Demolition Angel

I Luv L.A.

John Michael Fowles got off the plane with twenty-six thousand dollars, three driver’s licenses, and four credit cards, two of which matched with names on the licenses. He also had the phone number of a twenty-eight-year-old flight attendant with dimples deep enough to swallow you and a tan warmer than a golden sunset. She lived in Manhattan Beach. Her name was Penny.

Just being in Los Angeles made John smile.

He loved the dry sunny weather, the palm trees, the good-looking babes in their skimpy clothes, the cool people, the slick cars, the hunger for wealth, the asshole movie stars, that the whole damned place was so big and flat and spread to hell, the La Brea Tar Pits, hot dog stands that looked like hot dogs, that big-ass Hollywood sign spread across that friggin’ mountain, earthquakes and firestorms, the funky clubs on the Sunset Strip, sushi, the caramel tans, Mexicans, the tour buses filled with people from Iowa, the glittering swimming pools, the ocean, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the G’s with their forties, and Disneyland.

It was a great place for devastation.

First thing he did was rent a convertible from Hertz, strip off his shirt, slip on his shades, and cruise up Sepulveda Boulevard, looking good. He was past his mad now, over his snit; now was the time for cold calculation and furious vengeance. Mr. Red had arrived.

John dropped the shitkicker persona and went black. He loved white guys who acted black. M&Ms. Light on the outside, dark on the inside. Yo, G, ’sup? L. A. was the perfect place for this. Everyone was always pretending to be something they weren’t.

John bought oversized clothes from a secondhand shop two blocks up from the beach in Venice, a new iBook, and the other things he needed, then took a room at a small motel called the Flamingo Arms. It smelled of foreigners. John shaved his head, draped himself with faux gold chains, then signed on to the Internet. This time he didn’t bother with cracking into the NLETS system. He searched for news stories on the Silver Lake bomb, finding three pieces. The first two articles contained pretty much the same thing: the LAPD Bomb Squad had rolled out to investigate a suspicious package, whereupon Officer Charles Riggio, thirty-four, a nine-year veteran of the squad, was killed when the package exploded. None of the news stories gave details of the device, though the detective leading the investigation, a woman named Carol Starkey, was quoted as attributing the bomb, “a crude, poorly made device,” to “an infantile personality.” John laughed when he read that. He knew that the ATF suspected him, and that, therefore, LAPD suspected him, also.

John said, “The dumb bitch is trying to play me.”

John was especially intrigued by the third story, a sidebar article on Starkey herself, who had once been a bomb tech until she had been caught in an explosion. The article said that Starkey had actually died, but had been revived at the scene. John was fascinated by that. There was a photograph of Starkey and some other cops at the scene, but the picture was small and the resolution was poor. John stared at Starkey, trying to see through the murk, and touched the screen.

“Well.”

In the final paragraph, Starkey vowed to find the person or persons responsible for Riggio’s death.

John smiled at that one.

“Not if I find the motherfucker first.”

John dumped the news stories and went to his web site in Rochester for the list of phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other things he often needed but didn’t carry. He copied the phone number of a man he knew as Clarence Jester, who lived in Venice. Jester owned a small pawnshop as his primary occupation, but was an arsonist. Now in his late fifties, Jester had once served twelve years of federal time for starting fires and was an on-again, off-again psychiatric patient. His hobby was adopting dogs from the pound, dousing them with gasoline, and watching them burn. In the past, John had found him an excellent source of information about those in the bomb community.

“Clarence. It’s LeRoy Abramowicz, my man. I’m in L.A.”

“Yeah?”

Clarence Jester spoke with the careful hesitancy of a paranoid, which he was.

“Thought I might swing by and do a little business. That cool?”

“I guess.”

Anxious to get going, but hungry, John scarfed a Big Kahuna Burger on the way, ambling into Clarence Jester’s pawnshop a few minutes later.

Jester was a small, nervous man, with badly thinning hair. He would not shake hands, explaining that he had a thing about germs.

“Hey, Clarence. Let’s go for a walk.”

Clarence, ready for him, closed the shop without a word.

Outside, Clarence eyed him carefully.

“You look different.”

“I went black. Everybody’s doing it.”

“Mm.”

Business was always done outside, John knowing that Clarence would be more than happy to trade customers for prison time. Twice before, John had bought ammonium picrate from Jester. In addition to being an arsonist, Jester bought and sold explosives, extreme pornography, and the occasional automatic assault weapon. John knew that whoever duplicated his bomb would have to mix their own Modex Hybrid, which meant they would have had to acquire RDX.

“Clarence, I’m looking for a little RDX. You help me with that?”

“Ha.”

“What’s the ‘ha’ mean, my man?”

“You don’t sound black. You sound like a white man trying to talk nigger.”

“Stay with the RDX, Clarence. Do me that courtesy.”

“Nobody has RDX. I see some RDX once every couple of years, that’s it. I got some TNT and PETN, though. That PETN will blow your ass off.”

Clarence brushed his fingers across his mouth as he said it, mumbling his words. He probably thought John was wired.

“Gotta be RDX.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“That’s you. There’s gotta be someone else. Hell, you’re not living in Buttcrack. This is L.A. You got everydamnthing out here.”

A girl in a Day-Glo green bikini bladed past, her ears wrapped in headphones. She had a tattoo of a sun rising out of her pants and a yellow cocker spaniel on a leash. John noticed that Clarence watched the dog.

“Just point the way, Clarence. I find what I’m looking for, I’ll kick back a finder’s fee to you. I won’t leave you cold.”

The dog disappeared around a corner.

“The RDX is ringing a bell.”

“There you go.”

“Don’t get excited just yet. When I say it’s hard to find, I mean it’s hard to find. Just a few years ago, there was a fellow up north who got busted for blowing up cars. He was using RDX. I can maybe put you in touch with him.”

John began to feel jazzed. Connections lead to connections.

“A customer of yours?”

“He didn’t get the RDX from me, I’ll tell you that.”

Clarence proceeded to tell him about a man named Dallas Tennant, who was now serving time. John stopped him when he got to the part about prison, irritated.

“Hold on. What in hell good does it do me if he’s in the goddamn prison?”

“You can talk to him on Claudius.”

“In prison?”

“Like that means shit. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I did when I was in prison. Listen, somehow this guy turned enough RDX to blow up three cars. If he can’t help you, maybe he can put you with someone who can.”

His irritation lifted, and John began to feel jazzed again. This was the way he knew it had to be, all the way out from New Orleans. He wondered if Detective Starkey was smart enough to backtrack the RDX. And if their paths would cross.

“Do you know Mr. Tennant’s screen name?”

“Got it back in my computer. You know how to get on Claudius?”

“I know.”

John clapped Jester on the back, just to see him flinch.

“Thanks, Clarence.”

“Don’t touch me. I don’t like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey, you heard the big rumor we got out here?”

“No. What rumor?”

“Mr. Red came to town. They’re saying he blew up some cop in Silver Lake.”

His mood ruined, John clapped Clarence Jester on the back again.

When the last of the inmates had left the library, Dallas Tennant gathered the magazines and books from the tables, stacking them on his cart. The library wasn’t very big, only six tables, but the reading selection was current and varied. Several of the inmates at Atascadero were millionaires who had arranged for generous donations of books so that they would have something to read. The Atascadero library was the envy of the California State Prison system.

Mr. Riley, the civilian employee who managed the library, turned out the light in his office. He was a retired high school history teacher.

“Are you almost done here, Dallas?”

“I just have to put these away, then dust the stacks. It won’t take long.”

Mr. Riley hesitated in his door. He was never comfortable leaving the inmate employees unattended, though there was nothing in the rules against it.

“Well, maybe I should stay.”

Dallas smiled pleasantly. Earlier, Dalllas had overheard Mr. Riley say that his son and daughter-in-law were coming for dinner, so he knew that Riley was anxious to leave.

“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Riley. We got that box of new books today. I thought I would enter them into the computer tonight so I’d have more time to restack the shelves tomorrow. That might keep me here later than I thought.”

“Well, as long as the door is closed by nine. You have to be at the infirmary by nine or they’ll come looking for you.”

Inmates at Atascadero had enormous freedom, but there was still oversight. Dallas, for example, could work late at the library, but was required to stop by the infirmary for his nightly meds. If he didn’t report there by nine P.M., the nurse would notify the duty guard, who would set about finding him.

“I know, sir. I will. Would you tell the guard that I’ll be in your office, please, just in case he walks by and sees me in there?”

“I will. You have a good evening, Dallas.”

“You, too, sir.”

Not wanting to linger, Mr. Riley left, thanking Dallas for his good work just as he thanked him every evening.

Dallas Tennant was a good boy. Always had been and still was, even in Atascadero. He was polite, well-mannered, and even-tempered. He was also a bright boy, way bright enough not only to mix chemicals and construct intricate devices, but also to manipulate others.

As soon as Dallas arrived at Atascadero, he had arranged for a job in the kitchen, which not only gave him access to things like baking soda and match heads, but also gave him an unlimited supply of snack foods. He was then able to trade the snacks with inmates working in Janitorial Services for certain cleaning products, which, when combined with things pilfered from the kitchen, created dandy little explosives.

His little accident and the loss of his thumb had ruined that, getting him banned from any area containing chemical supplies, but this library job was almost as good for a different kind of access.

The ironic part of being banned from kitchen and cleaning duty was that Dallas did not create that particular explosive from supplies found within the prison. He had traded for that explosive with someone from the outside.

Dallas still smiled, thinking about it, even with the loss of his thumb. Some things were worth a small sacrifice.

Dallas cleared the remainder of the magazines and books, but didn’t take the time to put them in their proper places. He stepped out into the hall, making sure that Mr. Riley was gone, then checked the time. A guard would be along in about twenty minutes to see if Dallas was where he was supposed to be. Dallas went into Riley’s office, broke out the box of books that the guard would be expecting to see, then recovered the software diskette that he kept hidden behind Riley’s file cabinet. Though Atascadero was a modern facility and was linked to the California prison system via the Internet, no computer that prisoners could access was supposed to have Internet software installed; that was reserved for secure office machines and the computers belonging to the administrators.

Dallas had acquired his own software, arranging for his attorney to pay his monthly service charges from his rental income.

He loaded the software onto Riley’s hard drive, connected the modem to the phone line, and signed on. When he was finished for the evening, he would un-install, and Mr. Riley would be none the wiser.

In moments, Dallas Tennant was home again.

Claudius.

It was the one place where Tennant felt comfortable, an anonymous world where he was not judged or ridiculed, but embraced as one of a like tribe. His only friends were there, other anonymous screen names with whom he shared posts in the public areas and often chatted in the secret chat room. His instant-messaging list showed several who were currently signed on: ACDRUSH, who loved to post intricate chemical formulas that were, Tennant believed, always wrong; MEYER2, who shared Tennant’s admiration for Mr. Red; RATBOY, who had written a fourteen-page treatise on how the Oklahoma City bomb could have generated forty percent more explosive force with a few small enhancements; and DEDTED, who believed that Theodore Kaczynski was not the Unabomber.

Tennant posted under the name BOOMER.

Careful to keep an eye out for the guard, he scanned a message board thread that he had created about Mr. Red’s appearance in Los Angeles. He was writing an addition when a messaging window appeared on his screen.

Tennant did not know a “Neo,” but was curious. He clicked the button to accept, and the instant-messaging window opened.

Tennant glanced toward the hall again, nervous because he knew that the guard was due soon, and his time on-line was short. He typed a response.

Neo’s response came back quickly.

Tennant, like all habitues of Claudius, was aware that law enforcement agents often trolled to entrap people into saying something incriminating. He was careful never to post anything incriminating outside of the secure chat area.

Tennant felt a flush of fear at the use of his true name.

Tennant hesitated. This changed things. If Neo had a key to the chat room, then someone had vouched for him. He was as safe as safe could be in this uncertain world.

Tennant used his own key, and opened the chat room window. It was empty except for Neo.

Tennant stared at the name … incredulous … disbelieving … hopeful.

Then he typed:

9

As soon as Starkey walked through her door that night, she regretted agreeing to let Pell come to her home. She scooped magazines and newspapers off the floor, policed up a Chinese food carton, and fretted that the air smelled. She tried to remember the last time that she had cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, but couldn’t. There was nothing in the house to drink except gin, tonic, and tap water. You could write your name in the dust on top of the television. She grabbed a fast shower, dressing in jeans and a black T-shirt, then made a half-hearted attempt to make her house presentable. The last guest that she’d had was Dick Leyton, almost a year ago. He’d stopped by to catch up with her, and stayed for a drink.

You really should get a life, Starkey. Maybe they sell’m at the Best Buy.

Whatever Kelso thought, Starkey had a good feeling about the investigation. Having her hands on the Miami bomb had been good for her; it was concrete and real and had led to her learning something new, something she would not have otherwise known, about the Silver Lake bomb. Maybe Kelso and the others couldn’t see it, but Starkey was a bomb tech; she believed that the pieces added up, and now she had another piece. She was anxious to see if Claudius would yield anything useful, and was encouraged by Hooker’s report from the postproduction facility. She also felt that there was more to be had from Dallas Tennant.

Starkey set up the laptop on her dining room table, figuring that was the best place for them to work. She had plugged it in and turned it on when she heard Pell’s car turn into her drive.

When she opened the door, he was carrying a pizza and a white bag.

“It’s the dinner hour, so I thought I would bring something. I’ve got a pizza here and an antipasto. I hope you didn’t make something.”

“Crap. I’ve got a duck baking.”

“I guess I should’ve called.”

“Pell, I’m joking. My usual dinner is a can of tuna fish and some tortilla chips. This will be great.”

She brought the food into the kitchen, feeling doubly embarrassed that there was nothing to drink. She wasn’t even sure she had clean dishes.

“You don’t drink gin and tonic, do you?”

“Maybe some tonic without the gin. Where’s the computer?”

“It’s on the table in the dining room, through there. You want to eat first?”

“We can eat while we work.”

Starkey thought he was probably anxious to leave. She found that her glasses were spotted, and hoped he wouldn’t notice. She filled two glasses with ice and tonic. She felt a fierce urge to add gin to her glass, but resisted.

When she turned to hand him the glass, he was watching her.

“I didn’t know what you liked, so I got half veggie, half pepperoni and sausage.”

“Either way is fine, but thanks. That was thoughtful.”

Just hearing the words come out made her groan to herself. The two of them sounded like a couple of social misfits on an awkward first date. She reminded herself that this was work, not a date. She didn’t date. She still needed to go to Best Buy to pick out a life.

As she got out plates and silverware, she considered telling him what she had learned about the joint tape, but she decided against it. She would wait until she heard from Janice Brockwell. She told herself that then she would know whether or not she had something, but part of her didn’t want Pell to dismiss her discovery out of hand the way Kelso had.

They divided the antipasto and pizza, then brought their plates and glasses into the dining room. They put two chairs together, just like in Bergen’s office, then Starkey signed on to Claudius. She sat with an uncomfortable awareness of his proximity, then edged her chair away.

“Maybe we should eat first. So we don’t get grease on the keys.”

“Let’s not worry about the keys. I want to see if anyone responded.”

Starkey shifted her chair next to him again, and they opened the door into Claudius.

With Bergen, they had posted three messages, two expressing enthusiastic admiration for Mr. Red, one asking if the rumor that Mr. Red had struck again in Los Angeles was true. This last message had drawn several responses, one of which reproduced a story from the Los Angeles Times, but most of which doubted Mr. Red’s appearance, citing his recent criminal blast in Miami and growing status as “Urban Legend.” One poster compared Mr. Red to Elvis, suggesting that pretty soon he was going to be seen working in every Denny’s in America.

Starkey used the mouse control to advance from message to message, reading, waiting for Pell’s grunt, then clicking to the next message. As she concentrated on the bizarre nature of the posts, her awareness of Pell lessened until he reached across her and abruptly took the mouse.

“Hang on. I want to read the last one again.”

In the moment when his hand covered hers, she drew away from him as if she’d received an electrical charge, then felt herself flush with embarrassment. She covered it by taking back the mouse and asking a question.

“What did you see?”

“Read it.”

Starkey reread the message.

“You think he’s Mr. Red?”

“No. He’s making the joke about buying Modex, but Mr. Red mixes his own. Red wouldn’t expect to buy it, he would buy the components. What if we post back to this guy, making a joke of our own, saying something like we don’t have any Modex, but we could probably help him out with some RDX?”

“Throw bait on the water.”

“For him, and anyone else reading this stuff.”

Pell turned the keyboard and shifted in his seat. His knee touched her knee, his right arm touched her left. Starkey didn’t jerk away this time; she let the touch linger. She glanced at Pell, but Pell seemed lost in composing the message. Pictures flashed in her mind: She touches his arm, their eyes lock, they kiss. Her heart pounded, thinking about it. She takes his hand, leads him to the bedroom, he sees her scars.

Starkey felt sick to her stomach and eased away.

I’m not ready for this.

She stared at her pizza, but couldn’t eat it.

Pell, oblivious, said, “What do you think?”

“It looks good.”

Starkey glanced over and saw that he was rubbing his eyes and squinting.

“You okay?”

“Pretty soon I’m going to need reading glasses, then a cane.”

“I have some drops, if you want.”

“That’s okay.”

They posted the message.

“Anything else?”

“Just wait and see, I guess.”

Pell closed the laptop.

“I don’t want you to think I’m telling you what to do, but could I ask you to run another NLETS search on the RDX? See if we get a hit on anyone other than Tennant?”

“I already did, and we didn’t. The only name that comes up is Tennant.”

“We’ve already gotten what we’re going to get from him.”

“Maybe from Tennant, but not from Tennant’s case.”

“What does that mean?”

“I reread Mueller’s case notes again. It’s clear that he didn’t need to find Tennant’s shop or recover additional explosives to make his case, so he let a lot of stuff slide. His interview notes indicate that he didn’t spend much time with Tennant’s landlady or Tennant’s employer. He had pictures of the three cars Tennant destroyed and the statement from the kid who stole the cars; that was all he needed. If he blew off the other wits, there still might be something to find.”

“That’s good thinking, Starkey. That could pay off.”

Starkey realized that she was smiling at him, and that Pell was smiling back. The house was silent. With the computer off, Starkey was all the more aware that she and Pell were alone. She wondered if he felt that, too, and suddenly wished for other sounds: the television, the radio, a car on the street. But there was only the two of them, and she didn’t know what to do with that.

She abruptly cleared the plates, taking them into the kitchen.

“Thanks again for the pizza. Next time has to be on me.”

When the plates were in the sink, she returned to the dining room, but didn’t go to her chair. She didn’t offer more tonic, and hoped that it was apparent that she wanted him to leave. Pell looked like he wanted to say something, but she didn’t give him the chance. She wedged her hands in her pockets.

“So I guess we’ll check back tomorrow. I’ll call you about it.”

Pell finally stood. She walked him to the door, then stepped well back from him.

“I’ll see you, Pell. We’ll catch this bastard.”

“Good night, Starkey.”

As soon as he stepped through the door, she shut it. Starkey didn’t feel better with the door closed; she felt stupid and confused. She was still feeling that way when she went to bed, where she stared at the ceiling in the darkness and wondered why she felt so lost. All she had was the job. All she had was the investigation. That was her life these past three years. That was all it would ever be.

In his motel, Pell was staring at the computer when the monsters came. They floated up out of the keyboard like writhing segmented worms swarmed by fireflies. He closed his eyes, but still could see them, floating in the blackness. He stumbled into the bathroom for the ice and wet towels that were still in the lavatory, then lay on the bed, the cool towels on his face, his head aching from a pain so great that it left him gasping, and fearful.

He wanted to call Starkey.

He cursed himself for that and concentrated on the pain instead, on this place. He listened to the evening commuter traffic outside his window, the stop-and-go noise of people struggling upstream against the weight of the city; squealing brakes, revving engines, the rumble of overloaded trucks. It was like being on the edge of hell.

He was getting to know her, and that was bad. Every time they were together, he saw a deeper side of her, a surprising side, and his guilt was growing because of it. Pell was too good at reading people, at seeing the hidden face that all people secretly wear, their true face. Pell had learned long ago that everyone is really two people: the person they let you see and the secret person within. Pell had always been able to read the secret person, and the secret person within Starkey’s tough-cookie exterior was a little girl who was trying hard to be brave. Inside the little girl was a warrior heart, trying to rebuild her life and career. He hadn’t counted on liking her. He hadn’t counted on her liking him. It ate at him. It was growing.

But there was nothing to be done for it.

After a time, the pain passed and his vision cleared. Pell glanced at the clock. An hour. Pell covered his face with his hands. Five minutes, maybe ten, but it couldn’t have been an hour.

He climbed off the bed and went back to the computer. The flaming head stared out at him from the screen. Pell pushed the guilt he felt about Starkey to the side and opened the door into Claudius. Her name had been on the bomb. Mr. Red wanted her. He could work that.

Pell used a different screen name, one that Starkey didn’t know, and began to write about her.

10

The next morning, Starkey was the first detective in the office as usual. She figured that Mueller probably didn’t get into his office at six A.M., so she killed time with paperwork. Hooker arrived at five after seven, Marzik drifting in about twenty minutes later. Marzik had Starbucks.

Marzik was stowing her briefcase when she glanced over.

“How’d the big meeting with the A-chief go?”

“He told me to keep the case moving forward. That was his contribution.”

Marzik dropped into her seat, sipping the coffee. Starkey smelled chocolate. Mocha.

“I hear Dick Leyton saved your ass in there.”

Starkey frowned, wondering what Marzik had heard.

“What does that mean? What did you hear?”

Marzik pried the lid from her cup, blew to cool the coffee.

“Kelso told Giadonna. He said you floated some notion about Silver Lake being a copycat. I’m kinda curious when you were planning on telling me and Hooker about it.”

Starkey was pissed off that Kelso would say anything, and pissed that Marzik thought she’d been keeping something from them. She explained about the Miami device and the difference she had found in the direction of the tape.

“It’s not the big headline you’re making it sound. I wanted to talk it over with you guys today. I didn’t get a chance yesterday.”

“Well, whatever. Maybe you were too busy thinking about Pell.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hey, he’s a good-looking guy. For a fed.”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“He got you in on that Claudius thing, right? All I’m saying is when a guy does you a turn like that, you should think about paying him back. Give the man a blow job.”

Hooker lurched to his feet and walked away. Marzik laughed.

“Jorge is such a goddamned tightass.”

Starkey was irritated.

“No, Beth. He’s a gentleman. You, you’re trailer trash.”

Marzik wheeled her chair closer and lowered her voice.

“Now I’m being serious, okay? It’s pretty obvious you’re attracted to him.”

“Bullshit.”

“Every time somebody mentions the guy, you look like you’re scared to death. And it’s not because he might take the case.”

“Beth? When’s the last time you were choked out?”

Marzik arched her eyebrows knowingly, then rolled her chair back to her desk.

Starkey went for more coffee, ignoring Marzik, who sat on her fat ass with a smugfuckingsmile. Hooker, still embarrassed by Marzik’s remark, lingered on the far side of the squad room, too humiliated to meet Starkey’s eye.

Starkey went back to her desk, scooped up the phone, and dialed Mueller. It was still early, but it was either call Mueller or shoot Marzik between the eyes.

When Mueller came on the line, he sounded rushed.

“I gotta get movin’ here, Starkey. Some turd put a hand grenade in a mailbox.”

“I just have a couple of questions, Sergeant. I spoke with Tennant, and now I need to follow up a few things with you.”

“He’s a real piece of work, ain’t he? He loses any more fingers, pretty soon he’ll be countin’ on his toes.”

Starkey didn’t think it was funny.

“Tennant still denies that he had a shop.”

Mueller interrupted her, annoyed because she was wasting his time.

“Waitaminute. We talked about this, didn’t we?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s nothing new to cover. If he’s got a shop, we couldn’t find it. I been thinking about this since you called. I’ve got to tell you I think the guy is probably telling the truth. A pissant like this wouldn’t have the balls to hold out when he could trade for time.”

She didn’t bother pointing out that for a pissant like Tennant, his shop would be the most important thing in the world.

Instead, she told him that she had reason to believe that Tennant had a shop and more RDX, also. This time when he spoke, his voice was stiff.

“What reason?”

“Tennant told us the same thing he told you, that he salvaged the RDX from a case of Raytheon GMX antipersonnel mines. That’s six mines.”

“Yeah. That’s what I remember.”

“Okay. I looked up the GMX in our spec book down here. It says that each GMX carries a charge of 1.8 pounds of RDX, which means he would have had a little over ten pounds. Now, I’m looking at the pictures of these three cars you sent. They’re fairly light-bodied vehicles, but most of the damage seems to be from fire. I ran an energy calc on the RDX, and it seems to me that if he had used a third of his load on each car, the damage would’ve been much greater than it is here.”

Mueller didn’t answer.

“Then I saw here in your interview notes with Robert Castillo that Tennant asked him to steal a fourth car. That implies to me that Tennant had more RDX.”

When Mueller finally spoke, his tone was defensive.

“We searched that rathole he was living in. We searched every damned box and cubbyhole in the place. We had his car impounded for three months and even stripped the damned rocker panels. We searched the old lady’s house, and her garage, and I even had the Feebs bring out a goddamned dog for the flower bed, so don’t try to make out that I fucked up.”

Starkey felt her voice harden and regretted it.

“I’m not trying to make out anything, Mueller. Only reason I called is that there aren’t many notes here from your interviews with his landlady or employer.”

“There was nothing to write. The old bat didn’t want to talk to us. All she gave a shit about was us not tromping on her flower beds.”

“What about his employer?”

“He said what they all say, how surprised he was, how Dallas was such a normal guy. We wear cowboy boots up here, Starkey, but we’re not stupid. You just remember. That sonofabitch is sitting in Atascadero because of me. I made my case. When you make yours, call me again.”

He hung up before she could answer, and Starkey slammed down her phone. When she looked up, Marzik was staring at her.

“Smooth.”

“Fuck him.”

“You’re really pissed off today. What got up your ass?”

“Beth. Just leave it alone.”

Starkey shuffled through the casework again. Tennant’s landlady had been an elderly woman named Estelle Reager. His employer had been a man named Bradley Ferman, owner of a hobby shop called Robbie’s Hobbies. She found their phone numbers and called both, learning that Robbie’s Hobbies was out of business. Estelle Reager agreed to speak with her.

Starkey gathered her purse, and stood.

“Come on, Beth. We’re going up there to talk to this woman.”

Marzik looked shocked.

“I don’t want to go to Bakersfield. Take Hooker.”

“Hooker’s busy with the tapes.”

“So am I. I’m still talking to the laundry people.”

“Get your shit together and put your ass in the car. We’re taking the drive.”

Starkey left without waiting.

The Golden State Freeway ran north out of Los Angeles, splitting the state through the great, flat plain of the Central Valley. Starkey believed it to be the finest driving road in California, or anywhere; long, straight, wide, and flat. You could set the cruise control at eighty, put your brain on hold, and make San Francisco in five hours. Bakersfield was less than ninety minutes.

Marzik sulked, bound up tight on the passenger side with her arms and legs crossed like a pouting teenager. Starkey wasn’t sure why she had made Marzik come, regretting it even as they left Spring Street. Neither of them spoke for the first half hour until they crested the Newhall Pass at the top of the San Fernando Valley, the great roller coasters and spires of the Magic Mountain amusement park appearing on their left.

Marzik shifted uncomfortably. It was Marzik who spoke first.

“My kids want to go to that place. I keep putting them off because it costs so much, but, Jesus, they see these damned commercials, these people on the roller coasters. The commercials never say how much it costs.”

Starkey glanced over, expecting Marzik to look angry and resentful, but she didn’t. She looked tired and miserable.

“Beth, I want to ask you something. What you said about me and Pell, is it really that obvious?”

Marzik shrugged.

“I don’t know. I was just saying that.”

“Okay.”

“You never talk about your life. I just kinda figured you don’t have one.”

Marzik looked over at her.

“Now can I ask you something?”

Starkey felt uncomfortable with that, but told Marzik she could ask whatever she wanted.

“When’s the last time you had a man?”

“That’s a terrible thing to ask.”

“You said I could ask. If you don’t want to talk about it, fine.”

Starkey realized that she was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white. She took a breath, forcing herself to relax. She grudgingly admitted that she wanted to talk about this, even though she didn’t know how. Maybe that was why she had made Marzik come with her.

“It’s been a long time.”

“What are you waiting for? You think you’re getting younger? You think your ass is getting smaller?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know what you want because we never talk. Here we are, the only two women in the section, and we never talk about anything but the goddamned job. Here’s what I’m saying, Carol, you do this damned job, but you need something else, because this job is shit. It takes, but it doesn’t give you a goddamned thing. It’s just shit.”

