent to Chen for examination and documentation, though it might take several days to work its way through the system.

Hooker finished logging the tapes and put the box under his desk. Official LAPD filing. He waved one of the three-quarter-inch tapes.

“I’m done. We’d better get started unless you want to wait for Marzik.”

Starkey’s hands grew damp. She leaned back, her swivel chair squeaking.

“Jorge, look, I’d better return these calls. You start without me, okay?”

Hooker had spent a lot of time getting the tapes together. Now he was disappointed.

“I thought you wanted to see this. We’ve only got the room for a couple of hours.”

“I’ll watch them at home, Jorge. I’ve got these calls.”

Her phone rang then. Starkey snatched it up like a life preserver.

“CCS. Starkey.”

“Don’t you return your calls?”

It was Pell.

“I’ve been busy. We’ve got a wit who might have seen the man who placed the 911 call.”

“Let’s meet somewhere. We need to discuss how we’re going to handle the case.”

“There is no ‘we,’ Pell. If my guy isn’t your Mr. Red, then it doesn’t matter to me. I still want to see what you have on the first seven bombings.”

“I have the reports. I have something else, too, Starkey. Let’s get together and talk about it. This is important.”

She wanted to brush him off, but she knew that she would have to talk with him and decided to get it done. Starkey told him how to get to Barrigan’s, then hung up.

Santos had been watching her. He came over with a handful of cassettes.

“Are the feds taking the case?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“I guess it’s just a matter of time.”

She looked at him. Santos shrugged and gestured with the tapes.

“I’m gonna go up. You sure you don’t want to come?”

“I’ve got to meet Pell.”

Starkey watched Santos walk away, embarrassed that she had not been able to look at them with him. She had been to the bomb site, she had seen Riggio’s body, she had smelled the heat and the blast in the hot air. After that, her fear of seeing the tapes seemed inexplicable, though she understood it. Starkey wouldn’t be seeing only Riggio on the tape; she would see herself, and Sugar. She had imagined the events of her own death a thousand times, but she had never seen tape of the actual event or even thought that the moments had been recorded until now: Joking with Sugar, the news crews watching with electronic eyes, tape reels spinning for the six o’clock news. Memories of those things had vanished with the explosion until now.

Starkey fingered the three cassettes, wondering if that tape of her own death still existed.

After a time, she told herself to stop thinking about it, gathered her things, and left to meet Pell.

Barrigan’s was a narrow Irish bar in Wilshire Division that had catered to police detectives since 1954, when suits from the Homicide Bureau had held court with tales of blackjacking New York mobsters as they deplaned at LAX. The walls were covered with four-leaf clovers, each bearing the name and date of an officer who’d killed a man in the line of duty. Until only a handful of years ago, female police detectives were discouraged as customers, conventional wisdom being that the presence of female officers would discourage the emotionally dysfunctional secretaries and nurses who flocked to the bar eager to dispense sexual favors to any man with a badge. Though there was some truth to this, the female detectives replied, “Tough shit.” The gender barrier was finally broken the night a Robbery-Homicide detective named Samantha Dolan shot it out toe-to-toe with two rape suspects, killing both. As is the custom after such incidents, a party was held for her at Barrigan’s that same night. Dolan invited every female detective of her acquaintance, and the women decided they liked the place and would return. They informed the owner that they would be accorded proper service, else they’d have the good sisters over in the Department of Health close his ass down for health violations. That ended that. Starkey had never met Dolan, though she knew the story. Samantha Dolan had later been killed when she’d stepped through a doorway that had been booby-trapped with a double-barreled shotgun.

When Starkey entered Barrigan’s late that afternoon, the bar was already lined with detectives. Starkey found a bench between a couple of Sex Crimes D-2s, struck up a fresh cigarette, and ordered a double Sapphire.

She was taking her first sip when Pell appeared beside her and put a heavy manila envelope on the bar.

“You always drink like that on the job?”

“It’s none of your goddamned business what I do. But for the record, Special Agent, I’m off duty. I’m here as a favor to you.”

The D-2 next to her glanced over, eyeing Pell. He tinkled the ice in the remains of his double scotch, offering Pell the opportunity to comment on his drink, too.

Starkey offered to buy Pell a drink, but Pell refused. He slid onto the bench next to her, uncomfortably close. Barrigan’s didn’t have stools; the bar was lined with little benches hooked to a brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar, each wide enough for two people. Starkey hated the damn things because you couldn’t move them, but that’s the way it had been since 1954, and that’s the way it was going to stay.

“Move away, Pell. You’re too close.”

He edged away.

“Enough? I could sit at another table if you like.”

“You’re fine where you are. I just don’t like people too close.”

Starkey immediately regretted saying it, feeling it revealed more of herself than she cared to share.

Pell tapped the manila envelope.

“These are the reports. I’ve got something else here, too.”

He unfolded a sheet of paper and put it on the bar. Starkey saw that it was a newspaper article that he had printed off the net.

“This happened a few days ago. Read it.”

Starkey stopped reading.

“What is this?”

“We recovered an intact device in Miami. It’s a clone of the bomb that killed Riggio.”

Starkey didn’t like the news about this Miami device. If the bombs were clones like Pell said, that would give him what he needed to jump the case. She knew what would happen then: The ATF would form a task force, which would spur the FBI to come sniffing around. The Sheriffs would want to get their piece of the action, so they would be included, and before the day was done, Starkey and her CCS team would be relegated to gopher chores like overnighting the evidence to the ATF lab up in San Francisco.

She pushed the article away.

“Okay. A hoax. If your boy Mr. Red is in Miami, why aren’t you on a plane headed east?”

“Because he’s here.”

“It looks to me like he’s in Miami.”

Pell glanced at the D-2.

“Could we move to a table?”

Starkey led him to a remote corner table, taking the outside seat so that she could see the room. She figured that it would annoy him, having his back to the crowd.

“Okay, no one can hear you, Pell. We’re free to be spies.”

Pell’s jaw flexed with irritation, which pleased her. She struck a fresh cigarette, blowing smoke past his shoulder.

“The Miami police didn’t give the full story to the papers. It wasn’t a hoax, Starkey, it was a message. An actual note. Words on paper. He’s never done that before, and he’s never done anything like this. That means we have a chance here.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Would the deaths of these people put me in the Top Ten?’ ”

Starkey didn’t know what in hell that meant.

“What does that mean?”

“He wants to be on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“It’s a symbol, Starkey. He’s some underachieving nobody who resents being an asshole. He’s not on the list because we don’t know who the hell he is; no one makes that list unless we have an ID. We don’t, so he’s getting frustrated. He’s taking chances he didn’t take earlier. That means he’s destabilizing.”

Starkey’s jaw felt like an iron clamp, but she understood why Pell was on it. When a perp changed his pattern, it was always good for the case. Any change gave you a different view of the man. If you could get enough views, pretty soon you had a clear picture.

“You said he’s here. How do you know that? Did his message say that he was coming to Los Angeles?”

Pell didn’t answer. He stared at her as if he was searching for something in her eyes, leaving her feeling naked and uncomfortable.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you and Kelso everything. When Mr. Red goes hunting, he does not hunt randomly. He picks his targets, usually senior people or a tech who’s been in the news; he goes after the big dog. He wants to say he beats the best a Bomb Squad has to offer. It’s the ego thing.”

“That what he told you in his little note?”

“We know because he etches the target’s name on the bomb casing. The first two techs he killed, we found their names in the frag during the reconstruction. Alan Brennert in Baltimore; Michael Cassutt in Philadelphia; both sergeant-supervisors who’d been involved in big cases.”

Starkey didn’t say anything. She drew a large 5 in the water rings on the table, then changed it to an S. She guessed it came from “Charles.” Charlie Riggio wasn’t exactly the big dog of the LAPD Bomb Squad, but she wasn’t going to say that.

“Why are you telling me this here in a bar and not in Kelso’s office?”

Now Pell glanced away. He seemed nervous about something.

“We try to keep that information on a need-to-know basis.”

“Well, I’m honored, Pell. I sure as hell have a need to know, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“Makes me wonder what else you might be holding back.”

Pell glanced back sharply.

“As the lead, you could make statements to the press to help advance his destabilization. These aren’t just little machines that he’s building. These bombs are who he is, and he’s meticulous about them. They are very precise, very exact. We know he takes pride in them. In his head, it could become a one-on-one game that keeps him in Los Angeles and gives us a better shot to nail him.”

“Me versus him.”

“Something like that. What do you say?”

Starkey didn’t have to think about it.

“I’m in.”

Pell sighed deeply, his shoulders sagging as he relaxed, as if he had been afraid that she wouldn’t go along. She smiled to herself, thinking how little he knew.

“All right, Starkey. All right. We believe that he builds the bombs locally. He’ll go into an area, acquire the things that he needs, and build the bomb there, so he doesn’t have to transport anything, risking capture on the airlines. I put a list of the Modex components in with the reports. I want you to run a local check for people with access to RDX.”

Even though Starkey was already running the search, it irritated her that he was giving instructions.

“Listen, Pell, if you want to run a search, do it yourself. You’re not giving the orders here.”

“It’s important, Starkey.”

“Then you do it!”

Pell glared at her, then seemed to reconsider. He showed his palms and relaxed.

“I guess you could look at it this way, Detective: If I do it, I’m taking over your case; if you do it, I’m only advising you. Which do you want it to be?”

Starkey looked smug.

“It’s already happening, Pell. I punched it in today.”

He nodded without expression and went on. She found herself irritated that he didn’t acknowledge that she was ahead of him.

“Do we have a photograph of this guy? There must’ve been a security camera.”

“There aren’t any security cameras in the downtown branch, but I’ll have a sketch by tomorrow. The wits described a white male in his twenties with bright red hair. We also have two other sketches from previous incidents. I can already tell you that all three look different. He changes his appearance when he lets himself be seen.”

Starkey shrugged noncommittally. Lester had described an older man, nothing even close to young, but she decided not to mention Lester until they had the sketch.

“Whatever. I want a copy of all three of your sketches when you have them, and I want something else, too. I want to see the bomb.”

“As soon as I get the report, you’ll get the report.”

“You didn’t hear me. I want the bomb. I want it in my hands. I’m a bomb technician, Pell. I want to break it down myself, not just accept someone else’s report. I want to compare it to the Silver Lake bomb and learn something. I know we can do this because I’ve traded comparative evidence with other cities before.”

Pell seemed to consider her again, then nodded.

“Okay, Starkey, I think that’s a good idea. But I think you should arrange it.”

Starkey frowned, wondering if Pell was going to be deadwood.

“Your people have the damned thing. It would be easier for you to get it.”

“The more I do, the more pressure I’ll get from Washington to take over the case before the FBI comes in.”

“Who’s talking about the FBI? We’re not dealing with a terrorist here. This is domestic.”

“A terrorist is whoever the FBI says is a terrorist. You’re worried about me coming in, I’m worried about the FBI. We all have something to worry about.”

“Jesus Christ, Pell.”

He showed his palms again, and she nodded.

“Okay. I’ll do it myself.”

Pell stood, then gave her a card.

“This is the motel where I’m staying. My pager number is on the back.”

Starkey put it away without looking at it.

“Anything comes up, I’ll give you a call.”

Pell was staring at her.

“What?”

“Mr. Red is dangerous, Starkey. A guy like this in town, you don’t want to be too drunk to react.”

Starkey rattled the ice in her glass, then took a sip.

“I’ve already been dead once, Pell. Believe me, there are worse things.”

Pell considered her another moment, Starkey thinking he wanted to say something, but then he left. She watched him until he stepped out of the bar into a wedge of blinding light and was gone. Pell had no fucking idea.

Starkey returned to her bench at the bar and ordered a refill. She was convinced that Pell knew more than he was saying.

The Sex Crimes dick leaned close.

“Fed?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re all pricks.”

“We’ll see.”

Starkey spent most of the afternoon thinking about the tapes that waited in her car. Those tapes and what was on them were real. After a while, it was the weight of the tapes that pulled her from the bar. It was almost eight when she left Barrigan’s and drove home.

Starkey’s head hurt from the gin. She was hungry, but there was nothing to eat in her house and she didn’t want to go out again. She put the tapes in her living room by the VCR, but decided to shower first, then read the reports.

She let the water beat into her neck and skull until it ran cold, then dressed in a black T-shirt and panties. She found a box of raisins, ate them standing at the kitchen sink. When she was finished, she poured a glass of milk, struck a fresh cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table to read.

The manila envelope contained seven ATF explosives profiles written at the ATF’s National Laboratory Center in Rockville, Maryland. Each report contained an analysis of a device that was attributed to an unidentified suspect known only as Mr. Red, but each was heavily edited. Pages were missing, and several paragraphs in each report had been deleted.

She grew angry at the deletions, but she found herself interested in the details that were present and read with clear focus. She took notes.

Every one of the devices had been built of twin pipe canisters capped and sealed with plumber’s tape, one pipe containing the radio receiver (all receivers identified as being from the WayKool line of remote-control toy cars) and 9-volt battery, one the Modex Hybrid explosive. None of the reports mentioned the etched names that Pell had described. She thought that the deleted material probably referenced that.

When she finished with the reports, she went into her living room and stared at the tapes. She knew that she had been avoiding them, evidence that could potentially offer a breakthrough in her case. But even now, her stomach knotted at the thought of seeing them.

“Oh, goddamnit. This is stupid.”

She went into the kitchen, poured herself a stiff gin, then loaded the first tape into the machine. She could have watched the tapes with Buck Daggett or Lester Ybarra, or with Marzik and Hooker, but she knew she had to see them alone. At least, this first time. She had to see them alone because she would be seeing things that none of the rest of them would see.

The image was a wide shot of the parking lot. The Bomb Squad Suburban was in place, the parking lot and the nearby streets cordoned off. The frame did not move, telling Starkey that the helicopter had been in a stationary hover. Riggio, already in the suit, was at the rear of the Suburban, talking with Daggett. Seeing them like that chilled her. Seeing Daggett pat Riggio’s helmet, seeing Riggio turn and lumber toward the bomb was like watching Sugar.

“How you doin’, cher? You gettin’a good air flow?”

“Got a windstorm in here. You?”

“Wrapped, strapped, and ready to rock. Let’s put on a good show for the cameras.”

They checked over each other’s armor suit and cables. Sugar looked okay to her. She patted his helmet, and he patted hers. That always made her smile.