Starkey glanced over. Marzik’s eyes were wet and she was blinking. Starkey realized that suddenly everything had turned; they were talking about Marzik, not Starkey.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I want. I want to get married. I want someone to talk to who’s taller than me. I want someone else in that house even if he spends all his time on the couch, and I have to bring him the beer and listen to him fart at three in the morning. I am sick of being alone, with no one for company but two kids eating crackers. Shit, I want to be married so bad they see me coming a mile away and run.”

Starkey didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, Beth. You’re dating, right? You’ll find someone.”

“You don’t know shit about it. I hate this fucking job. I hate my rotten life. I hate these two kids. Isn’t that the most horrible thing you’ve ever heard? I hate these two kids, and I don’t know how I’m gonna get them up here to Magic Mountain.”

Marzik ran out of gas and lapsed into silence. Starkey drove on, feeling uncomfortable. She thought that Marzik must want something for having said all that, but didn’t know what. She felt that she was letting Marzik down.

“Beth, listen?”

Marzik shook her head, not looking over, clearly embarrassed. Starkey was embarrassed, too.

“I’m not very good at girl talk. I’m sorry.”

They lapsed into silence then, each of them lost in her own thoughts as they followed the freeway down from the mountains into the great Central Valley. When Bakersfield appeared on the flat, empty plain, Marzik finally spoke again.

“I didn’t mean that about my kids.”

“I know.”

They left the freeway a short time later, following directions that Estelle Reager had given until they came to a prewar stucco home between the railroad transfer station south of Bakersfield, and the airport. Mrs. Reager answered the door wearing jeans, a checked shirt, and work gloves. She bore the lined, leathery skin of a woman who had spent much of her life in the sun. Starkey guessed that Mueller had come in like a cowboy, thinking he could ride roughshod over the old woman, who had gotten her back up. Once up, she would be hard to win over.

Starkey introduced herself and Marzik.

Reager eyed them.

“A couple of women, huh? I guess none of the lazy men down there wanted to drive up.”

Marzik laughed. When Starkey saw the twinkle that came to Estelle Reager’s eye, she knew they were home free.

Mrs. Reager showed them through the house and out the back door to a small patio covered by a translucent green awning. The awning caught the sun, washing everything with a green glow. The driveway ran along the side of the house to a garage, behind which sat a small, neat guest house. A well-maintained vegetable garden filled the length of the yard between the patio and the guest house.

“We appreciate your seeing us like this, Mrs. Reager.”

“Well, I’m happy to help. I don’t know what I can tell you, though. Nothing I ain’t already said before.”

Marzik went to the edge of the patio to look at the guest house.

“Is that where he lived?”

“Oh, yes. He lived there for four years, and you couldn’t ask for a better young man. I guess that sounds strange, considering what we know about him now, but Dallas was always very considerate and paid his rent on time.”

“It looks empty. Is anyone living there now?”

“I had a young man last year, but he married a teacher and they needed a bigger place. It’s so hard to find quality people in this price range, you know. May I ask what it is you’re hoping to find?”

Starkey explained her belief that Tennant still had a store of bomb components.

“Well, you won’t find anything like that here. The police searched high and low, let me tell you that. They were all in my garden. I was happy to help, but they weren’t very nice about it.”

Starkey knew that her guess about Mueller had been right.

“If you want to look through his things, you can help yourself. They’re all right there in the garage.”

Marzik turned back, glancing at Starkey.

“You’ve still got Tennant’s things?”

“Well, he asked me to keep them, you know, since he was in jail.”

Starkey looked at the garage, then at Mrs. Reager.

“These were things that were here when the police searched?”

“Oh, yes. I got’m in the garage, if you want to look.”

She explained that Tennant had continued to pay rent on his guest house for the first year that he was in prison, but that he had finally written to her, apologizing that he would have to stop and asked if she would be willing to store his things. There weren’t very many. Only a few boxes.

Starkey asked the older woman to excuse them, and walked with Marzik to the garage.

“If she says we can go into the garage, we’re okay with that because it’s her property. But if we go into his boxes and find anything, we could have a problem with that.”

“You think we need a search warrant?”

“Of course we need a search warrant.”

They would need a search warrant, but they were also out of their operating area, Los Angeles police in the city of Bakersfield. The easist thing to do would be to call Mueller and have him come out with a request for a telephonic warrant.

Starkey went back to Mrs. Reager.

“Mrs. Reager, I want to be clear on something. These things in your garage, they are things that the police have already looked at?”

“Well, they were in the guest house when the police came. I would guess they looked.”

“All right. Now, you said that Tennant asked you to store his things. Did you pack them?”

“That’s right. He didn’t have very much, just clothes and some of those adult movies. I didn’t pack those. I threw them away when I found them. The furniture was mine. I rented it furnished in those days.”

Starkey decided that there was nothing to be gained by searching the boxes. Her real hope was in identifying people with whom Tennant might have stored his components well before the time of his arrest.

“Did you know any of his friends or acquaintances?”

“No one ever came here, if that’s what you’re asking. Well, I take that back. One young man did come by a few times, but that was long before Dallas was arrested. They worked together, I think. At that hobby shop.”

“How long before?”

“Oh, a long time. At least a year. I think they were watching those movies, you know?”

Marzik took out the three suspect sketches.

“Do any of these look like the man?”

“Oh, Lord, that was so long ago and I didn’t pay attention. I don’t think so.”

Starkey let it go, thinking that she was probably right.

Marzik said, “That was Tennant’s only job, the hobby shop?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he have any girlfriends?”

“No. None that I knew.”

“What about family?”

“Well, all I knew of was his mother. I know she died, though. Tennant came into my house and told me that. He was heartbroken, you know. We had coffee, and the poor boy just cried.”

Starkey wasn’t thinking about the mother. Something about the boxes bothered her.

“Tennant continued paying rent to you for a year, even after he was in prison?”

“That’s right. He thought he might be released, you know, and wanted to come back. He didn’t want me to rent the house to anyone else.”

Marzik raised her eyebrows.

“Imagine that. Is anyone renting it from you now?”

“No. I haven’t had a guest in there since my last young man.”

Starkey glanced over, and Marzik nodded. They were both thinking the same thing, wondering why Tennant didn’t want to give up his apartment even when he had no use for it. If Tennant wasn’t paying rent now and wasn’t the occupant of record, they could legally enter and search the premises with the owner’s permission.

“Mrs. Reager, would you give us permission to look inside?”

“I don’t know why not.”

The guest house was musty and hot, revealing one large main room, a kitchenette, bath, and bedroom. The furniture had long since been removed, except for a simple dinette table and chairs. The linoleum floor was discolored and dingy. Starkey couldn’t remember the last time she had seen linoleum. Mrs. Reager stood in the open door, explaining that her husband had used the building as an office, while Starkey and Marzik went through the rooms, checking the flooring and baseboards for secret cubbyholes.

Mrs. Reager watched with mild amusement.

“You think he had a secret hiding place?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Those police who were here, they looked for that, too. They tried looking under the floor, but we’re on a slab. There’s no attic, either.”

After ten minutes of poking and prodding, both Starkey and Marzik agreed that there was nothing to find. Starkey felt disappointed. It looked as if the drive up to Bakersfield was a waste, and her trail backwards to the RDX was at an end.

Marzik said, “You know, this is a pretty nice guest house, Mrs. Reager. You think I could send my two kids up here to live with you? We could put iron bars on the windows.”

The older woman laughed.

Starkey said, “Beth, can you think of anything else?”

Marzik shook her head. They had covered everything.

Something about Tennant continuing to pay rent still bothered Starkey, but she couldn’t decide what. After thanking Mrs. Reager for her cooperation, Starkey and Marzik were walking through the gate when it came to her. She stopped at the gate.

Marzik said, “What?”

“Here’s a guy who worked at a hobby shop. He couldn’t have made very much money. How do you figure he could afford paying rent while he was in prison?”

They went back around the side of the house to the back door. When Mrs. Reager reappeared, they asked her that question.

“Well, I don’t know. His mother died just the year before all that mess came up. Maybe he got a little money.”

Starkey and Marzik went back to their car. Starkey started the engine, letting the air conditioner blow. She recalled that Mueller had noted that Tennant’s parents were deceased, but nothing more had been written about it.

“Well, that was a bust.”

“I don’t know. I’m having a thought here, Beth.”

“Uh-oh. Everyone stand back.”

“No, listen. When Tennant’s mother died, he could have inherited property, or used some of the money to rent another place.”

“When my mother died, I didn’t get shit.”

“That’s you, but say Tennant got something. I’ll bet you ten dollars that Mueller didn’t run a title search.”

It would take a day or two to run the title check, but they could have a city prosecutor arrange it through the Bakersfield district attorney’s office. If something was identified, Bakersfield would handle the warrant.

Starkey felt better as they drove back to Los Angeles, believing that she had something that kept her investigation alive. The A-chief had told her to keep the case moving forward; now, if Kelso asked, she could point to a direction. If she and Pell could turn a second lead through Claudius, fine, but now they didn’t need it.

By the time they reached Spring Street, Starkey had decided to call Pell. She told herself that it was because she had to arrange a time for visiting Claudius tonight, but she finally realized that she wanted to apologize for the way she had acted last night. Then she thought, no, she didn’t want to apologize, she wanted another chance to show him that she was human. Another chance at a life. Maybe talking with Marzik had helped, even though they had mostly talked about Marzik.

Starkey saw the manila envelope waiting on her desk all the way from the door. It was like a beacon there, hooking her eye and pulling her toward it. Giant letters on the mailing label read KROK-TV.

Starkey felt her stomach knot. She could tell by the way the envelope bulged that it was a videocassette. After ordering it, she had put it out of her mind. She had refused to think of it. Now, here it was.

Starkey tore open the envelope and lifted out the cassette. A date was written on the label. Nothing else, just the date three years ago on which she died. The noise of her breathing was loud and rasping, her skin cold, and getting colder.

“Carol?”

It took her forever to look over.

Marzik was next to her, her expression awkward. She must have seen the date, recognized it.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Starkey would have spoken, but couldn’t find her voice.

“What are you going to do with it?”

Her voice came from a million miles away.

“I’m going to watch it.”

Marzik touched her arm.

“Do you want someone with you?”

Starkey couldn’t take her eyes from the cassette.

“No.”

Driving home from Spring Street, the tape was a presence in Starkey’s car. It sat on the passenger seat like a body brought back from the dead, breathing so deeply to fill long-empty lungs that it threatened to draw all the air from the car and suffocate her. When traffic forced her to stop, she looked at it. The tape seemed to be looking back. She covered it with her briefcase.

Starkey did not drive directly home. She stopped at a coffee shop, bought a large black coffee, and drank it leaning on a little counter that looked out toward the street. Her neck and shoulders were wound tight as metal bands; her head ached so badly that her eyes felt as if they were being crushed. She thought about the bad stools at Barrigan’s and how a double gin would ease the pressure on her eyes, but she refused to do that. She told herself no; she would see this tape sober. She would witness the events of that moment and her final time with Sugar Boudreaux sober. No matter how terribly it hurt, or how difficult it was. She was sober on that day. She would be sober now.

Starkey decided that the way to play it was not to race home and throw herself into the tape, but to act as if her life were normal. She would pace herself. She would be a mechanical woman feeling mechanical emotions. She was an investigator; this was the investigation of herself. She was a police detective; you do your job, leave it at the office, go home and live your life.

Starkey stopped at the Ralphs market. There was no food in the house, so she decided this was the time to stock up. She pushed the buggy up and down the aisles, filling it with things she had never eaten and probably would never eat. Canned salmon. Creamed corn. Brussels sprouts. Standing in the check-out line, she lost her appetite, but bought the food anyway. What in hell would she do with creamed corn?

Starkey fought an overpowering urge for a drink as soon as she stepped through the door. She told herself it was a habit, a learned pattern. You get home, you have a drink. In her case, several.

She said, “After.”

Starkey brought her briefcase and three bags of groceries into the kitchen. She noticed that there were two messages on her answering machine. The first was from Pell, asking why he hadn’t heard from her and leaving his pager number. She shut him out of her thoughts; she couldn’t have him there now. The second call was from Marzik.

“Ah, Carol, it’s me. Listen, ah, I was just, ah, calling to see if you were okay. Well. Okay. Ah, see ya.”

Starkey listened to it twice, deeply moved. She and Beth Marzik had never been friends, or even had much to do with each other in a personal way. She thought that she might phone Marzik later and thank her. After.

Starkey set the cassette on the kitchen table, then went about putting away the groceries. She had a glass of water, eyeing the cassette as she drank, then washed the glass and put it on the counter. When the last of the groceries were away, she picked up the cassette, brought it into the living room, and put it into her VCR. Marzik’s offer to be with her flashed through her head. She reconsidered, but knew this was just another ploy to avoid watching the tape.

She pressed the “play” button.

Color bars appeared on the screen.

Starkey sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her television. She was still wearing her suit; hadn’t taken off the jacket or removed her shoes. Starkey had no recollection of when KROK arrived on the scene; when they had started taping or for how long. They might have gotten everything or they might only have the end. She recalled that the cameraman had been on top of their van. That was all. The camera was on top of the van and had a view of everything.

The tape began.

She was pulling the straps tight on Sugar’s armor suit. She was already strapped in, except for the helmet. Buck Daggett and another sergeant-supervisor, Win Bryant, who was now retired, moved at the back of the truck, helping them. Starkey hadn’t worn the suit since that day, but now felt the weight of it, the heavy density and the heat. As soon as you put the damned thing on, it turned your body’s heat back at you, cooking you. Starkey, tall and athletic, had weighed one hundred thirty-five pounds; the suit weighed ninety-five pounds. It was a load. Starkey’s first thought: Why do I look so grim? Her expression was somber, almost scowling; wearing her game face. Sugar, naturally, was smiling his movie star smile. Once, not long after they had begun sleeping together, she confessed to him that she was never scared when she was working a bomb. It sounded so much like macho horseshit that she had to work up her courage to say it, but it was true. She used to think that something was wrong with her because she felt that way. Sugar, in turn, had confessed that he was so terrified that as soon as they received a call-out he would pop an Imodium so he wouldn’t crap in the suit. Watching the tape, Starkey thought how relaxed Sugar looked, and that it was she who looked scared. Funny, how what you see isn’t always what’s there.

They were talking. Though the tape had sound, she could hear only the ambient noise around the microphone. Whatever she and Sugar were saying to each other was too far away for the mike to pick up. Sugar must have said something funny; she saw herself smile.

Daggett and Bryant helped them on with their helmets, then handed the Real Time to Sugar. Sugar smacked her helmet, she smacked his, then they lumbered toward the trailer like a couple of spacewalking astronauts.

The field of view gave her the full length of the trailer, the overhanging trees, and a prime view of the thick azaleas that made a thready, matted wall around the trailer. Sugar had cut away part of the bushes on an earlier trip out, leaving a bare spot to work through. As she now watched, they each pointed at different parts of the bush, deciding how to approach the device. The plan was for Starkey to hold the limbs aside so that Sugar could get the snaps with the Real Time.

Starkey watched the events with a sense of detachment she found surprising.

Sugar had less than thirty seconds to live.

She leaned into the bush first, using the weight of the suit to help her shove the limbs aside. She watched herself step away, then move in again for a better position. She didn’t recall that, and marveled at it. In her memory, she had not made that second move. Sugar leaned past her with the Real Time, and that’s when the camera bounced from the earthquake, not a big one, a pretty damned small one by L.A. standards, 3.2 centered just north of them in Newhall. The picture bounced, and she heard the cameraman mutter.

“Hey, was that—?”

The sound of the bomb going off covered his words. On television, it was a sharp crack! like a gunshot.

It happened so fast that all Starkey saw was a flash of light and the Real Time spinning lazily end around end through the air. She and Sugar were down. There were shouts and frantic cries from behind the camera.

“You gotta get this! Don’t fuck up! Keep rolling!”

The picture was small and far away. It was like watching someone else.

Daggett and Bryant ran to them, Daggett to her, Bryant to Sugar, Buck dragging her away from the trailer. One of the things they drilled into you at Bomb School was to fear a secondary explosion. When there was one explosion, there might be another, so you had to clear the wounded from the area. Starkey had never known that she had been moved. She was dead when it happened.

The tape ran for another nine minutes as the paramedics raced forward, stripped away the armor suits, and worked to resuscitate them. In the dreams, Starkey was beneath a canopy of branches and leaves that covered her like lace, but now she saw that there was nothing above her. In the dreams, she was close enough to Sugar to reach out and touch him. Now, she saw that they were ten yards apart, crumpled like broken dolls, separated by a wall of sweating, cursing EMTs desperate to save them. There was no beauty in this moment. The tape ended abruptly as an ambulance was turning into the shot.

Starkey rewound the tape to a point where she and Sugar were both on the ground and pressed the “pause” button. She touched the screen where Sugar lay.

“You poor baby. You poor, poor baby.”

After a while, she rewound the tape, ejected it from the VCR, then turned off her television.

Twice during the evening, the phone rang again. Both times the caller left a message. She didn’t bother to check.

She went to bed without having a drink, slept deeply, and did not dream.

“And you are?”

“Alexander Waverly, attorney at law. I phoned about Dallas Tennant.”

The guard inspected the California State Bar card and the driver’s license, then handed them back, making a note in his log.

“Right. You’re Tennant’s new attorney.”

“Yes, sir. I phoned to arrange the interview.”

“Have you seen clients here at Atascadero before, Mr. Waverly?”

“No. I’ve never been to a facility like this before. My specialty is medical malpractice and pyschiatric disorders.”

The guard smiled.

“We call this ‘facility’ a prison. But it’s more like a country club, if you ask me. You gonna talk to Tennant about why he’s crazy?”

“Well, something like that, but I shouldn’t discuss that with you, should I?”

“No, I guess not. Okay, what you do is sign here and here in the register. I’ll have to inspect your briefcase, and then you come around here through the metal detector, okay?”

“All right.”

“Do you have any weapons or metal objects on you?”

“Not today.”

“A cell phone?”

“Yes. Can’t I bring my cell phone?”

“No, sir. Your pager is okay, but not the cell. We’ll have to hang on to it here. What about a tape recorder?”

“Yes. I have this little tape recorder. It’s okay to have this, isn’t it? I’m the worst at taking notes.”

“The tape recorder’s okay. I just need to look at it, is all.”

“Well, all right, but about my phone. What if I’m paged and need to make a call? I have an associate in court.”

“You let us know and we’ll get you to a phone. Won’t be a problem.”

He signed the register where instructed, careful to use his own pen, careful not to touch the counter or logbook or anything else that might be successfully lasered for a fingerprint. He didn’t bother to watch as the guard inspected his briefcase and tape recorder. Instead, he passed through the metal detector, smiling at the guard who waited on the other side. He traded the cell phone for the briefcase and recorder, then followed the second guard through double glass doors and along a sidewalk to another building. He was aware that a security camera had recorded him. The videotape would be studied and his picture reproduced, but he had a high level of confidence in his disguise. They would never be able to recognize his true self.

John Michael Fowles was delivered to a small interview room where Dallas Tennant was already waiting. Tennant was seated at a table, his good hand covering his damaged hand as if he was embarrassed by it. Tennant smiled shyly, then forgot himself and rested the good hand on a thick scrapbook.

The guard said, “You’ve got him for thirty minutes, Mr. Waverly. You need anything, I’ll be at the desk down the hall. Just stick out your head and give a shout.”

“That’s fine. Thank you.”

John waited until the door was closed, then set his briefcase on the table. He gave Tennant the big smile, spreading his hands.

“Tah-DAH! Mr. Red, at your service.”

Tennant slowly stood.

“This is … an honor. That’s what it is, an honor. There’s no other way to describe it.”

“I know. This world is an amazing place, isn’t it, Dallas?”

Tennant offered his hand, but John didn’t take it. He found Tennant’s personal hygiene lacking.

“I don’t shake hands, m’man. For all I know, you were just playing with your pecker, toying with your tool, commingling with your cockster, know what I mean?”

When Tennant realized that John wasn’t going to shake hands, he pushed the heavy book across the table. His awkward, shuffling manner made John want to kick him.

“I’d like to show you my book. You’re in here, you know?”

John ignored the book. He slipped off his suit coat, folded it over the back of the chair, then unbuckled his belt. He moved the chair with his toe.

“We’ll get to the book, but first you have to tell me about the RDX.”

Tennant watched John like a dog waiting for his master to spoon out the kibble.

“Did you bring it? What we talked about, did you bring it?”

“You don’t have to stand there drooling, Dallas. You think I’m taking off my clothes because I want to flash my pecker?”

“No. No, I’m sorry.”

“Mr. Red is a man of his word. You just remember that. I expect that you’ll be a man of his word, too, Dallas. That’s very important to me, and to our future relationship. You’re not gonna get carried away and brag to anyone that Mr. Red came to see you, now, are you?”

“No. Oh, no, never.”

“You do that, Dallas, and there’ll be hell to pay. I’m just warning you, okay? I want that to be clear between us.”

“I understand. If I told, then you couldn’t come see me again.”

“That’s right.”

John smiled, absolutely certain that Dallas Tennant couldn’t go the week without telling someone of their encounter. John had planned for that.

“The police were already here, and, you know, they might come back. I don’t want you to find out and think I told them anything. I can’t help it that they came.”

“That’s fine, Dallas. Don’t you worry about it.”

“They came about the RDX. I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Good.”

“One of them was a woman. Her name was Carol Starkey. She’s in my book, too. She was a bomb technician.”

Tennant pushed the book across the table, desperate for John to look.

“She wasn’t alone. She brought an ATF agent named Pell or Tell or something like that.”

“Jack Pell.”

Tennant looked surprised.

“You know him?”

“You might say that.”

“He was mean. He grabbed my hand. He hurt me.”

“Well, you just forget about them. We got our own little business here, you and me.”

John dropped his trousers, pulled down his shorts, and un-taped two plastic bags from his groin. One contained a thin gray paste, the other a fine yellow powder. John placed them on top of Tennant’s book.

“This oughta wake’m up out in the vegetable garden, you set it off.”

Tennant massaged each bag, inspecting the contents through the clear plastic.

“What is it?”

“Right now, just a couple of chemicals in bags. You mix’m together with a little ammonia like I’m gonna tell ya, Dallas, and you’re going to end up with what we in the trade call a very dangerous explosive: ammonium picrate.”

Tennant held the two bags together as if he could imagine them mixing. John watched him closely, looking for signs that Tennant knew what he held in his hands. He figured that Tennant had heard of ammonium picrate, but probably had no experience with it. He was counting on that.

“Isn’t that what they call Explosive D?”

“Yeah. Nice and stable, but powerful as hell. You ever work with D before?”

Dallas considered the chemicals again, then put the bags aside.

“No. How do I detonate it?”

John smiled widely, pleased with Tennant’s ignorance.

“Easy as striking a match, Dallas. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.”

“I won’t tell where I got it. I promise. I won’t tell.”

“I ain’t worried about that, Dallas. Not even a little bit. Now, you tell me who has the RDX, then I’ll tell you how to mix these things.”

“I won’t forget this, Mr. Red. I’ll help you out any way I can. I mean that.”

“I know you do, Dallas. Now you just tell me about the RDX, and I am going to give you the power of life and death, right there in those little bags.”

Dallas Tennant stuffed both bags down the front of his pants, then told Mr. Red who had the RDX.

Later, John took his time signing out, but once he was in his car and past the security gate, he pushed hard toward the freeway. He had made Tennant promise not to mix the components for at least two days, but he didn’t trust in that any more than he trusted Tennant not to tell anyone about his visit. He knew that Dallas would mix the damned stuff as soon as possible; a goof like Tennant couldn’t help himself. John was counting on that, too, because he had lied about what the chemicals were, and how they would react.

They weren’t Explosive D, and they were anything but stable.

It was the only way he had to make sure that Tennant kept his mouth shut.

11

Starkey woke at her usual early hour, but without the sense of anxiety she often felt. She made a cup of instant coffee, then sat smoking in the kitchen, trying to figure out how she felt about the tape. She knew she felt differently, but she wasn’t sure how. There had been no revelations, no surprises, no hidden truths to be found. She had witnessed no mistakes on her part or Sugar’s that would have sealed the curse of guilt, but also no heroic action that would remove it. Finally, it came to her. Every day for three years the trailer park had ridden her like a yoke, been immediate to her thoughts. Now the trailer park was farther away.

Starkey showered, put on the same suit that she had worn the day before, then went outside and positioned her car so that the headlights lit the white gardenia bush on the side of her house. She cut three flowers.

The Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood didn’t open their gates until six A.M., but Starkey found a security guard, badged him, and told him she needed to go in. He was an older man, uncertain and insecure, but Starkey kept the flat cop eyes on him until he relented.

Starkey wasn’t one for visiting the dead. She had trouble finding Sugar’s grave, her flashlight darting over the uniform white grave markers like a lost dog trying to find her master. She walked past it twice, then doubled back, found it, and put the flowers beneath his name. Sugar had grown up with the scent of gardenias in Louisiana.

She wanted to tell him something about moving beyond it all, but didn’t know that there was really anything to say. She knew that she would be saying it more for herself than him, anyway. Life was like that.

Finally, Starkey took a deep breath.

“We were something, Shug.”

The old man watched her wordlessly from the gatehouse as she left the cemetery, driving away to start her day.

Starkey spent her first hour at Spring Street organizing her casebook, then made a list of things to cover with Marzik and Hooker. Hooker got there before Marzik, sidling up to her as if he expected her to spray the office with gunfire. Starkey could tell by his expression that Marzik had told him about the tape. She felt disappointed, but that was Marzik.

“Morning, Carol. Ah, how’s it going?”

“I’m okay, Jorge. Thanks.”

“You doing all right?”

“I saw the tape. I’m okay with it.”

Hooker nodded nervously.

“Well, if there’s anything I can do.”

Starkey stood and kissed his cheek.

“You’re a sweet man, Jorge. Thank you.”

Hooker showed enormous white teeth.

“Now get out of my face and lemme get back to work.”

Hooker laughed and went back to his desk. He was still laughing when Starkey’s phone rang.

“Detective Starkey.”

“It’s Warren Mueller, up here in Bakersfield.”

Starkey was surprised, and told him so. She asked why he was calling.

“Your people down there had our city attorney run a property check on Tennant’s mother, a woman named Dorthea Tennant.”

“That’s right.”

“You scored, Starkey. I wanted to be the one to tell you that. I’m standing outside the place right now. The old lady died owning a little duplex up here that’s still in her name. Tennant must have never brought the issue to probate court.”

Starkey felt a tremendous rush of energy. Marzik walked in as Mueller was saying it. Starkey waved her over, cupping the mouthpiece to tell her the news.

“It’s Bakersfield. We got a hit, Beth. Tennant has property.”

Marzik pumped her fist.

Mueller said, “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

“I was telling the people here. Listen, Mueller, you need to have your Bomb Squad roll. There might be explosive materials on the site—”

Mueller cut her off.

“Throttle back, Detective. We’re two jumps ahead of you. You didn’t just score on the property; you got his shop. This is where he kept his goods, Starkey. Our bomb people are securing the location now.”

Hooker and Marzik were both spreading their hands, wanting to know what was going on. She asked Mueller to hold on, told them what she knew, then got back to Mueller.

“Okay, Sergeant. I’m with you. What do you have?”

“This place his mother owned is a little duplex house. One’s empty, but the other has people living in it.”

“Jesus. Was his shop next door?”

Starkey was thinking this was how Tennant continued to pay rent on his own apartment even from prison.

“No, it wasn’t like that. He’s got a converted garage here in back of the place that he kept locked. That’s where he kept the goods.”

“You find the RDX?”

“Negative on the RDX, but we got some TNT and about twenty pounds of black powder.”

“We’re hoping that there might be evidence that links Tennant with his source for the RDX. This has a direct bearing on the Silver Lake investigation, Mueller. If you find anything like papers, correspondence, pictures, anything that gives us a trail, I want it secured. I’ll drive up there to inspect it.”

“Will do, but there’s more. These people in the house said they had a prowler back here about a month ago.”

“Wait. Someone went into the shop?”

“They didn’t see him enter or leave the building. All they saw was some guy looking around. The old man who lives up at the house called out, but the guy takes off over the fence. My wit says it looked like he was carrying something.”

“You’re thinking the RDX?”

“Well, if there was RDX inside, he could have taken it.”

“You get a description?”

“White male between forty and fifty, five ten to six feet, one-eighty, baseball cap, and sunglasses.”

She cupped the phone to fill in Marzik and Hooker. The man in the baseball cap had them trading high fives.

“Sergeant, we have a similar suspect from Silver Lake. If we fax our likeness up there, would you run it past those people, see what they say?”

“You bet.”

“Give me your fax.”

Starkey passed the number along to Marzik, then got back to Mueller.

“One more thing. Was there any sign of forced entry? If the guy went in, did he have to break in?”

“I know what you meant. No. Tennant had the place locked up with a couple of heavy-duty Yale padlocks. We had to cut’m off with bolt cutters. They hadn’t been forced. So if this guy went in there and took the RDX, he had a key.”

Starkey couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

“Mueller, I know you didn’t have to make this call. It shows class.”