They started toward the trailer.

Starkey stopped the tape.

She took a breath, realizing only then that she had stopped breathing. She decided that her drink needed more lime, brought it into the kitchen, cut another slice, all the while knowing that she was simply avoiding the video.

She went back into the living room and restarted the tape.

Riggio and the Suburban were in the center of the screen. The bomb was a tiny cardboard square at the base of the Dumpster. The shot was framed too tightly on the parking lot to reveal any of the landmarks she had paced off that morning. The only figures visible were Riggio, Daggett, and a uniformed officer standing at the edge of the building in the bottom of the frame, peeking around the corner.

When Riggio started toward the bomb, the frame shifted, sliding above the minimall to reveal a small group of people standing between two apartment houses. Starkey focused on them, but they were too small and shadowed to tell if any wore long-sleeved shirts and baseball caps.

Starkey was cursing the tiny image when suddenly the frame shifted down, centering on Riggio and losing the people. The camera operator in the helicopter must have adjusted the shot, losing everything except the side of the mall, the bomb, and Riggio.

Riggio reached the bomb with the Real Time.

Starkey knew what was coming and tried to steel herself.

She had more of the drink, feeling her heart pound.

She glanced away and crushed out her cigarette.

When she looked at the screen again, Riggio was circling the box.

They were in the azaleas, wrestling the heavy branches aside so that Sugar could position the Real Time. Sugar looked for all the world like some kind of Star Trek space invader with a ray gun. She had to twist her body to see him.

Her eyes blurred as the white flash engulfed her …

Starkey strained to see into the shadows and angles at the outer edge of the frame, between cars, on roofs, in garbage cans. She wondered if the bomber was somehow underground, peering out of a sewer drain or from the vent of a crawl space beneath a building. Riggio circled the bomb, examining it with the Real Time. She put herself in the killer’s head and tried to see Riggio from the ground level. She imagined the radio control in her hand. What was he waiting for? Starkey felt anxious and wondered if the killer was growing frightened at the thought of murdering another human being, or excited. Starkey saw the switch as a TV remote, held in the killer’s pocket. She saw his eyes on Riggio, unblinking. Riggio finished his circle, hesitated, then leaned over the box. In that moment, the killer pressed the switch and …

… the light hurled Charlie Riggio away like an imaginary man.

Starkey stopped the tape and closed her eyes, her fist clenched tight as if it was she who had clutched the switch and sent Charlie Riggio to hell.

She felt herself breathe. She felt her chest expand, her body fill with air. She gripped her glass with both hands and drank. She wiped at her eyes.

After a while, she pressed the “play” button and forced herself to watch the rest of the tape.

The pressure wave flashed across the tarmac, a ripple of dust and debris sucked up after it. The Dumpster rocked backwards into the wall. Smoke rose from the crater, drifting lazily in a swirl as Buck Daggett rushed forward to his partner and pulled off the helmet. An Emergency Services van screeched into the lot beside them, two paramedics rushing in to take over. Buck stood watching them.

Starkey was able to pick out the boundaries she had marked and several times found knots of people at the edge of the hundred-yard perimeter who were hidden behind cars or buildings. She froze the image each time, looking for long-sleeved males in blue baseball caps, but the resolution was too poor to be of much use.

She watched the other two tapes, drinking all the while. She examined the murky images as if willing them to clear, thinking all the while that any of those shadowed faces might belong to the man or woman who had built and detonated the bomb.

Later that night, she rewound the tapes, turned off her television, and fell into a deep sleep there on her couch.

She is kicked away from the trailer by a burst of white light.

The paramedics insert their long needle.

She reaches for Sugar’s hand as his helmet is pulled free.

His head lolls toward her.

It is Pell.

5

The next morning, Marzik walked through CCS like a shy student handing back test papers, passing out copies of the suspect likeness that had been created from Lester Ybarra’s description. Kelso, the last to get one, scowled as if it were his daughter’s failing exam.

“There’s nothing here we can use. Your wit was a waste of time.”

Marzik, clearly disappointed, was stung by Kelso’s words.

“Well, it’s not my fault. I don’t think Lester really saw anything. Not the face, anyway.”

Starkey was at her desk when Kelso approached with the picture. She kept her eyes averted, hoping that neither he nor Marzik wouldn’t notice their redness. She was sure the gin was bleeding through her pores and tried not to blow in their faces when she commented on the likeness.

“It’s a ghost.”

Marzik nodded glumly, agreeing.

“Casper all the way.”

The portrait showed a white male approximately forty years of age with a rectangular face hidden by dark glasses and a baseball cap. His nose was undistinguished in shape and size, as were his lips, ears, and jaw. It worked out that way more times than not. If a wit saw no identifying characteristics, the portrait ended up looking like every other person on the street. The detectives called them “ghosts” because there was nothing to see.

Kelso scowled at the portrait some more, then shook his head and sighed deeply. Starkey thought he was being an ass.

“It’s nobody’s fault, Barry. We’re still interviewing people who were in the laundry at about the same time. The portrait is going to develop.”

Marzik nodded, encouraged by Starkey’s support, but Kelso didn’t look impressed.

“I got a call from Assistant Chief Morgan last night. He asked how you were doing as the lead, Carol. He’s going to want a report soon.”

Starkey’s head throbbed.

“I’ll go see him whenever he wants. That’s not a problem.”

“He won’t just want to look at you, Carol; he’ll want facts, as in progress.”

Starkey felt her temper starting to fray.

“What do you want me to do, Barry, pull the perp out of my ass?”

Kelso’s jaw knotted and unwound like he was chewing marbles.

“That might help. He suggested that we could forestall the ATF taking over this case if we had something to show for our efforts. Think about it.”

Kelso stalked away and disappeared into his office.

Starkey’s head throbbed worse. She had gotten so drunk last night that she scared herself and had spent most of the morning worried that her drinking was finally out of hand. She woke angry and embarrassed that Pell had once more been in her dreams, though she dismissed it as a sign of stress. She had taken two aspirin and two Tagamet, then pressed into the office, hoping to find a kickback on the RDX. She hadn’t. Now this.

Marzik said, “Kelso’s a turd. Do you think he talks to us like that because we’re women?”

“I don’t know, Beth. Listen, don’t sweat the picture. Pell has three other likenesses that he’s going to deliver. We can show those to Lester. Maybe something will click.”

Marzik didn’t leave. Starkey was certain that she needed another breath mint, but wouldn’t take one with Marzik standing over her.

“Even though Lester didn’t get a face, he’s solid on the cap and long-sleeved shirt.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got him set up to come in this afternoon to look at the tapes. You see anything last night?”

Starkey leaned back to stay as far from Marzik as possible.

“Not on the wide shots. Everything is so murky you can’t really see. I think we need to have them enhanced, see if that won’t give us a better view.”

“I could take care of that, you want.”

“I already talked to Hooker about it. He’s had tapes enhanced before when he was working Divisional Robbery over in Hollenbeck. Listen, I need to check the NLETS, okay? We’ll talk later.”

Marzik nodded, still not moving. She looked like she wanted to say something.

“What, Beth?”

“Carol, listen. I want to apologize for yesterday. I was a bitch.”

“Forget it. Thanks for saying so, but it’s okay.”

“I felt bad all night and I wanted to apologize.”

“Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Don’t sweat the picture.”

“Yeah. Kelso’s such a turd.”

Marzik took her portrait and went back to her desk. Starkey stared after her. Sometimes Marzik surprised her.

When Marzik wasn’t looking, Starkey popped a fresh Altoid, then went for the coffee. When she checked the NLETS system on the way back to her desk, this time something was waiting.

Starkey had expected one or two hits on the RDX, but nothing like what she found.

The California State Sheriffs reported that Dallas Tennant, a thirty-two-year-old white male, was currently serving time in the California State Correctional Facility in Atascadero, a facility for prisoners receiving treatment for mental disorders. On three separate occasions two years ago, Tennant had exploded devices made with RDX. Starkey smiled when she saw it was three devices. RDX was rare; three devices meant that Tennant had had access to a lot of it. Starkey printed off the computer report, noting that the case had been made by a Sheriff’s Bomb and Arson sergeant-investigator named Warren Mueller out of the Central Valley office in Bakersfield. Back at her desk, she looked up the phone number in her State Law Enforcement Directory, then called the Central Valley number, asking for the Bomb and Arson Unit.

“B and A. Hennessey.”

“Warren Mueller, please.”

“Yeah, he’s here. Stand by.”

When Mueller came on, Starkey identified herself as a Los Angeles police officer. Mueller had an easy male voice with a twang of the Central Valley at the edges. Starkey thought he had probably grown up downwind of one of the meatpacking plants up there.

“I’m calling about a perp you collared named Dallas Tennant.”

“Oh, sure. He’s enjoying a lease in Atascadero these days.”

“That’s right. Reason I’m calling is I got a kicker saying that he set off three devices using RDX. That’s a lot of RDX.”

“Three we know of, yeah. Coulda been more. He was buying stolen cars from some kids up here, hundred bucks, no questions, then driving’m out into the desert to blow’m up. He’d soak’m in gas first so they’d burn, you know? Crazy fool just wanted to see’m come apart, I guess. He blew up four or five trees, too, but he used TNT for that.”

“It’s the RDX that interests me. You know where he got it?”

“Well, he claimed that he bought a case of stolen antipersonnel mines from a guy he met at a bar. You believe that, I got some desert land up here I’ll sell you. My guess is that he bought it off one of these meth-dealing biker assholes, but he never copped, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Starkey knew that the vast majority of bombings were the result of drug wars between rival methamphetamine dealers, many of whom were white bikers. Meth labs were chemical bombs waiting to happen. So when a meth dealer wanted to eliminate a rival, he often just blew apart his Airstream. Starkey had rolled out on almost a hundred meth labs when she was a bomb tech. Bomb Squad would roll even for a warrant service.

“So you think you could still have a guy up there with RDX to sell?”

“Well, that’s possible, but you never know. We didn’t have a suspect at the time, and we don’t have one now. All we had was Dallas, blowing up his goddamned cars. The guy’s your classic no-life, loner bomb crank. But the guy stood up, though, I’ll give’m that. Wherever he got it, he didn’t roll.”

“Did he have any more RDX in his possession at the time of his arrest?”

“Never found any of his works. Said he made everything at home, but there was no evidence of it. He had this shithole apartment over here out past the meat plant, but we didn’t find so much as a firecracker. We couldn’t find any evidence of these mines he claimed to have bought, either.”

Starkey considered that. Building bombs for bomb cranks like Dallas Tennant was a way of life. It was their passion, and they inevitably had a place where they built their bombs, in the same way that hobbyists had hobby rooms. Might be a closet or a room or a place in their garage, but they had a place to store their supplies and practice their craft. Such places were called “shops.”

“Seems like he would’ve had a shop.”

“Well, my personal feeling is that he was butt-buddies with the same guy sold him the RDX, and that guy packed up when Dallas was tagged, but like I say, that’s just my feeling.”

Starkey put that in her notes, but didn’t think much of Mueller’s theory. As Mueller had already pointed out, bomb cranks were introverted loners, usually of low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy. They were often extremely shy and almost never had relationships with women. Sharing their toys didn’t fit with the profile. Starkey suspected that if Tennant didn’t cop to his shop, it was because he didn’t want to lose his toys. Like all chronics, he would see explosions in his dreams, and probably spent much of every day fantasizing about the bombs he would build as soon as he was released.

Starkey closed her pad.

“Okay, Sergeant, I think that about does it. I appreciate your time.”

“Anytime. Could I ask you something, Starkey?”

“I’ve asked you plenty.”

He hesitated. She knew in that moment what was coming, and felt her stomach knot.

“You being down there in L.A. and all, you the same Starkey got blown up?”

“Yeah. That was me. Listen, all I’ve got here is what the Sheriffs put out on the kicker. Could you fax your casework on Tennant to give me a little more?”

“This about that thing happened down there in Silver Lake?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure. It’s only a few pages. I can get to it right away.”

“Thanks.”

Starkey gave him the fax number and hung up before Mueller could say any more. It was always like that, even more so from the bomb techs and bomb investigators, from the people who lived so close to the edge but never looked over, in a kind of awe that she had.

Starkey refilled her coffee and brought it into the stairwell where she stood smoking with three Fugitive Section detectives. They were young, athletic guys with short hair and thick mustaches. They were still enthusiastic about the job and hadn’t yet let themselves go, the way most cops did when they realized that the job was bureaucratic bullshit that served no purpose and did no good. These guys would bag their day at two in the afternoon, then head over to Chavez Ravine to work out at the Police Academy. Starkey could see it in their tight jeans and forearms. They smiled; she nodded back. They went on with their discussion without including her. They had made a collar that morning in Eagle Rock, a veterano gang member with a rep as a hard guy who was wanted for armed robbery and mayhem. The mayhem charge meant he’d bitten off a nose or an ear during one of the assaults. The three Fugitive cops had found him hiding under a blanket in a garage when they made the pinch. The tough veterano had pissed his pants so badly that they wouldn’t put him in the car until they’d found a plastic trash bag for him to sit on. Starkey listened to the three young cops relive their story, then crushed out her cigarette and went back to the fax machine. Another cop story. One of thousands. They always ended well unless a cop took a bullet or got bagged in an unlawful act.

When Starkey got back to the fax machine, Mueller’s casework was waiting in the tray.

Starkey read it back at her desk. Tennant had an arrest history of fire starting and explosives that went back to the age of eighteen and had twice received court-mandated psychiatric counseling. Starkey knew that the arrests had probably started even earlier, but weren’t reflected in the case file because juvenile records were sealed. She also knew this because Mueller’s notes indicated that Tennant was missing two fingers from his left hand, an explosives-related injury that occurred while he was a teenager.

Mueller’s case involved interviewing a young car thief named Robert Castillo, who had stolen two of the three cars that Tennant destroyed, along with photographs of the demolished cars. Mueller had been summoned to the Bakersfield Puritan Hospital Emergency Room by patrol officers, where he found Castillo with a windshield wiper blade through his cheek. Castillo, having delivered a late-model Nissan Stanza to Tennant, had apparently stood too close when Tennant destroyed it, caught the blade through his face, and had been rushed to the hospital by his friends. Starkey read Mueller’s interview notes several times before she caught something in the Castillo interview that reinforced her belief that Tennant still maintained his shop. She decided that she wanted to speak with him.