“Well, you were right, Starkey. I might be a hardhead, but I’m also a gentleman.”

“You are. This is good work, Sergeant. This is going to help us down here.”

Mueller laughed.

“How about that? I guess me and you’re just about the best two cops ever to strut the earth.”

Starkey smiled as she hung up.

Marzik said, “Fuckin’ A! Are we detectives or what?”

Starkey asked Hooker to see about getting them a look at the enhanced tape. She wanted to see it as quickly as possible because the similar description of the man in the baseball cap gave weight to their 911 caller as the bomber. She had a strong feeling that the man in the long-sleeved shirt would be on the tape. If Hooker was right about the three-hundred-sixty-degree view, he had to be. He had to be within the hundred-yard perimeter to detonate the bomb.

As Hooker set it up, Starkey filled in Kelso, then paged Jack Pell. She felt a powerful urge to share the news with him, which surprised her. She left her own pager number as the return.

The postproduction facility was a block south of Melrose, in an area saturated with Japanese tourists and used-clothing stores. Starkey and Santos drove over together where a thin young man named Miles Bennell met them in the lobby.

Starkey said, “Thanks for making the time for us.”

Bennell shrugged.

“Well, you guys are trying to solve a crime. That’s probably more important than editing a toilet paper commercial.”

“Some days it is.”

She was thinking that she would want Lester to see the tape, too, and probably Buck Daggett. She asked Bennell if they could have a copy when they left.

“You mean to play on a home machine?”

“That’s right.”

Bennell looked pained.

“Well, I can make a copy like that, but you’re going to lose resolution. That’s why you guys had to come here to see it. Do you know anything about how we do this?”

“I can’t even program my VCR.”

“A TV picture is made up of little dots called pixels. When we blow up the images on the tape, they get blurry because the pixels, which contain a set amount of information, expand and the information becomes diluted. What we do is take that pixel, break it into more pixels, then use the computer to extrapolate the missing content. It’s kind of like making high-definition television in reverse.”

“You mean the computer just colors in the space?”

“Well, not really. The computer measures the difference in lights and darks, determines where the shadow lines are, then makes the lights lighter and the darks darker. You end up with really sharp lines and concentrated colors.”

Starkey didn’t understand what he was saying and didn’t care. All she cared about was whether or not it worked.

They walked along a hall past other editing bays, from which she could hear the voices of popular television series, and into a dark room with a console facing a bank of television monitors. The room smelled of daisies.

“How much tape do we have?”

“Eighteen minutes.”

Starkey was surprised.

“Out of almost six hours, we got just eighteen minutes?”

Bennell sat at the console and pushed one of the green back-lit buttons. The center TV monitor flashed with color bars.

“If the only people who were in the shot were the two Bomb Squad guys, we cut it. That was most of the tape. We only get to see bystanders when the cameras changed angles or the helicopters rotated out of position.”

Starkey remembered that from when she viewed the tapes.

“Okay. So what are we going to see?”

“Short clips. Anytime an angle caught a view of the crowd, or the people hiding behind buildings, or things like that, we clipped them. That’s what we enhanced. We got kinda lucky with the angles, too. Jorge said you guys wanted to see pretty much the entire perimeter.”

“That’s right.”

“Between the different helicopters, I think we’ve got that. You’re looking for a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, right?”

“That’s right, wearing a long-sleeved shirt.”

Starkey put the likeness drawing on the console for Bennell to see.

“Hey, that looks like my roommate.”

“Your roommate been to Miami recently?”

“Nah. He never gets out of bed.”

Bennell continued adjusting his console.

“We’ve got a couple guys in caps, I can tell you that. Let’s see what they look like. I can go as fast or slow as you like. We can freeze frame. When we freeze, it will appear to lose some clarity, but I can help that.”

He pressed another button, and the tape started. There was a hyper-real quality to the image that Starkey thought made the objects in the picture look metallic. The blues were a brilliant blue; the grays almost glowed; the shadows were as sharply defined as the shadows on the moon.

Santos said, “It looks like a Maxfield Parrish painting.”

Bennell grinned.

“You got it, dude. Okay, I left a few seconds lead on the camera swings to give our eyes time to keep up with the picture. See, right now there’s no one but the cop—”

“His name is Riggio.”

“Sorry, Officer Riggio. Now, watch, the camera is about to move.”

The angle suddenly shifted, revealing several people clumped behind the cordon tape north of Sunset Boulevard by the Guatemalan market. Starkey recognized the landmarks she noted when she was pacing off distances. The people she was seeing were within that distance and therefore could have been the bomber.

The technician froze the tape, then tickled a joy stick to brighten the image.

Santos pointed at a figure.

“Here. Man here in a cap.”

Starkey counted eight people in this slice of the crowd. The image quality was still indistinct, but far crisper than the images she’d seen on her television when she was half in the bag from too many gins. The man Santos pointed out was wearing a red or brown cap with the bill forward. Lester Ybarra had described a man in a blue cap, like a Dodgers cap, but Starkey had enough experience with eyewitnesses to know that this meant little. It was easy to misremember a color. Because of the angle, it was impossible to see if the man was wearing sunglasses or a long-sleeved shirt.

Starkey said, “Does the shot stay on these people for long?”

Bennell checked a clipboard with his notes.

“They’re in the frame for sixteen seconds.”

“Let’s advance it and see what happens. I want a look at this guy’s arms if we have it.”

Bennell showed her a large dial on the console for controlling the frame advance.

“Here, you can advance it however fast or slow you want by twisting this dial. Clockwise is forward. You want to back up, turn it the other way.”

Starkey turned it too much on her first try, making the tape blur forward. The technician brought it back and let her have the knob again. The second time went better. Twelve seconds into the shot, the man in the hat turned to look at the man behind him and could be seen wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

They worked back and forth through the tape for almost an hour, isolating on everyone within the perimeter. Finally, Santos had to pee. Starkey called a cigarette break and was standing in the parking lot, smoking, when her pager buzzed. She felt a jolt of excitement when she saw that it was Pell. Santos stuck his head out the door.

“We’re ready to go, Carol.”

“Be there in a minute.”

She called Pell from the front seat of her car and told him what Mueller had found in Tennant’s shop. When she was done with that, there was a silence on the phone until she said, “Pell, listen, you got the pizza last time. I’ll take care of dinner tonight.”

She thought that he was going to say no or bring up what she’d said last night, but there was only a silence for a time that grew until he finally broke it.

“What time you want me over there?”

“How about seven?”

When they ended the call, Starkey asked herself what in hell was she doing. She hadn’t intended to bring up dinner or get together with Pell or any of that; that she said those things had surprised her as much as they had probably surprised Pell.

Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to the editing bay. Watching the eighteen minutes of enhanced tape took almost two hours. As they worked through the clips, Starkey charted the remaining perimeter landmarks, and, by the time they finished, was satisfied that they had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the scene, and a fairly complete picture of everyone within the maximum range of the radio transmitter.

But she was also disappointed because the man in the baseball cap was not to be found.

They finished on a wide shot that showed most of the area. Riggio was over the bomb in the instant before the detonation. Buck Daggett was by the Suburban. The parking lot looked wide and emtpy. Starkey crossed her arms and considered that this particular search had come to nothing.

Santos looked crestfallen.

“I was sure he would be here. He had to be.”

“He is, Jorge. Somewhere. If he took off his cap and rolled up his sleeves, he could be any of these people, and we wouldn’t know it, but he has to be here somewhere.”

Bennell seemed as disappointed as Santos. With all his work enhancing the film, he wanted to be a part of cracking the case.

“He could be on the other side of any of these buildings. He could be sitting on the sidewalk behind one of these cars, and we’d never see him.”

Starkey shrugged, but she knew that wasn’t likely. The representative from the radio-control manufacturer had said that the transmitter had to “see” the receiver, which meant that it had to have a clear line of sight.

Bennell said, “Do you still want a copy of the tape?”

“That would be good. Maybe I’ll look at it again later.”

“It won’t be as sharp on your home machine.”

“Right now, the sharpness isn’t helping much.”

Bennell made a copy for each of them.

Starkey and Santos drove back to Spring Street in silence, the enthusiasm of only three hours ago diminished, but not gone. Mr. Red had to be somewhere. The only question was … where?

John Michael Fowles was liking the Beverly Hills Library just fine except for the Arabs. It didn’t matter if they called themselves Arabs, Iranians, Persians (which was just another name for the goddamned Iranians), Iraqis, Saudis, sand niggers, dune coons, shade spades, or Kuwaitis; a raghead was a raghead. John hated the goddamned camel jockeys because they had such an easy time getting on the Ten Most Wanted List. You take an Arab, he farts sideways, and the feds put him on the list. A real American like John had to bust his ass to get there. Beverly Hills was crawling with Arabs.

John closed his eyes and meditated, trying to manage the stress. He pretended that the Arabs weren’t swarming through the stacks like Guccied locusts. It wasn’t easy being the world’s most dangerous man walking free in open sunlight. You had to cope.

John knew where to find the remains of the RDX now and would soon recover it, though that would keep for a day or two. Tennant had been helpful that way, the creepy doof. John hated the socially disgusting, fingerless misfits like Dallas Tennant who inhabited his world. They gave the serious explosives hobbyist a bad name.

After John had learned what he needed to know about the RDX, he had enjoyed hearing about Carol Starkey. Tennant described her as a tough cookie, which John liked a lot. Tennant talked about her so much that John found himself asking questions, and even looking in Tennant’s book just to see the articles on Starkey. After he had finished with Tennant, John had driven back to Los Angeles and here to the library. He spent several hours reading old newspaper stories about Starkey, searching for pictures of her, wondering if she was as good a bomb technician as the stories portrayed.

Tough break, that earthquake.

John had laughed aloud when he’d read that, causing a couple of Iranians to look. Man, John had thought, if there is a God, He is one mean-spirited sonofabitch.

A goddamned earthquake.

Only in California.

John was fascinated that Starkey had actually been killed by a bomb and had then returned from death. He marveled at the experience, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. To have been so close to the blast, to have been washed by the energy, to feel it press over the totality of her body like some insane kiss, to be lifted and caressed that way.

He thought that he and Carol Starkey might be soul mates.

When he left the library, John returned to his room at the Bel Air Hotel, a lovely romantic bungalow renting for eight hundred dollars per night, thanks to his latest American Express Gold card and false identity. He signed on to Claudius. The past few days he had noticed an increased number of posts about himself, and about RDX. Several of the posters were even spreading the same rumor that Jester had said, that Mr. Red was behind Silver Lake. John didn’t like that. Now that John knew Tennant had told Starkey and Pell about Claudius, he realized what was happening: Starkey thought that he had killed Riggio and was baiting him. She had fallen for the copycat’s ploy. John was both annoyed and elated. He enjoyed the idea of Starkey thinking about him, of her trying to catch him.

John read through the new posts and found that they were no longer only about him. Many were about Starkey, some saying that the former bomb tech and poster girl of the bomb crank crowd was now in charge of the investigation. It was like she had her own cheering section.

John scrolled through the thread of posts until he came to the last one:

John wondered what Kia had heard that made him think Mr. Red had tried to kill Starkey. Did these people shit rumors when they woke in the morning? John snapped off his computer and sulked. These people were out of their friggin’ minds. Starkey was becoming the star and he was becoming … the other guy.

After he calmed down, John rebooted the iBook and dialed on to his site in Minnesota. When he had the software he wanted, he hacked into the local telephone company and downloaded Carol Starkey’s address.

The bathroom window was louvered glass, dark green and pebbled, one of those narrow windows from the floor to the ceiling that you opened to let out the steam from your bath. It had probably been in the house since the fifties. He used a shim to slip the latches on the screen, set it aside, then worked out the first piece of glass. The first was the hardest; he anchored the pane with a loose strip of electrician’s tape so it wouldn’t fall, then worked it free using a screwdriver and his fingertips. When the first was out, he reached inside, groped around until he found the lever, then opened the window. After that, the other panes came easily.

John Michael Fowles took out enough of the panes to make an opening about two feet high, then stepped through the window and was inside Carol Starkey’s home.

He took a breath. He could smell her. Soap and cigarettes. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy the feeling of being here in her personal place. Here he was in her house, her home. Here he was, smelling her smells, breathing the air she breathed; it was like being inside her.

First thing John did was take a fast pass through the house, making sure there were no dogs, no guests, nothing that he hadn’t foreseen. The air conditioner running made him edgy; he wouldn’t be able to hear a car pull in, or hear a key slipping into a lock. He would have to hurry.

John unlocked the back door in case he had to leave fast, then returned to the bathroom. He pulled the screen back into place, latched it, then replaced the panes. That done, he gave himself a longer moment; he took a deeper breath. The bathroom counter was a clutter of jars and bottles: Alba Botanica lotion, cotton puffs in a glass jar, soap balls, a basket of dusty pinecones, a blue box of Tampax Super Plus, an LAPD coffee mug holding a toothbrush and a wilted tube of Crest. The mirror above the lavatory was spotted and streaked; the grout between the tile dark with fungus. Carol Starkey, John thought, had not paid attention in Home Ec. He found this disappointing.

John looked at himself in Starkey’s mirror. He made a wide monkey smile, inspecting his teeth, then considered her toothbrush. He put it in his mouth, tasting the Crest. Mint. He worked it around his teeth and gums, brushed his tongue, then put it back in the jar.

He moved through the living room, shooting a quick peek out the window to check for her car. Clear. He sat on the couch, running the flat of his palms along the fabric. He imagined Starkey doing the same thing, their hands moving in unison. The living room was no cleaner than the bathroom. John was particular about his personal grooming and thought it reflected poorly on the character of people who weren’t.

He found her computer on the kitchen table, its modem plugged into the phone line there. The computer was what he wanted, but he passed it now, moving through the kitchen to her bedroom. The bedroom was dark, and cooler than the rest of the house. He stood at the foot of the bed, which was unmade, the sheet and duvet mounded like a nest. This bitch lived like a pig. John knew it was crazy. He knew it was insane, that if she came home now, he would either have to kill her or pay a heavy price, but, Jesus Christ, man, here was her FUCKING BED. John took off his clothes. He rubbed his body over the sheets, his face into her pillow. He flapped his arms and legs like he was making a snow angel. He was hard, but he didn’t want to take the time for that now. He climbed out of the bed, rearranged the mound as it had been, then dressed and returned to the kitchen.

John came prepared for both PC and Macintosh, but was still disappointed to find that she used a PC. It was like the sloppy house; it spoke poorly of her.

He booted the laptop, expecting the usual array of personal icons to appear on the screen, but was surprised to find only one. It hit him then, and John laughed out loud; Starkey didn’t know a goddamned thing about computers. When Tennant told them about Claudius, Pell must have set her up through the feds. She probably didn’t even know how to work the damned thing.

It only took moments after that. John hooked his Zip drive to the laptop, installed the necessary software to copy her files, then uninstalled the software to remove all traces of what had happened. Later, at the hotel, he would open her files to confirm the screen name that she used on Claudius.

Now, he was inside her house. When he had her screen name, he would get inside her mind.

12

Starkey dropped off Hooker at Spring Street, then turned toward home. She stopped at a Ralphs market, where she picked up a roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and some diet soda. When she was waiting in line, it occurred to her that Pell might not drink soda, either, so she picked up a quart of milk, a bottle of merlot, then added a loaf of French bread. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a dinner guest. When Dick Leyton dropped by that evening a year ago, he’d only stayed for a drink.

The traffic moving out of downtown was brutal. Starkey wallowed along in it, feeling stupid. She hadn’t planned on asking Pell over and hadn’t thought it through. The words had just spurted out, and now she felt obvious and embarrassed. Once, when Starkey was sixteen years old, a boy she barely knew named James Marsters had invited her to the junior-senior prom. On the day of the dance, Starkey had put on the gown she was borrowing from her older sister and thought herself so fat and ugly that she was convinced James Marsters would run screaming. Starkey had vomited twice and had been unable to eat anything all day. She felt like that now. Starkey could disarm a case of dynamite wired to a motion sensor, but things like this held a different potential for destruction.

She was late getting home. Pell was already there, parked on the street in front of her house. He got out as she pulled into her drive and walked over to meet her. When she saw the expression on his face, she wanted to reach for her Tagamet. He looked like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be here.

She got out with the bags.

“Hey.”

“Help you with those?”

She gave him one of the two bags, telling him about Bakersfield as she let them into the house. When she told him that a man was seen at Tennant’s shop who could have been the same man making the 911 call, Pell seemed interested, but when she described the suspect as a man in his forties, Pell shrugged.

“It’s not our guy.”

“How do you know it’s not our guy?”

“Mr. Red is younger. This is Los Angeles; everyone here wears sunglasses and baseball caps.”

“Maybe our guy isn’t Mr. Red.”

Pell’s face darkened.

“It’s Mr. Red.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“It is.”

Starkey felt herself growing irritated at Pell’s certainty, like he had inside information or something. She thought again of telling him about the joint tape, but she still wanted to wait for Janice Brockwell.

“Look, maybe we shouldn’t talk about it. I think we’ve got something good here, and you’re shitting on it.”

“Then maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”

They put the two bags on the counter near her sink. Starkey took a deep breath, then faced him, squaring off as if she was about to ask to see some identification. She decided that the only way to survive the evening was to get it out in the open.

“Tonight is a date.”

She felt stupid. Here they were, standing in her kitchen, and she pops with that like it was a confession.

Pell looked so uncomfortable that Starkey wanted to crawl into the oven. He searched her eyes, then stared at the bags.

“I don’t know about this, Carol.”

Now she felt humiliated; three inches tall and kicking herself for being such an ass.

“I understand if you want to leave. I know this looks stupid. I’ve got to tell you, I feel really stupid right now, so if you think I’m as stupid as I’m thinking I am, I wish the hell you would leave.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“It’s only a date, for Christ’s sake. That’s all it is.”

She stared past him at the floor, thinking this was the biggest botch job anyone could imagine.

Pell started taking things from the bags.

“Why don’t we put these things away and have dinner?”

He worked for several minutes while she stood there. Finally, she pitched in, taking the things from the bags, putting the milk in the refrigerator, taking freshly washed plates and silverware from the dishwasher. Some date. Nobody was saying anything.

Starkey put the chicken and mashed potatoes to one side, wondering what she should do with them. They looked pathetic in their foil and plastic containers.

“Maybe we should heat them.”

Pell put his palm on the carton with the chicken.

“Feels warm enough.”

Starkey got out plates and a knife to cut the chicken, thinking that she should have gotten stuff for a salad. She felt thoroughly dispirited, which Pell seemed to read. It made him look even more awkward.

He said, “Why don’t I help? I’m a pretty good cook.”

“I can’t cook worth a shit.”

“Well, since it’s already cooked, you probably can’t mess it up too badly. All we have to do is put it on plates.”

Starkey laughed. Her body shook with it, and she feared she might cry, but she refused to let herself. You were always a tough girl. Pell put down the food and came to her, but she held up a hand, stopping him. She knew that doors were opening. Maybe because of what had happened to Charlie Riggio; maybe because she had seen the tape of the events in the trailer park; but maybe just because it had been three years and she was ready. She thought, then, that it didn’t matter why. It just was.

“I’m not very good at this, Pell. I’m trying to let myself feel something again, but it isn’t easy.”

Pell stared at the chicken.

“Damnit, why don’t you say something? I feel like I’m stuck out here all alone and you’re just watching me.”

Pell stepped closer and put his arms around her. She tensed, but he did nothing more than hold her. She allowed it. Slowly, she relaxed, and when her arms went around him, he sighed. It was as if they were giving themselves over to each other. Part of her wanted it to grow into more, but she wasn’t ready for that.

“I can’t, Jack.”

“Shh. This is good.”

Later, they brought the food into the dining room and spoke of inconsequential things. She asked him about the ATF and the cases he had worked, but he often changed the subject or turned his answer into a question.

Later still, when the dishes were cleared and cleaned and put away, he stepped away from her, still awkward, and said, “I guess I should go.”

She nodded, walking him to the front door.

“I hope it wasn’t too awful.”

“No. I hope we can do it again.”

Starkey laughed.

“Man, you must be a glutton for punishment.”

Pell stopped in the door and seemed to struggle with what he wanted to say. He had been struggling for all of their time together, and now she wondered why.

“I like you, Starkey.”

She felt herself smile.

“Do you?”

“This isn’t easy for me, either. For a lot of reasons.”

She took heart in that.

“I like you, too, Pell. Thanks for coming by tonight. I’m sorry it got kinda weird.”

Pell stepped through the door and was gone. Starkey listened as his car pulled away, thinking that maybe a little weirdness was good for people.

Starkey finished straightening the kitchen, then went back to her bedroom, thinking to get undressed and crawl into bed. She decided the bed was a mess, so she stripped the sheets and pillowcases, stuffed them in the wash, and put on fresh. Her whole damned house was a mess, and needed to be scoured. She showered, instead.

After the shower, she checked her messages at work, and found that Warren Mueller had called. His was the only message.

“Hey, Starkey, it’s Warren Mueller. I ran that crappy picture you faxed past the old man at Tennant’s place. He couldn’t tell one way or the other, but he thought they kinda looked alike, white guy around forty, the hat and the glasses. I’m gonna have our artist work with him, see if we can’t refine the picture. We get anything, I’ll fax it down. You take care.”

Starkey deleted the message, then hung up, thinking that their picture might be crappy, but everyone was seeing someone who looked more or less like the same guy, and nothing like Mr. Red.

Starkey decided that she might as well check Claudius. She went back into the dining room, turned on the computer, and signed on. She reread the message boards, noting that AM7 had responded to their post about RDX with a long, meandering story about his time in the army. Several other people had responded also, though no one offered to buy or sell RDX or even hinted that they knew how. A lot of people were posting about her.

Starkey was reading when a message window appeared on her screen.

A tingle of fear rippled up her back. Then she smiled because it had to be a joke, or some Internet weirdness that she had no chance of understanding.

The window hung there.

Starkey opened the window.

Starkey knew it had to be a joke.

Starkey went for her briefcase. She looked up Pell’s hotel number and called him there. Getting no answer, she phoned his pager.

She stared at the words, then checked the time and knew that it couldn’t be Pell; he didn’t have a computer. It must be Bergen. Bergen was probably a pervert, and he was the only other person besides Pell who knew about HOTLOAD.

Starkey stared at the messager, irritated.

Starkey’s phone rang, Pell calling back.

She said, “I think we’ve got a problem with Bergen. I’m on Claudius. This window just pops up, and whoever it is knows that I’m Hotload. He says that he’s Mr. Red.”

“Blow him off, Carol. It must be Bergen. I’ll see about him tomorrow.”

When Starkey put down the phone, the message was hanging there, waiting. She stared at it, but made no move to respond.

John Michael Fowles signed off Claudius. He broke the cell phone connection through which he had signed on to the net and settled back, pushing the iBook aside. The moonlit shade felt good after the heat of the day, sitting there on the quiet street.

His car was parked just up the block from Starkey’s house, in the dense shadows of an elm tree heavy with summer leaves. He could see her house from here. He could see the lights in her windows. He watched.

Dallas Tennant carried the ammonia in a paper cup, pretending it was coffee. He blew on it and pretended to sip, the sharp fumes cutting into his nose, making his eyes water.

“Night, Mr. Riley.”

“Good night, Dallas. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Mr. Riley was still at his desk, finishing the day’s paperwork. Dallas raised the cup to him.

“Is it all right if I take the coffee back to my cell?”

“Oh, sure. That’s fine. Is there any more in the pot?”

Dallas looked pained, and held out the cup.

“This was the last, Mr. Riley. I’m sorry. I’ve washed the pot. Would you like me to make another before I go? Would you like this one?”

Riley waved him off and turned back to his work.

“That’s all right. I’ll be leaving soon enough. You enjoy it, Dallas.”

Dallas bid Riley good night again, then let himself out. He hid the ammonia in a supply closet long enough to stop at the infirmary for his meds, then continued on to his room, walking more quickly because he was anxious to make the explosive. True, he had promised Mr. Red that he would wait a few days, but Dallas would have mixed the Explosive D yesterday as soon as Mr. Red had gone, if he had had the ammonia and a detonation system. He didn’t, so, earlier this morning when Mr. Riley was gone for lunch, Dallas had signed on to the Internet and printed out pornographic pictures from web sites in Amsterdam and Thailand. He had traded photographs of whores having sex with horses for the ammonia, and Asian women fisting each other for the match heads and cigarettes that he would use as a detonator. Once those things were in his possession, he had spent the rest of the day growing so anxious to mix his new toy that he was damn near running by the time he reached his cell.

Dallas waited long minutes by the door, making sure that no one was coming along the hall, then huddled at the foot of his bed with the two plastic bags and the cup of ammonia. Mr. Red’s instructions were simple: Pour the ammonia in the bag with the powder, mix it well until the powder was dissolved, then pour that mixture into the bag with the paste. Mr. Red had warned him that this second bag would get warm as the two substances mixed, but that the mixture would stiffen to a tacky paste, sort of like plastique, and the explosive would then be active.

Dallas poured the ammonia into the first bag, zipped the top, and kneaded it to dissolve the powder. He planned to make the explosive, then spend the rest of the night fantasizing about setting it off in one of the metal garbage cans behind the commissary. Just thinking about the can coming apart, the crack of thunder that was going to snap across the yard, made him aroused.

When the powder was dissolved, Dallas was preparing to pour the solution into the second bag when he heard the guard approaching.

“Tennant? You get your meds okay?”

Dallas pushed the bags under his legs, bending like he was untying his shoes. The guard was staring in at him through the bars.

“Sure did, Mr. Winslow. You can check with’m, if you want. I went by there.”

“No problem, Tennant. I’ll see them later this evening. I just wanted to make sure you remembered.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

The guard started away, then paused and frowned. Dallas’s heart hammered; sweat sprouted over his back.

“You okay in there, Tennant?”

“Yes, sir. Why?”

“You’re bent over all hunched.”

“I have to poo.”

The guard considered that, then nodded.

“Well, don’t shit your pants, Dallas. You’ve got about an hour till lights out.”

Dallas listened as the footsteps faded, then went to the door to peek up and down the hall before resuming his work. He opened the second bag, balanced it between his legs, then added the powder solution. He sealed the top and kneaded the second bag. Just as Mr. Red had told him, the bag grew warm.

What Mr. Red hadn’t told him was that the contents would turn bright purple.

Tennant was excited, and concerned. Earlier that day, when he had finished downloading the pornography, he had web-searched a couple of explosives sites and read about ammonium picrate. He had learned that it was a strong, stable explosive, easy to store and use, and safe (as far as such things go) because of its stability. But both articles had also described ammonium picrate as a white, crystalline powder; not a purple paste.

The bag grew warmer.

Tennant stopped kneading. He looked at the paste in the bag. It was swelling the way yeasty bread dough swells, as if it was filling with tiny bubbles of gas.

Tennant opened the bag and sniffed. The smell was terrible.

Two thoughts flashed in Dallas Tennant’s mind. One, that Mr. Red couldn’t have been wrong; if he said this was ammonium picrate, then it must be ammonium picrate. Two, that some explosives don’t require a detonator. Dallas had read about that once, about substances that explode just by being mixed together. There was a word for reactions like that, but Dallas couldn’t remember it.

He was still trying to recall that word when the purple substance detonated, separating his arms and rocking Atascadero so deeply that all the alarms and water sprinklers went off.

The word was “hypergolic.”

13

Starkey tried to ignore the way Marzik was staring at her. Marzik had finished interviewing the laundry people without finding anyone else who had seen the 911 caller and was supposed to be writing a report to that effect, but there she was, kicked back, arms crossed, squinting at Starkey. She had been watching Starkey for most of the morning, probably hoping that Starkey would ask why, but Starkey ignored her.

Finally, Marzik couldn’t stand it anymore and wheeled her chair closer.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m looking at you.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Liar. I’ve been admiring that Mona Lisa smile you’re sporting today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That smile right there beneath your nose, the one that says you bit the bullet and got yourself a fed-kabob.”

“You always take something sweet and make it gross.”

Marzik broke into a nasty grin.

“I WAS RIGHT!”

Every detective in the squad room looked. Starkey was mortified.

“You’re not right. Nothing like that happened.”

“Something must’ve happened. I haven’t seen you this mellow since I’ve known you.”

Starkey frowned.

“The change has come early. You should try it.”

Marzik laughed, and pushed her chair back to her desk.

“I’d be willing to try whatever put that grin on your face. I’d try it twice.”

Starkey’s phone rang while Marzik was still smirking. It was Janice Brockwell, calling from the ATF lab in Rockville, Maryland.

“Hi, Detective. I’m phoning about the matter we discussed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“In the seven bombing events that we attribute to Mr. Red, we have six usable end caps, out of an estimated twenty-eight end caps used in the devices. I broke the six and determined that the joint tape was wrapped in a clockwise direction each time.”

“They were all wrapped in the same direction?”