Starkey looked up the phone number for Atascadero, called, and asked for the law enforcement liaison officer. Police officers couldn’t just walk in off the street to speak with prisoners; the prisoner had the right to have counsel present and could refuse to speak with you. Atascadero was a long way to drive just to be told to fuck off.

“You have an inmate up there named Dallas Tennant. I’m working an active case here in Los Angeles that he might have information relating to. Would you see if he’d talk to me without counsel?”

“Would you still want to see him if he demands counsel?”

“Yes. But if he wants to play it that way, I’ll need the name of his attorney.”

“All right.”

She could tell by the way the man paused that he was writing. Soft music played behind him.

“When would you want to see him, Detective?”

Starkey glanced at the clock on the wall and thought about Pell. “Later today. Ah, say about two this afternoon.”

“All right. He’s going to want to know what it’s about.”

“The availability of an explosive called RDX.”

The liaison officer took her number and told her he’d call back as soon as possible.

After she hung up, Starkey got a fresh cup of coffee, then went back to her desk, thinking about what to do. LAPD policy required detectives to always work in pairs, but Marzik had interviews and Hooker was going to see about the tape. Starkey thought about Pell. There was no reason to call him, no reason to tell him any of this until it was over and she had something to say.

She found his card in her purse and paged him.

Starkey completed the evidence transfer request, which she faxed to the ATF regional office in Miami, then waited for Pell in the lobby. The drive from downtown L.A. to Atascadero was going to be just over three hours. She had thought that Pell would want to drive, because men always wanted to drive, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I’ll use the time to read Tennant’s case file, then we can work out a game plan.”

There he was with the game plan again.

She gave him the report, then maneuvered out of the city and up the coast along the Ventura Freeway. He read without comment, seeming to take forever to get through the six pages. She found his silence irritating.

“How long is it going to take you to read that, Pell?”

“I’m reading it more than once. This is good stuff, Starkey. We can use this. Searching for the RDX paid off.”

“I wanted to mention that to you. I want to make sure we don’t get off on the wrong foot here.”

Pell looked at her.

“What wrong foot?”

“I know you think you were advising me, but I don’t need it. You come in, start telling me what to do and how to do it, and expect me to hop to it. It doesn’t work that way.”

“It was just a suggestion. You did it anyway.”

“I just want to get things straight. Don’t expect that I’ll get coffee for you.”

Pell stared at her, then glanced back at the pages.

“You spoke with the arresting officer?”

“Yeah. Mueller.”

“Can I ask you to tell me what he said, or is that too much like asking you for a mocha?”

“I’m not trying to fight with you. I just wanted to set the ground rules.”

She went through her conversation with Mueller, recounting pretty much everything that had been said. Pell stared at the passing scenery, so silent that she wondered if he was even listening. But when she finished, he glanced through the pages again, then shook his head.

“Mueller dropped the ball about Tennant not having a shop. According to this, Tennant was buying stolen cars to destroy them. Three cars, three explosions. The car thief —”

“Robert Castillo.”

“Yeah, Castillo. Castillo said that Tennant had asked him to steal a fourth car. He wouldn’t need another car if he didn’t have more RDX to destroy it or knew how to get more.”

Starkey’s grip tightened on the wheel.

“That’s what I figured.”

Pell shrugged and put the pages aside.

It sounded so lame. That was exactly what Starkey had reasoned, and now she wished that she had said it before Pell. Now it looked like he was the one who’d found the hole in Tennant’s denials.

“You said you had a suspect likeness coming from Miami. Did you get it for me?”

“Yeah. That, and the first two we have.”

He slipped them from his jacket and unfolded them for her.

“Can you see?”

“Yeah.”

“There were enough people in the library to put together a pretty good composite. Our guy shows to be six feet, one-eighty or so, but he’s probably wearing lifts and padding. The wits from the earlier sightings made him at five ten. He had a square jaw, bright red hair, sideburns. That doesn’t square with the earlier sightings, either.”

Starkey glanced at the three sheets as she drove. Pell was right, none of the three looked very much alike, and none of them looked like the man Lester Ybarra described. The Miami likeness was as Pell said, the second likeness showed a balding, professorial-looking man with glasses, and the third, which was the first description that the feds had, showed a much heavier man with woolly Rasta braids, sunglasses, and a beard.

She handed them back to Pell.

“This last one looks like you in drag, Pell.”

Pell put the sheets away.

“What about your guy? He match any of these?”

Starkey told him to open her briefcase, which was on the backseat. When Pell had it, he shook his head.

“How old is this guy supposed to be?”

“Forty, but our wit isn’t dependable.”

“So he might’ve made himself up to look older.”

“Maybe. If we’re talking about the same guy.”

“Mr. Red is in his late twenties, early thirties. That’s about all we know for sure. That, and him being white. He lets himself be seen, Starkey. He changes his look to fuck with us. That’s how he gets off, fucking with us.”

After that, they drove in silence for a while, Starkey thinking about how she was going to approach Tennant. She happened to glance over and found Pell staring at her.

“What?”

“You said you had gotten videotapes from the Silver Lake event. Did you look at them yet?”

Starkey put her eyes on the road. They had passed Santa Barbara; the freeway was curving inland toward Santa Maria.

“Yeah. I looked at them last night.”

“Anything?”

Starkey shrugged.

“I’ve gotta have them enhanced.”

“That must’ve been hard for you.”

“What?”

“Looking at what happened. It must’ve been hard. It would be for me.”

Pell met her eyes, then went back to staring out the window. She thought he might be pitying her and felt herself flush with anger.

“Pell, one more thing.”

“What?”

“When we get there with Tennant, it’s my show. I’m the lead here.”

Pell nodded without expression, without looking at her.

“I’m just along for the ride.”

Starkey drove the remaining two hours in silence, pissed off that she had invited him along.

The Atascadero Minimum Security Correctional Facility was a village of brown brick buildings set in the broad open expanse of what used to be almond groves in the arid ranch-land south of Paso Robles. There were no walls, no guard towers; just a ten-foot chain-link fence and a single front gate with two bored guards who had to slide a motorized gate out of the way.

Atascadero was used to house nonviolent felons who the court deemed unsuitable for the general prison population: ex-police officers, white-collar criminals convicted of one-shot paper crimes, and vacationing celebrities who’d wrung out the eight or nine chances the courts inevitably gave them on drug charges. No one ever got knifed or gang-raped at Atascadero, though the inmates did have to maintain a three-acre truck garden. The worst that could happen was heatstroke.

Starkey said, “They’re going to make us check our guns. Be faster with the paperwork if we leave’m in the car.”

“You going to leave yours?”

“It’s already in my briefcase. I never carry the damned thing.”

Pell glanced over, then pulled an enormous Smith 10mm autoloader and slipped it under the seat.

“Jesus, Pell, why do you need a monster like that?”

“No one gets a second shot.”

Starkey badged the gate guards, who directed her to the reception area. They left the car in a small, unshaded parking lot, then went inside to find the law enforcement liaison officer, a man named Larry Olsen, waiting for them.

“Detective Starkey?”

“Carol Starkey. This is Special Agent Pell, with the ATF. Thanks for setting this up.”

Olsen asked for identification and had them sign the log. He was a bored man who walked as if his legs hurt. He led them out the rear through double glass doors and along a walk toward another building. From back here, Starkey could see the truck garden and two basketball courts. Several inmates were playing basketball with their shirts off, laughing and enjoying themselves. They missed easy shots and handled the ball poorly. All of them except one were white.

Olsen said, “I should tell you that Tennant is currently being medicated. These are court-mandated therapies. Xanax for anxiety and Anafranil to help regulate his obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’s required to take them.”

“Is that going to give us a problem with him agreeing to have no lawyer present?”

“Not at all. They don’t affect his judgment, just his compulsions. He was off the meds for a while, but we had a problem recently and had to resume the treatment.”

Pell said, “What kind of problem?”

“Tennant used cleaning products and some iodine he stole from the infirmary to create an explosive. He lost his left thumb.”

Pell shook his head.

“What an asshole.”

“Well, this is a minimum-security installation, you know. The inmates have a great deal of freedom.”

Dallas Tennant was an overweight man with pale skin and large eyes. He was sitting at a clean Formica table that had been pushed against the wall, but stood when Olsen showed them into the interview room. His left hand was bandaged, strangely narrow without its thumb. Tennant’s eyes locked on Starkey and stayed there. He barely glanced at Pell. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were missing at the second joint, the caps of scar old and worn. This was the injury that Starkey had read about in Mueller’s case file.

Tennant said, “Hello, Mr. Olsen. Is this Detective Starkey?”

Olsen introduced them, Tennant offering his hand, but neither Starkey nor Pell taking it. You never shook their hand. Shaking hands put you on an equal basis, and you weren’t equals. They were in prison; you weren’t. They were weak; you were strong. Starkey had learned that it was a game of power when she was still in uniform. Assholes in prison thought of a friend as someone it was easy to manipulate.

Olsen put his clipboard on the table and opened a felt-tipped pen.

“Tennant, this form says that you have been advised of your right to have an attorney present for this interview, but that you have declined that right. You have to sign it here on this line, and I will witness.”

As Tennant signed the forms, Starkey noticed a thick plastic book on the corner of the table. Two screw-thread hasps kept it fastened at the spine; the cover was of a tropical island at sunset with script letters that read My Happy Memories. It was the kind of inexpensive photo album you could buy at any dime store.

When Starkey glanced up, Tennant was staring at her. He smiled shyly.

“That’s my book.”

Olsen tapped the form.

“Your signature right here, Detective.”

Starkey forced her eyes away from Tennant and signed. Olsen signed beneath her signature, dated the page, then explained that a guard would be outside the room to remove Tennant when they were finished. After that, he left.

Starkey directed Tennant where to sit. She wanted to be across from him, and she wanted Pell at his side so that Tennant would have to look at one or the other, but not both. Tennant slid his scrapbook across the table when he changed seats to keep it near him.

“First off, Dallas, I want to tell you that we’re not investigating you. We’re not looking to bring charges against you. We’re going to overlook any crimes you admit to, as long as they don’t include crimes against persons.”

Tennant nodded.

“There won’t be any of that. I never hurt anyone.”

“Fine. Then let’s get started.”

“Can I show you something first? I think it might help you.”

“Let’s not get sidetracked, Dallas. Let’s stay with the reason we’re here.”

He turned his book for her to see, ignoring her objection.

“It won’t take long, and it’s very important to me. I wasn’t going to see you at first, but then I remembered your name.”

He had marked a place in the book with a strip of toilet tissue. He opened to the marked page.

The newspaper clip was yellow from being smothered by the plastic for three years, but the below-the-fold two-column headline was still readable. Starkey felt her skin grow cold.

It was an L.A. Times article about the trailer park bombing that had killed Sugar and wounded Starkey. Above the headline was a grainy black-and-white picture that showed the two EMT teams, one team working on Sugar, the other on Starkey, as firefighters hosed the flaming trailer behind them. She had never read the article or the three follow-up articles that followed. A friend of Starkey’s named Marion Tyson had saved them and brought them to Starkey in the week after her release from the hospital. Starkey had thrown them away and had never spoken to Marion Tyson again.

Starkey took a moment to make sure her voice would not waver, that she wouldn’t give away her feelings.

“Are all the articles in this book bomb-related?”

Tennant flipped the pages for her to see, revealing flashes of death and devastated buildings, crumpled cars, and medical text photographs of severed limbs and disrupted bodies.

“I’ve collected these since I was a child. I wasn’t going to talk to you, but then I remembered who you are. I remember watching the news the day you were killed, and what an impression that made on me. I was hoping I could get you to autograph it.”

Before she could respond, Pell reached across the table and closed the book.

“Not today, you piece of shit.”

Pell pulled the book close and laid his arm across it.

“Today, you’re going to tell us where you got the RDX.”

“That’s mine. You can’t take that. Mr. Olsen will make you give it back.”

Starkey was inwardly livid with Pell for intruding, but she kept her manner calm. The change in Pell was dramatic; in the car, he’d seemed distant and thoughtful; this Pell was poised in his chair like a leopard anxious to pounce.

“I’m not going to sign your book, Dallas. Maybe if you tell us where you got the RDX and how we could get some, maybe then I might sign it. But not now.”

“I want my book. Mr. Olsen is going to make you give it back.”

“Give it back, Pell.”

Starkey eased the book away from Pell and slid it across the table. Tennant pulled the book close again and covered it with his hands.

“You won’t sign it?”

“Maybe if you help us.”

“I bought some mines from a man I didn’t know. Raytheons. I don’t remember the model number.”

“How many mines?”

He had told Mueller that he’d bought a case, which, she knew because she had phoned Raytheon, contained six mines.

“A case. There were six in the case.”

Starkey smiled; Tennant smiled back at her.

Pell said, “What was this man’s name?”

“Clint Eastwood. I know, I know, but that was how he identified himself.”

Starkey took out a cigarette and lit up.

“How could we find Clint?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you find Clint?”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

“Mr. Olsen gave me special permission. How did you find Clint? If we let you out today and you wanted more RDX, how would you reach him?”

“I met him in a bar. That’s all there was to it. Like I told them when they arrested me. He had a case of antipersonnel mines, I bought it, and then he was gone. I didn’t want mines; I mean, I wasn’t going to put them out in a field and watch cows walk on them or anything. I bought them to scavenge the RDX.”

Starkey believed that Tennant was telling the truth about salvaging his RDX from stolen mines; high-order explosives were almost always acquired that way, from mortar shells or hand grenades or other military gear. But she also believed that his source wasn’t some nameless yahoo in a roadhouse. Bomb cranks like Tennant were low self-esteem loners; you wouldn’t find “Plays well with others” on his report cards. Starkey knew that, as with arsonists, Tennant’s obsession with explosives was a sublimated sexuality. He would be awkward with women, sexually inexperienced in the normal sense, and find his release in a large pornography collection devoted to deviant practices such as sadomasochism and torture. He would avoid face-to-face confrontations of any kind. He would lurk in hobby shops like the one where he had been employed and swap meets; he would be far too afraid to connect in a biker bar. Starkey decided to change her approach and come at him from a different direction. She took out the photographs of the three cars and the interview pages from Mueller’s case file. The same things that Pell had read and understood on the drive up.