“Clockwise. That’s right. You should know that the six end caps are from five different devices used in three cities. I consider this significant, Detective. We’re going to include this as part of Mr. Red’s signature in the National Repository and forward it along as an alert to our field offices. I’ll copy my report to you via snail mail for your files.”

Starkey’s palms were cold, and her heart pounded. If Mr. Red wrapped the joint tape in the same direction every time, why had the Silver Lake bomb been wrapped in the opposite direction?

Starkey wanted to shout at Hooker and Marzik.

Brockwell said, “You did good, Detective Starkey. Thanks for the assist.”

Starkey put down the phone, trying to decide what to do. She was excited, but she wanted to be careful and not overreact. A small thing like the direction in which that tape was wrapped might have meant nothing, but now meant everything. It did not fit within the pattern. It was a difference, and therefore it meant that the Silver Lake bomb was different.

Starkey paced to the coffee machine to burn off energy, then returned to her desk. Mr. Red was smart. He knew that his devices were recovered, that the analyses were shared. He knew that federal, state, and local bomb investigators would study these things and build profiles of him. Part of the thrill for him was believing that he was smarter than the men and women who were trying to catch him. That was why he etched the names, why he hunted bomb technicians, why he had left the false device in Miami. He would enjoy playing with their minds, and what better way to play than change a single small component of his signature just to create doubt, to make investigators like Carol Starkey doubt.

If the bomb was different, you had to ask why? And the most obvious answer to that was also the most terrible. Because a different person had built it.

Starkey wanted to think it through. She wanted to be absolutely certain before she brought it back to Kelso.

“Hey, Beth?”

Marzik glanced over.

“I’ve got to get out of here for a few minutes. I’m on pager, okay?”

“Whatever.”

Starkey walked the few short blocks to Philippe’s, smoking. She knew bombs, she knew bombers. She decided that Mr. Red would not change his profile, even to taunt the police. He was too much about being known; he didn’t want them to doubt who they were dealing with; he wanted them to know it. The very fact of his signature screamed that he wanted the police to be absolutely certain with whom they were dealing. Mr. Red wanted his victory to be clear.

At Philippe’s, Starkey bought a cup of coffee, sat alone at one of the long tables, and lit a fresh cigarette. It was illegal to smoke in the restaurant, but the customer load was light and no one said anything.

I did not kill Charles Riggio.

The feds had multiple suspect descriptions from the Miami library as well as earlier sightings, all of which described Red as a man in his late twenties. Yet Lester Ybarra had described a man in his forties, as had the old man in Tennant’s duplex. If Mr. Red had not built this bomb, then someone else had built it, someone who had gone to great lengths to make the bomb appear to be Mr. Red’s work. Starkey finally said the word to herself: Copycat.

Copycats were most common in serial killer and serial rapist crimes. Hearing frequent news coverage of such crimes could trigger the predisposed into thinking they could get away with a one-shot homicide, using the copycat crime to cover a motive that was far removed from an insane desire to kill or an overpowering rage against women. The perpetrator almost always believed that the cover of the other crimes would mask his true intent, which was typically revenge, money, or the elimination of a rival. In almost all cases, the copycat did not know the full details of the crimes because those details had not been released. All the copycat knew was what he or she had read in the papers, which was invariably wrong.

Yet this copycat knew all the details of how Mr. Red constructed his bombs except for the one thing that had never appeared in the bomb analysis reports: the direction that Mr. Red had wrapped the plumber’s tape.

Starkey watched the smoke drift off her cigarette in a lazy thread, uncomfortable with the direction of her thoughts. The pool of suspects who knew the exact components of Mr. Red’s bombs, and how he put those components together, was small.

Cops.

Bomb cops.

Starkey sighed.

It was hard to think about. The person who murdered Charlie Riggio had been within one hundred yards. He had seen Riggio arrive at the scene, watched him strap into the armor, waited as Riggio approached the device. He knew who he was killing. In the two and a half years that she had served as a bomb investigator, she had made exactly twenty-eight cases, none of those against people with access to the details of Mr. Red’s bombs or with the acumen to pull it off.

Starkey dropped her cigarette into the coffee, its life extinguished in a sharp hiss.

Starkey took out her cell phone. She caught Jack Pell at his motel.

“Pell? I need to see you.”

“I was getting ready to call. I spoke with Bergen this morning.”

They agreed to meet at Barrigan’s. Starkey wanted to see him with an urgency that surprised her. It had occurred to her, late last night and again early this morning, that she might be falling in love with him, but she wasn’t sure and wanted to be careful. The past three years had left an emptiness within her that longed to be filled. She told herself that it was important not to confuse that longing with love, and not to let that need distort friendship and kindness into something it wasn’t.

The morning crowd at Barrigan’s was the usual assortment of Wilshire detectives, sprinkled with drifters from the Rampart table and a clique of Secret Service agents who kept to themselves at the end of the bar. Even at ten in the morning, the place was loaded with cops. Starkey shoved through the door and, when she saw Pell sitting at the same table where they had sat before, felt a flush of warmth.

“Thanks. I really need to see you about this.”

He flashed a smile, clearly pleased to see her. He looked happy. She hoped it was because he was seeing her.

“Jack, it’s time for you to take the case.”

He smiled the way somebody smiles when they think you’re joking, but aren’t sure.

“What are you talking about?”

It wasn’t easy to say.

“I’m talking about you — the ATF — taking over the investigation into Charlie Riggio’s murder. I cannot carry it forward, Jack. Not effectively. I now believe that what happened in Silver Lake to Charlie involves the Los Angeles Police Department.”

He glanced toward the bar, probably to see if anyone was listening.

“You think one of your people is Mr. Red?”

“I don’t think Mr. Red is behind this. I could go over Kelso’s head to Parker, or go to IAG, but I am not prepared to do that until I have more evidence.”

Pell leaned forward and took her hand. She felt encouraged. It was funny how you could draw strength from someone you cared about.

“Waitaminute. Hold on. I spoke with some people about Bergen this morning. Bergen was with other clients last night at exactly the time you called me. You had Mr. Red last night, Carol. We’ve got the bastard. We can use this to bring him in.”

Pell was so excited she thought he was going to fall out of his chair.

“That can’t be. He knew my name. He knew that Hotload is Carol Starkey. How could he know that?”

Pell answered slowly.

“I don’t know.”

“He told me that he didn’t kill Riggio. He said that he knew who did.”

Pell stared at her.

“Is that what this is about? He tells you he didn’t kill Riggio, and you believe him?”

“He didn’t build the Silver Lake bomb.”

“Did he tell you that, too?”

“The ATF lab in Rockville, Maryland, told me that.”

She told him about the call from Janice Brockwell, and how the Silver Lake bomb differed from every other bomb that had been attributed to Mr. Red.

Pell grew irritated, staring at the Secret Service agents until she finished.

“It’s just tape.”

Pell’s voice had taken on a note of impatience. Her own voice came out harder.

“Wrong, Jack, it is forensic evidence, and it shows that this bomb is different. It’s different in the one way that no one knew about because it had never been in any of the bomb analysis reports. Every other component could have been copied from a police report. He cut Riggio’s name in the bomb to make us think it was Mr. Red.”

Pell stared at the bar again. With that one turn of his head, she felt a chill of loneliness that left her confused and frightened.

“It’s Mr. Red. Trust me on this, Starkey, it’s Mr. Red. Everything we’re doing here is working. We’re flushing out the sonofabitch. Don’t get sidetracked. Keep your eye on the ball.”

“The people in the Miami library described a man in his twenties. The other descriptions you had were also of men in their twenties. But here in L.A., we’ve got two descriptions of men in their forties.”

“Mr. Red changes his appearance.”

“Damnit, Pell, I need your help with this.”

“Every investigation turns up contradictory evidence. I’ve never seen an investigation that didn’t. You’ve grabbed onto a few small bits and now you’re trying to turn the whole investigation. It’s Mr. Red, Carol. That’s who you need to have in your head. That’s who we’re going to catch. Mr. Red.”

“You’re not going to help me, are you?”

“I want to help you, but this is the wrong direction. It’s Mr. Red. That’s who did this. Please just trust me.”

“You’re so fixated on Mr. Red that you won’t even look at the facts.”

“It’s Mr. Red. That’s why I’m here, Starkey. That’s what I’m about. Mr. Red.”

The warm feelings that she had felt were gone. It should have helped, she later thought, that he seemed to be in as much pain as she, but it didn’t.

She was alone with it. She told herself that was okay; she had been alone for three years.

“Pell, you’re wrong.”

Starkey walked out, and drove back to Spring Street.

“Hook, you have the casebook?”

Hooker looked up at her, eyes vague from his paperwork.

“I thought you were gone.”

“I’m back. I need to see the casebook.”

“Marzik had it. I think it’s on her desk.”

Starkey found the book on Marzik’s desk and brought it to her own. One of the pages contained a list of all police officers at the Silver Lake parking lot on the day Riggio died. She felt surreal looking at the list. These people were friends and coworkers.

“You find it?”

Hooker was staring at her. She startled at his voice, closing the book, then tried to cover her embarrassment.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Marzik had it, right?”

“It was on her desk. Thanks.”

The book contained the names of those Bomb Squad officers present at the time of the call-out and also listed those officers who checked in on the scene after the event. Buck, Charlie, Dick Leyton, and five other members of the day-shift Bomb Squad. Eight out of the fourteen-person squad. Herself, Hooker, Marzik, and Kelso. The uniformed officers and detectives from Rampart. What the list could not say, and what she could not know for sure, was when those people had arrived or who else might have been at the scene, hidden by cover or disguise.

Starkey removed the page from the binder, made a copy of it, then returned the book to Marzik’s desk.

The drive north to Glendale happened in slow motion. Starkey constantly questioned her actions and conclusions, both about Riggio and about Pell. She wasn’t a homicide investigator, but she knew the first rule of any homicide investigation: Look for a link between the victim and the killer. She would have to look to Charlie Riggio and hope that something in his life would lead to who killed him. She felt sick about Pell. She wanted to call him; she wanted him to call her. She was certain that he felt something for her, but no longer trusted her certainty.

Starkey pulled into the police parking lot, but did not leave her car. She stared at the modern brick Bomb Squad building, the day bright and hot. The parking lot, the great dark Suburbans, the laughing techs in their black fatigues; everything was different. She was suddenly within the perception puzzle that Dana had described, one view giving her a picture of police officers, another the faces of suspects and murderers. Starkey stared at the building and wondered if she were out of her mind for thinking these things, but either she was right about what the plumber’s tape meant or she was wrong. She hoped that she was wrong. She sat smoking in the car, staring at the building where she had felt most alive and at home, most a part of something, and knew that if she was wrong she had to prove it to herself.

“How’re you holding up, kiddo?”

Starkey nearly jumped out of her skin.

“You scared me.”

“I saw you sitting out here and thought you saw me. If you’re coming in, you can walk with me.”

Dick Leyton was smiling his kindly smile, the tall benevolent older brother. She got out and walked with him because she didn’t know what else to do.

“Has Charlie’s desk been cleared yet?”

“Buck came by and boxed it for the family. Charlie had two sisters. Did you know that?”

She didn’t want to talk about Riggio’s sisters or walk with Dick Leyton, who had come to see her every night when she was in the hospital.

“Ah, no, no, I didn’t. Listen, Dick, are Charlie’s things still here?”

Leyton didn’t know, asking why she was interested. She was so embarrassed at the lie that she thought he must surely see it, but he didn’t.

“I didn’t know about the sisters. You work on something like this, you see the case, but you never see the man. I guess I was hoping to look at his things to get to know him a little better.”

Leyton didn’t answer. They walked together into the squad room where Russ Daigle pointed out the box of Riggio’s things beneath his desk. Riggio’s locker had been cleared also, his sweats and a change of clothes and toiletry items bagged and secured with the box. Waiting for his sisters.

Starkey carried the box into the suit room where she could be alone. Buck had been complete and careful in packing Riggio’s things: Pens and pencils were bound together with a rubber band, then secured in the LAPD Bomb Squad coffee cup that had probably held them; two powerboat magazines and a James Patterson paperback were protecting a short stack of snapshots. Starkey examined the snapshots, one showing Riggio on a motorcycle, another of Riggio as a whitewalled Marine, three showing Riggio posing with a trophy deer. Starkey recalled that Riggio was a hunter, who often bragged of being a better shot than the two SWAT buddies with whom he hunted every year. She doubted that any of them concealed a motive for Charlie Riggio’s death. The street clothes that Riggio had probably worn to work on the day he died were neatly folded and placed to cover everything else. A Motorola cell phone was wrapped in a black T-shirt to keep it safe. Starkey looked through the clothes for a wallet, didn’t find it, and figured that Riggio had probably had the wallet in his fatigues when he died. The coroner’s office either still had it or would release it directly to the next of kin. Starkey finished with the box in less than ten minutes. She was hoping for a desk calendar or day book that might give her an insight into his life over the past few months, but there wasn’t anything like that. She was surprised at how little of a personal nature Riggio had brought to the job.

She brought the box back out to the squad room and stowed it beneath the now empty desk.

Russ Daigle nodded at her, his face tired.

“Pretty sad, isn’t it?”

“Always, Russ. Has the family set a date for the funeral yet?”

“Well, you know, the coroner hasn’t released the body.”

She hadn’t known. She’d been so busy with the investigation that she hadn’t paid attention.

Daigle had turned back to his paperwork, his heavy shoulders hunched over the black desk. His gray hair was cropped short, the back of his neck was creased and stubbled. The oldest of the sergeant-supervisors, he had been on the squad longer than anyone. Last year an officer named Tim Whithers had transferred in from Metro, the elite uniform division. Whithers was a tough, cocky young guy, who insisted on calling Russ “Dad” even though Russ repeatedly asked him to stop. Whithers called him Dad until Russ Daigle coldcocked him one morning out in the parking lot. One punch below the ear. Knocked him out. Whithers went back to Metro.

“Hey, Russ?”

He glanced over.

“Were you at Silver Lake when it happened?”

“I was at home. Something like this happens, you always wish you had been there, though. You think you maybe could have done something. You feel that, too?”

“Yeah. I feel like that, too.”

“Are you okay, Carol? You look like something’s on your mind.”

Starkey walked away without answering, feeling a sudden swell of panic as if she were trapped in a den of killers, and hated herself for it. Russ Daigle was happily married, had four adult children and nine grandchildren. Their pictures were a forest on his desk. To think he might have killed Charlie Riggio was absurd.

“Carol?”

She didn’t look back.

14

Starkey left Glendale without knowing where she would go or what she would do. That was bad. Working an investigation was like working a bomb. You had to keep your focus. You had to have a clear objective and work to that end, even when you were drinking sweat and pissing blood.

If this were a normal investigation, Starkey would have questioned Riggio’s coworkers about his friends and relationships, but now she couldn’t do that. She considered contacting his two SWAT hunting buddies, but worried that word of it might get back to the Bomb Squad.

Leyton had said that Riggio had two sisters. Starkey decided to start there.

Every casebook included a page on the victim. Name, address, physical description, that kind of thing. On the night of Riggio’s death, Starkey had assigned Hooker the task of gathering this information, and he had done his usual thorough job. She looked up the page and saw that Riggio was the middle child between two sisters, Angela Wellow and Marie Riggio. The older of the sisters, Angela, lived in Northridge, which wasn’t far from Charlie’s apartment in Canoga Park. The other sister lived south of Los Angeles in Torrance.

Starkey phoned Angela Wellow, identified herself, and expressed her condolences.

Angela’s voice was clear, but tired. Jorge had listed her age as thirty-two.

“You worked with Charlie?”

Starkey explained that she had, but that now she was a bomb investigator with the Criminal Conspiracy Section.

“Ms. Wellow, there are some—”

“Angela. Please, I get enough of that missus from the kids. If you were a friend of Charlie’s, I don’t want you calling me missus.”

“You live near Charlie’s apartment, don’t you, Angela?”

“That’s right. It’s just over here.”

“Has anyone from the department talked to you?”

“No, not to me. Someone called our parents about Charlie, then Mom and Dad called me. They live in Scottsdale. I had to call my sister.”

“Reason I’m calling now is because you live so close to Charlie’s. We think that Charlie had some files that we need on two other cases. We think he brought them home. Now we need them back. Could you meet me at his apartment, and let me see if I can find them?”

“Charlie had files?”

“Bomb reports on older cases. Nothing to do with Silver Lake. Now we need them back.”

A note of irritation crept into Angela’s voice.

“I was already there. I’ve been there every day, trying to get his things packed. Oh, for God’s sake.”

Starkey made herself hard and detached, even though she felt like a dog for lying.

“I appreciate your feelings, Angela, but we really need those files.”

“When do you have to do this?”

“I’m available right now. The sooner the better from our end.”

They agreed to meet in an hour.

With the traffic, it took Starkey almost that long to get to Northridge, high in the San Fernando Valley. Riggio’s apartment building was on a busy street three blocks south of the Cal State campus. It was a great cave of a building, an upscale stucco monster that had probably been rebuilt after the big earthquake in ’94. Starkey left her car in a red zone, then went to the glass security doors where she and Angela had agreed to meet. Two young women on their way out with book bags held the door, but Starkey waved them off, telling them that she was meeting someone. Starkey watched them heading toward the campus and smiled. This was just the kind of place where Charlie Riggio would live. Inside, there would be a pool and Jacuzzi, probably a game room with a pool table, cookouts every night, and plenty of young women.

Now, a thin young woman with the harried look of a mother opened the glass door and looked out. She was carrying a little boy who couldn’t have been more than four.

“Are you Detective Starkey?”

“Ms. Wellow? Sorry, Angela?”

“That’s right.”

Angela Wellow must have parked beneath the building and entered through the inside. Starkey showed her badge, then followed Angela through the central courtyard and up a flight of stairs to a second-floor apartment. The little boy’s name was Todd.

“I hope this won’t take long. My older boy gets home from school at three.”

“It shouldn’t, Angela. I appreciate your going to this trouble.”

Riggio’s apartment was nice, a two-bedroom loft with a high arched ceiling and an expensive big-screen television. A mounted deer head stared down at her from the wall. Starkey wondered if it was the same deer she’d seen in the pictures. The couch was lined with large boxes, and more boxes were in the kitchen. It would be a sad job, packing the belongings of the dead.

Angela put down her little boy, who ran to the television like it was a close and trusted friend.

“What do your files look like? Maybe I’ve seen them.”

Starkey cringed at the lie.

“They look like three-ring binders. They’re probably black.”

Angela stared at the boxes as if she were trying to remember what was in them.

“Well, I don’t think so. These are his clothes, mostly, and things from the kitchen. Charlie didn’t keep anything like an office. There’s his bedroom upstairs. He has one of those weight machines in the other bedroom.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

“No, but I really don’t have very long.”

Starkey hoped that she would have Riggio’s bedroom to herself, but Angela picked up the little boy and showed her up the stairs.

“It’s this way, Detective.”

“Were you and Charlie close?”

“He was probably closer to Marie, she’s the youngest, but our family was a good one. Did you know him well?”

“Not as well as I would have liked. Something like this happens, you always wish you’d taken the time.”

Angela didn’t answer until they reached the top of the stairs.

“He was a good guy. He had a stupid sense of humor, but he was a good brother.”

The bed had already been stripped of linen. More boxes waited on the floor, some empty, others partially filled. A dresser stood against one wall, a jumble of pictures wedged into the mirror frame. Most of the pictures were of an older couple that Starkey took to be his parents.

“Is this your sister?”

“That’s Marie, yes. These here are our parents. We haven’t taken down the pictures yet. It’s just too hard.”

The little boy upended a box and climbed inside. Angela sat on the bed, watching him.

“I guess you can look through these boxes. They’re mostly clothes, but I remember some papers and books and things.”

Starkey used her body to block Angela’s view as she went through the boxes. Having Riggio’s sister three feet behind her left her with the feeling that even if something was here, she would not find it. There was a heavy photo album that she wanted to look through, and a notepad, and, in the corner of the room, a Macintosh computer that might contain anything at all. There was too much, and here she was, going through it under false pretenses with the dead man’s sister staring at her back. What a half-assed, pathetic way to conduct an investigation.

Angela said, “You were a bomb technician like Charlie?”

“I used to be. Now I’m a bomb investigator.”

“Could I ask you something about that?”

Starkey said that she could.

“They won’t release Charlie’s body. They haven’t even let us go see him. I keep seeing these pictures in my head, you see? About why they won’t let us have him.”

Starkey turned, feeling awkward with this woman’s discomfort.

“Is Charlie, you know, in pieces?”

“It’s not like that. You don’t have to worry about Charlie being like that.”

Angela nodded, then looked away.

“You think about these things, you know? They don’t tell you anything, and you imagine all this stuff.”

Starkey changed the subject.

“Did Charlie talk about his job?”

She laughed and wiped at her eyes.

“Oh, God, when didn’t he talk about it? You couldn’t shut him up. Every call-out was either an atom bomb or a practical joke. He liked to tell about the time they rolled out on a suspicious package that someone had left outside a barber shop. Charlie looked inside and he sees that it’s a human head, just this head. When Charlie’s supervisor asks what’s in the box, Charlie tells him it looks like the barber took too much off the top.”

Starkey smiled. She had never heard that story, and thought that Riggio had probably made it up.

“Charlie loved working with the Bomb Squad. He loved the people. They were like a family, he said.”

Starkey nodded, remembered that feeling, and the pang of loss that came with losing it. And now she suspected that family of murder.

Starkey finished with the boxes, then went through the dresser and the closet without finding anything helpful. She had lost confidence that, working alone, she could discover something that would suggest a motive for Riggio’s death. Maybe there was nothing to be found, and never had been.

“Well, maybe I was wrong about those reports. It doesn’t look like Charlie brought them home after all.”

“I’m sorry.”

Starkey couldn’t think of anything else to say or ask and was ready to leave. Angela had been saying how she was in a hurry to get home for her son, but now she lingered on the bed.

“Detective, could I ask you something else?”

“Of course.”

“Were you and Charlie girlfriend and boyfriend?”

“No. I didn’t know Charlie had a girlfriend.”

Starkey glanced at the pictures in the mirror: Riggio and his parents, Riggio with his sisters and nieces and nephews.

“He had a girlfriend, but he never brought her to meet us. Here’s this nice Italian boy, you’re supposed to be married and have a million kids. My parents were always after him, you know, when are you going to get married, when are you going to settle down, when do we get to meet this girl?”

“What did Charlie say?”

Angela seemed embarrassed again.

“Well, some of the things he said, I got the impression she was married.”

“Oh.”

Angela nodded.

“Yeah. Oh.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, I understand. But it happens, right? I think it was hard for Charlie. Here’s this young, good-looking guy, but he was heartfelt. I think she was married to someone Charlie worked with.”

Angela met Starkey’s eyes as if she was waiting for a reaction, but then she looked away.

“I probably shouldn’t have said that, but if it’s not you, I thought you might know her. I’d like to talk to her. I wouldn’t make a problem with her husband or anything like that. I just thought we could talk about Charlie. It might be good.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about that.”

Starkey wondered if the photo album held pictures that Riggio had wanted to keep hidden, pictures of a woman who was married to someone else that he couldn’t keep out on the mirror.

Angela suddenly glanced at her watch and jumped up.

“Oh, shit. Now I really am late. I’m sorry, but I have to go. My son will be home soon.”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

Starkey followed Angela down, but now her mind was racing for a way to get a view of Riggio’s photo album.

By the time they reached the door, Todd was squirming in his mother’s arms. He was tired and cranky and overdue for his nap. When Starkey saw the time Angela was having with him at the door, Starkey took her keys.

“Here, I’ll get the door. That boy’s a handful.”

“It’s like trying to hold a fish.”

Starkey held the door to let Angela through. She pretended to lock the door, but unlocked it, instead. She closed it, then rattled the knob as if checking to make sure it was secure. Angela’s arms still filled with squirming child, Starkey placed the keys in Angela’s purse.

“Thanks again for trying to help, Angela. I feel a little silly that I got you out here and couldn’t find the files. I was sure Charlie brought them home.”

“If they turn up, I’ll call.”

Angela saw Starkey to the glass doors and let her out. Starkey walked out to her car, climbed behind the wheel, but did not start her car. Her heart was hammering. She told herself that what she was about to do was insane. Worse, it was illegal. A D.A. out to make an example of her could press for breaking and entering.

Five minutes later, Angela Wellow appeared on the service drive at the side of the apartment building in a white Honda Accord, turned south, and drove away. Starkey flicked her cigarette out the window, then crossed back to the apartment building just as a young man with a book bag was wrestling a mountain bike through the glass door. Starkey held the door for him.

“Don’t be late for class.”

“I’m always late. I was born late.”

Starkey walked calmly to the second floor, where she let herself into Charlie Riggio’s apartment. She took the stairs two at a time, going directly to the box with the photo album. Now that she was thinking in terms of an illicit affair, she wanted Riggio’s phone bills and charge receipts, but had no idea which box held those things and was too frightened to take the time to find them. Starkey smiled grimly; she might have been a fearless bomb technician, but she was a chickenshit crook. She found the photo album, but didn’t dare look at it there. It was too thick, and held too many photographs.

She took the book, this time locking the door behind herself, and hurried down to her car. She drove straight home and brought the photo album inside under her jacket as if it were pornography.

She sat with the album at the dining room table, turning the pages slowly, telling herself that the odds were so long as to be unimaginable, that Angela Wellow was probably wrong, and that tomorrow she would be back to square one, all alone in her belief that someone other than Mr. Red was behind Charlie’s death.

Page after page were pictures that charted Charlie Riggio’s life: Charlie playing high school football, Charlie with his buddies, Charlie with pretty young girls who looked anything but like the wives of cops, Charlie hunting, Charlie at the Police Academy, Charlie with his family. They were happy pictures; the type of pictures that a man kept because they made him smile.

It was near the end of the book where she found a picture taken at last year’s Bomb Squad Chili Cookoff. She found the second like it taken at the Christmas party, and then, two pages later, a third which had been taken at a CCS barbeque that Kelso had thrown on the Fourth of July.

Starkey peeled the pictures from the album and put them on the table side by side, asking herself if they could really mean what she thought they meant. She told herself they couldn’t; she told herself she was wrong, and reading too much into them, but what Angela Wellow had said hung over her like an ax.

… she’s married to someone he works with.

The pictures were all the same, a man and a woman, arms around each other, smiling, a little too close, a little too familiar, a little too friendly.

Charlie Riggio and Suzie Leyton.

Dick Leyton’s wife.

Starkey poured a tall gin and tonic, drank most of it. She felt angry, and betrayed. Leyton being a suspect was too big to get her arms around. Just thinking about it wore her down. Starkey decided to deal with it as if Leyton were just another part of the investigation. There was no other way to see it.

She went to her own collection of pictures and found a shot of Leyton that she’d taken at an LAPD Summer Festival Youth Camp. It was a crisp shot, a close-up showing Leyton in civilian clothes and sunglasses. She brought it to Kinko’s, made several copies, adjusting the contrast until she had one that showed the best detail, then returned home where she phoned Warren Mueller. She didn’t expect him to be in his office, but she tried him anyway. To Starkey’s surprise, she got him on the first ring.

“I’ve got a favor to ask, Sergeant. I have a photograph that I want you to show the old man who lives in Tennant’s duplex.”

“Is it the guy in the hat?”

“It could be. Here’s the thing, I don’t want anyone else to see the picture. I want this kept between me and you.”

Mueller hesitated.

“I’m not liking the way this sounds.”

“It’s about tracing Tennant’s RDX. I don’t want to tell you any more than that, and I am asking you not to ask.”

“All this makes me wonder who’s in your picture.”

“Look, Mueller, if this is too hard, I’ll drive up there and do it myself.”

“Now, hold on.”

“It’s someone who would be hurt badly by this if I’m wrong, and I might be wrong. I’m asking you for a favor here, goddamnit, so what’s it going to be?”

“This guy in your picture, he’s LAPD, isn’t he?”

Starkey couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll take care of it. You know what you’re doing down there, Starkey? You gonna be okay with this?”

“I’m okay.”

“All right. You fax up your picture. I’ll go wait by the machine. If you’re expecting to use this ID in court, I’m gonna have to make up a six-pack.”

The suspect picture was never shown to witnesses by itself; the courts ruled this to be leading. Detectives were required to show a spread of pictures, hoping that the witness would identify the right one.

“That’s fine. Now, one more thing. If we get a confirmation from your wit, I’m going to want to see Tennant about this. I’d like to do that tomorrow.”

Mueller cleared his throat, hesitating.

“Hell, Starkey, I guess you didn’t hear. Tennant’s dead. I called Atascadero today to set up a little interview about his shop, you know? The silly sonofabitch blew his damned arms off and bled to death.”

Starkey didn’t know what to say.

“He blew off his arms? His arms were separated?”

The energy it took to do that was tremendous.

“Yeah. Man I talked to over there said it was a real mess.”

“What did he use, Mueller? Christ, you can’t make anything like that out of cleaning products.”