“All right, Dallas. I can buy that. Now tell me this, how much RDX do you have left?”

Tennant hesitated, and Starkey knew that Mueller had never asked that.

“I don’t have any left. I used it all.”

“Sure you do, Dallas. You only blew up three cars. I can look at these pictures and tell that you didn’t use all the RDX. We can calculate things like that, you know? Start with the damage, then work backwards to estimate the amount of the charge. It’s called an energy comparison.”

Tennant blinked his eyes blandly.

“That’s all I had.”

“You bought the cars from a young man named Robert Castillo. Mr. Castillo said that you asked him for a fourth car. Why would you need a fourth car if you only had enough pop for three?”

Tennant wet his lips and made the shy smile. He shrugged.

“I had some dynamite. You soak the interior with enough gasoline, they go fine even with the dynamite. Not as good as with the RDX, but that’s special.”

Starkey knew he was lying, and Tennant knew she knew. He averted his eyes and shrugged.

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing to say.”

“Sure there is. Tell us where we can find your shop.”

Starkey was certain that if they could find his shop, they would find evidence that would lead to his source of the RDX or to other people with similar sources.

“I didn’t have a shop. I kept everything in the trunk of my car.”

“Nothing was found in the trunk of your car except a few clips and wire.”

“They kept asking me about that, but there was nothing to say. I’m a very neat person. They even offered to reduce my time and give me outpatient status, but I had nothing to trade. Don’t you think I would have made a deal if I could?”

Pell leaned forward and put his hands close to Tennant’s book.

“I think you jerk off every night about using the rest of your stuff when you get out of here, but you’re here on a mental. That’s a one-way ride until the headshrinkers decide that you’re sane, which figures to be never. Does a sane man blow off his own thumb?”

Tennant flushed.

“It was an accident.”

“I represent the United States Government. Detective Starkey here represents the Los Angeles Police Department. Together, with a little cooperation from you, we might be able to help get your time reduced. Then you won’t have to mess around popping off fingers with window cleaner, you can go for the whole hand, maybe even an arm.”

Starkey stared at Tennant, waiting.

“I never hurt anybody. It’s not fair they keep me here.”

“Tell that to the kid with the windshield wiper through his face.”

Starkey could see that Tennant was thinking. She didn’t want to give him much time, so she stepped in, trying to appear sympathetic.

“That’s right, Dallas. You didn’t intend to hurt that boy, you even tried in your own way to keep him safe.”

“I told him to take cover. Some people just won’t listen.”

“I believe that, Dallas, but the thing is, you see, this is why we’re here, we’ve got someone out there who doesn’t care about people the way you do. This person is trying to hurt people.”

Tennant nodded.

“You’re here because of the officer who was killed. Officer Riggio.”

“How do you know about Riggio?”

“We have television here, and the Internet. Several of the inmates are wealthy people, bankers and lawyers. If you have to be in prison, this is the place to be.”

Pell snorted.

“Officer Riggio was killed with RDX?”

“RDX was a component. The charge was something called Modex Hybrid.”

Tennant leaned back and laced his fingers. The missing thumb must have hurt because he winced and drew back his hand.

“Did Mr. Red set that bomb?”

Pell came out of his chair so suddenly that Starkey jumped.

“How do you know about Mr. Red?”

Tennant glanced nervously from Starkey to Pell.

“I don’t, really. People gossip. People share news, and lies. I don’t even know that Mr. Red is real.”

Pell reached across the table and gripped Tennant’s wrist above his bandaged hand.

“Who, Tennant? Who’s talking about Mr. Red?”

Starkey was growing uncomfortable with Pell’s manner. She was willing to let him play bad guy to her good guy, but she didn’t like it that he was touching Tennant, and she didn’t like the intensity she saw in his eyes.

“Pell.”

“What do they say, Tennant?”

Tennant’s eyes grew larger and he tried to twist away.

“Nothing. He’s a myth, he’s someone who makes wonderful elegant explosions.”

“He kills people, you sick fuck.”

Starkey pushed out of her chair.

“Leave go of him, Pell.”

Pell’s face was bright with anger. He didn’t leave go.

“He knows that Red uses Modex, Starkey. We’ve never released that information to the public. How does he know?”

Pell gripped Tennant’s bandaged hand. Tennant went white and gasped.

“Tell me, you sonofabitch. How do you know about Mr. Red? What do you know about him?”

Starkey shoved Pell hard, trying to move him away, but couldn’t. She was terrified that the guard would hear and burst in.

“Damnit, Pell, leave go! Step away from him!”

Tennant slapped at Pell without effect, then fell backward out of the chair.

“They talk about him on Claudius. That’s how I know! They talk about the bombs he builds, and what he’s like, and why he’s doing these things. I saw it on Claudius.”

“Who the fuck is Claudius?”

“Goddamn you, Pell. Get back.”

Starkey shoved at Pell again, and this time he moved. It was like pushing a house.

Pell was breathing hard, but he seemed in control again. He stared at Tennant in a way that Starkey read with certainty that if Pell had his gun, he would be holding it to the man’s head.

“Tell me about Claudius. Tell me how you know about Mr. Red.”

Tennant whimpered from the floor, cradling his hand.

“It’s an Internet site. There’s a chat room for people … like me. We talk about bombs and the different bombers and things like that. They say that Mr. Red even lurks there, reading what they say about him.”

Starkey turned away from Pell, staring at Tennant.

“Have you had contact with Mr. Red?”

“No. I don’t know. It’s just a rumor, or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. If he’s there, he uses a different name. All I’m saying is what the others say. They said the Unabomber used to come around, too, but I don’t know if that was true.”

Starkey helped Tennant to his feet and put him in the chair. A red flower blossomed on the bandage; his wound was seeping.

“You okay, Tennant? You all right?”

“It hurts. Goddamn, it hurts. You bastard.”

“You want me to get the guard? You want the doctor?”

Tennant glanced at her and picked up his book with his good hand.

“I want you to sign.”

Starkey signed Tennant’s book, and then she called the guard and got Pell out of there. Tennant seemed fine when they left, but she wasn’t sure what he might say once they were gone.

Pell moved like an automaton, stalking out ahead of her, stiff with tension. Starkey had to walk hard to keep up, growing angrier and angrier. Her face felt like a ceramic mask, so brittle that if he stopped walking before they reached the car, it might shatter, and, with it, her control.

She wanted to kill him.

When they reached the parking lot, Starkey followed him to his side of the car and shoved him again. She caught him from behind, and this time he wasn’t ready. He stumbled into the fender.

“You crazy bastard, what was that all about? Do you know what you did in there? Do you know what kind of trouble we could be in?”

If she had her Asp from her uniform days, she would happily beat him stupid.

Pell glared at her darkly.

“He gave us something, Starkey. This Claudius thing.”

“I don’t give a shit what he gave us! You touched a prisoner in there! You tortured him! If he files a complaint, it’s over for me. I don’t know about the motherfucking ATF, but let me tell you something, Pell, LAPD will have my hide on the barn! That was wrong, what you did in there. That was wrong.”

She was so angry that she wanted to throttle him. All he did was stand there, and that made her feel even angrier.

Pell took a deep breath, spread his hands, and looked away as if whatever had driven him inside was leaching away.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s great, Pell, thanks. You’re sorry.”

She walked away from him, shaking her head. She could still feel last night’s drunk, and suddenly she realized that she was already thinking about getting there again, blasting back a couple of quick shots to kill the knots in her neck. She was so damned angry that she didn’t trust herself to speak.

That’s when Pell said, “Starkey.”

Starkey turned back just in time to see Pell stagger against the car. He caught himself on the fender, then collapsed to one knee.

Starkey ran to him.

“Pell, what’s wrong?”

He was as pale as milk. He closed his eyes, hanging his head like a tired dog. Starkey thought he was having a heart attack.

“I’m going to get someone. You hang on, okay?”

Pell caught her arm, holding tight.

“Wait.”

His eyes were clenched shut. He opened them, blinked, then closed them again. His grip on her was so strong that it hurt.

“I’m okay, Starkey. I get these pains sometimes. It’s a migraine, that’s all. Like that.” He wasn’t letting go of her.

“You look like shit, Pell. I’d better get someone. Please.”

“Just give me a minute.”

He closed his eyes, taking deep breaths. Starkey had the frantic thought that he was dying right here in the damned parking lot.

“Pell?”

“I’m okay.”

“Let go of me, Pell, or I might have to smack you again.”

He held her with a grip like pliers, but when she said it, his face softened, and he let go. Color began to return to his face.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He looked at her then. She was very close to him. His closeness embarrassed her, and she scooted away.

“Let me just sit here for a second. They can’t see us, right?”

She had to stand to peer over the car at the reception building.

“Not unless they can see through the car. If they saw what happened, they probably think we’re down here making out.”

Starkey flushed, surprised that she’d said something like that. Pell seemed not to notice.

“I’m okay now. I can get up.”

“You don’t look okay. Just sit here for a minute.”

“I’m okay.”

He stood, balancing himself against the car, then used the door for support as he climbed in. By the time she went around the other side and got behind the wheel, he had more color.

“Are you okay?”

“Close enough. Let’s go.”

“You really fucked us up in there.”

“I didn’t fuck us up. He gave us Claudius. That’s something we didn’t have before.”

“If he files a complaint, you can use that to explain to Internal Affairs why they shouldn’t bring me up on charges.”

Pell reached across the seat and touched her thigh. His expression surprised her; his eyes were deepened with regret.

“I’m sorry. If he files a complaint, I’ll take the bullet. It wasn’t you in there, Starkey, it was me. I’ll tell them that. Just drive, would you, please? That isn’t an order; it’s a request. It’s a long ride home.”

She stared at him a moment longer, then she started the car and pulled away, her leg feeling the weight of his hand as if it were still there.

6

It was after seven when Starkey let Pell off at the curb outside Spring Street. The summer sun was still high in the west, resting on the crown of a palm. Soon, the sky would purple.

Starkey struck a fresh cigarette, then turned into the traffic. Hooker and Marzik had long since gone home. Even Kelso was gone, probably eating dinner about now. Starkey passed an In-’n-Out Burger, her stomach clenching at the thought of food. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, so she made do with a couple of antacids.

In the long silence coming back to L.A., Starkey had decided that Pell was dangerous to her case and to her chances of reclaiming her career. If Tennant filed a complaint or squawked to his attorney, she was done. Olsen might be on the phone with Kelso right now; Kelso might be filing for an IAG investigation. A lot could happen in three hours.

Starkey flicked her cigarette out the window, hard. Trading her job for this Claudius thing seemed like a sour deal. The only way Starkey could protect herself was to report Pell and file an officer complaint. She could call Kelso at home and explain what happened. Tomorrow morning, he would walk her up to IAG, where she would be interviewed by a lieutenant, who would then phone Olsen and ask him to interview Tennant. By midafternoon, the lines between Spring Street and the ATF field office would burn. Washington would jerk Pell from the case, and her own ass would be covered. Then, if Tennant squawked, Starkey would be clear. She would have acted accordingly and by the book. She would be safe.

Starkey lit a second cigarette, thankful for the slow pace of the traffic. Around her, cars pulsed from parking garages like the life bleeding from a corpse. Going to Kelso was not an acceptable option. Even thinking about it made her feel cheesy and low.

She couldn’t get Pell out of her head.

Starkey didn’t know anything about migraine headaches, but what had happened in the parking lot had scared her even more than Pell losing control with Tennant. She fretted that beating the hell out of suspects was Pell’s ATF way of doing things, and that meant he would do it again, placing her in even greater legal jeopardy. She was certain that he was hiding something. She had enough secrets of her own to know that people didn’t hide strengths; they guarded their weaknesses. Now she feared Pell’s. The bomb investigators that she had known were all detail people; they moved slowly and methodically because they built puzzles often made of many small pieces over investigations that lasted weeks, and often months. Pell didn’t act like a bomb investigator. His manner was predatory and fast, his actions with Tennant extreme and violent. Even his gun didn’t fit the profile, that big ass Smith 10.

She drove home, feeling as if she was in a weakened position and angry because of it. She thought about calling Pell at his hotel and raising more hell, but knew that would do no good. She could either call Kelso or move on; anything else was just jerking off.

At home, Starkey filled her tub with hot water for a bath, then poured a stiff gin and brought it to her bedroom where she took off her clothes.

Naked, she stood at the foot of her bed, listening to the water splash, sipping the gin. She was intensely aware of the mirror on the closet. It was behind her, almost as if it were waiting. She took a big slug of the drink, then turned and looked at herself. She saw the scars. She saw the craters and rills and valleys, the discolorations and the pinhole stitching. She looked at her thigh, and saw the print of his hand as clearly as if she bore a brand.

Starkey sighed deeply and turned away.

“You must be out of your goddamned mind.”

She finished the drink in a long series of gulps, stalked into the bath, and let the heat consume her.

7

“Tell me about Pell.”

“He’s a fed with the ATF. That’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”

“I know.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I meant I know what the acronym stands for, that ATF is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. You seem irritable today, Carol.”

“How inconsiderate of me. I must have forgotten to take my daily dose of mellow.”

Starkey was annoyed with herself for mentioning Pell to Dana. On the drive to Santa Monica, she had mapped out what she wanted to talk about in today’s session, which had not included Pell, yet Pell was the first damned thing that popped from her mouth.

“I put myself at risk for this guy, and I don’t even know him.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Nobody likes a rat.”

“But he violated the law, Carol. You said so yourself. He laid hands on this prisoner, and now you are in jeopardy for not reporting him. You clearly don’t approve of what he did, yet you are conflicted about what to do.”

Starkey lost track of Dana’s voice. She stood at the window, watching the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, smoking. A cluster of women waited at the crosswalk below, anxiously watching their bus idle on the other side of six lanes of bumper-to-bumper morning rush hour traffic. From their squat Central American builds and plastic shopping bags, Starkey made them for housekeepers on their way to work in the exclusive homes north of Montana. When the light changed, the bus began to rumble away. The women panicked, charging across the street even as cars continued through the red. Horns blew, a black Nissan swerving, almost nailing two of the women, who never once looked at the car as it passed. They ignored it in their need to catch the bus, giving themselves up to chance. Starkey knew she could never do that.

“Carol?”

Starkey didn’t want to talk about Pell anymore or watch a bunch of women with nothing more on their minds than catching a goddamned bus.

She went back to her seat and crushed out her cigarette.

“I want to ask you a question.”

“All right.”

“I’m not sure if I want to do this or not.”

“Do what, Carol? Ask me the question?”

“No, do what I’m about to tell you about. I got these tapes of what happened to Charlie Riggio, the news video that the TV stations took. You know what I realized? The TV station has tapes of me, too. They have videotape of what happened to me and Sugar. Now I can’t stop thinking about it, that it’s out there right now, trapped on a tape, and I could see it.”

Dana wrote something on her pad.

“When and if you decide that you’re ready for something like that, I think it would be a good idea.”

Starkey’s stomach went cold. Part of her had wanted Dana’s permission; part of her had wanted to be let off the hook.

“I don’t know.”

Dana put her pad aside. Starkey didn’t know whether to be frightened by that or not. She had never known Dana to put aside the pad.

“How long have you had the dreams, now, Carol?”

“Almost three years.”

“So you see Sugar’s death, and your own, almost every night for three years. I had a thought about this the other day. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but I want to share it with you.”

Starkey eyed her suspiciously. She hated the word “share.”

“Do you know what a perception illusion is?”

“No.”

“It’s a drawing. You look at it, and you see a vase. But if you look at it with a different mind-set, you see two women facing each other. It’s like a picture hidden within a picture. Which you see depends upon the perceptions and predispositions you bring to the viewing. When a person looks at a picture over and over again, maybe they’re trying to find that hidden picture. They keep looking, hoping that they’ll see it, but they can’t.”

Starkey thought this was all bullshit.

“You’re saying that I’m having the dream because I’m trying to make sense of what happened?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think that if you don’t know, I sure as hell don’t. You’re the one with a Ph.D.”

“Fair enough. Okay, the Ph.D. suggests that we have to deal with the past in order to heal the present.”

“I do that. I try to do that. Christ, I think about that goddamned day so much I’m sick of it.” Starkey raised a hand. “And, yes, I know that thinking about it isn’t the same as dealing with it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Right.”

“This isn’t a criticism, Carol. It’s an exploration.”

“Whatever.”

“Let’s get back to the perception illusion. The notion I had is that your dream is the first picture. You return to it because you haven’t found the second picture, the hidden picture. You can only see the vase. You’re looking for the two women, you suspect that they’re there, but you haven’t been able to find them. It occurred to me that maybe this is because what you’re seeing isn’t what really happened. It’s what you imagined happening.”

Starkey felt her irritation turning to anger.

“Of course it’s what I imagined. I was fucking dead, for Christ’s sake.”

“The tape would show what really happened.”

Starkey drew a deep breath.

“Then, if there are two women to be found, you might be able to find them. Maybe what you would discover is that there is only the vase. Whichever you find, maybe that knowledge would help you put this behind you.”

Starkey looked past Dana to the window again. She pushed to her feet and went back to the window.

“Please come back to your seat.”

Starkey shook out a cigarette, lit up. Dana wasn’t looking at her. Dana faced the empty seat as if Starkey were still there.

“Carol, please come back to your seat.”

Starkey blew out a huge screen of smoke. She sucked deep, filled the air with more.

“I’m okay over here.”

“Have you realized that whenever we come to something that you don’t want to hear or that you want to avoid, you escape through that window?”

Starkey stalked back to the chair.

“The dream changed.”

“How so?”

Starkey crossed her legs, realized what she was doing, uncrossed them.

“Pell was in the dream. They took off Sugar’s helmet, and it was that bastard Pell.”

Dana nodded.

“You’re attracted to him.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“A little while ago, you told me that he scared you. Maybe this is the true reason why.”

“The two faces?”

“Yes. The hidden picture.”

Starkey tried to make a joke of it.

“Maybe I’m just a freak who likes to put herself at risk. Why else would I work the Bomb Squad?”

“You haven’t seen anyone since it happened?”

Starkey felt herself flush. She averted her eyes, hoping she looked thoughtful instead of sick to her stomach with fear.

“No. No one.”

“Are you going to act on this attraction?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat quietly until Dana glanced at her clock.

“Looks like our time is almost up. I’d like to leave you with something else to think about for next time.”

“Like I don’t have enough?”

Dana smiled as she picked up the pad, laying it across her legs as if she was already considering the notes she would write.

“You made a joke about working on the Bomb Squad because you enjoyed the risk. I remember something that you said when we were first seeing each other. I had said that being a bomb technician seemed like a very dangerous profession.”

“Yeah?”

Starkey didn’t remember.

“You told me that it wasn’t. You told me that you never thought of bombs as dangerous, that a bomb was just a puzzle that you had to solve, all neat and contained and predictable. I think you feel safe with bombs, Carol. It’s people who scare you. Do you think that’s why you enjoyed the Bomb Squad so much?”

Starkey glanced at the clock.

“Looks like you were right. Time’s up.”

After leaving Dana, Starkey worked her way through the crosstown traffic toward Spring Street with a growing sense of inevitability. She told herself it was resolve, but she knew it was as much about resolve as a drunk falling down stairs. He was going to hit the bottom whether he resolved to or not. She was on the stairs. She was falling. She was going to see herself die.

By the time Starkey reached CCS, she felt numb and fuzzy, as if she were a ghost come back to haunt a house, but was now separate from it, unseen and weightless.

Across the squad room, Hooker was screwing around with the coffee machine. She watched him, thinking that Hooker had the phone numbers for the TV news departments. She told herself to get the numbers, start calling, and find the goddamned tapes of herself. Do it now, before she chickened out.

She marched to the coffee machine.

“Jorge, did you set it up to have those tapes enhanced?”

“Yeah. I told you I’d take care of it, remember?”

“Mm. I just wanted to be sure.”

“It’s a postproduction company in Hollywood that the department uses. We should have them in two or three days.”

“Right. I remember. Listen, did we get any of those tapes from channel eight?”

“Yeah. You took one of them home, Carol. Don’t you remember?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jorge, I took a shitload of tapes home. Can I remember where they all came from?”

Hooker was staring at her.

“No. I guess not.”

“Who’d you talk to over there at channel eight? To get the tapes?”

“Sue Borman. She’s the news director.”

“Lemme have her phone, okay? Something I want to ask her about.”

“Maybe I can help. What do you want to know?”

Nothing was easy. He couldn’t just say, sure, and go get the goddamned number.

“I want to talk to her about the tapes, Jorge. Now, could I please have her number?”

Starkey followed Hooker back to his desk for the number, then went directly to her phone where she called channel eight. She punched the number mechanically, without thought of what she would say or how she would say it. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to give herself time to not do it.

Channel eight was the only television station that she recalled at the trailer park. She knew that others had been there, but she did not remember which others and didn’t want to call around, asking. Channel eight she remembered because of their station ID letters. KROK. The bomb techs used to call the KROK remote vehicle the shitmobile.

“This is Detective Carol Starkey with LAPD. I’d like Sue Borman, please.”

When Borman came on, she sounded harried. Starkey guessed that probably went with the job.

“We sent tapes over there. Is everything all right with them? You don’t have a playback problem, do you?”

“No, ma’am. The tapes are fine. We appreciate your cooperation. I’m calling about another set of tapes.”

“What you got are the only tapes we have. We sent you everything.”

“These are older tapes. They’d probably be in your library. Three years ago, an officer was killed at a trailer park in Chatsworth, and another officer was injured. Do you remember that?”

“No. Was that another bomb thing?”

Starkey closed her eyes.

“Yes. It was a bomb thing.”

“Waitaminute. It wasn’t just one guy; both guys were killed, but they brought back one of them at the scene, right?”

“That’s the one.”

“I was a news writer back then. I think I wrote the story.”

“It’s been three years. Maybe you don’t keep the tapes.”

“We keep everything. Listen, what did you say your name is?”

“Detective Starkey.”

“You’re not who I talked to about the Silver Lake thing, right?”

“No, that was Detective Santos.”

“Okay, what I’ll have to do is check our library. I’ll do that and get back to you. Gimme the date of the incident and your phone number.”

Starkey gave her the date and phone number.

“You want the tape if we have it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this connected to what happened in Silver Lake?”

Starkey didn’t want to tell this woman that she was one of the officers on the tape.

“We don’t believe that they’re connected, but we’re checking. It’s just something we have to follow up.”

“If there’s a story here, I want in.”

“If there’s a story, you can have it.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Starkey.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Starkey was shaking when she put down the phone. She put her hands flat on the desk and tried to still them. She couldn’t. She thought she should feel elated or proud of herself for taking this step, but all she felt was sick to her stomach.

She dry-swallowed a Tagamet and was waiting for the nausea to pass when Pell called.

“Can you talk?”

“Yes, I can talk.”

“I wanted to apologize again about yesterday, up there with Tennant. I hope that what happened hasn’t created a problem for you.”

“I haven’t been marched upstairs to Internal Affairs yet, if that’s what you mean. Tennant could still change his mind and destroy my career, but so far I’m safe.”

“Did you report me?”

“Not my style, babe. Forget it.”

“Okay. Well, like I said yesterday, if it comes to that, I’ll take the hits.”

She felt herself flush with an anger that seemed more aimed at herself than him.

“You can’t take the hits, Pell. I guess you’re being noble or something, but I’m fucked for not reporting you whether you take the hits or not. That’s the way it works here on the local level.”

“Okay. Listen, there’s another reason I called. I’ve got someone who can help us with this Claudius thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s true what Tennant said, that Mr. Red goes there, I’m thinking we can use that. The ATF has a guy at Cal Tech who knows about this stuff. I’ve set it up, if you’re game.”

“You’re damn right I am.”

“Great. Can you pick me up?”

The card from Pell’s hotel was on her desk. She looked at it and saw that he was staying in Culver City near LAX. A place called the Islander Palms.

“You mean you want me to come get you? Why don’t we just meet there? You’re way the hell in the wrong direction.”

“I’m having trouble with my damned rental car. If you don’t want to pick me up, I’ll take a cab.”

“Take it easy, Pell. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

The Islander Palms was a low-slung motel just off Pico Boulevard, a couple of blocks west of the old MGM Studio. It was two floors, with neon palm trees on a large sign overlooking the parking lot, sea-green trim, and an ugly stucco exterior. Starkey was surprised that Pell was staying in such a dump and thought he’d probably picked it out of a low-end tour book. It was the kind of place that screamed “family rates.”

Pell stepped out of the lobby when she turned into the parking lot. He looked pale and tired. The dark rings under his eyes made her think that the trouble wasn’t with his car; he was probably still shaken from whatever had rocked him up at Atascadero.

He got in without waiting for her to shut the engine.

“Jesus, Pell, is the ATF on a budget? LAPD would put me up in a better place than this.”

“I’ll call the director and tell him you said to shape up. You know how to get there?”

“I was born in L.A. I got freeways in my blood.”

As they drove back across the city, Pell explained that they were meeting a man named Donald Bergen, who was a graduate student in physics. Bergen was one of several computer experts employed by the government to identify and monitor potential presidential assassins, militia cranks, pedophiles, terrorists, and others who used the Internet as a source of communication, planning, and execution of illegal activity. This was a gray area of law enforcement, and getting darker every day. The Internet wasn’t the U.S. Postal Service, and chat rooms weren’t private phone calls, yet law enforcement agencies were increasingly limited as to what they could and could not do on the Internet.

“Is this guy some kind of spook?”

“He’s just a guy. Do me a favor, okay, and don’t ask him about what he does, and don’t tell him too much about what we’re doing. It’s better that way.”

“Listen, I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to do anything that’s illegal.”

“This isn’t illegal. Bergen knows why we’re coming, and he knows about Claudius. His job is to get us there. After that, it’s up to us.”

Starkey considered Pell, but didn’t say any more. If Bergen and Claudius could help close her case, then that’s what she wanted.

Twenty minutes later, they found a spot in visitors’ parking and entered the Cal Tech campus. Even though Starkey had spent her life in L.A., she’d never been there. It was pretty; earth-colored buildings nestled in the flats of Pasadena. They passed young men and women who looked normal, but, she thought, were probably geniuses. Not many of the kids here would choose to be cops. Starkey thought that if she were smarter, neither would she.

They found the Computer Sciences building, went down a flight of stairs, and walked along a sterile hall until they found Bergen’s office. The man who opened the door was short and hugely muscular, like a bodybuilder. He smelled, faintly, of body odor.

“Are you Jack Pell?”

“That’s right. Mr. Bergen?”

Bergen peered at Starkey.

“Who’s she?”

Starkey badged him, already irritated.

“She is Detective Carol Starkey, LAPD.”

Bergen looked back at Pell, suspicious.

“Jerry didn’t say anything about this. What’s the deal with her?”

“We’re a matched set, Bergen. That’s all you need to know. Now open the door.”

Bergen leaned out to see if anyone else was in the hall, then let them in, locking the door after them. Starkey smelled marijuana.

“You can call me Donnie. I’m all set up for you.”

Bergen’s office was cluttered with books, software manuals, computers, and pinups of female bodybuilders. Bergen told them to sit where two chairs had been set up in front of a slim laptop computer. Starkey was uncomfortable, sitting so close to Pell that their arms touched, but there wasn’t room to move away. Bergen pulled up a tiny swivel chair to sit on the other side of Pell, the three of them hunched in front of the small computer as if it were a window into another world.

“This isn’t going to take long. It was pretty easy, compared to some of the stuff I do for you guys. But I’m kinda curious about something.”

Starkey noted that Bergen talked to Pell without looking at her. She thought that he was probably uncomfortable around women.

Pell said, “What’s that?”

“When I get jobs like this, I file a voucher back through Jerry, but this time he said leave it alone.”

“We’ll talk about that later, Donnie. That isn’t Detective Starkey’s concern.”

Bergen turned a vivid red.

“Okay. Sure. Whatever you say.”

“Show us about Claudius, Donnie.”

“Okay. Sure. What do you want to know?”

“Show us how to find Claudius.”

“It’s already found. I was there this morning.”

Bergen, who was sitting on the far side of Pell, as far from Starkey as he could get, reached over and punched several computer keys.

“First thing I did was run a search for web sites about bombs, explosives, improvised munitions, mass destruction, things like that. There are hundreds of them.”