“Sheriff’s EOD is running the analysis. Guess we’ll know in a day or two. Whatever the case, you can forget about getting anything from Tennant. He’s a memory.”

Starkey was slow to answer.

“I’ll fax that picture now. If it doesn’t come through clear, call back and I’ll try again.

She gave him her home phone.

“Owe you one, Sergeant. Thanks.”

“I’ll collect. You can bet your split-tail bottom on that.”

“Mueller, you’re the most charming man I know.”

“Kinda grows on you, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Like anal warts.”

Starkey gave Mueller a minute, then put the photocopy of Leyton through her fax. She waited for his call, but after a few silent minutes had passed, she figured that the photo had gone through okay.

She didn’t know what else to do. She could take the photo to Lester Ybarra, but if he told Marzik she would have to explain. She needed to put Leyton in Silver Lake at the time of the detonation, but that meant questioning more people who she couldn’t question. She knew that Leyton was at the scene when she arrived, but had he been there in the moment when someone had triggered the device?

Starkey’s eye kept going to the computer, waiting silently on her dining room table. She had not turned it on since she turned it off last night. Now it seemed to watch her.

I did not kill Charles Riggio.

I know who did.

Starkey lit a cigarette, then went into the kitchen and made herself another drink. Sobriety had lasted all of two days. She went back into the dining room, turned on the computer, and signed on to Claudius.

Mr. Red did not jump out at her. The chat room was empty. She sipped her drink, smoked, and read through the boards. There were new posts, but nothing beyond the mundane chitchat of defective personalities. She finished her second drink, then made another. She left the computer on with Claudius’s flaming head like a painting on her wall. She smoked a second cigarette. Starkey walked through her house, once stepping out the back door, twice stepping out the front. She thought about Pell, and she thought that she might one day like a persimmon tree. She didn’t know what persimmons were like, but that didn’t stop her from wanting the tree. Outside, the eastern sky purpled and time passed.

Starkey floated like that for almost two hours as the purple dimmed to black, and then she was rewarded.

She opened the window.

She stared at the line, then typed her answer.

Red’s hesitation left her with a grim satisfaction.

She did. She drew deep on the cigarette, then typed her question.

Starkey laughed at the way he wrapped the conversation around to force her admission.

He hesitated again, and she felt a stab of hope that he might actually tell her.

She waited, but nothing came back. She thought he might be typing a long reply, but the minutes stretched until she finally realized that he wanted her to beg. His need to manipulate and control was textbook.

He paused again, and then his message appeared.

The statement struck her like a board. It came from nowhere, jolting her like a head-on collision.

He didn’t answer.

No answer.

Nothing.

No answers came back. The window hung there, unchanging. His statement that Pell was not who he seemed haunted her. Her first impulse was to phone Pell, but she felt caught between them like a ship between the ocean and a storm, Mr. Red on one side, Pell the other.

During the days when Starkey served on the Bomb Squad, the ATF had maintained a liaison agent with LAPD in an office housed with CCS. Three weeks after Starkey returned from Bomb School in Alabama, Sugar had introduced her to Regal Phillips, the ATF liaison agent. Phillips was an overweight man with a friendly smile, who had retired near the end of Starkey’s first year; they had worked together only occasionally during that year, but Sugar loved the older man, and Starkey sensed then that the feelings had run deep both ways. Phillips had visited Starkey twice during her time in the hospital, both visits ending with Phillips weeping after recounting stories about Sugar’s exploits on the squad.

That final visit had been the last time Starkey had seen Regal Phillips, almost three years ago. She hadn’t phoned him after the hospital because she couldn’t be with Regal without being with Sugar, and that hurt too much.

Now, after all this time, she felt embarrassed as she listened to his phone ring.

When Regal answered, she said, “Reege, it’s Carol Starkey.”

“Lord, girl, how are you? I had it in my head that you didn’t talk to black people anymore.”

He sounded like the same old Reege, the warm voice revealing only a hint of surprise.

“Pretty good. Working. I’m on with CCS now.”

“I heard that. I still got friends over there. I’m keeping tabs on you.”

He laughed softly when he said it, his voice so full of affection that she felt ashamed of herself.

“Reege, ah, listen, I’m really sorry I haven’t stayed in touch. It’s hard for me that way.”

“Don’t worry about it, Carol. Things changed for a lot of people that day in the trailer park.”

“You know about Charlie Riggio?”

“What I see on the news. You working on that?”

“That’s right. Reege, this is an awkward thing for me to ask.”

“Ask it.”

“I’m working with an ATF agent that I, ah, have my doubts about. I was wondering if you could look into him for me. You know what I mean?”

“No, Carol, I don’t think that I do.”

“I want to know who he is, Reege. I guess I’m asking you if I can trust him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jack Pell.”

Phillips told her that it might take a day or two, but that he would call back soon. Starkey thanked him, then hung up and doused the lights. She did not sleep. She didn’t even get into bed. Starkey stayed on the couch in the dim light, waiting until morning, wondering how a man she now trusted so little could mean so much to her.

Earlier that day, when Pell left Barrigan’s, he squinted against the nuclear California sun. The light was so bright that it felt like an ax blade wedged between his eyes. Even the sunglasses didn’t help.

Pell sat in his car, trying to figure out what to do. The look of hurt on her face had left him feeling like a dog. He knew that she was right: He was so obsessed by Mr. Red that he couldn’t see anything else, but he had the fragment with her name on it. He had wanted to reach across the table and tell her everything, tell her the truth. He had wanted to open himself, because he had also been closed, and thought that she might be the only one who could understand, but he couldn’t be sure. He had wanted to tell her of his growing feelings for her, but there was only Mr. Red. He no longer knew where Red ended and he began.

His head began to throb.

“Jesus. Not again.”

Soft gray shapes floated up from the dashboard, from the windows, from the hood of his car.

It was happening more frequently now. It would only get worse.

15

Starkey left her house well before dawn. She had had it with the emptiness of the quiet rooms, the conflicting thoughts about Pell and Dick Leyton and her shitty life. She told herself to get her head in the case, so she left the thoughts and emptiness, and made her way across town.

She needed to determine Dick Leyton’s whereabouts at the time of the blast and thought that Hooker might have noted Leyton’s TOA in the casebook. Starkey didn’t bother to shower. She changed clothes, lit a fresh cigarette, and drove.

Spring Street was a tomb. Hers was the only car on the parking level. Not even the Fugitive Section had shown for work.

Starkey said fuck it and brought her cigarette into the office. She could always blame the cleaning crew.

The casebook was on Marzik’s desk where she remembered it, but Hooker had made no note of Leyton’s arrival time, just that he was present. Starkey pulled the box of videotapes from under Hooker’s desk. She found the copy of the enhanced tape that Bennell had made for them, along with the news tape she remembered as having the widest angles, and brought them upstairs to the video room. She had watched those damned tapes so many times she knew them by heart, but she had always been looking for the man in the baseball cap; she had never looked at the cops.

The image quality of the enhanced tape was crappy on the VCR just as Bennell had warned, but she watched it anyway, searching the perimeter of the cordon for Dick Leyton. She remembered that he was wearing a polo shirt, that he looked as if he’d just come from home.

She watched the tape, then watched it again, but it was always the same: Riggio approached the box, the explosion, then Buck ran forward to strip away his partner’s helmet. Starkey gave up trying to find Leyton in the moments prior to the explosion because the clips were too short and indistinct. She concentrated on that time after the blast figuring that if Leyton were at the scene, he would have run forward to see about his man. She keyed the tape to the explosion, and watched again. Bang! For almost twelve seconds of real time after the blast, Buck and Charlie were alone in the frame. Then the paramedics’ ambulance raced up beside them from the bottom of the picture. Two LAFD paramedics jumped out, taking Buck’s place. Four seconds later, a single uniformed officer ran forward from the left side of the frame, and two more uniformed officers entered from the right. The officer from the left appeared to be trying to get Buck to sit down or move away, but Buck shook him off. Three more officers entered the frame from the bottom, turning back almost at once to head off two men in street clothes. Other men in street clothes entered from the right. Now a second ambulance moved into the frame, followed by more people on foot. Two of the figures appeared to be wearing polo shirts, but she didn’t recognize them. Then the tape ended.

“Shit!”

Something about the tape bothered her, but she wasn’t sure what. She was seeing something, yet not seeing it. The answer was in the tape. Starkey cursed the news station for not running the camera longer, then went back to CCS.

Starkey decided to ask Buck. She left CCS before the other detectives arrived and made her way to Glendale. She didn’t know whether or not Buck had duty that day, so she stopped at a diner to wait until seven when the Bomb Squad receptionist, Louise Mendoza, arrived. Mendoza, who would know the duty roster, usually arrived before the bomb techs.

At five minutes before seven, Starkey phoned.

“Louise, it’s Carol Starkey. Does Buck have duty today?”

“He’s back in the shed. You want me to put you through?”

“I just wanted to know if he was there. I’m on my way over to see him.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“One other thing, Louise. Ah, is Dick there?”

“Yeah, but if you want to talk to him you’d better let me put you through. He has to go down to Parker this morning.”

“That’s okay. It’ll keep.”

Starkey pulled into the Glendale PD parking lot ten minutes later. She found Buck and Russ Daigle in the shed, the brick building at the ass end of the parking lot where the squad practiced with the de-armer and the robots. They were standing over the Andrus robot, drinking coffee and frowning. Both men smiled when they saw her.

“Damn thing’s pulling to the right. You try to make the damn thing go straight ahead, but it veers off to the right. You got any idea what’s wrong?”

“It’s a Republican.”

Daigle, a staunch Republican, laughed loudly.

“Buck? Could I see you for a moment?”

Buck joined her at the door, the two of them stepping outside.

She told him that she had come about the enhanced tape, that they were ready for him to take a look. That was her excuse for the conversation.

“I’ll look if you want, but I didn’t see anything in those other tapes. Jesus, I don’t know if I can stomach it again, seeing Charlie like that.”

She wanted to turn the conversation to Leyton.

“There’s no rush. Maybe I should ask Dick if he saw anything. He might be able to pick out someone.”

Daggett nodded.

“You might. He was back there behind the cordon.”

Starkey felt sick. She told herself to be professional. This is why she was here. This is why she was a cop.

“When did he get on scene?”

“I dunno, maybe twenty minutes before Charlie went out, something like that.”

“I’ll talk to him about it.”

Starkey walked back across the parking lot feeling as if her legs were enormous stilts, pushing her to a height that left her dizzy. She could barely get into her car, taking forever to fold the stilts the way a mantis folds its legs. Nothing fit anymore. She stared at the Bomb Squad. Leyton’s office was there. The box with Charlie Riggio’s things was still beneath Daigle’s desk. She thought of his cell phone there. If Riggio and Susan Leyton had been lovers, Starkey thought that he would probably have called her often. He would have snuck calls to her during the day when Dick was at work, and there would be the record of it in his phone bills. Starkey was surprised at how unin-volved she felt when that thought came to her. Maybe it was just another step along the case. It was as if nothing mattered very much except building the evidence that she could bring to Kelso, and prove Pell wrong.

She took out her own cell phone, and called Angela Wellow. This time she told her the truth.

Starkey sat with Angela Wellow in the quiet of her home, the two of them sitting on the edge of a tattered couch. Riggio’s photo album was on the couch between them; Todd was sleeping facedown on the floor. Angela glanced at the album again and again, as if there were some explanation beyond what Starkey was giving. She rubbed her palm on her thigh.

“I don’t know about this. I don’t know what to think when someone says something like this. You’re telling me that Charlie was murdered?”

“I’m investigating that possibility. That’s why I need Charlie’s phone bills, Angela. I need to see who he was calling.”

Angela stared at her. Starkey knew what was coming. When Starkey gave back the album and explained that she had gone to Charlie’s condo under false pretenses, Angela had listened to it all without saying a word. Now she was about to say it.

“Why did you have to lie to me yesterday? Why couldn’t you just say?”

Starkey tried to look her in the eyes, but couldn’t.

“I don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.”

“Jesus.”

Angela walked over to her little boy, stared down at him like she wasn’t sure who he was.

“What do I tell my parents?”

Starkey ignored that. She didn’t want to talk about the details of what was happening. She didn’t want to get sidetracked. She wanted to keep moving forward until this thing was tied down, and she could bring it to Kelso.

“I need his phone bills, Angela. Can we please go look for his phone bills.”

Angela said, “Todd? Todd, wake up, honey. We have to go out.”

Angela lifted her sleeping boy onto her shoulder, then turned on Starkey with angry eyes.

“You can follow me over there. I don’t want you going in Charlie’s house again.”

Starkey waited outside Riggio’s building for almost an hour until Angela Wellow came out the glass doors with a handful of white envelopes.

“It took me forever to find them. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. I appreciate this, Angela.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t know what you’re doing or why, but you don’t know me well enough to appreciate what I’m doing.”

Angela left her with the envelopes, walking away without another word.

Starkey struck a cigarette, exhaling a cloud that settled in the car even with the windows open. She liked the taste of it, and the way smoking made her feel. She didn’t see what all the whining was about. So what if you got cancer.

She opened Charlie Riggio’s phone bills and there it was, so obvious that it jumped out at her. She didn’t know the Leytons’ home number, but she didn’t need to know it. Charlie had called the same number in the same 323 area code two and three times every day, sometimes as many as six or seven calls, going back for months.

Starkey put the bills aside, finished her cigarette, then took out her own phone. She checked the number again, then dialed.

A familiar woman’s voice.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Susan.”

Starkey felt tired.

“I’m sorry. Who?”

Starkey paused.

“Susan?”

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”

Starkey looked at the number again, making sure she had dialed correctly. She had.

“This is Carol Starkey. I’m calling for Susan Leyton.”

“Oh, hi, Detective Starkey. You dialed the wrong number. This is Natalie Daggett.”

16

Natalie Daggett said, “Are you still there? Hello?”

Starkey checked the phone numbers again. It was the same number; multiple calls every day for months.

“I’m here. I’m sorry, Natalie. I was expecting someone else. It’s taking me a minute to switch gears.”

Natalie laughed.

“That happens to me, too. I have these senior moments all the time.”

“Are you going to be home for the next hour or so?”

“Buck isn’t home. He went back to work.”

“I know. I’ll be stopping by to see you. It won’t take long.”

“What do you want to see me about?”

“It won’t take long, Natalie. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“What is this about?”

“It’s about Buck. I’m working on a little surprise for him. Because of what happened to Charlie. Sort of a welcome back party.”

“Is that why you were calling Susan?”

“That’s right. Dick is the one who suggested it.”

“Oh. Oh, okay. I guess so.”

“I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

Starkey closed her phone, then put it aside. Not Dick, but Buck Daggett. She had searched the tapes for the killer again and again, and he was right there in plain sight every time, hiding in open view, waiting for his partner to get over the bomb. Starkey thought about Dana again, and the perception puzzle. It was all in how you looked at it. Now she realized what had bothered her about the tape. Buck hadn’t cleared the area for a secondary device. He should have pulled Riggio away from the scene before stripping off his armor, just as he had pulled Carol away from the trailer; she’d seen that on the tape of her own death, but he hadn’t pulled Riggio. All bomb techs were trained to clear the area for a secondary, but Buck knew there wasn’t a secondary. It was always there, glaring at her, and she’d missed it.

Starkey made the long drive to Monterey Park in good time. She didn’t hurry. Starkey was confident that Natalie did not know that her husband had murdered her lover. Buck had planned the murder far too carefully to risk confessing to his wife, even if to punish her.

Starkey was still relieved when she pulled into the Daggetts’ drive and saw that Buck’s Toyota 4-Runner wasn’t home. She put on her best cop face before she went to the door; the same face that she had used when she confronted the father in Venice with his little girl’s thumb.

Starkey rang the bell.

Natalie looked drawn when she answered the door. Starkey thought that she probably hadn’t been sleeping.

“Hi, Natalie. Thanks for seeing me.”

Starkey followed her into a small dining room, where they sat at a bare table. The Lawn-Boy mower was still sitting in the backyard. Buck had never mowed the lawn. Natalie didn’t offer something to drink, just as she hadn’t offered anything the last time Starkey was there.

“What kind of surprise did you have in mind?”

Starkey took the phone bills from her purse and put them on the table. Natalie glanced at them without comprehension.

“Natalie, I’m sorry, but I’m not here about a party. I went through Charlie’s things and found some things I need to ask you about.”

Starkey could see the fear rise when she mentioned Charlie’s name.

“I thought this was about Buck?”

Starkey pushed the bills across the table, turning them so that Natalie could read them.

“These are Charlie’s cell phone bills. You see your number there? You see how many calls he made? Now, I already know the answer to this, but I need to hear you say it, Natalie. Were you and Charlie having an affair?”

Natalie stared at the pages without touching them. She sat absolutely still as her nose turned red and tears bled from her eyes.

“Natalie, were you? Were you and Charlie in love?”

Natalie nodded. She looked twelve years old, and Starkey’s heart filled with an embarrassing ache, and shame.

“How long were you involved?”

“Since last year.”

“Please speak up.”

“Since last year.”

“Does Buck know?”

“Of course not. He would be so hurt.”

Starkey took back the telephone bills and returned them to her jacket.

“Okay. I’m sorry I had to ask, but there it is.”

“Are you going to tell Buck?”

Starkey stared at the woman, then lied.

“No, Natalie. This isn’t something I’m going to tell Buck. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I just made a mistake with Charlie. That’s what it was, a mistake. Everybody’s entitled to a mistake.”

Starkey left her like that, walking out to her car in the fierce heat, then driving away to Spring Street.

Buck Daggett didn’t like it that Starkey had been spending so much time in Glendale. Her asking so many questions about that bastard, Riggio, made him nervous. Especially when he’d heard about her wanting to get to know Riggio now that Riggio was dead. What in hell was that about? Starkey had never given a damn about Riggio or anyone else since that fucking bomb in the trailer park. She had turned into a lush and a has-been, and now she was supposed to be Ms. Maudlin?

Buck had been proud of himself that he’d built in the connection between Mr. Red and Starkey. He had wanted to keep the investigation as far from Riggio as possible, but just his rotten luck the only piece of her name that had been found was the goddamned S, letting them think it was part of Charles. Still, he’d thought everything was going to be fine when the feds rolled in and everyone started chasing their tails about Mr. Red, but now it looked as if that bitch, Starkey, had tumbled to the truth anyway. Or at least suspected it.

Buck Daggett had still been fucking around with the Andrus robot when Natalie called. The stupid bim couldn’t help telling him that Starkey was coming by because they were going to toss a surprise party for him. To cheer him up. Ha. Buck had hung up and barely made it to the toilet before he’d puked up his guts, then he’d raced home to see for himself.

As Starkey drove away from his house, Buck crouched in his neighbor’s yard, watching her. He didn’t know how much she had on him yet, but he knew she suspected him, and that was enough.

Buck decided to kill her.

17

Starkey phoned Mueller from her car, trying to catch him at his office, but he was gone. She left word on his voice mail that the man in the photo was no longer a suspect, and that she would be faxing up a new image. She phoned Beth Marzik next.

“Beth, I want you to get together a six-pack and meet me at the flower shop. Call Lester and make sure he’s there. If he’s on a delivery, tell them to have him come back.”

“I was just getting ready to go to lunch.”

“Damnit, Beth, lunch will keep. I want a mix of Anglos and Latins in their forties, just as Lester described. Don’t tell anyone, Beth. Just get it together and meet me at Lester’s.”

“Listen, you can’t just drop this on me. Who am I putting together the six-pack for? Do you have a suspect?”

“Yes.”

Starkey hung up before Marzik could ask who. Time was now a factor. She could not trust that Natalie wouldn’t tell Buck about her visit, or about her interest in Charlie Riggio. She didn’t fear that Buck would flee; her concern was that he would move to destroy evidence that might be necessary in the case against him.

She drove faster now, swinging past her house for a snapshot of Buck Daggett before turning toward Silver Lake. Like the shot of Dick Leyton, it was a picture of Buck in civilian clothes. When she reached the flower shop, Marzik and Lester were talking together on the sidewalk. Marzik left Lester, and walked over as Starkey got out of her car. She had the six-pack sheet in a manila envelope.

“You want to tell me what’s going on here? That kid’s old man is raising nine kinds of hell.”

“Let me see the sheet.”

The six-pack was a paper sandwich with places for six photographs like a page from a photo album. Detective bureaus kept files of them based on age, race, and type, most of the pictures being file photos of police officers. Starkey pulled out one of the six pictures, then fitted in the picture of Buck Daggett.

Marzik gripped Starkey’s arm.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m not joking, Beth.”

Starkey brought the sheet to Lester. She explained that she wanted him to look at each picture carefully before making his decision, then asked if any of the men pictured here was the man that Lester saw using the telephone. Marzik watched Lester so closely that Lester asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing, pal. Just look at the pictures.”

“None of these guys are wearing hats.”

“Look at their faces, Lester. Think back to the guy you saw on the phone. Could any of these men be him?”

“I think it’s him.”

Lester pointed out Buck Daggett.

Marzik walked away.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, Lester. Thanks.”

“Did I pick the right one?”

“None of the answers are right, Lester. Some are just more wrong than others.”

Marzik was staring at the sidewalk when Starkey joined her.

“You going to tell me now?”

Starkey laid it out, and then they called Kelso, telling him that they were on their way in. Starkey asked if he would have Hooker meet them. Kelso demanded to know why Starkey wanted to see them together.

“I have some additional evidence in the case, Barry. I need your advice on how to proceed with it.”

The ploy of asking for his guidance worked. Kelso told her that he and Santos would be waiting.

Marzik was still leaning against her car when Starkey got off the phone.

Marzik said, “This is going to sound stupid, Carol, but can we take one car? I don’t want to ride back alone.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid.”

When they reached Spring Street, Starkey didn’t bother wrestling her car in the parking garage. They left it in the red zone out front and used the elevator.

For the first time that she could remember, Kelso’s computer was turned off. He was waiting behind his desk with his fingers steepled as if he had been like that since she called. Santos was on his couch, looking like a kid who’d been called in to see the principal. Carol thought he looked tired. They probably all looked tired.

Kelso said, “What is it, Carol?”

“It isn’t Mr. Red, Barry. It was never Mr. Red.”

Kelso raised his hands, shaking his head even as she spoke.

“We covered that, didn’t we? The signatures are identical—”

Marzik snapped, “Barry, just listen.”

Santos arched his eyebrows, surprised. Kelso stared at her, then spread his hands.

“I’m listening.”

Starkey went on.

“Barry, the signatures are not identical. Almost, but not. If you don’t believe me, call Rockville yourself and ask the ATF.”

Santos said, “What will they tell him?”

“That the Silver Lake bomb is different. They will suggest that the person who built the Silver Lake device was working from an ATF bomb analysis because the one deviation from the other devices was an element that was not included in those reports.”

Starkey took it one step at a time, never mentioning Buck Daggett until the end. She went through the difference in the bomb devices, then the similarities, and that the builder would need to find a source of RDX in order to mix the Modex Hybrid that Mr. Red favored.

“RDX is the hardest of the components to find, Barry. The only person in this area in recent history who’s had any was Dallas Tennant. If you were looking to find some, you would go to him. Beth and I found Tennant’s shop. A man similar in description to the individual who made our 911 report was seen there about a month ago. I believe he went there for Tennant’s RDX. I don’t know how this man learned of Tennant’s shop. I don’t know if he discovered it the way Beth and I did, through a property search, or if he made a deal of some kind with Tennant. We can’t ask Tennant because Tennant is now dead.”

“What man?”

Starkey plowed on without answering. She believed that if she accused Buck Daggett before laying out the supporting evidence, the meeting would become a shouting match.

Starkey held up the six-pack, but didn’t yet give it to him.

“We showed this six-pack to Lester Ybarra. Lester identified one of these men as the man who placed the call. We’ll have to show a similar six-pack to the witness up in Bakersfield to see if they confirm.”

She handed the sheet to Kelso and pointed out Buck Daggett’s picture.

“Lester identified that man.”

Kelso shook his head and looked up.

“He made a mistake. That’s all there is to it.”

Starkey put Riggio’s phone bills on top of the six-pack.

“These are Charlie Riggio’s cell phone bills. Look at every phone number I’ve marked. That’s Buck Daggett’s home phone number. Riggio and Natalie Daggett were involved. Natalie Daggett confirmed this involvement to me less than an hour ago. I believe that Buck found out, and murdered Charlie because of it.”

Hooker sighed loudly.

“Oh, my Lord.”

Kelso’s jaw flexed. He went to the window, looked out, then came back and leaned against his desk with his arms crossed.

“Who else knows this, Carol?”

“Only the people in this room.”

“Did you tell Natalie that you suspect Buck of the murder?”

“No.”

Kelso sighed again, then went back behind his desk.

“Okay, we can’t let this sit. If Buck has explanations for these things, he can make them and clear this up.”

Marzik grunted, and Kelso’s eyes flashed angrily.

“You think this is easy, Detective? I’ve known this man for ten years. This isn’t just some fucking collar.”

Starkey had never heard Barry Kelso swear.

Jorge said, “No, sir. It’s not.”

Kelso glanced at Santos, then took another breath and leaned back.

“I’ll have to notify Assistant Chief Morgan. Starkey, I’ll want you with me. He might want to see us, and I’m damned well sure he’ll have questions. This is goddamned terrible, a Los Angeles police officer involved in something like this. We’ll have to bring in Dick Leyton. We’re not going to roll over there and arrest one of his people without telling him what’s happening. As soon as I talk to Morgan and Leyton, we’ll get this done.”

Starkey found herself liking Barry Kelso. She wanted to say something.

“Lieutenant, I’m sorry.”

Kelso rubbed at his face.

“Carol, you don’t have anything to be sorry for. I want to tell you that this is good work, but it doesn’t seem like the thing to say.”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Buck didn’t go back to Glendale. He phoned Dick Leyton to tell him that he’d left early for the day and wouldn’t be back. The real reason for the call was to get a sense of what Leyton knew. If Leyton considered Buck a suspect, Buck was going to hire the best damned attorney he could find and ride it out straight down the middle. But Leyton was relaxed and friendly, and Buck was willing to bet the farm that Starkey had kept her suspicions to herself.

And that’s what he was doing, betting the farm.

Buck still had almost seven pounds of Modex Hybrid, plus components left over from copycatting Mr. Red’s bomb. He convinced himself that Starkey hadn’t yet gathered enough evidence to make her move, which gave him hope. If he acted fast enough and took her out before she could develop her case, he might still get out of this.

After he spoke with Leyton, Buck concocted an elaborate list of errands to get Natalie out of the house, then went home. She seemed strained, probably from Starkey’s visit and questions, but he pretended not to notice. He gave her the list, kicked her out, then forced himself to calm down and think it through again. He was desperate, and scared; he knew that desperate and scared men make mistakes.

When Buck felt composed, and absolutely convinced that killing Starkey was the only way out, he said, “Well, get to it, then.”

Buck kept the Modex Hybrid and the remaining components in a large Igloo cooler out in the garage. He backed his 4-Runner out to give himself room, then shut the overhead door so no one could see him from the street. He opened the side door that let onto his backyard for air and turned on a utility fan; the Modex sublimated vapors that were toxic.

Buck pulled the cooler from the high shelf where it was out of Natalie’s reach and brought it to his workbench. The remaining Modex was in a large, nonreactive glass jar. It was dark gray in color and looked like window putty. He wore vinyl gloves as he laid out the components so as not to leave fingerprints, but also to avoid getting the Modex on his skin. The shit could kill you dead as lead just from handling it.

The sudden voice in Buck’s backyard damn near made him piss his pants.

“Yo yo yo, whasup, whasup? Anybody home?”

Buck threw a towel over his bench, and went to the door. He had thought it was a black guy from the voice, but this kid was white.

“What do you want?”

“Be lookin’ to earn a little extra bank, my man. Saw the yard was in, shall we say, disarray? Thought I’d offer my landscaping services.”

“I’ll mow it myself, thanks anyway. Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Looks like that ain’t exactly on your immediate agenda, if you see what I’m sayin’. Help a brother who wants to earn a living instead of do crime.”

Buck’s head began to throb. Now that he looked at him, this kid wasn’t a kid. He looked to be in his late twenties.

“Help yourself by getting out of here, asshole. I said I was busy.”

The kid took a step back, but didn’t look scared.

“Yowza! Guess you be handin’ out walkin’ papers. Feets, do yo stuff!”

“Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

“Nah, Mr. Daggett, I’m just tryin’ to have a good time. Sorry I bothered you.”

Buck caught the name right away.

“How’d you know my name?”

“Chinaman across the street told me. I tried to cut his place first, but he told me to come over here. He said your place always looks like shit.”

“Well, fuck him, too. Now let me get back to work.”

Buck watched the kid walk away, then went back into his garage, hating the Chinaman across the street. Buck didn’t see the kid come back, didn’t see the hard thing that knocked him to his knees. Even if he had seen it coming, it would not have mattered. It was already too late.