As Starkey watched, the screen filled with the home page of something called GRAVEDIGGER, showing a skull with atomic bomb mushroom clouds in the eye sockets. Bergen explained that it was built and maintained by a hobbyist in Minnesota and was perfectly legal.

“A lot of the more elaborate sites have message boards so people can post notes to each other or get together in a chat room so they can talk in real time. Do you know how we run the assassination scans?”

Starkey said, “Donnie?”

Bergen cleared his throat, glancing at her quickly before looking away.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You don’t have to ma’am me. But I want you to talk to me, too, okay? I’m not going to bust you for smoking pot or whatever it is you’re worried about, okay?”

“I wasn’t smoking pot.”

“Just talk to me, too. I have no idea how you run the assassination scans. I don’t even know what assassination scans are.”

Pell said, “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this.” Bergen turned red again.

“Sorry.”

“Just tell us how you found Claudius and bring us there.”

Bergen twisted around to point out a stack of bright blue PowerMacs wired together on a metal frame.

“What you do is search for word combinations. Say your combination is President, White House, and kill. I’ve got software that floats on forty service providers, constantly searching for that combination of words on message boards, newsgroups, and in chat rooms. If the combination shows up, the software copies the exchange and the e-mail addresses of the people involved. What I did was task the software with looking for the word ‘Claudius,’ along with a few others, and this is what we found. It’s as easy as keeping the world safe for democracy.”

Bergen clicked another button, and a new page appeared. His chest swelled expansively.

“You can run but you can’t hide, motherfuckers. That’s Claudius.”

It was a face with a head of flames. The face was tortured, as if in great pain. Starkey thought it looked Roman. Along the left side was a navigation bar that showed different topics: HOW TO, THE PROS, MILITARY, GALLERY, LINKS, MOST WANTED, and several others.

Starkey leaned toward the screen.

“What are all these things?”

“Pages within pages. The gallery is pictures of blast victims. It’s pretty gruesome. The how-to pages have articles about bomb construction and a message board where these a-holes can talk about it with each other. Here, let’s take a tour.”

Bergen used a mouse control to click them through a tour of hell. Starkey watched diagrams of improvised munitions flick past on the screen, saw articles on substituting common household products for their chemical counterparts in order to create explosives. The gallery contained photographs of destroyed buildings and vehicles, medical text pictures of people that had been killed by explosive blasts, endless shots of third-world people missing feet and legs from land mines, and photos of animals that had been blown apart in wound research studies.

Starkey had to look away.

“These people are fucking nuts. This is disgusting.”

“But legal. First Amendment, babe. And if you read close, you’ll note that nothing posted on these pages, which we call public pages, is legally actionable. No one is admitting to crimes or to buying and selling illegal items. They’re just hobbyists. Ha.”

Pell said, “We’re looking for someone who calls himself Mr. Red. They talk about him here. We were told that he might even visit himself.”

Bergen was nodding again before Pell finished, letting them know that he was still ahead of them. He checked his watch, then glanced over at a large desktop Macintosh.

“Well, if he’s been here since eleven-oh-four last night, he’s calling himself something else. I’m charting the sign-ons.”

He swiveled back to the laptop and used the mouse control to open the message boards.

“As far as people posting about him, you got a lot of that. A bunch of these freaks think he’s a fucking hero. Red, and these other assholes. We’ve got discussion threads here about the Unabomber; that guy out in California they called the IRS Bomber, Dean Harvey Hicks; that asshole down south who was trying to kill judges and lawyers; those Oklahoma pricks; and a ton of stuff about Mr. Red.”

Starkey said, “Show us.”

Bergen punched up a thread devoted to Mr. Red, explaining that a thread was a string of messages posted on a particular bulletin board and how she could move sequentially from message to message to follow the exchange.

She said, “Where do I start?”

“Start anywhere. It won’t matter. The thread goes on forever.”

Starkey chose a message at random and opened it.

Starkey opened the next message of the thread.

Starkey looked at Pell.

“None of these people should be allowed to breed.”

Pell laughed.

“Don’t worry about that, Starkey. I’d guess most of these people have never had a date.”

Starkey glanced to Bergen.

“That’s what they do here, they leave messages back and forth like this?”

“Yeah. That’s why they call it a message board. But these guys are the lightweights. No one here is gonna admit to anything criminal. If you want the real kooks, you’ve got to go to the chat room. See, most anyone can get where we are now if you know where to look, but the chat room here is different. You can’t just sign on, you know, like, knock, knock, here I am. You’ve got to be invited.”

“How did you get invited?”

Bergen looked smug.

“I didn’t need an invitation; I broke in. But normal people need what’s called a hot ticket, that’s special software that someone has to send to you via e-mail. It’s like a key to get in. These guys want to talk about things they can be arrested for, so they want their privacy. They know that I’m out here, man, the guys like me. But they think they’re safe in the chat room.”

Bergen hit more keys, after which a window on the screen opened, showing two names having a conversation, ALPHK1 and 22TIDAL. They weren’t discussing bombs, or explosives, or anything even remotely related; they were discussing a popular television series.

Pell said, “They’re talking about a goddamned actress.”

“They can talk about anything they want in a chat room. It’s real time. They’re having a conversation just like we are, only they’re typing it. These guys could be anywhere on the planet.”

Starkey watched their exchange with a growing sense that she might be discovered, that these people might suddenly look through the computer screen and see her.

“Can they see us?”

“Nope, not now. We are cloaked, man, absolutely invisible. There are no walls on the Internet, no walls at all when I am at play.”

Bergen laughed again, and Starkey thought he was probably as crazy as the loons they were watching.

Pell sighed deeply, then nodded at her.

“I can see him here, Starkey. These people would appeal to his ego. He would come here, read all this crap about how great he is, it’s just the kind of thing a guy like this would do. We can reach him here.”

Starkey was swept by the realization that any of these people could be Mr. Red himself.

She looked past Pell to Bergen.

“We can leave messages here if we have a screen name?”

“Sure. Post messages, come here into the chat room, anything you want if I set you up for it. That’s why we’re here, right?”

She looked at Pell, and Pell nodded.

“That’s what we want.”

“No problemo. Let’s get to it, and you can get on your way.”

They chose the name HOTLOAD. Pell thought it was silly, but, as they sat there working, he decided that there was a subliminal sexuality to it that could work for them.

He watched Starkey out the corner of his eye, admiring her intensity. Bergen’s office was small and cramped; barely big enough for the three of them to fit in front of the computer. Bergen smelled so bad that Pell kept leaning away from him into Starkey. Every time Pell touched her, Starkey shrank away. Once, when their thighs touched, he thought she was going to fall out of her chair.

Pell wondered about that, thinking that maybe she had an aversion to men or hated being touched, but he decided that this was unlikely. When he’d had the damned spell in Atascadero, she had expressed a surprising warmth that he’d found moving … even as she chewed his ass about Tennant.

“Earth to Pell.”

Starkey and Bergen were both staring at him. He realized that he hadn’t been paying attention, that he had been thinking about Starkey.

“Sorry.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, Pell, pay attention. I don’t want to spend the night here.”

Bergen showed them how to use the little computer, how to turn it on and off, and set them up with an Internet address through an anonymous provider owned and operated by the government. Then he showed them how to get to Claudius once they had accessed the Internet. They talked over how to proceed and decided to do something that Bergen called “trolling.” Writing as Hotload, they posted three messages about Mr. Red on the message boards: two affirming Hotload’s status as a fan and one reporting a rumor that Mr. Red had struck again in Los Angeles, asking if anyone knew if this was true. Bergen explained that the idea was to provoke a response and establish a presence on the boards.

When they finished, Pell told Bergen that he would be back in a few minutes, then walked Starkey out.

Starkey said, “Why do you have to go back?”

“ATF business. Don’t worry about it.”

“Oh, fuck yourself, Pell. Jesus.”

“This annoyance? Is it perpetual with you?”

Starkey frowned without answering. She shook out a cigarette and lit up. Pell thought about all the smoking and drinking, wondering if she had always been this way or if this Starkey had been born that day in the trailer park. Like the tough talk and bad attitude. Sometimes, as he drove around the city or lay in his shitty hotel room, Pell wanted to ask her those things, but knew it wouldn’t be appropriate. He knew too damned much for his own good, such as how something like the trailer park could change a person, like if your inside was weak, you covered it with a hard outside. He forced himself to stop thinking these things.

She waved the cigarette like she wasn’t happy with the way it was lit, then stared past him.

“I’ve got to get back to Spring Street. I’m supposed to go out with Marzik, looking for people who saw our guy.”

“You take the computer. We can get together at your place later to see if anyone responded.”

She glanced at him, then shrugged.

“Sure. We can do it at my place. I’ll wait in the car.”

Pell watched Starkey walk away until she was gone, then went back to Bergen’s office. He knocked again, and Bergen peered past him down the hall just like before, making sure that the coast was clear. Pell hated dealing with people like this.

When the door was closed, Bergen said, “I hope I didn’t say anything wrong in front of her.”

Pell took out an envelope containing twelve hundred dollars, then watched as Bergen counted it.

“Twelve hundred. That’s fine. This is the first time you guys have paid me in cash. Usually I file a voucher, but this time Jerry said to leave it alone.”

“If Jerry said to leave it alone, you should leave it alone.”

Bergen shrugged, nervous.

“Right. You want a receipt?”

“What I want is a second computer.”

Bergen stared at him.

“You want another one? Just like the one I gave you?”

“Yes. Set up so I can reach Claudius.”

“What do you need a second one for?”

Pell stepped closer, met Bergen’s eyes in a way that made the muscular man flinch.

“Can you fix me up with a second computer or not?”

“It’s another twelve hundred.”

“I’ll come back later. Alone.”

8

After Starkey dropped Pell back at his motel, she and Marzik spent the afternoon interviewing customers of the Silver Lake laundry with no success. No one recalled seeing a man in a baseball cap and long-sleeved shirt making a call. Starkey dreaded reporting to Kelso that the suspect likeness would remain unresolved.

At the end of the day, they swung past the flower shop to show Lester Ybarra the three likenesses that Starkey had gotten from Pell.

Lester considered the three pictures, then shook his head.

“They look like three different guys.”

“They’re the same guy wearing disguises.”

“Maybe the guy I saw was wearing a disguise, too, but he looked older than these guys.”

Marzik asked to bum one of Starkey’s Tagamet.

Starkey drove home that night determined to give herself a break from the gin. She made a large pitcher of iced tea. She sipped it as she tried to watch television, but spent most of the evening thinking about Pell. She tried to focus on the investigation instead, but her thoughts kept returning to Pell and their earliest conversation that day, Pell saying that he would take the bullets if Tennant filed the charge, Pell saying he would take the hits.

Starkey shut the lights, went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Not even her usual pathetic two hours.

Finally, she took Sugar’s picture from her dresser, brought it into the living room, and sat with it, waiting for the night to end.

One man had already taken the hits for her. She would never allow another man to do that again.

At ten minutes after nine the next morning, Buck Daggett called her at Spring Street.

“Ah, Carol, I don’t want to be a pest, but I was wondering if you’ve had any breaks.”

Starkey felt a wave of guilt. She knew what it was like to be in Buck’s position, feeling that you were on the outside of something so devastating. She had felt that way after the trailer park. She still did.

“Not really, Buck. I’m sorry.”

“I was just wondering, you know?”

“I know. Listen, I should call to keep you up on this. I’ve just been so busy.”

“I heard they found some writing in the frag. What’s that about?”

“We’re not sure what we found. It’s either a 5 or an S but, yeah, it was cut into the body of the pipe.”

Starkey wasn’t sure how much she should tell him about Mr. Red, so she let it go at that.

Buck hesitated.

“A 5 or an S? What in hell is that, part of a message?”

Starkey wanted to change the subject.

“I don’t know, Buck. If anything develops, I’ll let you know.”

Santos waved at her, pointing at the phone. A second line light was blinking.

“Listen, Buck, I got a call. As soon as we get anything, I’ll call.”

“Okay, Carol. I’m not nagging or anything.”

“I know. I’ll see you later.”

Starkey thought he sounded disappointed, and felt all the more guilty for avoiding him.

The second call was John Chen.

“We got an evidence transfer here in your name from the ATF lab in Rockville.”

“Is it bomb components from Miami?”

“Yeah. You should’ve told me it was coming, Starkey. I don’t like stuff just showing up like this. I got court today, and now I have to take care of all this chain of evidence paperwork. I’ve gotta be at court by eleven.”

Starkey glanced at her watch.

“I’ll be there before you leave. I want to look at it.”

To maintain the chain of evidence, Chen or another of the criminalists would have to personally log over the components into Starkey’s possession.

“I’ve got court, Carol. Make it later today or tomorrow.”

He got this whiny quality to his voice that annoyed the hell out of her.

“I’m leaving now, John. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She was on her way out when Kelso’s door opened, and she remembered Tennant. For a few brief minutes, she had forgotten Atascadero.

“Starkey!”

Kelso steamed across the squad room, carrying a coffee cup that read WORLD’S SEXIEST LOVER. Starkey watched him without expression, thinking fuck it, if Olsen had made the call filing a complaint, it was too late to worry about it.

“Assistant Chief Morgan wants to have a meeting this afternoon. One o’clock in my office.”

Starkey felt the ground fall away beneath her.

“About what?”

“What do you think, Detective? He wants to know what we’re doing down here about Riggio. Dick Leyton will be here, too. You will advise them on the status of the investigation, and I hope to hell you have something to say.”

Starkey felt her panic ease; apparently, no one was complaining to Internal Affairs.

Kelso spread his hands.

“So? Would you care to give me a preview?”

Starkey told him about Claudius, explaining that Tennant had learned about Mr. Red there, and that she felt it was a possible source of information.

Kelso listened, somewhat mollified.

“Well, that’s something, I guess. At least it looks like we’re doing something.”

“We are doing something, Barry.”

Even with nothing to drink, he made her head throb.

Starkey was still shaking when she left CCS, hoping to reach Chen before he left for court. She did, catching him coming down the stairs with a sport coat draped over his arm. He wasn’t happy to see her.

“I told you I had court, and you said you’d be here in twenty minutes.”

“Just get me squared away, then you can leave me to it.”

She preferred being alone when she worked. It would be easier to concentrate if Chen wasn’t watching over her shoulder, being male and offering his help.