Buck was never fully unconscious. He knew that something had hit him, and that he was hit twice more after he went down. He saw the kid over him, but he couldn’t raise his arms to protect himself. The kid handcuffed him to the workbench, then disappeared from view.

Buck tried to speak, but his mouth didn’t work any better than his arms and legs. Buck grew frightened that he was paralyzed, and cried.

After a while, the kid came back and shook him.

“You awake?”

The kid looked into his eyes, then slapped him. The kid had a thin, gaunt face like a ferret. Buck noticed now for the first time that his scalp was very pale; he hadn’t been bald for long.

“You awake? C’mon, I know I didn’t hit you hard enough to kill you. Get your fuckin’ act together.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“I don’t want your money, dumbass. You should be so lucky, I only wanted your money.”

Buck’s ears were ringing, a steady high-pitched sound that did not diminish. Once, during a high school baseball game, he had collided with another player and gotten a concussion. He remembered it feeling like this.

“Then what do you want? You want the truck, the keys are in my pocket. Take it.”

“What I’m going to take is the rest of this Modex. What I want is to teach you a lesson.”

Buck wasn’t thinking at his best. It surprised him that this kid made up like some kind of black rapper would know about the Modex, or even what it was.

“I don’t understand.”

The kid took Buck’s face in his hands and leaned close.

“You stole my fucking work, you cocksucker. You pretended to be me. Can you spell … error in judgment?”

“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about.”

“Maybe this will help you understand.”

The kid went to the other end of the bench. When he came back, he had one of the pipes. Wires led into an open end; the other end had been capped. He waved it under Buck’s nose to let Buck catch the sharp smell of the Modex inside, and in that moment, Buck grew scared.

“Now do you know who I am?”

Buck knew, and felt so scared in that moment of knowing that the urine ran out of him in a rush of warmth.

“Please don’t kill me. Please. Take the fucking Modex and go. Please don’t kill me. I’m sorry I pretended I was you but you see I had to kill that motherfucker who was fucking my wife and—”

Mr. Red put a hand over Buck’s mouth.

“Chill. Just be cool. Relax.”

Buck nodded.

“You okay now?”

Buck nodded.

“Okay. Now listen.”

Mr. Red sat cross-legged on the hard concrete in front of him, holding the bomb in his lap as if it was a playful kitten.

“You listening?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to kid you about this, I am seriously pissed off you tried to make everyone think it was me who killed that guy, but here’s your shot. You got one shot, and here it is.”

Buck waited, but Mr. Red was waiting for him to ask.

“What? What’s my shot?”

“Tell me what Carol Starkey knows.”

John walked out to the stolen car he’d left on the street. The Chinaman was nowhere to be seen. He had left Buck at his bench, very much alive, but unconscious. John had splashed some water on Daggett and slapped his face to bring him around. When he saw that Buck was waking up, he left.

John climbed behind the wheel, started his car, and shook his head. It was a hot day on a crappy street in the middle of Shitsville, U.S.A. How could people live like this? John let his car creep down the street as he counted to a hundred. When he reached one hundred, he figured Buck was fully awake.

That’s when he pressed the silver button.

Marzik and Santos phoned their homes, Santos telling his wife and Marzik her mother that they would be late. Starkey could tell from Marzik’s reaction that her mother wasn’t happy about it. After those calls, the three detectives sat at their desks, alone with their thoughts. At one point, Jorge asked if anyone wanted a fresh pot of coffee, but neither Starkey nor Marzik answered. He did not make the coffee.

Marzik was the first one bored with the wait, and expressed her annoyance.

“What in hell is taking so long? We don’t need Parker Center to rubber-stamp this thing. Let’s just go pick up the sonofabitch.”

Santos frowned at her.

“He wants Morgan to sign off, is all. It’s politics.”

“Kelso’s such a chickenshit.”

“Maybe Morgan isn’t there. Maybe he can’t reach Lieutenant Leyton.”

“Oh, screw that.”

Starkey had decided to head for the stairwell with a cigarette when Reege Phillips called. The tone of his voice was careful and measured, which immediately put her on edge. She didn’t want Hooker and Marzik to hear.

Starkey said, “I don’t know that I can talk right now, Reege. Will this keep?”

“I don’t think so, Carol. You got a problem on your hands.”

“Ah, can I call you right back?”

“You want to change phones?”

“That’s right. I’ve got your number.”

“Okay. I’m right here.”

Starkey hung up, told Santos and Marzik she was going for a smoke, and brought her purse. When she was in the stairwell, she called Phillips on her cell phone. Just pressing the numbers left her feeling sick.

“What do you mean, that I have a problem?”

“Jack Pell isn’t an ATF agent. He used to be, but not anymore.”

“That can’t be right. Pell had bomb analysis reports from Rockville. He had a spook at Cal Tech doing work for us.”

“Just listen. Pell was an ATF field agent working for the Violent Crime Task Force, attached to the Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department. Twenty months ago, he was in a warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, trying to get the goods on some Chinese AKs coming up from Cuba. You read those reports he gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Think Newark.”

“Mr. Red’s first bomb.”

“Pell was in that warehouse when it went off. The concussion caused something in his eyes called commotio retinae. You catch it in time, you can fix it with the laser. Pell’s didn’t show up until later, and then it was too late.”

“What does that mean, too late?”

“He’s going blind. Way the man explained it is that the retinas are pulling away from his optic nerves, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. So the Bureau retired him. Now you’re telling me he’s acting like he’s still on the job. You got a rogue agent on your hands, Carol. He’s hunting down the bastard who took his eyes. You call the FO and get them in on this before Pell hurts somebody.”

Starkey leaned against the wall, feeling numb.

“Carol? You there?”

“I’ll take care of it, Reege. Thank you.”

“You want me to get the office on this?”

“No. No, I’ll do it. Listen, I’ve gotta go, Reege. We have something here.”

“You watch out for that guy, Carol. He’s looking to kill that sonofabitch. No tellin’ what he might do. He might even kill you.”

After she ended the call, Starkey finished her cigarette, then went back into the squad room. She must have looked odd.

Marzik said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

Finally, Kelso’s door opened and Kelso stepped out. Starkey could see that something was wrong with him, but Marzik was already halfway to the stairs, muttering.

“It’s about goddamned time.”

“Beth, wait.”

Kelso stared at them. He didn’t speak; he didn’t move for the longest time.

Santos said, “What is it, Lieutenant?”

Kelso cleared his throat. His jaw worked as if he were trying to make spit.

“Detectives, the San Gabriel police were notified that an explosion occurred at Buck’s home. He was pronounced dead at the scene.”

18

By the time they reached Daggett’s home, the San Gabriel Fire Department had the fire out. The garage and the back side of the house were still venting steam, but the Sheriff’s bomb investigators were already walking the scene. Starkey wanted to walk with them, but the commander of the Sheriff’s Bomb Squad refused to clear her onto the site until the body had been removed. Only Kelso was allowed in the rear. Dick Leyton had arrived a few minutes before them.

Starkey, Marzik, and Santos stood in a tight knot in the front yard, Santos talking to burn off the nervous energy.

“Do you think he killed himself? That’s what happens when you get close, you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“You hear that a lot with officers. They realize they’re about to take the fall, bang, they kill themselves.”

Starkey, feeling bad enough, walked away.

“I wonder if he killed his wife, too.”

Marzik put a hand on his shoulder.

“Jorge? Shut the fuck up.”

Starkey’s first thought had also been suicide, but that was something they might never know unless Daggett left a note. If he didn’t, the rubble would be sifted, the frag collected, the device reconstructed as with any other bomb. They would try to place the moment of detonation and determine if it had been accidental, or by design. Starkey knew it would all be a matter of guesswork.

Waiting there on the street, Starkey’s thoughts drifted back to Pell. She considered paging him, but didn’t know what she would say if he returned her call. She put it out of her head. She was getting good at that, putting things out of her head.

After a while, Kelso came up the drive past Buck’s 4-Runner, and waved them to join him.

“How many bodies?”

“Just Buck. It looks like Natalie wasn’t home. We don’t yet know if she left before it happened or after, but her car is missing.”

Starkey felt some of her tension ease, though not much. She had been worried that Buck and Natalie had gone together.

Kelso looked at Starkey.

“The thinking now is that it was a suicide. I want you to be ready for that, Carol. We can’t be sure yet, but that’s what it looks like.”

Marzik said, “Why?”

“He wrote something on the wall above his workbench. The spray paint is still tacky. We can’t be sure it’s a suicide note, but it could be.”

Starkey took a deep breath.

“Does it mention me?”

“No. All it says is, ‘the truth hurts.’ That’s all it says.”

The San Gabriel coroner investigators wheeled a gurney bearing a blue plastic body bag to their van. The bag was misshapen and wet.

Kelso started back down the drive.

“Come on. We can go back now. I want to warn you all that it’s a mess. His body was badly dislocated. Also, I want you to remember that this is not our crime scene. The Sheriff’s investigators are talking to Dick Leyton now, and they will want to talk to us. Stay close.”

Santos looked sad.

“So Carol was right.”

Marzik frowned at him.

“Of course she was right, you idiot.”

“I was hoping that … even with everything we know, I guess I was hoping she was wrong.”

Marzik stopped, and waved them on.

“Screw it. I don’t want to see all that blood. I’m going to stay out here.”

They walked back along the drive past the firemen and the San Gabriel Bomb Squad. Under other circumstances, at another crime scene, Starkey would have talked to these people, but she ignored them. Dick Leyton was in the backyard with a couple of San Gabriel suits that Starkey took to be Sheriff’s investigators. Kelso and Santos joined them, leaving Starkey alone. She was glad for that. She didn’t want to look at these things, and think the things that she was thinking, and have to talk to anyone. She wished she hadn’t heard all that crap about suicide because now she was feeling guilty about it.

The drive and the buildings were wet. The firemen were cranking in their hoses, moving in teams around Buck’s 4-Runner and away from the garage. Starkey stepped off the drive to make way for them and felt the water squish up around her shoes. The aluminum garage door had been pulled out of its frame by the fire department. Starkey could see that it had been down at the time of the detonation by the way the aluminum panels were bowed outward. The firemen would have wanted to raise it to get water on the flames, but couldn’t; they had probably set grappling hooks to pull it away. Inside the garage, the Sheriff’s bomb investigators were sifting and photographing the debris exactly as Starkey and her people had done in Silver Lake. The air in the garage was damp, and heavy with the scent of burned wood.

The spray-painted words were above his bench.

THE TRUTH HURTS

They were red.

“You one of the L.A. people?”

Starkey showed her badge.

“Yeah. CCS. You mind if I look?”

“Just tell us before you touch anything, okay?”

Starkey nodded.

A half-moon shape like a jagged crown of splinters was blown out of Buck’s workbench. Wooden shrapnel sprouted from the inner garage walls like porcupine quills. Much of the bench was charred from the fire, but not the area shattered by the blast. Something had hit the far wall and left a red smear. Starkey concentrated on the painted words. THE TRUTH HURTS. It could mean anything or nothing. What truth? The truth that was about to come out? The truth that his wife loved another man? That Pell had lied to Starkey, and used her?

Starkey said, “How do you call the scene?”

“Too early for that.”

“I know it’s too early, but I haven’t seen the body. You have, so you probably have an idea.”

The investigator didn’t stop what he was doing to offer his opinion. Like any investigator, he wanted to finish his work and get the hell out.

“Judging from the way he came apart, I’d say he was right on top of it, there at his bench. His lower extremities are fine except for the wood frag they caught. Most of the damage was in his chest and abdomen. He was damn near eviscerated, which suggests he had the device against his stomach when it went off. If it was a suicide, well, I guess he figured tucking it into his stomach was the way to go. If it was accidental, he was probably setting the leg wires into the detonator and he caught a spark. That would be my guess.”

Starkey tried to picture Buck Daggett stupid enough to wire a charge with the batteries connected, but couldn’t. Of course, she also couldn’t picture Buck building bombs to murder someone.

Starkey walked back out onto the drive to consider the scene. She tried to get a sense of the pressure release. The garage door had been bowed, the side door blown out, and Buck Daggett seriously injured, but the structural damage was minor. She guessed the energy released was about as much as two hand grenades. Big enough, but not on the order of what killed Charlie Riggio or what Tennant was using to blow apart cars.

Kelso called out to her.

“Starkey, come over here.”

“Just a minute.”

The side door had been blown off its hinges and cracked by the pressure change, which meant the door had been closed. She could understand that Buck would want the garage door closed so that his neighbors couldn’t see what he was doing, but it didn’t make sense that he would close the side door. She knew that he was working either with Modex or RDX, and either one threw some pretty nasty fumes.

Starkey went back inside to the investigator.

“Your Bomb Squad recover any undetonated explosive?”

“Nope. What was here is what went up. They ran a dog through, too, before they let in the coroner’s people. You just missed him. Those dogs are something to see.”

“What about his hands?”

“You mean the injuries?”

“Yeah.”

“They were intact. We noted some lacerations and tissue loss, but they were still on. I know what you’re thinking, that the hands should’ve gone, but if he was hunched over it, it kinda depends what he was doing when the charge let go.”

Starkey couldn’t see it. If Buck had committed suicide, she thought that he would have been gripping the bomb, holding it tight against his body to make sure he died quickly. His hands would have been gone. If he was seating a detonator in the charge and the explosive had set off accidentally, his hands would still be gone.

“Starkey.”

Starkey had an uneasy feeling as she joined Kelso and the others in the yard. She kept thinking about the red paint, and that Mr. Red claimed to know who had imitated him. How could Mr. Red know that? From Tennant?

The two suits were Sheriff’s homicide detectives named Connelly and Gerald. Connelly was a large, serious man; Gerald had the empty eyes of a man who had been on the job too long. Starkey didn’t like being around him.

After the introductions, Kelso told Starkey that Connelly and Gerald wanted to interview her. They exchanged cards, Connelly saying that they would be in contact sometime within the next few days.

Gerald said, “Maybe there’s something you can help us with right now.”

“If I can.”

“Did you see Sergeant Daggett earlier today?”

“Not today. I saw him yesterday.”

“You see any bruises or contusions on his face or head?”

Starkey glanced at Kelso, who was staring at her.

“I didn’t see anything like that. I can’t say about today, but there was nothing like that yesterday.”

Gerald touched the left side of his forehead.

“Daggett has a lump here that shows edema and bruising. We’re wondering when he got it.”

“I don’t know.”

She wasn’t liking this. First Tennant blows up, now Daggett blows himself up. Mr. Red claims he knows the copycat, and how could he know except through Tennant?

Starkey looked back at the garage.

“It wasn’t a very big charge.”

Gerald made a grin like a nasty shark.

“You didn’t see the body. It blew that poor fucker to shit.”

Starkey forgot about Gerald and spoke to Kelso.

“I got a description from the bomb investigator in there, Barry. Daggett shows the injuries because of his proximity, but I don’t think it was much of a blast. I can’t know for sure how much RDX Tennant had, but it was more than this.”

Kelso squinted at her.

“Are you saying that some explosive is missing?”

“I don’t know.”

Starkey walked back to the street to smoke. Everything had come to an end that wasn’t really an ending. She kept thinking about the contusion on Buck’s head, and about his hands. His hands should be gone. She found herself wondering what Tennant had used to blow himself up, and how he had gotten it. It took enormous energy to blow a man’s arms off. She didn’t like the little questions that had no answers. They were like reconstructing a bomb, only to find that there are wires that lead nowhere. You couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist. Wires always led somewhere. When you were dealing with bombs, wires always led to someplace bad. She thought about Pell.

Marzik came up, shaking her head.

“Was it bad?”

“Not too bad. We’ve both seen worse.”

“It must have been pretty goddamned bad. You’re crying.”

Starkey turned away.

Marzik cleared her throat, embarrassed.

“I didn’t want to see all that mess. I’ve got enough mess to last me into my next life. Let me have a cigarette.”

Starkey looked at her, surprised.

“You don’t smoke.”

“I haven’t smoked in six years. Are you going to give me one of those things or do I have to buy it from you?”

Starkey gave her the pack.

They heard Natalie’s screams before they saw her, coming from the cordon at the end of the street. Natalie tried to push past the officers, struggling to get to her home. An older woman, probably a neighbor, wrapped Natalie in her arms as Dick Leyton ran to her from the front of the house. Later, Starkey knew, a San Gabriel detective would question her, asking about the explosives, asking if Buck had talked about suicide. Starkey was relieved that she would not have to ask those questions, and guilty for feeling that relief.

Marzik shook her head.

“Could this get any worse?”

Starkey knew that it could. She crushed out her cigarette.

“Beth, get a ride back with Kelso, okay? I’m taking the car.”

“Where are you going?”

Starkey walked faster.

All the small, odd things about Pell made sense now; the shitty motel, him needing her to run the NLETS search and the evidence transfer, the way he had lost it with Tennant. Driving to his motel, Starkey tried to put herself into the same mind-set that she used when she was de-arming bombs. It had always felt to her, then, as a kind of separation. As if she was in some other dimension, safe and secure, from where she used her body to handle the bomb like a flesh-and-bone robot, devoid of feelings. She tried to get to that place, but failed. It wasn’t so easy to separate herself from her feelings anymore.

Starkey parked outside the motel, used her cell phone to call him. The phone rang ten times before the hotel operator, a tired male voice, asked if she’d like to leave a message. Starkey hung up, then went inside, walking past the lobby as if she knew where she was going. She knew Pell’s room number from calling him there, found the room, then searched the halls until she found a housekeeper. Starkey tried to make herself look pleasant, an expression she didn’t trust herself to pull off.

“Hi, I’m Mrs. Pell, in 112. My husband has both keys, and he’s not here right now. Could you let me in?”

“Wass you name?”

“Pell. P-e-l-l. It’s room 112.”

The housekeeper, a young Latina, looked up the room on her clipboard.

“Shoe. I let you in.”

The housekeeper keyed the lock, then stepped out of the way as Starkey entered. Mr. Red’s words echoed in her brain.

He is using you, Carol Starkey. He has been playing us against each other.

The computer was sitting on a spindly desk against the wall. Identical to her computer. The same. She turned it on. The same icons on the screen. She opened them. The same doorway to Claudius.

Starkey turned to the bed. It was rumpled, and smelled of sweat. A thought came: I would have slept in that bed. Words lost like a whisper on a breeze.

She searched the room. She did not know what she was looking for, nor what she might find, but she went through the bathroom, the chest and desk, and his suitcase without finding anything more. Again in the center of the room, she tried to decide if she should wait or go. She was walking to the door when she turned to the closet, and searched the pockets of his clothes there. A plastic Ziploc baggie was in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. A piece of frag. She unzipped the plastic, dropped the fragment into her palm, and saw the letters:

TARKEY

Her hands and forearms tingled as if the blood had been cut off. It didn’t matter that it was Buck Daggett who had etched her name to mislead them; Pell had thought that Mr. Red had built the bomb. Sitting in Barrigan’s, he had known. That night in her house, holding her, he had believed that she was the target. And he had hidden that from her. He had used her.

“What are you doing here?”

Pell stood in the door. His face was pale, cut with hollows. He looked like a hundred-year-old man waiting for his second stroke. Now that she understood that he was a victim just as she was a victim, some deep part of her felt the urge to soothe him. She called herself a fool.

“You bastard.”

She didn’t slap him. She used her fist. She hit him hard in the mouth, making him bleed.

Starkey held up the bit of black metal.

“Where did you get this? The medical examiner? The first goddamned day you were here?”

Pell didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to feel the blow.

“Carol, I’m sorry.”

“What was I, Jack? Bait? All along you thought he was after me, and you didn’t warn me?” She pointed at the computer. “You’ve been on that damned thing trying to make him come for me, and you didn’t warn me!”

“IT WASN’T MR. RED! Buck Daggett killed Riggio, and now Buck is dead!”

“It’s Mr. Red.”

She hit him again.

“STOP SAYING THAT.”

The housekeeper appeared in the hall, staring with wide eyes. Starkey forced herself to calm.

“Charlie was having an affair with Buck’s wife, so Buck killed him. An eyewitness in Bakersfield put Buck at Tennant’s shop. That’s where Buck got the materials to make the bomb. We were on our way to arrest Buck when he was killed in his own garage with those same materials. IT WASN’T MR. RED.”

Pell moved past her to sit on the edge of his bed.

“Is that why you came here? To tell me that?”

“No. I know that you’re not on active duty anymore, and I know why. I’m sorry about your eyes. I really am, Jack, but you’re already blind. You can’t even see that we’re killing people.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dallas Tennant. Buck Daggett. If they didn’t do it to themselves, then someone did it to them. What if we drew Mr. Red here, and they’re dead because of us?”

“If he’s here, then we can catch him.”

Starkey felt sad for him.

“Not you, Jack. That part of it is over. I’m going to tell Barry. He’s going to call the ATF field office. What you do about that is up to you. I wanted you to know it was coming.”

Pell started toward her, but Starkey shook her head.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you not to.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were going to do. What matters is what you did. I have tried for so long to feel nothing, but I opened myself to you, and you used me. Three years, I finally take a step, and it was a lie.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Don’t say that. It doesn’t matter if you felt something for me. Don’t tell me if you did, because that will just make this harder.”

To his credit, he nodded.

“I know.”

It was harder than Starkey thought it would be, to tell him these things. More difficult because she had expected that he would argue with her, or be defensive, but he wasn’t. He seemed hurt and confused.

“I believe that everyone has a secret heart, a heart deep down inside where we keep our secret selves. I think our secret hearts see things that our eyes can’t. Maybe mine saw that you had been hurt the way I had been hurt. Like we were kindred spirits. Maybe that’s why I let myself feel again. I only wish mine could have seen that you were lying to me.”

When she looked at him again, tears had filled his eyes. She had to turn away from him. All of this was so much harder than it should have been.

“That’s what I came here to say. Good-bye, Jack.”

Starkey put the fragment bearing her name on the desk, then walked out.

Starkey signed on to Claudius as soon as she reached home. The chat room occupancy counter showed four people, none of whom were Mr. Red. She didn’t bother to read what they were writing. She typed three words.

The others responded, but no message from him appeared.

The window appeared. He was waiting for her.

Starkey slapped the mouse to open the message window. The conversation would be between only them. Private.

Starkey closed her eyes to calm herself. She waited until she was ready.

Starkey went into the kitchen, mixed a tall drink. She downed two Tagamet, telling herself that she had to stay calm and control the conversation.

She returned to the computer.

She knew that he had given his answer. He had written that on Buck Daggett’s wall. The Truth Hurts.

Calmly, she typed.

The screen blurred through Starkey’s tears. She had more of the drink, then wiped her eyes.

Starkey composed herself.

It took Starkey a moment to compose herself.

He let her wait. Starkey knew that he wanted her to ask again, but she didn’t. She decided that she would sit there the rest of her life and not ask him. She was tired of being manipulated.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore.

Starkey read the question and felt nothing. She knew that he wanted a reaction, but she would not give him the satisfaction.

Starkey knew that there would be no more messages that night. She turned off the computer, then sat in her silent house, smoking. She went to her answering machine and played the messages that Pell had left. She played them over and over, listening to his voice. It hurt.

19

Starkey drank for most of the night, smoking an endless chain of cigarettes that left her home cloudy and gray. She fell asleep twice, both times dreaming of Sugar again and the day in the trailer park. The sleep was anguished, lasting only for a few minutes at a time. Once, she woke seeing the trailer with red words painted on its side: THE TRUTH HURTS. That was the end of the sleep.

She decided that she would tell Kelso first thing in the morning. There wasn’t anything else to do. The investigation had to turn back to Mr. Red, and it had to turn quickly if they were to have any chance of catching him. She thought she knew how.

At ten minutes after five that morning, she paged Warren Mueller. She was too drunk to give a damn about the time. Her phone rang twelve minutes later, a groggy voice on the other end of the line.

“Damn, Mueller, I didn’t expect you to call until later. I guess you sleep with your pager right there by your bed.”

“Starkey? Do you know what time it is?”

“Listen, I know how Tennant got the explosives that he blew himself up with. He got them from Mr. Red. Red went in there to see him.”

She could hear Mueller clearing his throat.

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“Tennant?”

“No, Warren, Mr. Red. There’s two things you need to do. First, you want to check the video record for whoever went in there to see him in the past couple of days. And here’s the other thing, and this is important. You know Tennant’s scrapbook?”

“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about.”

“You never went to see Tennant there?”

“Why in hell would I go see him?”

“He had a scrapbook, Mueller. A collection of clippings and junk about bomb incidents. Anyone who went in there to see him had to look at that damned book. Get the book. Have it printed and run every print you find. There’s no way Red went to see him and didn’t touch that book.”

She described the book in detail, giving Mueller the rest of the facts. After that, she showered, dressed, and packed up the computer. She would need it when she explained to Kelso about Claudius. The last things she did before leaving were fill her flask and drop a fresh pack of Tagamet into her purse.

Starkey timed her arrival at Spring Street so that Kelso would be in his office. She didn’t want to get into the office first and have to make conversation with Marzik and Hooker. She wedged her car into the parking lot next to Marzik’s, gathered up the computer, and brought it with her.

Hooker was at his desk.

“Hey, Hook. Is Kelso in?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Beth?”

“The ladies’ room.”

Starkey loved Jorge. He was the last man in America who called it the ladies’ room.

Starkey went out to the bathroom, where she found Marzik smoking. Marzik fanned the air before she realized it was Starkey, and looked guilty.

“This is your fault.”

“Why don’t you just go in the stairwell?”

“I don’t want anyone to know. Six years I’ve been off these damned things.”

“Throw it away and come inside. I’ve got to see Kelso, and I want you and Hooker with me.”

“Jesus, I just lit the damned thing.”

“For God’s sake, Beth, please.”

Even when Starkey was loving Marzik, she hated her.

Starkey didn’t wait for Hooker and Marzik to get themselves together; she didn’t want the three of them trooping into his office like a bunch of ducks in a row. She knocked on the door, then pushed her way inside with the computer. Kelso eyed it because he knew that Starkey didn’t own a computer and knew nothing about them.

“Barry, I need to see you.”

“You and I have a meeting with Chief Morgan later. He wants to be briefed before the press conference. He also wants to congratulate you, Carol. He told me that. Everyone except you was running off half-cocked about Mr. Red, and you broke this case. I think he’s going to bump you to D-3.”

Starkey put the computer on his desk. Both Marzik and Hooker came in behind her.

“Okay, Barry, we can do that. But I have to tell you some things first, and I want Beth and Jorge to hear it, too. Buck didn’t kill himself. It wasn’t an accident. Mr. Red killed him.”

Kelso glanced at Marzik and Santos, then frowned at Starkey.

“Maybe I’m confused. Weren’t you the one who said that Mr. Red wasn’t involved here?”

“Mr. Red did not kill Charlie Riggio. That was Buck. Buck copycatted Red’s M.O. to cover the murder, just like we proved.”

“Then what in hell are you talking about?”

“Mr. Red didn’t like someone pretending to be him. He came here to find that person. He did.”

Santos said, “Carol, how do you know that?”

Starkey pointed at the computer.

“He admitted it to me on that through Claudius. Mr. Red and I have been in personal contact now for almost a week.”

Kelso’s face closed into an unreadable scowl as she told them about the entire avenue of the investigation that she had held secret, and how, through Claudius, it had led to her contact with Mr. Red. Kelso only stopped her once, when she was telling them about Jack Pell.

“How long have you known that Pell is not a representative of the ATF?”

“Since yesterday. I confronted him about it last night.”

“You are sure about this? You are positive that this man is functioning without authority?”

“Yes.”

Kelso’s jaw flexed. His nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath. When Starkey glanced at Hooker and Marzik, they both stared at the floor.

She said, “Barry, I’m sorry. I was wrong for playing it this way, and I apologize. But we still have a shot at Mr. Red. Buck had more Modex. I’m sure he had more, and I think Red took it.”

“Did Red tell you this?”

“We don’t have conversations. It’s not like we tell each other secrets; he taunts me, he teases me. We have this, I don’t know what you would call it, a relationship. That’s why Pell and I went on-line like this, to try to bring him out. I’m sure I can contact him again. We can work him, Barry. We can catch the sonofabitch.”

Kelso nodded, but he wasn’t nodding agreement. She could see that in his face. He was angry, and probably nodding to something he had thought.

“We look like fools.”

Starkey took a breath.

“You don’t, Barry. I do.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Detective. I’m going to call Morgan. I want you to wait outside. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t do anything. Marzik, Santos, that’s you, too.”

They nodded.

“Did either of you know about this?”

Starkey said, “No.”

“Goddamnit, I’m not asking you.”

Marzik said, “No, sir.”

“No, sir.”

“Wait outside.”

As Starkey was walking out, Kelso stopped her.

“One more thing. At any time during your, I don’t know what to call them, conversations? At any time when you were talking to that murderer, did you impart or reveal any, and I mean anything at all, information about this investigation?”

“No, Barry, I did not.”

“Starkey. Never call me by my first name again.”