Chen grumped about it, but turned and two-stepped the stairs, bringing her back along the hall and into the lab. Two techs were eating sandwiches between plastic bags containing what appeared to be human body parts. The smell of preservative was strong.

Chen said, “They sent two devices, Starkey. It isn’t just the library device like you said.”

That surprised her.

“All I expected was the library device.”

“We got that, but we also got the frag from a detonation they had down there. The reports say they’re pretty much the same design, only one was really a bomb and the other wasn’t.”

Starkey recalled what Pell had told her about a sweatshop bombing, which was described in one of the seven reports he had provided. She had already read the Dade County report on that device and thought that having it might prove useful.

Chen led her to a corner of the lab where two white boxes rested on the black lab table. Both boxes had been opened.

Chen said, “Everything’s bagged, tagged, and logged. You’ve gotta sign here, then the ATF says you’re clear to do whatever you want, up to and including destructive testing.”

Destructive testing was sometimes necessary to separate components or obtain samples. Starkey didn’t anticipate having to do that and would refer to those results that the Miami authorities had found.

Starkey signed four federal evidence forms where Chen indicated, then gave them back to him.

“Okay. Can I work here at your table?”

“Just try not to make a mess. I know where everything is, so put it back in its proper place. I hate when people move things.”

“I won’t move anything.”

“You want me to tell Russ Daigle you’re up here? He’ll probably want to see this.”

“I’d rather work the bomb by myself, John. I’ll get him when I’m done.”

When Chen was finally gone, Starkey took a breath, closed her eyes, and felt the tension melting away with the glacial slowness of ice becoming water. This was the part of the job that she loved, and had always loved. This was her secret. When she touched the bomb, when she had its pieces in her hands, when they pressed into the flesh of her fingers and palms, she was part of it. It had been that way since her first training exercise at the Redstone Arsenal Bomb School. The bomb was a puzzle. She became a piece in a larger whole that she was able to see in ways that others couldn’t. Maybe Dana was right. For the first time in three years, she was alone with a bomb, and she felt at rest.

Starkey pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves.

The ATF had sent both devices along with their respective reports, one each from the Dade County Bomb Squad and the ATF’s National Laboratory Center in Rockville, Maryland. Starkey put the reports aside. She wanted to come at the material with a fresh eye and draw her own conclusions. She would read their reports later to compare the conclusions of the bomb techs in Maryland and Miami with her own.

The exploded device was the usual scorched and twisted frag, the fragments in twenty-eight Ziploc bag, each bag labeled with a case number, an evidence number, and description.

Starkey glanced at the contents of each without opening the bags because she saw no need; her interest was in the intact device. The largest fragment was a twisted, four-inch piece of pipe that flattened into a perfect rectangle, its edges as perfect as if they had been cut with a machinist’s tool. Explosions could do that, changing the shape of things in unexpected and surprising ways, ways that often made no sense because every distortion was not only the result of the explosive, but was also predicted by the inner stresses of the material being changed.

She returned the bags to their box, pushed that box aside. The second box contained the disassembled parts of the device that had been recovered from the library. She laid these bags out on the bench, organizing them by components. One bag contained the siren that had sounded to draw attention, another the timer, another the siren’s battery pack. The siren had been crushed and two of three AA batteries ruptured when Dade County de-armed the device with its water cannon. Starkey thought she would not have recognized the siren if the bag hadn’t been labeled.

When the bomb components were laid out, Starkey opened the bags.

The two galvanized pipe cylinders had been blown open like blooming flowers, but were otherwise intact. The duct tape that had joined the pipes had been scissored, but was still in place. The scent of the glue that Dade County had used in their attempt to bring up fingerprints still clung to the metal. Starkey knew that the Dade County forensics team would have expected to find print fragments, even though they might not have belonged to Mr. Red. Salespeople, store clerks, the person who rang up the sale. But nothing had been found. Mr. Red had cleaned the components, leaving nothing to chance.

Starkey assembled the pieces with little effort. Some of the pieces would no longer fit together because they were misshapen by the de-armer, but Starkey had everything close enough. Outwardly, the only difference between this device and the one that had killed Charlie Riggio was the addition of the timer. Red had placed the device, then, when he was ready, pressed the switch to start the countdown. She guessed by the looks of it that the timer was probably good for an hour, counting down from sixty minutes. The police report, if it was thorough, would have constructed a timeline built from witness reports to try to establish how long between the time Red was last seen near the table and the siren going off. This didn’t interest Starkey.

She placed her hands on the components, feeling the substance of them. The gloves hid much of the texture, but she kept them on. These were the same pieces of metal and wire and tape that Mr. Red had touched. He had acquired the raw components, cut them, shaped them, and fitted them together. The heat of his body had warmed them. His breath had settled over them like smoke. Oils from his skin stained them with unseeable shadows. Starkey knew that you could learn much about a person by the way they kept their car and their home, by the way they ordered the events of their life or covered canvas with paint. The bomb was a reflection of the person who built it, as individual as their face or their fingerprints. Starkey saw more than pipe and wire; she saw the loops, arches, and whorl patterns of his personality.

Mr. Red was proud of his work to the point of arrogance. He was meticulous, even obsessive. His person would be neat, as would his home. He would be short-tempered and impatient, though he might hide these things from other people, often by pretending to be someone else. He would be a coward. He would only let out his rage through the perfect devices that he constructed. He would see the devices as himself, as the self he wished to be — powerful, unstoppable. He was a creature of habit because the structure of it gave him comfort.

Starkey examined the wiring, noting that where the wires were joined, each had been connected with a bullet connector of a type available in any hobby store. The connector sleeves were red. The wires were red. He wanted people to see him. He wanted people to know. He was desperate for the attention.

Starkey put the bullet connectors under a magnifying glass and used tweezers to remove the clips. She found that the wire was looped around the connector three times in a counterclockwise direction. Every wire. No bullet connectors from Riggio’s bomb had been found, so she had nothing to compare it with. She shook her head at Mr. Red’s precision. Every wire, three times, counterclockwise. The structure gave him comfort.

Starkey examined the threads cut into the pipe ends and the white plastic plumber’s tape that had been peeled away. Starkey hadn’t removed the tape from Riggio’s bomb because she hadn’t thought it necessary, but now she realized that this was a mistake. The plumber’s tape was a completely unneccessary part of the bomb, and therefore potentially the most revealing. It occurred to Starkey that if Mr. Red liked to write messages, he might write them on the tape, which had started out as a clean white surface.

She examined the tape fragments that the ATF people had stripped, but found nothing. The tape, designed to be crushed to make the pipe joint airtight, had been shredded when it was removed. Even if something had been written there, she couldn’t have found it.

Deciding to examine the tape from the remaining joints, Starkey brought the pipes to a vise at the end of Chen’s bench. She fit rubber pads on the vise jaws so that the pipe wouldn’t be marred, then used a special wrench with a rubber mouth to unscrew the end cap. It wasn’t particularly tight and didn’t take much effort.

The plumber’s tape was cut deep into the threads. She brought the magnifying glass over and, using a needle as a probe, worked around the root of the threads until she found the end of the tape. Working this close made her eyes hurt. Starkey leaned away, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. She noticed the black tech smiling at her, gesturing with her own reading glasses. Starkey laughed. That would come soon enough.

Starkey worked the tape for almost twenty minutes before she got it free. She found no writing or marks of any kind. She switched the pipes in the vise, then went to work on the second tape. This one didn’t take as long. Ten minutes later, Starkey was unpeeling the tape when she realized that both joints had been wrapped the same way. Mr. Red had pressed the tape onto the top of the pipe, then wrapped away from himself, winding the tape over and down and around before bringing it under the pipe and back up again. Clockwise. Just as he had wound the wire to the bullet clips the same way every time, he had wrapped the plumber’s tape to the threads the same way every time. Starkey wondered why.

Starkey’s eyes were killing her, and the beginnings of a headache pulsed behind her forehead. She peeled off the gloves, got a cigarette, and went out to the parking lot. She leaned against one of the blue Bomb Squad Suburbans, smoking. She stared at the red brick garages at the back of the facility where bomb techs practiced aiming and firing the de-armer. She remembered the first time she had fired the de-armer, which was nothing more than a twelve-gauge water cannon. The noise had scared the hell out of her.

Mr. Red thought about his bombs and built them carefully. She suspected that he had a reason for wrapping the tape clockwise around the pipe threads. It bothered her that she didn’t see it. If he saw a reason that she couldn’t see, it meant he was better than her, and Starkey could not accept that. She flicked away her cigarette, pretended to hold the pipe and wrap it. She closed her eyes and pretended to screw on the end cap. When she opened her eyes, two uniformed officers heading out to their cars were laughing at her. Starkey flipped them off. The third time she assembled her imaginary pipe, she saw the reason. He wrapped the tape clockwise so that when he screwed on the end cap — also clockwise — the tape would not unwind and bunch. If everything went clockwise, the cap would screw on more easily. It was a small thing, but Starkey felt a jolt of fierce pride like nothing she had known in a long time. She was beginning to see how his mind worked, and that meant she could beat him.

Starkey went back inside, wanting to check the taping on the sweatshop bomb, but found only a fragment of an end cap. There would be a sample of joint tape in the threads, but not enough to tell her the direction of the winding. She went downstairs to the Bomb Squad, looking for Russ Daigle. He was in the sergeants’ bay, eating a liverwurst sandwich. He smiled when he saw her.

“Hey, Starkey. What are you doing here?”

“Upstairs with Chen. Listen, we got an end cap off Riggio’s bomb, right?”

He took down his feet and swallowed as he nodded.

“Yep. Got one intact and a piece of another. I showed you the joint tape, remember?”

“You mind if I take apart the one that’s intact?”

“You mean you want to unscrew it?”

“Yeah. I want to look at the tape.”

“You can do whatever you want with it, but that’s going to be hard.”

He brought her out to his workbench where the pieces of the Silver Lake bomb were locked in a cabinet. Once Chen had released them, they were Daigle’s to use in the reconstruction.

“See here? The pipe is still mated to the cap, but they bulged from the pressure so you can’t unscrew them.”

Starkey saw what he meant and felt her hopes sag. The pipe wasn’t round; it had been distorted by gas pressure into the shape of an egg. There was no way to unscrew it.

“Can I take it upstairs and play with it?”

Daigle shrugged.

“Knock yourself out.”

Starkey brought the cap upstairs, fit it into the vise, then used a high-speed saw to cut it in half. She used a steel pick to pry the inner pipe halves away from the outer cap halves, then fitted the two pipe halves together again in the vise. Daigle would probably be irritated because she had cut the cap, but she couldn’t think of another way to reach the tape.

It took Starkey almost forty minutes to find the end of the tape, working with one eye on the clock and a growing frustration. Later, she realized that it took so long because she thought it would be wrapped overhand like the tape on the Miami device. It wasn’t. The tape on this joint had been wrapped underhand.

Counterclockwise, not clockwise.

Starkey stepped away from the bench.

“Jesus.”

She flipped through the report that had been sent from Rockville and found that it had been written by a criminalist named Janice Brockwell. She checked the time again. Three hours later in D.C. meant that everyone back there should have returned from lunch, but not yet left for the day. Starkey searched through the lab until she found a phone, called the ATF’s National Laboratory, and asked for Brockwell.

When Janice Brockwell came on, Starkey identified herself and gave the case number of the Miami hoax device.

“Oh, yeah, I just sent that out to you.”

“That’s right. I have it here now.”

“How can I help you?”

“Are you familiar with the first seven devices?”

“The Mr. Red bombs?”

“That’s right. I read those reports, but don’t remember seeing anything about the tape on the pipe joints.”

Starkey explained what she had found on the library device.

“You were able to unwrap the tape?”

Starkey could hear the stiffness in Brockwell’s voice. She felt that Starkey was criticizing her.

“I unscrewed one of the end caps, and the tape darn near unwrapped itself. That got me to thinking about it, so I worked the other loose. Then I started wondering about the caps on the other bombs.”

Starkey waited, hoping her lie would soften the sting.

The defensiveness in Brockwell’s voice eased.

“That’s a pretty cool notion, Starkey. I don’t think we paid attention to the tape.”

“Could you do me a favor and check the others? I want to know if they match.”

“You say they’re clockwise, right?”

“Yeah. Both windings were clockwise. I want to see if the others match.”

“I don’t know how many intact end caps we have.”

Starkey didn’t say anything. She let Brockwell work it through.

“Tell you what, Starkey. Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you, okay?”

Starkey gave Brockwell her number, then returned the bomb components to their boxes and locked them beneath Chen’s bench.

Starkey arrived back at Spring Street with ten minutes to spare. She was harried by the rush to get back, so she stopped on the stairs, smoking half a cigarette to give herself a chance to calm down. When she had herself composed, she went up and found Marzik and Hooker in the squad room. Marzik arched her eyebrows.

“We thought you were blowing off the meeting.”

“I was at Glendale.”

She decided that she didn’t have time to tell them about the Miami bomb. They could hear it when she went over it for Kelso.

“Is Morgan here yet?”

“In there with Kelso. Dick Leyton’s in there, too.”

“Why are you guys still out here?”

Marzik looked miffed.

“Kelso asked us not to attend.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The prick. He probably thinks his office will look smaller with too many bodies in there.”

Starkey thought Marzik’s guess was probably true. She saw that she still had a minute, so she asked Marzik and Santos if they had anything new. Marzik reported that the Silver Lake interviews were still a bust, but Santos had spoken with the postproduction facility and had some good news.

He said, “Between all the tapes, we’ve got pretty much of a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the area around the parking lot. If our caller is there, we should be able to see him.”

“When can we have the tape?”

“Day after tomorrow at the latest. We’re going to have to go see the tape on their machine for the best possible clarity, but they say it’s looking pretty good.”

“Okay. That’s something.”

Marzik came closer to her, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear.

“I want to warn you about something.”

“You’re always hearing these things you warn me about.”

“I’m just telling you what I heard, all right. Morgan’s thinking about turning over the investigation to Robbery-Homicide.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? A man died. It’s a murder. You have Homicide investigate. Look, I’m just telling you what I heard, is all. I don’t want to lose this investigation any more than you.”

Starkey could tell by Santos’s expression that he took it seriously, too.

“Okay, Beth. Thanks.”