Outside, Starkey apologized to Santos and Marzik. Santos nodded glumly, then went to his desk and lapsed into silence. Marzik was livid and didn’t try to hide it.

“If you cost me a promotion, I’m going to kick your drunken ass. I knew you were fucking that bastard.”

Starkey didn’t bother to argue. She sat at her desk and waited.

Kelso’s door remained closed for almost forty-five minutes. When it opened, Starkey, Marzik, and Santos all rose, but Kelso froze Marzik and Santos with a glance.

“Not you. Starkey, inside.”

When she went in, he closed the door. She had never seen him as angry as he was right now.

He said, “You’re finished. You are suspended immediately, and you will be brought up on professional-conduct charges, as well as charges of compromising this investigation. I have already spoken to IAG. They will contact you directly, and you will be subject to their administrative orders. If any criminal charges arise from the subsequent investigation, you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I would advise you to contact a lawyer today.”

Starkey went numb.

“Barry, I know I fucked up, but Mr. Red is still out there. He has more Modex. We can’t just stop; we can’t just end it like this.”

“The only thing at an end is you. You’re done. The rest of us are going to continue doing our jobs.”

“Damnit, I am the investigation. I can get to him, Barry. You want to fire me, fine, fire me after we get the sonofabitch!”

Kelso slowly crossed his arms, considering her.

“You are the investigation? That’s the most arrogant, self-centered statement I’ve ever heard from a detective on this department.”

“Barry, I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know you took it upon yourself to conduct an investigation independent of my office. I know — because you told me so — that you secretly set about baiting the murderer we were all supposed to be trying to find. Maybe, if you had come to me, we would have done that anyway, but we don’t know that. And now, according to you, I know that Buck Daggett is dead by that man’s hand. How does that feel, Carol, knowing that you may have cost Buck his life?”

Starkey blinked hard, trying to stop the tears that filled her eyes. The truth hurts. But there it was.

“It feels just like you think it feels. Please don’t, Barry. Please let me stay and help you catch this guy. I need to.”

Kelso took a deep breath, stood, then went behind his desk and took his seat.

“You’re dismissed.”

Starkey moved for the computer. She needed the computer to get to Mr. Red.

“That stays.”

Starkey left the computer on his desk and walked out.

20

Marzik was at her desk; Santos wasn’t in the squad room. Starkey thought about telling Marzik what had happened, but decided to hell with it. Later, when everyone had calmed, she thought she might call.

“Good-bye, Beth.”

Marzik didn’t respond. So far as Starkey could tell, she didn’t even look.

Starkey worked her car out of the parking garage and drove out into the city with no idea of what to do or where to go. She had expected that Kelso would punish her, that there would be a suspension and loss of pay, but she never thought that he would jerk her from the investigation. She was too much a part of it, had too much of herself invested in it. Everything she had was invested in it. In Mr. Red. Thinking that, she felt the tears, and angrily fought them back. Pell was probably telling himself the same thing.

Starkey fished her flask from beneath the seat, propped it between her legs. She lit a cigarette, blowing a geyser of smoke out the window. The flask was real. She wanted the drink. She squeezed the flask hard between her legs and thought, Oh, for Christ’s sake. She shoved it back under the seat.

She drove to the top of Griffith Park. The place was crawling with tourists. It was hot; the smog was so thick it hung like a mist, hiding the buildings. Starkey watched the tourists trying to see the city through the curtain of crap in the air. They probably couldn’t see more than two or three miles out into the basin. It was like staring at lung cancer. Starkey thought, Here, here’s some more. She lit a fresh cigarette.

She told herself to stop it. She was acting like an ass. She knew that it was Buck Daggett. Whatever Buck had done, it was eating her up that she might have played a role in his death. It was Pell, because the rotten prick had meant something to her, even more than she cared to admit.

Starkey bought a Diet Coke at the concession stand and was walking to the top of the observatory when her pager buzzed. She recognized Mueller’s number by the area code. When she reached the top, she called him.

“It’s Starkey.”

“You’re gonna be the FBI’s cover girl.”

“The book?”

“Oh, baby. Was that a call, or was that a call? We got a clean set, eight out of ten digits, both thumbs. You know the bastard went in there posing as Tennant’s attorney? Can you believe the balls?”

“Warren? Is there a surveillance tape?”

“Yeah. We’ve got that, too. The SLO field office is all over this thing. Starkey, the feds up here are creaming their pants. We got his ID. Listen to this, John Michael Fowles, age twenty-eight. No criminal record of any kind. Had his prints in the federal casket because he enlisted in the Navy when he was eighteen, but washed out as unsuitable for service. He used to start fires in the goddamned barracks.”

Starkey was breathing hard, like a horse wanting to get into the race.

“Warren, listen, I want you to call CCS down here and give them this information, okay? I’m off the investigation.”

“What in hell are you talking about.”

“I fucked up. It’s my fault. I would tell you about it, but I just can’t right now. Would you call them, please? They’re going to need this.”

“Listen, Starkey, whatever you did, they gotta be crazy. I just want you to know that. You’re a top cop.”

“Will you call them?”

Starkey felt as if the world was shifting away beneath her feet, sliding out to sea and leaving her behind.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure, I’ll do that.”

“I’ll talk to you later about it.”

“Starkey?”

“What?”

“Look, you just take care of yourself, okay?”

“Good-bye, Sergeant.”

Starkey closed her phone and watched the tourists putting dimes into the telescopes so they could get a better view of the smog. John Michael Fowles. She saw John Michael hunched over his computer, waiting for Hotload to sign on. She saw him building his bomb with Buck Daggett’s leftover Modex. She saw him targeting another bomb technician and waiting to punch the button that would tear someone apart. She wanted to be on that computer with him. She wanted to finish the job she had started, but Kelso had cut her out of it.

No.

There was another way.

She opened her phone again, and called Pell.

Pell left the motel. He knew that once the local ATF field office was informed that an agent was illegally prosecuting a case, they would act quickly to investigate. He assumed that Starkey would identify his hotel, so he moved. He didn’t know what he would do or where he would go, but he was certain that his pursuit of Mr. Red was at its end. Now that he was found out, the local field offices around the country would be notified, as well as the bomb units of every police force in America. He was done.

He decided not to run. His retinas would soon detach completely, and irreparably — and that would be that. He thought he might wait a day or two, hoping that Starkey and the L.A. cops could bag Mr. Red, and then he would turn himself in. Fuck it. There ain’t no prize for second place.

He felt no loss at missing Mr. Red. That part of it surprised him. For almost two years, his private pursuit had been his consuming passion. Now, well, it just didn’t matter. The loss he felt was for Starkey. The regret he felt was for the pain he had caused her.

Pell checked into a different hotel, then drove aimlessly until he found himself at a diner on the water in Santa Monica. He had gone there to see the ocean. He thought that he should probably try to see as many things as possible while he was still able, but once there he hadn’t even bothered to get a table facing outward. He sat at the counter, thinking that he might try to stay in Los Angeles. At least long enough to try to make peace with Starkey. Maybe he could apologize. If he couldn’t make it right, maybe he could make her hate him less.

When his pager vibrated, he recognized her number, and thought that she might be calling to tell him to turn himself in. He thought that he might do that.

He returned her call.

“You calling to arrest me?”

What she said surprised him.

“No. I’m calling to give you one last chance to catch this bastard.”

Starkey found him at a rathole diner, waiting in a booth. Her heart felt heavy when she saw him, but she pushed that aside.

“You might as well know. You’re not the only one on the wrong side of the law.”

“What does that mean?”

She told him what had happened. She kept it short. She was uneasy being around him.

“Here’s the deal, Pell, and you have to agree to it. If we get this guy, we are not going to kill him, we are going to arrest him. This is no longer your personal vendetta. Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“If we get this set up, we are going back to Kelso. I am not a goddamned cowboy like you. I want to do this the right way, and I want to make sure it works.”

“You want to save your job.”

“Yes, Pell, I want to save my job. They might fire me anyway, but I want to go out as the police officer I am, and not some half-cocked asshole who got Buck Daggett killed.”

Pell stared out the window. She thought he was trying to memorize whatever he saw out there.

“If I go in with you, I might be taken into custody.”

“You don’t have to go. Come if you want, or not. I’m just telling you how it has to be played.”

Pell nodded again. She knew that was hard for him. He would be taking himself out of the play.

“Then what do you need me for?”

“Mr. Red waits for me. He’s got this … fixation. I can use that. But I need your computer to get back on Claudius. Kelso took mine.”

Pell glanced away again.

“I should have told you what I was doing. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’ve been living with one thing in my life for a long time. You get used to doing things a certain way.”

“Is this what you’ve been doing for two years, Pell? Bullshitting your way from city to city after this guy?”

Pell shrugged, as if it embarrassed him.

“I have a badge and an ID number. I know the procedure, and I have friends. Most people don’t question the badge. Cops never question it.”

“Look, I don’t care, and I don’t want to talk about it. You want to do this or not?”

He looked at her.

“I want to do it.”

“Then let’s go.”

She started to slide out of the booth. He took her arm, stopping her.

“Carol?”

“What? Don’t touch me like that, Pell. I don’t like it.”

“I fell in love with you.”

She hit him again, so fast that she didn’t even know she was doing it. The people at the surrounding tables looked at them.

“Don’t you say that.”

Pell felt his face.

“Jesus, Starkey, that’s three.”

“Don’t you say that.”

He shoved himself out of the booth.

“The computer is in my car.”

They went to her place.

It was hard looking at Pell. It was difficult being in the same room with him, but she told herself to be strong. They had brought themselves down this road together. There was no other way to play it, but she was uncomfortably aware of the feelings she’d had when they’d been in this position before.

They set up the computer at the dining room table, and Starkey signed on as before. It was earlier than the previous times she’d had contact with Mr. Red, but she couldn’t just sit. When the flaming head stared out at her, she entered the chat room, which was empty.

Pell said, “What are you going to say?”

“This.”

“Who’s John Michael Fowles?”

“Mr. Red. Warren Mueller got his prints off Tennant’s book. I knew that if Red had gone in there, Tennant would have made him look at that damned book.”

Pell stared at the screen. Starkey saw his lips move, as if he were reading the name silently to himself, branding it into his cells.

Starkey didn’t expect Fowles to be waiting for her, not this early in the day. He might come anytime, or no time; they might have a long wait. She struck a cigarette, and told Pell that if he wanted anything in the kitchen, he could find it for himself. Neither of them left the computer.

Fowles was there almost at once.

Starkey smiled. Pell shifted forward, Starkey thinking he might fall into the computer.

“Fast.”

“He’s been waiting.”

She opened the window.

Starkey did not answer.

Pell said, “Why aren’t you answering him?”

“Let him wait. It’s a game he plays.”

Finally, another message appeared.

Fowles again fell silent. It was several moments before he replied.

“Christ, Starkey, how close are you two?”

“Shut up.”

Pell shifted again. Starkey watched the screen, thinking, then typed:

Starkey hesitated. Her fingers trembled, and she thought of the flask again. She lit a fresh cigarette.

Pell saw the tremble.

“You okay?”

She didn’t answer him.

Fowles paused again.

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s thinking. He wants something. He’s trying to figure out how to get it.”

“What does he want?”

“Pay attention, Pell. He wants me.”

She leaned back, letting it sit. She needed to think. She knew that they would have only one shot to bring him in; if he figured out what she was trying to do, her chance would be gone, and so would he.

Pell said, “Be weak.”

Starkey glanced over and found Pell watching her.

He said, “He’s male. If you want him, need him. Let him take care of you.”

“That isn’t me.”

“Pretend.”

She turned back to the keyboard.

She didn’t respond.

She hesitated again. She knew what she wanted, but she could not suggest it. He had to suggest it. It had to be his idea or he would never go for it.

“You’ve got him, Starkey.”

“Maybe.”

She had what she needed to go back to Kelso, but everything depended on Mr. Red. A large part of her was scared that if he signed off now, he would not return. He would not be there at three o’clock. She knew better than to type this, but something in her wanted to know. She told herself that if she brought him to this point, he would be hers. He would not vanish, he would not disappear. He would return to her, and she would catch him.

It was such an intimate thing that she felt embarrassed writing it in front of Pell.

He hesitated so long that she grew scared that he had gone. When his answer came, she regretted having asked.

Starkey did not reply. She signed off Claudius, then turned off the machine.

Pell was staring at her.

She said, “Stop looking at me like that. We’ve got a lot to do.”

John Michael Fowles was parked less than two blocks up the street from Starkey’s house. He closed the iBook and smiled.

“DAMN, I’m good! I am so fucking good that somebody should tattoo ‘Mr. Irresistible’ on both cheeks of my ass.”

He pushed the iBook aside and patted the jar of Modex. He liked having it with him, the gray explosive in its jar like a big glob of toothpaste. It was better than having a goldfish. You didn’t have to feed it.

He waited until Starkey and Pell left, then drove back to his hotel to work on the new bomb. He was building a different kind of bomb this time, one just for Carol Starkey. He didn’t have much time.

21

Starkey wanted to manuever John Michael Fowles into revealing his location so that she could bag him. To do that, she needed phone traps in place in the event they spoke on a land line, and the cell companies standing by for a triangulation in the more likely event that his number linked to a cell phone. Once his position was fixed, she needed bodies to close the perimeter. Since the target was John Michael Fowles, AKA Mr. Red, she feared that he would have explosives on his person, which required a call-out from the Bomb Squad. All of this meant that she needed Kelso’s help.

She phoned Dick Leyton.

When he came on the line, he sounded distant, but concerned. She knew from his tone that he’d heard the news.

“Dick, I need your help.”

“I don’t know that I’m in a position to give it. I spoke with Barry. What in hell were you thinking, Carol?”

“Did Barry tell you that I was in contact with Mr. Red?”

“Of course, he told me. You’re in serious trouble because of this. Serious. I don’t think you’ll get off with just a suspension.”

“Dick, I know I’m in trouble. Please listen to me. I am still in contact with Mr. Red. I was just on-line with him.”

“Damnit, Carol, you’re only making it worse for yourself. You need to—”

Starkey interupted him.

“I know Barry fired me, I know that I’m not part of the team, but I can get this guy, Dick. I have a relationship with him whether Barry likes it or not, and we can use that to bag this mutt. I have him set up, Dick. I have the guy set up.”

Leyton didn’t say anything. She knew he was thinking, so she pressed ahead to convince him.

“At exactly three o’clock, he’s going to be on-line again. He’s going to give me a phone number to call. I will call it. Dick, I think I can arrange a face-to-face. If I can’t, maybe we can still trap the call. This is Mr. Red, for God’s sake, do you think we should walk away from an opportunity like this? Take me to Barry, Dick. Please.”

They spoke about it for another ten minutes, Leyton asking questions, Starkey answering. They both knew that Leyton would have to call Morgan. He needed to convince the A-chief before Kelso would go for it. They would also need Morgan’s horsepower to get everything set up in time. Starkey immediately regretted agreeing with Fowles to do this today; she kicked herself for not putting him off until tomorrow, but it was too late for that now. Leyton finally said that he would do it, telling Starkey to meet him at Spring Street by two o’clock.

When she hung up, she looked at Pell.

“You heard.”

“We’re on.”

“If Morgan goes for it, I would guess that he’s going to alert the ATF and the Feebs. They might be there.”

“They probably will. Those boys don’t like to sit out the dance.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t come.”

“I didn’t come this far to quit, Starkey.”

“Well, let’s go. You want to get something to eat?”

“I don’t think I could.”

“You want some Tagamet?”

Pell laughed.

She brought him back to the diner for his car, and then they went their separate ways.

Starkey put her car in the red zone outside Spring Street at five minutes before two, and went up with the second computer. Leyton was already present, as were Morgan and two of his Men in Black. Pell hadn’t yet arrived. Starkey found herself hoping that he would change his mind about coming. Kelso was outside his office with two suits who Starkey took to be federal agents. Marzik was talking up one of the Men in Black and ignored her.

Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and looked at her.

Dick said, “Carol, why don’t we go into Barry’s office.” Starkey followed them into Kelso’s office, where Morgan nodded politely.

“Looks like you’re in some trouble, Detective.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, let’s see how this turns out.”

Kelso wasn’t happy about any of it, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He wanted Mr. Red, and if this was their best shot, he was game to take it. Three representatives from the phone company had set up a computer of their own, feeding into Barry’s phone jack.

Leyton said, “Carol, I sketched out our discussion both to Chief Morgan and to Lieutenant Kelso. They’re on board with this. The dispatch office is standing by with secure communication to the patrol division. SWAT has been alerted, and the Bomb Squad is, as always, ready to roll.”

Starkey nodded, smiling at the “as always.”

“All right.”

Secure communication meant that all directions to patrol units would be transmitted through the computers in the black and whites. No one wanted to use radio calls because those could be intercepted by the media and private citizens.

“Where do you want to do this?”

Kelso said, “Here in my office. Do you need anything special for the computer?”

“Just a phone line. I’ll use my cell phone to make the voice call.”

One of the Men in Black said, “Shouldn’t she use a hard line for the trap?”

One of the phone company people said, “Negative. He’s providing the number. We’ll work the address from that unless he’s on a cell. If he’s mobile, it doesn’t matter what she’s on.”

Kelso cleared his desk so that Starkey could set up the computer. She caught a glimpse of Pell out in the squad room, talking with the federal suits.

At ten minutes before three, Starkey was waiting to sign on with an audience crowded around her. Leyton came up behind her and rubbed her shoulders.

“We’ve still got a few minutes. Get a cup of coffee.”

Starkey left for the squad room, glad for the break. Pell was still with the two suits, but he wasn’t in handcuffs. She didn’t go for a cup of coffee. She went over to Pell.

“Are these people with the ATF?”

The shorter of the two introduced himself as Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Wally Coombs and the taller as Special Agent Burton Armus, both of the Los Angeles field office.

“Is Mr. Pell under arrest?”

“Not at this time. We’d like to ask you a few questions about all this.”

“You’ll have to ask me later.”

“We understand that.”

“I will need Mr. Pell’s assistance in the other room.”

The two agents traded a look, then Coombs shrugged.

“Sure.”

Pell followed her back to Kelso’s, walking very close behind her.

“Thanks.”

At two fifty-nine, Starkey was again in front of the computer.

She said, “Are we ready?”

Morgan met the eyes of the section leaders and the phone company people. One of the phone people murmured something into his private line, and gave a thumbs-up. Morgan nodded at her.

“Go.”

Starkey opened the door into Claudius. Almost at once, the words appeared.

Kelso said, “Jesus.”

Morgan frowned.

“No talking.”

When the window appeared, it wasn’t what any of them expected.

Kelso said, “Damnit!”

Morgan shushed him. He nodded to Starkey, encouraging.

“Play it as you would, Detective Starkey. You know what they say, shit happens.”

Starkey glanced up at him, and the Man in Black smiled.

Starkey typed.

Kelso said, “Ah, Carol—”

Pell said, “She knows what she’s doing.”

Starkey leaned back, waiting. She could feel Kelso, Leyton, and the others shifting behind her, and didn’t like it.

Morgan quietly told his assistants to have plainclothes units position themselves around Echo Park. She heard Dick Leyton speaking softly into his cell phone, alerting the Bomb Squad. She ignored them.

They set it up on the roll, coordinating SWAT and the Bomb Squad to meet in a parking lot six blocks east of Echo Park. Plainclothes spotters of Latin descent were posted on the streets surrounding the park, equipped with radios. All uniformed officers and black and white radio cars were pulled.

The phone people wrapped a wire on Starkey there in Kelso’s office, even as the orders were being given. Starkey was to drive to the park in her own car and do exactly as John Michael Fowles had instructed. Once in the park, if and when he approached her and identified himself, the area would be sealed. Snipers would be in position if needed.

Pell said, “You okay with this?”

It was happening so fast that she wanted to throw up.

“Sure.”

They hustled her out to her car less than eight minutes after the computer was off.

Starkey drove to Echo Park pretending that none of this was happening. She knew that this was the best approach. Forget about all the activity in support of her, just like approaching a bomb. Do it that way, and she wouldn’t be caught looking for the snipers or the plainclothes people, and give herself away.

The drive from Spring Street to Echo Park took twelve minutes. She parked on the south side like he said, fighting the urge to throw up. He wouldn’t be standing there with a grin and a hot dog in his hand. He was Mr. Red. There would be a surprise.

“Radio check.”

“One two three, three two one.”

“You’re clear.”

“I’m pulling the plug.”

“Rog.”

She took the plug from her ear. If he saw it, he would know she was wired. The mike taped between her breasts would pick up her voice. If she said, “Hello, Mr. Red,” they would hear.

The plan was simple. Point him out, hit the ground, let everyone else do their jobs.

Starkey locked her car and walked toward the concession stand. It was a weekday summer afternoon. The park was jammed with families, kids with balloons, bladers and boarders and plenty of ice cream. It was so hot that the tarmac beneath her feet was soft. Starkey hoped that it wouldn’t get hotter.

A long line waited at the concession stand. She had to cover about sixty yards, which she did slowly so that she could search each face in the area. She didn’t care if Fowles thought she was being careful, but she didn’t want him to think she was stalling to give other officers a chance to set up.

When she reached the concession stand, she stopped. No one approached her, and no one even looked like they could be Mr. Red. The crowd was mostly Latin, with a smattering of blacks and Asians. She was one of the few Anglos that she could see.

Starkey shook out a cigarette and lit up. The minutes stretched. He could be anywhere, he could be nowhere. She wondered if he had changed his mind again.

A short, squat woman and her children joined the line. She reminded Starkey of the women she had seen from Dana’s window, the women trying to catch their bus. This woman had four children, small ones, all boys, all short, squat, and brown like their mother. The oldest boy stood close by his mother’s side, but the other three ran pell-mell in circles, chasing each other and screaming. Starkey wished that they would shut the hell up. All the screaming was getting on her nerves. The two smallest boys raced behind the concession stand, came out from around the other side, and skidded to a stop. They had found the bag. At first, Starkey wasn’t sure what they were doing or what they had, but then the earth heaved up against her feet and she knew.

The two smallest boys looked in the bag. Their older brother joined them. A plain paper shopping bag that someone had left at the corner of the concession stand.

Starkey wished she had eaten more Tagamet.

“Get away from there.”

She didn’t shriek or rush forward. This was Mr. Red. He would have a remote. He was watching, and he could fire the charge whenever the fucking hell he wanted.

Starkey dropped her cigarette and crushed it. She had to get those kids away from there.

She walked toward the bag.

“We have a possible device. I say again, possible device. I gotta get these kids away.”

When she was closer, she raised her voice, made it sharp and angry.

“Hey!”

The boys looked. They probably spoke no English.

“Get the fuck away from that.”

The boys knew she was talking to them, but stared at her without comprehension. Their mother said something in Spanish.

Starkey said, “Tell them to get away from that.”

The mother was chattering in Spanish when Starkey reached the bag and saw the pipes.

“BOMB!”

She grabbed two of the boys, she could only get two, and lunged backwards, screaming, “BOMBBOMBBOMB! POLICE OFFICER, CLEAR THE AREA, MOVE MOVE MOVE!”

The boys screamed, their mother lit into Starkey like a mama cat, the people in the line milled in confusion. Starkey pushed and shoved, trying to get the people to move even as police units bucked over the curb and roared toward her across the park—

— and nothing happened.

Russ Daigle, wet with sweat, his face drawn in the way a person’s face can be drawn only when they work a bomb, said, “There’s no charge in the pipes.”

Starkey had guessed that forty minutes ago. If Mr. Red had wanted to blow it, he would have blown it when she was standing there. Now she was sitting in the back of Daigle’s Suburban, just as she used to sit when she was on the squad, and winding down from de-arming a device. Daigle had sent the Andrus robot forward with the de-armer to blow the pipes apart.

“There was a note.”

Daigle handed her the red 3 × 5 index card. Dick Leyton and Morgan had walked over with him.

The note said: Check the list.

Starkey looked at them.

“What the fuck does this mean?”

Leyton squeezed her arm.

“He’s on the Ten Most Wanted List. As soon as the Feebs had his identity, they added him.”

Starkey laughed.

“I’m sorry, Carol. It was a good try. It was a really good try.”

They were done. Any relationship she’d had with Mr. Red was history. He would’ve seen what they had tried to do. Wherever he was, he was no doubt laughing his ass off. She might sign on to Claudius again, and he might be there, but any hope of baiting him into a trap was gone. He had what he wanted.

Kelso came over and told her pretty much the same thing. He even managed to look embarrassed.

“Listen, Carol, we’re still going to have to deal with what happened, but, well, maybe we can work out something to keep you on the job. You won’t be able to stay with CCS, but we’ll see.”

“Thanks, Barry.”

“You can even call me by my first name.”

Starkey smiled.

The two ATF agents hovered around Pell like his personal guards. Starkey caught Pell’s eye. Pell spoke to the agents, then walked over.

“How you doing?”

“Been better. But I’ve been worse, too. You hear they put him on the list?”

“Yeah. Maybe he’ll retire. The sonofabitch.”

Starkey nodded. She didn’t know what to think about that. Would Mr. Red stay in Los Angeles? Would he continue to kill, or would he simply vanish? She thought about the Zodiac Killer up in San Francisco, who had murdered a string of people, and then simply stopped.

She looked at the two feds.

“What’s going to happen with your friends?”

“They’re not going to drag me away in chains. They want me to come in to the FO for an interview, they advised me of my rights, and told me to get an attorney. What does that tell you?”

“That you’re fucked?”

“You have such a way with words.”

Starkey smiled, even though she didn’t feel much like smiling.

“That’s a nice smile.”

“Don’t.”

“I need to talk to you, Carol. We have to talk about this.”

Starkey shoved off the back of the Suburban.

“I don’t want to talk. I just want to go somewhere and heal.”

“I don’t mean talk about what’s going to happen to me. I mean talk about us.”

“I know what you meant. Good-bye, Jack. If I can help you when they interview me, I will.”

Starkey looked deeply into the two dimming eyes, then walked away so that he could not see how very much she wanted that time with him.

22

Starkey did not drive back to Spring Street. The summer sun was still high in the west, but the air was clear, and the heat felt good. She drove with the windows down.

Starkey stopped at an A.M./P.M. minimart, bought a jumbo iced tea, then took a turn through Rampart Division. She watched the citizens and enjoyed the play of traffic. Every time she saw a black and white, she tipped her head at them. The pager at her waist vibrated once, but she turned it off without checking the number. Pell, she figured. Or Kelso. Either way, it didn’t matter. She was done with the bombs. She could walk away and live without working the bombs or being a bomb investigator and get along just fine. She was heartened by what Kelso had said. She thought that she might like working Homicide, but most detectives wanted Homicide. It was a tough billet to get, and she hadn’t done all that well at CCS. When word got out that she had withheld information from her own detectives, she’d be lucky to find a spot in Property Crimes.

Starkey thought about these things until she realized that she was doing it so she wouldn’t think about Pell, and then she couldn’t get him out of her head. The tea was suddenly bitter, and the knowledge of how Red had played her was a jagged pill that cut at her throat. She threw away the tea, popped two Tagamet, then turned for home, feeling empty, but not so empty that she wanted to fill that lost place with gin.

That was something, and, she guessed, maybe she had Pell to thank for it, though she was in no mood to do so.

By the time Starkey reached her house, she was hoping that she would find Pell waiting in the drive, but she didn’t. Just as well, she thought, but in that same moment her chest filled with an ache of loss that she hadn’t known since Sugar had died. Realizing that did not improve her spirits, but she forced the thought of it and what it meant away. She was better now. She had grown. She would spend the rest of her day trying to save her job, or deciding how best to leave it and the memory of Jack Pell behind.

Starkey shut her engine and let herself into her home. The message light was blinking by the front phone, but she did not see it, nor would it have mattered if she had.

The first and only thing she saw, the thing that caught her eye as if it had reached out with claws, was the device on her coffee table. An unexpected visual jolt of plastic and wires, alien and mechanical, stark and obvious as it rested on a stack of Glamour and American Crime Scene; everything about it screaming BOMB in a way that flushed acid through Starkey’s soul in the same moment her world exploded in a white fury.

“Can you hear me?”

His voice was surprisingly mellow. She could barely understand him over the shrill ringing in her ears.

“I can see your eyes moving, Carol Starkey.”

She heard footsteps, heavy heels on hard floor, then smelled the overripe odor of what she thought was gasoline. The footsteps moved away.

“You smell that? That’s charcoal starter fluid I found in your pantry. If you don’t wake up, I’m going to set your leg on fire.”

She felt the wet on her leg, the nice Donna Karan pants and the Bruno Magli shoes.

The sharp throb behind her right ear was a swelling spike that made her eyes water. She could feel her heart beating there, strong and horrible. When she opened her eyes, she saw double.

“Are you okay, Carol Starkey? Can you see me?”

She looked toward his voice.

He smiled when their eyes met. A black metal rod about eighteen inches long sprouted from his right hand. He’d found her Asp in the closet. He spread his hands, gesturing wide and presenting himself.