Starkey checked her watch again. All this time she’d been worried about losing the case to a federal task force, and now this. She decided not to think about it because there was nothing that she could say. She would either convince Morgan that she was on top of the case or she wouldn’t. She popped an Altoid and a Tagamet, then steeled herself and knocked on Kelso’s door exactly at one o’clock.

Kelso answered with his smarmiest smile, putting on a show for the A-chief. Dick Leyton smiled as he greeted her.

“Hi, Carol. How you doing?”

“Fine, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

Her palms were wet when she shook his hand. He held onto her an extra moment, giving her hand a squeeze to show his support.

Kelso introduced her to Assistant Chief of Police Christopher Morgan, an intense, slender man sporting a charcoal suit. Like most officers, Starkey had never met Morgan, or any of the other six assistant chiefs, though she knew them by reputation. Morgan was reputed to be a demanding executive who micromanaged his domain with a violent temper. He had run in twelve consecutive Los Angeles City Marathons, and he demanded that his staff run, also. None of them smoked, drank, or were overweight. Like Morgan, all of them were immaculately groomed, wore charcoal suits, and, outside the office, identical military-issue sunglasses. Officers in the lower ranks called Morgan and his staff the Men in Black.

Morgan shook her hand without emotion, bypassing pleasantries by asking her to bring him up to date.

Leyton said, “Carol, why don’t you start by describing the device, since your investigation stems from there?”

Starkey briefed Morgan on the Silver Lake bomb’s configuration, how it had been detonated, and how they knew that the builder had been on the scene within one hundred yards. She used these descriptions to brief him on Mr. Red. When she was explaining his use of radio detonation and why they believed he had been within one hundred yards of the bomb, Morgan interupted.

“The TV stations can help you with that. They can provide videotape.”

Starkey told him that she had already acquired the tapes and was currently having them enhanced. Morgan seemed pleased with that, though it was hard to tell because his expression never changed.

It took her less than five minutes to describe everything that had been done, including their development of Claudius as a possible source of information about RDX and Mr. Red. All in all, she felt that she had done a pretty good job.

“This bomb couldn’t have been placed in Silver Lake as a threat to one of the businesses there?”

“No, sir. Detectives from the OC Bureau and Rampart did background checks on all the businesses in the mall, and the people who work in them. Nothing like that came up. No one was threatened, and, so far, no one has taken credit for the bombing.”

“So what’s the line of your investigation?”

“The components. Modex Hybrid is an elite explosive, but it’s not complicated to make if you have the components. TNT and ammonium picrate are easy to come by, but RDX is rare. The idea now is to use the RDX as a way to backtrack to whoever built the bomb.”

Morgan seemed to consider her.

“What does that mean, ‘whoever’? I thought it was understood that Mr. Red built the bomb.”

“Well, we’re working under the assumption that he did, but we also have to consider that it might have been built by someone else, too.”

Dick Leyton shifted on the couch, and Kelso frowned.

“What are you talking about, Starkey?”

Starkey described comparing the joint tape from both end caps of the Miami device and the surviving end cap from the Silver Lake device.

“Each of the bombs that has been linked to Mr. Red has been designed and constructed the same way. Even the way he binds the wire to the bullet connectors, three clockwise twists. Same way every time. He’s a craftsman, he probably even thinks of himself as an artist. There’s something different about the Silver Lake bomb. It’s small, but people like this are creatures of habit.”

Dick Leyton appeared thoughtful.

“Was that noted in the seven earlier bombs?”

“I called Rockville and asked about it. No one thought to check the direction of the wrapping before.”

Morgan crossed his arms.

“But you did?”

Starkey met his eyes.

“You have to check everything, Chief. That’s the way it works. I’m not saying we have a copycat; the security around the Mr. Red investigation has been tight. All I’m saying is that I found this difference. That bears consideration.”

Starkey wished that she’d never brought it up. Morgan was frowning, and Kelso looked irritated. She felt like she was digging a hole for herself. Dick Leyton was the only one in the room who seemed interested.

“Carol, if this were the work of a copycat, how would that affect your investigation?”

“It expands. If you assume that this bomb wasn’t built by Mr. Red, you have to ask who did build it? Who knows enough about Mr. Red to duplicate his bombs, and how would they get the components? Then you start to wonder, why? Why copycat Mr. Red? Why kill a bomb tech, or anyone else, especially if you’re not taking credit for it?”

Morgan heard her out, his face an impenetrable mask. When she was done, he glanced at his watch, then at Kelso.

“This sounds like a Homicide investigation. Barry, I’m thinking we should let Robbery-Homicide take over. They have the experience.”

There it was. Even with Marzik’s warning, Starkey’s breath caught. They were going to lose the case to the Homicide Bureau.

Kelso wasn’t happy with that.

“Well, I don’t know, Chief.”

Dick Leyton said, “Chief, I think that would be a mistake.”

His statement surprised her.

Leyton spread his hands reasonably, looking for all the world like the calm, assured professional.

“The way to get to this guy is through a bomb investigation. Following the RDX, just as Detective Starkey is doing. It takes a bomb investigator to do that, not a homicide cop. Starkey’s doing a good job with that. As for this difference she’s found, we have to recognize it, but not get carried away with it. Serial offenders like Mr. Red undergo evolutions. Yes, they’re creatures of habit, but they also learn, and they change. We can’t know what’s in his mind.”

Starkey stared at him, feeling a warmth that embarrassed her.

Morgan seemed thoughtful, then checked his watch again and nodded.

“All right. We’ve got a cop killer out there, Detective Starkey.”

“Yes, sir. We’re going to find him. I am going to clear this case.”

“I hope so. Those are all fine questions you raise. I’m sure you could spend a very long time finding answers for them. But, considering what we know, it seems like a long shot. Long shots are enormous time wasters. All the evidence seems to point to Mr. Red.”

“The tape was just something that didn’t fit, that’s all.”

Her voice came out defensive and whiny. Starkey hated herself for saying it.

Morgan glanced at Kelso.

“Well, as long as we don’t get sidetracked chasing theories that don’t pan out. That’s my advice to you, Detective. Listen to Lieutenant Leyton. Keep your investigation moving forward. Investigations are like sharks. If they stop moving forward, they sink.”

Kelso nodded.

“It will move forward, Chief. We’re going to lock down this sonofabitch. We’re going to get Mr. Red.”

Morgan thanked everyone for the fine jobs they were doing, then glanced at his watch again and left. Dick Leyton winked at her, then followed Morgan out. Starkey wanted to run after him and kiss him, but Kelso stopped her.

Kelso waited until Morgan and Leyton were gone, then closed the door.

“Carol, forget this copycat business. You were doing fine until you said that. It sounds like nonsense.”

“It was only an observation, Barry. Did you want me to ignore it?”

“It made you sound like an amateur.”

John Michael Fowles bought the 1969 Chevelle SS 396 from a place called Dago Red’s Used Cars in Metairie, Louisiana. The SS 396 sported a jacked-up rear end, big-assed Goodyear radials with raised letters, and rust rot along the fenders and rocker panels. The rust rot was extra; John bought it because the damned thing was red. A red car from Dago Red’s for Mr. Red. John Michael Fowles thought that was a riot.

He used the Miami money, paying cash with a false Louisiana driver’s license that gave his name as Clare Fontenot, then drove to a nearby mall where he bought new clothes and a brand-new Apple iBook, also for cash. He got the one colored tangerine.

He drove across Lake Pontchartrain to Slidell, Louisiana, where he ate lunch at a diner called Irma’s Qwik Stop. He had seafood gumbo, but didn’t like it. The shrimp were small and shriveled because they’d been simmering all day. This was the first time John Michael Fowles had been to Louisiana. He didn’t think much of the place. It was as humid as Florida, but not nearly so pretty. Most of the people were fat and looked retarded. Too much deep-fried food.

Irma’s Qwik Stop was across a narrow two-lane road from a titty bar called Irma’s Club Parisienne. John was going to meet a man there at eight that night who called himself Peter Willy, Peter Willy being a play on Willy Peter, military slang for white phosphorous explosive. Peter Willy claimed to have four Claymore antipersonnel mines to sell. If this was true, John would buy the mines for one thousand dollars each in order to recover the half pound of RDX housed in them. RDX, which he needed for the Modex Hybrid he used in his bombs, was harder than hell to find, so it was worth the effort to come to Louisiana for it, even though Peter Willy was probably full of shit.

John had “met” Peter Willy, as with many of his contacts, in an Internet chat room. Peter Willy purported to be a death-dealing ex-Ranger and former biker who now worked the offshore oil platforms for Exxon, two weeks on, two weeks off, and occasionally spent his off time hiring out as a mercenary in South America. John knew this was bullshit. Using what was known as a “Creeper” program, John had backtraced Peter Willy’s screen name to an Earthlink member named George Parsons and to the Visa card number with which Parsons paid for his account. Once John had the Visa number, it was easy to establish Parsons’s true identity as an FAA flight controller employed at New Orleans International Airport. Parsons was married with three daughters, had never been convicted of a crime, and was not a veteran of military service, let alone being a death-dealing ex-Ranger and part-time mercenary. Maybe he would show tonight, but maybe he wouldn’t. People like Peter Willy often chickened out. Big talk on the net, but short of action in the real world. This, John knew, is what separated the predators from the prey.

John sat in the diner, sipping iced tea until six women rose from a corner booth and left. The alpha female, a busted-out Clairol blonde with cratered skin and an ass as wide as a mobile home, had put the bill on her charge card. Now, as they herded out, John ambled past their table. He made sure that no one was looking, then palmed the credit card receipt and tucked it into his pocket.

As it was only a little after two in the afternoon, John had time to kill, and was curious to learn what the ATF had made of his little love letter in the Broward County Library. John had been moving steadily since then, working Claudius to locate a new source of RDX, but was now anxious to read the alerts that had been written about him in the ATF and FBI bulletins. He knew that his little stunt at the library would not place him on the Ten Most Wanted List, but he expected that field offices around the country would be buzzing with alerts. Reading them gave him a serious boner.

John laughed at the absurdity.

Sometimes he was so goddamned bizarre that he amazed himself.

John paid for his meal without leaving a tip (the crappy shrimp), saddled up the big 396, and rumbled down the road back to the Blue Bayou Motel, where he had acquired a room for twenty-two dollars. Once in his room, John plugged the new iBook into the phone line and dialed up AOL. Typically, he would sign on to Claudius to read what the geeps posted about him, and sometimes he would even pretend to be someone else, dropping hints about Mr. Red and enjoying his mythic status. John ate that stuff up: John Michael Fowles, Urban Legend, Rock God. But not tonight. Using the Visa card slip and the Clairol blonde’s name, he joined AOL, signed on to the Internet, then typed in the URL address for a web site he maintained under the name Kip Russell. The web site, housed in a server in Rochester, Minnesota, was identified by a number only and had never been listed on any search engine. It could not be found on Yahoo! AltaVista, HotBot, Internet Explorer, or anything else. John’s web site was a storage facility for software.

John Michael Fowles traveled light. He moved often, abandoned those possessions and identities by which he could be tracked, and often carried no more than a bag of cash. He was without bank accounts, credit cards (except those he stole or bought for temporary use), and real property. Wherever he relocated, he acquired the things he needed, paid cash, then abandoned them when he moved. One of the things he often needed but never carried was software. His software was indispensable.

Before John built bombs, he wrote software. He hacked computer systems, networked with other hackers, and was as deeply into that world and its ways as he was into explosives. He wasn’t as good at it as he was with explosives, but he was good enough. The software that waited for him in Rochester was how he was able to run background checks on doofballs like Peter Willy, and how he knew what the feds knew about Mr. Red. With the software that rested in Rochester, he could open doors into credit card companies and banks, telephone systems and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, including the FBI’s Bomb Data Center, the ATF’s National Repository, and some branches of the Defense Department, which he often scanned for reports of munitions thefts.

When John had accessed his web site, he downloaded an assault program named OSCAR and a clone program named PEEWEE. The downloading took about ten minutes, after which John hand-dialed the phone number for a branch of Bank of America in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and used OSCAR to hack into their system. PEEWEE piggybacked on OSCAR, and, once in the B of A system, cloned itself into a free entity that existed only within the B of A branch in Kalamazoo. PEEWEE, from Kalamazoo, then dialed into the ATF’s National Repository. As expected, PEEWEE was stopped at a gate that demanded a coded password. PEEWEE then imported OSCAR to assault the gate. Start to finish, the process took two minutes and twelve seconds, whereupon John Michael Fowles, also known as Mr. Red, had access to everything within the ATF’s database of information on bombs and bombers.

John smiled to himself as he always did, and said, “Piece a’ fuckin’ cake.”

The most recent entry was from Los Angeles, which surprised John. It should have been from Miami, but it wasn’t.

John Michael Fowles had not been to Los Angeles in almost two years.

John stared at the entry for several seconds, curious, then opened the file. He skimmed the summary remarks, learning that an LAPD bomb technician named Charles Riggio had died in a Silver Lake parking lot. John scanned the summary, the last lines of which hit him with all the impact of a nuclear device.

… analysis finds residue of the trinary explosive Modex Hybrid … Initial evidence suggests that the perpetrator is the anonymous bomber known as “Mr. Red.”

John walked across the room, leaned against the wall and stared at nothing. He was breathing harder now, his back clammy. He stalked back to the iBook.

John’s eye zoomed into the components of the bomb until they filled his screen.

MODEX HYBRID

He wondered for a crazy, insane moment if he had built the bomb and somehow forgotten it, laughed aloud at that, then threw the iBook across the room as hard as he could, gouging a three-inch rent in the wall and shattering the plastic case.

John shouted, “You MOTHERFUCKER!”

John Michael Fowles grabbed his bag of cash and ran out of the motel. Peter Willy would have a long night at the titty bar, waiting for someone who would not show. John barrel-assed the big red SS 396 along the edge of the lake, pushing the gas-guzzling engine hard and making the fat, low-class tires squeal. He stopped on the side of the causeway long enough to throw the iBook into the water, then drove like a motherfucker all the way back to the airport. He put the car in long-term parking, wiped down the interior and doors to remove his fingerprints, then paid cash for a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

No one knew better than John Michael Fowles what it took to make Modex Hybrid or how to find those things within the bomb community.

John Michael Fowles had resources, and he had clues.

Somebody had stolen his work, which meant someone was trying to horn in on his glory.

John Michael Fowles was not going to tolerate that.

He was going out there to get the sonofabitch.