“I’m Mr. Red.”

She was seated on the hearth, arms spread wide, handcuffed to the metal frame surrounding her fireplace. Her legs were straight out before her, making her feel like a child. Her hands were numb.

“Congratulations, John. You finally made the list.”

He laughed. He had beautiful even teeth, and didn’t look anything like she’d imagined or anything like the grainy photos that she’d seen. He looked younger than his twenty-eight years, but in no way the shabby misfit that most bombers were. He was a good-looking man; he had all his fingers.

“Well, now that I’m there, it ain’t so much, you know? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

She thought to keep him talking. As long as he was talking, her odds of survival increased. The device was on longer on the coffee table. Now, the device was sitting on the floor inches beyond her feet.

She tried not to look at it.

“Look at it, Carol Starkey.”

Reading her mind.

He came over and sat cross-legged on the floor, patting the device like a friend.

“The last of Daggett’s Modex Hybrid. It’s not the mix I prefer, but it’ll get the job done.” He stroked the device, proud of it. “And this one really is for you. Got your name on it and everything.”

She looked at it just to watch his hand; the fingers were long and slender and precise. In another life, they could have belonged to a surgeon or watchmaker. She looked at the bomb: Dark shapes within a plastic container, wires sprouting up through the lid to a black plastic box with a switch on its side. This bomb was different. This bomb was not radio-controlled.

She said, “Timer.”

“Yeah. I gotta be somewhere else when this one goes off. Celebrating my ascension to the Ten. Isn’t this cool, Carol Starkey? They wouldn’t put me on the list until they knew my name, and you’re the one who identified me. You made my dream come true.”

“Lucky me.”

Without another word, he reached to the black box, pressed the side, and a green LED timer appeared, counting down from fifteen minutes. He grinned.

“Kinda hokey, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I wanted you to watch the damned thing.”

“You’re insane, Fowles.”

“Of course, but couldn’t you be more original than that?”

He patted her leg, then went to her couch and came back with a wide roll of duct tape.

“Look, don’t do anything chicken and close your eyes, okay? I mean, why waste the moment? This is my gift to you, Carol Starkey. You’re going to see the actual instant of your destruction. Just watch the seconds trickle down until that final second when you cease. Don’t sweat being wounded or anything like that. You’ll reach death as we know it in less than a thousandth of a second. Oblivion.”

“Fuck you.”

He tore off a strip of tape, but stopped on his knees and smiled.

“In a way, that’s what I’m doing to you.”

“I want the truth about something.”

“The truth is a commodity.”

“Answer me, you bastard. Did all of this happen … did Buck die because I brought you here?”

He settled back on his heels to consider her, then smiled.

“Do you want the truth?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to answer one of mine.”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

“All right. Then here’s the truth. Spend your guilt on other matters, Detective Starkey. I learned about the Silver Lake bomb on the NLETS system before you and Pell ever started playing your little game. Daggett brought me here, not you.”

Starkey felt a huge wedge of tension ease.

“Now you answer mine.”

“What?”

“How did it feel?”

“How did what feel? Being used?”

He leaned closer, like a child peering into an aquarium.

“No, no, no. The trailer park. You were right on top of it. Even though it was just black powder and dynamite, it had to hit you with an overpressure of almost sixty thousand pounds.”

His eyes were alive with it. She knew then that this was what he wanted, to be the person in that moment, to feel the force of it. Not just control it, but feel it, to take it into himself and be consumed by it.

“Fowles. It felt like … nothing. I lost consciousness. I didn’t feel anything until later.”

He stared at her as if he was still waiting for her answer, and she felt her anger rage. It had been the same with everyone since the day it had happened; friends, strangers, cops, now even this maniac. Starkey had had enough of it.

“What, Fowles? Do you think a window opens so that you see God? It’s a fucking explosion, you moron. It happens so fast you don’t have time even to know it’s happening. It’s about as mystical as you hitting me when I walked through that door.”

Fowles stared without blinking. She wondered if he was in a fugue state.

“Fowles?”

He frowned, irritated.

“That’s because you had nothing but a low-end piece of bullshit, Starkey. Homemade crap thrown together by some ignoramus. Now you’re dealing with Mr. Red. Two kilos of Modex boiling out at twenty-eight K. The pressure wave is going to sweep up your legs in one ten-thousandth of a second, smashing the blood up into your torso just like a steamroller driving right up to your hips. The hydrostatic shock is going to blow out every capillary in your brain in about a thousandth of a second. Instant brain death at just about the same time as your lower legs separate. You’ll be dead, though, so you won’t feel it.”

“You should stay and enjoy the show. You could sit on my lap.”

Fowles grinned.

“I like you, Starkey. Too bad I didn’t know you when you worked the bombs. I would’ve gotten it right the first time.”

He grabbed her hair with his left hand, forced her head back, and pressed the tape over her mouth. She tried to twist away, but he pressed the tape down hard, then added a second piece. She opened her mouth as far as she could, letting the skin pull. She felt the tape loosen, but it didn’t pull free.

The timer was down to thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds. Fowles checked his watch.

“Perfect.”

She tried to tell him to fuck himself, but it came out a mumble.

John Michael Fowles squatted beside her and gently touched her head.

“Save a place in hell for me, Carol Starkey.”

He stood then and went to the door, but she did not see him. She watched the timer, the green LED numbers spinning down toward eternity.

Coombs and Armus were gentlemen about it. They could have brought him in like just another mutt, but they played it straight. They wanted his gun and his badge, which he had left in his motel, and they wanted to talk to him. He asked if he could meet them at the field office, and they said fine. It helped that Dick Leyton told them that Pell had been instrumental in getting them this close to Mr. Red.

Pell drove back to his motel, got the ID and the big Smith 10, then checked out. He sat in his car for a long time, listening to his heart beat and feeling sweat run down his chest. He did not think about John Michael Fowles, or about Armus and Coombs; he thought about Starkey.

Pell cranked his car and went after her, having no idea what he would say or do, only knowing that he could not let her go this easily. Coombs and Armus could wait.

Pell parked on the street in front of her house, relieved when he saw her car in the drive. Funny, he thought, that his heart beat now with the same kind of intensity as when he was facing a mutt in a life-or-death situation.

When Starkey didn’t answer, his first thought was that she’d seen him approach, and was ignoring him.

He knocked, and called through the door.

“Carol, please. I want to talk.”

He tried to see through the little panes of glass that ran vertically beside her door, but they were crusted with dust. He rubbed at them, looked harder. He thought that she was sitting at the fireplace, but then he saw the tape, and her wrists and the handcuffs. Then he saw the device at her feet.

Pell slammed the door with his foot, and then he was in, going through the door when something heavy hit him from behind and the world blurred. He stumbled forward, seeing flashing bursts of light. Starkey’s eyes were wild. Something exploded brilliantly in his head. A man was behind him, hitting him. The man was screaming.

“You fuck! You fuck!”

Pell clawed out his Smith as he was hit again. He could feel consicousness slipping away, but the Smith came out and the safety went off and he fired up into the shadow above him even as the light bled into darkness.

When Pell came to the door, Starkey tried to call through the tape, whipping her head from side to side. She kicked at the floor with her heels, trying to warn him with the noise. She raked her face on her shoulders, tearing at the tape, and jerked at the handcuffs, letting them cut into her wrists.

Fowles jumped behind the door with the Asp just as Pell crashed through. Pell saw only her, and even as Starkey tried to warn Pell with her eyes, Fowles nailed him with the Asp. Fowles hit him again and again, the hard weight of the Asp crashing down like a cinder block.

Pell went down, woozy and blank. Starkey saw him reach out his gun, that monster ugly autoloader, and then he was shooting, shooting up into Fowles, who flipped back and sideways, then crawled toward her couch.

Starkey raked her face against her shoulders, feeling the tape work free, even as she watched the timer. It was winding down so fast the numbers blurred.

Fowles tried to rise, but couldn’t.

Pell moaned.

Starkey worked at the tape, stretching her jaw and raking her face until finally one end of the tape came free and she found her voice.

Starkey screamed, “Pell! Pell, get up!”

6:48.47.46.

“Pell. Get up and get the keys! Wake up, Pell, goddamnit!”

Pell pushed himself onto his back. He stared straight up at the ceiling, blinking his eyes again and again as if he were seeing the most amazing thing.

“Damnit, Pell, we’ve got six minutes, this thing is gonna explode! Come over here.”

Pell pushed onto his side and blinked some more, then rubbed at his face.

“I can’t see you. I can’t see anymore. There’s nothing left but light and shadows.”

Starkey’s blood drained. She knew what had happened. The fight had finished the work on his eyes, caused the damaged retinas to separate and fold away, severing their final fragile connection to the optic nerves.

She felt herself hyperventilating and forced herself to hold her breath, to stop breathing just long enough to get herself under control.

“You can’t see, Jack? How about up close? Can you see your hand?”

He held his hand in front of his face.

“I see a shadow. That’s all I see. Who hit me? Was it him?”

“You shot him. He’s on the couch.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know if he’s dead or not, Jack, but forget him! This bomb is on a timer. The goddamned timer is running down, you understand?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Six minutes, ten seconds.”

Not enough time for the police to respond. She knew it was the first thing he would think.

“I can’t see, Carol. I’m sorry.”

“Goddamnit, Jack, I’m handcuffed to this fucking fireplace. You get me loose and I can de-arm that bomb!”

“I CAN’T SEE!”

She could see the sweat leaking from his short hair down his face. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Facing away from her. Across the room, Fowles tried to rise once more, failed, and whatever life was left seemed to drain from him.

“Jack.”

Pell turned.

She forced her breathing to even out. When you work the bomb, you stay calm. Panic kills.

“Jack, quick now, okay? Turn toward my voice.”

“This is pathetic.”

But he did it.

6:07.06.05.

“Straight ahead of you is twelve o’clock. Fowles is at eight o’clock, right? Just across the room. Maybe fourteen feet. He’s on a couch behind the coffee table, and I think he’s dead. The keys might be in his pockets.”

She could see the hope flicker on his face.

“MOVE, damnit!”

He crawled, two knees and a hand, the other feeling ahead for the table.

“That’s it, Jack. Almost at the table and he’s right behind it.”

When Pell reached the table, he shoved it aside. He found the couch before Fowles’s leg, then walked his hands up the legs to the pockets. Fowles’s shirt was wet, and the blood had soaked down along his thighs. Pell’s hands grew red as he worked.

4:59.58.57.

“Find it, Jack! GET THE DAMNED KEYS!”

“They’re not here! They’re not in his pockets!”

“You missed them!”

“THEY’RE NOT HERE!”

She watched him dig in both pants pockets and the back pockets, then run his fingers around Fowles’s waist just as he’d frisk a suspect.

“The socks! Check his socks and shoes!”

She searched the room with her eyes, thinking maybe Fowles had tossed the keys. You didn’t need keys to lock handcuffs; only to remove them. He had never intended to remove them. She didn’t see them, and it would only be wasting time for him to feel his way around the room searching for something so small.

“I CAN’T FIND THEM!”

Fowles moaned once, and shifted.

“He’s still alive!”

3:53.52.51.

Her eyes went back to the flashing timer and watched the seconds trickle away.

“Is he armed? Does he have a gun?”

“No, no gun.”

“Then forget him! Five o’clock now. Come around to five o’clock.”

Pell continued ripping at Fowles’s clothes.

“JACK GODDAMNIT DO IT! FIVE O’CLOCK!”

Pell turned toward her voice.

3:30.29.28.

“The door’s at five o’clock. Get out of here.”

“No.”

“Romantic, Jack. Very romantic.”

“I’M NOT LEAVING YOU!”

He crawled toward her, covering the ground without concern for obstacles, veering far to the right —

“Here.”

Changing course to find her foot, barely missing the device, then walking his hands up her legs.

“Talk to me, Carol. You’re handcuffed to what?”

“An iron fire grate. The frame is set into the bricks.”

His hands slid across her body, jumped to her arms and found her right hand, felt over the cuffs and her wrist to the iron frame. He gripped the frame with both hands and pulled, his face going red. He swung around and wedged his feet against the wall and pulled even harder until the veins bulged huge and swollen in his face.

“It’s solid, Jack. The bolts are set deep.”

He grabbed across her and tried the other bar. She found herself, strangely, growing calm. She wondered what Dana would say about that. Acceptance? Resignation.

Pell’s voice was frantic.

“A lever. Maybe I can pry it out. There’s gotta be something I can use.”

“The Asp.”

The Asp had rolled against the far wall. They lost almost a minute as she directed him to it, then back. He wedged it behind the rail and pulled.

The Asp bent at its joint, useless, and fell free.

“It broke.”

Pell threw it aside.

“Something stronger, then! A fireplace poker! A log!”

“I DON’T HAVE ANY OF THAT, PELL!! THERE’S NOTHING IN MY GODDAMNED HOUSE!!! I’M A ROTTEN HOMEMAKER!! NOW GET OUT OF HERE!”

He stopped then, and looked toward her face with eyes so gentle and open that she felt sure he could see.

“Where’s the door, Carol?”

She didn’t hesitate, and loved him for going, loved him for sparing her the final three minutes of guilt that she had caused his death, too.

“Behind you, seven o’clock.”

He touched her face, and let his fingers linger.

“I did you wrong, Carol. I’m sorry about that.”

“Forget it, Jack. I absolve you. Hell, I friggin’ love you. Now please go.”

He followed her leg down to the device, cradled it under his arm, and began navigating toward the door.

Starkey realized what he was doing and screamed in a rage.

“GODDAMNIT, NO!!! PELL, DON’T YOU DO THAT!!! DON’T YOU KILL YOURSELF FOR ME!!”

He crawled for the door, carrying the device under his left arm, moving well right of the door as he’d lost his bearings.

“You’re doing me a favor, Starkey. I get to go out a hero. I get to die for the woman I love. That’s the most a guy like me can ever hope to do.”

He bumped into the nester tables, lost his balance, and dropped the bomb. She could see the lights in the timer blurring.

As he fumbled to pick it up, Starkey knew that he was going to do it. He was going to carry the damned thing outside and blow himself to hell and leave her in here to carry the weight of it just as she’d done with Sugar, and then, only then, her eyes filled and the only possible way to save them both came to her.

“Pell, listen.”

He had the bomb again and was feeling for the door.

“Pell, LISTEN! We can de-arm the bomb. I know how to de-arm the fuckin’ bomb!”

He paused, and looked at her.

“How much time?”

“I can’t see it. Turn it to the right and put it on its side.”

2:44.13.12.

“Bring it over here, Jack. Let me look close at it, and I’ll tell you what to do.”

“That’s bullshit, Starkey. You just want to die.”

“I want to live, Pell! Goddamn you, I want to live and I want you to live, too, and you’re wasting time! We can do this!”

“I CAN’T SEE!”

“I CAN TALK YOU THROUGH IT! Pell, I’m serious. We’ve still got a little time, but we’re losing it. Bring it over here.”

“Shit!”

Pell followed her directions until he was next to her, breathing hard and sweating so much that his shirt was wet.

“Put it on the floor. Next to me. A little farther away.”

He did as she said.

“Now rotate it. C’mon. I want to see the time.”

1:56.55.54.

“How long?”

“We’re doing great.”

She once more forced herself to hold her breath. It reminded her of the first time she had walked a bomb, and then she remembered that it had been Buck Daggett who’d been her supervisor that day, and who had told her the trick of holding her breath as they had buttoned her into the suit.

“Okay. Now turn it over. Lemme look at the bottom.”

“I got no clippers. I got no pliers. I think I have a knife.”

“Shut up and let me think.”

You make choices. The choices can haunt you forever, or they can set you free.

“Tell me what you see, Carol. Describe it.”

“We’ve got a black Radio Shack timer fastened on top of a transluscent Tupperware food storage container. Looks like he melted holes in the lid to drop the leg wires. Typical Mr. Red … the works are hidden.”

“Battery pack?”

“Gotta be inside with everything else. The top isn’t taped. It’s just snapped on.”

She watched his fingers feel lightly over the timer, then around the edges of the lid. She knew that he would be thinking exactly what she was thinking: that Red could’ve built a contact connection into the lid that would automatically trigger the explosive if the lid were removed.

You make choices. The choices can haunt you forever, or they can set you free.

“Open it, Jack. From the corners. Just pop up the corners. Slow.”

She could feel the sweat creep down from her hair.

Pell was blinking at the Tupperware, trying to see it, but then he wet his lips and nodded. He was thinking it, too. Thinking that this could be it, but that, if it were, neither of them would know it. A ten-thousandth of a second was too fast to know much of anything.

1:51.50.49.

Pell opened the lid.

“Loose all four corners, but don’t lift the lid away from the container. I want you to lift it just enough to test the tension on the wires.”

She watched him do as she instructed, sweat now running into her own eyes so that she had to twist her face into her shoulders to wipe it away. She was blinking almost as much as Pell.

“I can feel the wires pull against whatever’s inside.”

“That’s the explosive and the initiator. Is there play in the wire?”

He lifted the top a few inches away from the container.

“Yeah.”

“Lift the top until you feel the wire pull.”

He did.

1:26.25.24.

“Okay. Now tilt the container toward me. I want to see inside.”

When Pell tilted the Tupperware, she saw the contents slide, which was good. That meant it wasn’t fastened to the container and could be removed.

A squat, quart-sized metal cylinder that looked like a paint can sat inside with the end plug of an electric detonator sticking up through the top. Red and white leg wires ran from the end plug to a shunt, from which another set of wires sprouted up through the lid to the timer, and off to the left to a couple of AA batteries that were taped to the side of the can. A purple wire ran directly from the batteries to the timer, bypassing the shunt, but connecting through a small red box that sprouted yet another wire that led back to the detonator. She didn’t like that part. Everything else was simple and direct and she’d seen it a hundred times before … but not the red box, not the white wire leading back to the detonator. She found herself staring at these things. She found herself scared.

“Tell me what to do, Carol.”

“Just hang on, Pell. I’m thinking. Lift it out, okay? It looks like everything is taped together in there, so you don’t have to worry about it falling apart. Just cup it with your hands, support it from the bottom, and lift it out. Put it on the floor.”

He did as she instructed, handling it as gently as a lace egg.

“Can you see it okay?”

“Fine.”

1:01.00.

0:59.

“How’re we doing with the time?”

“All the time in the world, Pell.”

“Are we going to be able to do this?”

“No sweat.”

“You don’t lie worth shit, Starkey.”

With the bomb sitting openly on the floor, she could see the connections and wiring more clearly, but she still did not know the purpose of the tiny red box. She thought it might be a surge monitor, and that scared her. A surge monitor would sense if the batteries had been disconnected or the wiring cut and bypass the shunt and the timer. It would be a built-in defense trigger to prevent de-arming the bomb. If they cut the wires or pulled the timer, the shunt would automatically fire the detonator.

Her heart rate increased. She had to twist her head again to wipe away the sweat.

“Is there a problem, Carol?”

She could hear the strain in his voice.

“No way, Pell. I live for this stuff.”

Pell laughed.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Wish He was here, pal.”

Pell laughed again, but then the laugh faded.

“What do I do, Carol? Don’t lose it on me, babe.”

She guessed that he could hear the strain in her, too.

“Okay, Pell, here’s what we’re looking at. I think there’s a surge monitor cut into the circuit. You know what that is?”

“Yeah. Auto-destruct.”

“We try to disconnect anything, it’ll sense a change in something called the impedance and detonate the bomb. The timer won’t matter.”

“So what do we do?”

“Take a big chance, buddy. Put your fingers on the timer, then find the wires that lead down through the lid. I want you to be on the bottom side of the lid, okay, so you’re closest to the device.”

He did it.

“Okay.”

“There are five wires coming through the lid. Take one. Any one.”

He took the red wire.

“Okay, that’s not the one we want, so separate it from the others, and take another.”

Purely by chance, he took the purple.

“That’s it, babe. That’s the one. Now follow it and you’ll come to a little box.”

She watched the gentle way his fingers moved along the wire, and thought that he would have been equally gentle as his fingers moved along her scars.

“I’m there. Two wires lead out the other side.”

“Right, but don’t worry about it. Before we can de-arm the timer, we’ve got to de-arm this thing, and I don’t know how to do that. I’m telling you the truth now, Jack. I don’t know what we’re dealing with, so all I can do is guess.”

He nodded without saying anything.

“Real easy now, because I don’t want you to accidentally pull loose a wire, I want you to separate the surge monitor from the rest of the device. Just kinda pull the wires to the side so that the box is off by itself and put it on the floor.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“You’re going to stomp on it.”

He didn’t bat an eye or tell her she was crazy.

“Okay.”

As he did that, she said, “It could detonate, Jack. I’m sorry, but it could just fucking let go.”

“It’s going to go anyway.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve both been through it before, Carol.”

“Sure, Pell. No sweat to people like us.”

When he had the monitor on the floor away from the other wires, he kept one hand on the surge monitor, then crabbed around into a squat to position his heel over the monitor.

“Am I lined up over the damned thing?”

“Do it, Pell.”

One ten-thousandth of a second.

Pell brought his heel down hard.

Starkey felt her breath hiss out as if her chest had been wrapped in iron bands.

Nothing happened.

When Pell lifted his foot, the plastic square was in pieces. And they were still alive.

“I crushed it, right, Starkey? Did I get it?”

She stared at the broken pieces. A set of small silver keys were in the debris. The handcuff keys. That bastard had put the keys in the bomb.

“Starkey?”

She glanced at the timer.

0:36.35.34.

Something inside her screamed for him to scoop up the keys, unhook her, and let them both run. But she knew he couldn’t. He could never find the keys and fumble to the cuffs and unlock her in time. There wasn’t nearly enough time.

“What do I do? Talk to me, Carol. Tell me what to do!”

She didn’t want him thinking about the keys. She didn’t want him distracted.

“Find the batteries.”

His fingers traced over the device until they found the little 9-volt taped to the side of the paint can.

“Got it.”

“Feel the wires coming off the top? They’re attached by a little snap at the top of the battery.”

“Got it. Now what?”

If she was working this bomb in a call-out, she would be in the armor and would’ve set up the de-armer and blown the bomb apart from the safety of the Suburban from sixty yards away. They wouldn’t be handling the bomb because you never knew what might set them off, or how stable they were, or what the builder might have rigged. Safety was in distance. Safety was in playing it safe, and taking no chances and thinking everything through before you did it.

“Take it off.”

Pell didn’t move.

“Just take it off?”

0:18.17.16.

“Yes, take it off. Just unsnap the damned thing. That’s all we can do. We have to break the circuit, and we don’t have any other way to do it, so we’re going to cut the battery out of the loop and pray there won’t be a backcharge that fires the detonator. Maybe this sonofabitch didn’t build in a second surge monitor that we can’t even see. Maybe it won’t go off.”

He didn’t say anything for a while.

0:10.09.08.

“I guess this is it, then, right?”

“Pull it off in one clean move. Don’t let the contacts brush together again after you separate them.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let it be halfway, Pell. One clean move. Cut the connection like your life depends on it.”

“How much time?”

“Six seconds.”

He tilted his head toward her, his eyes looking too much to the right.

He smiled.

“Thanks, Starkey.”

“You, too, Pell. Now pull off the damned cap.”

He pulled.

0:05.04.03.

The timer continued reeling down.

“Is it safe, Starkey?”

The timer continued spinning, and Starkey felt her eyes well. She thought, Oh, goddamnit, but she said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

0:02.01.

She closed her eyes and tensed for something she would never feel.

“Starkey? Are we okay, Starkey?”

She opened her eyes. The timer showed 00:00.

Pell said, “I think we’re still alive.”

John Michael Fowles did not want to die. His head grew light, even as his chest seemed to swell. He heard Starkey’s voice, and Pell’s. He realized that they were working to de-arm the bomb, and, in that moment, wanted to laugh, but he was bleeding to death. He could feel the blood filling his lungs. He passed out again, then once more heard their voices. He lifted his head just enough to see them. He saw the bomb. They had done it. They had de-armed it. John Michael Fowles laughed then, blowing red bubbles from his mouth and nose. They thought they had saved themselves. They didn’t know that they were wrong.

Fowles summoned all of his strength to rise.

“Pell, my hands hurt.”

Pell was holding her. He had crawled to her when the moment had passed, put his arms around her, and held her close. Now, he pushed up onto his knees.

“Tell me how to get to the phone. I’ll call 911.”

“Get the keys first, and unhook me. There were keys in the surge monitor. I think they probably go to the handcuffs.”

Pell sat back on his heels.

“There were keys, and you didn’t tell me?”

“We didn’t have time, Jack.”

Pell sighed deeply, as if all of the tension was only then flooding out of him. He followed her directions to the keys, then back to her. When her hands were free, Starkey rubbed her wrists. Her hands burned as the circulation returned.

Beyond Jack, from the couch, Fowles made a sound like a wet gurgle, then rolled off the couch onto the floor.

Pell lurched around.

“What was that?”

Starkey felt no sense of alarm. Fowles was as limp as a wet sheet.

“It’s Fowles. He fell off the couch.”

Starkey called to him.

“Fowles? Can you hear me?”

Fowles reached a hand toward her dining room. His legs slowly worked as if he was trying to crawl away, but he couldn’t bring his knees beneath himself.

“What’s he doing, Carol?”

“I’ll call 911 and get an ambulance. He’s still alive.”

Starkey rose, then helped Pell to his feet. Across the room, Fowles inched past the end of the coffee table, leaving a red trail.

Starkey said, “Just lay there, Fowles. I’m getting help.”

She left Pell by the front door, then went back to Fowles just as he edged to the far end of the couch.

Starkey came abreast of him as he reached behind the end of the couch, his back to her.

“Fowles?”

Fowles slowly teetered onto his back, once more facing her. What Starkey saw then made all of her training as a bomb technician come screaming back at her: Secondary! Always clear for a secondary!

She should have cleared the area for a secondary, just as Buck Daggett had always preached.

Fowles was clutching a second device to his chest. He looked up at Starkey with a blood-stained smile.

“The truth hurts.”

Starkey pushed away from him, shoving hard against a floor that tried to anchor her, trapped in a nightmare moment with legs that refused to move, her heart echoing thunder in her ears as she rushed in a painful, panicked, horrible lunge for Pell and the door as—

John Michael Fowles gazed up through the red lens of his own blood at a crimson world, then pressed the silver button that set him free.

Starkey stood in the open front door of the house they were renting, smoking as she watched the house across the street. The people who lived there, whose name she didn’t know, had a black Chihuahua. It was fat and, Starkey thought, ugly. It would sit in their front yard, barking at anyone or anything that passed, and stand in the middle of the street, barking at cars. The cars would blow their horns, but the damned Chihuahua wouldn’t move, forcing the cars to creep around it in a wide berth. Starkey had thought that was funny until two days ago when the Chihuahua came over and shit on her driveway. She’d tried to chase it back across the street, but the dog had just stood there, barking. Now she hated the mean little sonofabitch.

“Where are you?”

“Smoking.”

“You’re going to get cancer.”

She smiled.

“You say the most romantic things.”

Starkey couldn’t wait to move back to her own house, though the repairs would take another month, what with the foundation work, the new floor, two new shear walls, and all the doors and windows being replaced. Not one window or door was square after the blast because of the overpressure. It could have been worse. Starkey had reached Pell in the doorway when the device detonated. The pressure wave had washed over her like a supersonic tidal wave, kicking her into Pell and both of them through the door. That’s what saved them. Kicked out the door, off the porch, and into the yard. They had both been cut by glass and wood splinters, and neither of them could hear for a week, but it could have been worse.

Starkey finished the cigarette, then flicked the butt into the yard. She tried not to smoke in the house because it irritated his eyes. She had been twenty-three days without a drink. When she was done with that, maybe she would try to kick the smokes. Change wasn’t just possible, it was necessary.

They weren’t going to prosecute a blind man. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had made a lot of noise about it at first, but Starkey and Pell had gotten Mr. Red, and that counted for a lot. They even let Jack keep the medical; no one would take health benefits from a guy who’d lost his eyes on the job.

Starkey was still waiting to hear about herself. She had a good Fraternal Order of Police lawyer and Morgan’s support, so she would do all right. She had the month off, and then the hearing. Morgan had told her that he would take care of it, and she trusted him. Barry Kelso called from time to time, asking after her. She found that she liked hearing from him. Beth Marzik never called.

Pell said, “Come here. I want you to see this.”

He always said things like that, as if by her seeing something, he could enjoy it. She found that she liked that, too. She liked it very much.

Jack had placed candles around the bedroom. He had them in little stubby candleholders and on saucers and plates, twinkling on the dresser and the chest and the two nightstands. She watched as he set the last one, tracing the wick with his fingers, lighting it with one of her Bic lighters, dripping the wax that he aimed so carefully with his fingers onto a plate, setting the butt of the candle into it. He never asked for help with anything. She would offer, time to time, but she never pushed it. He even cooked. He scared the shit out of her when he cooked.

“What do you think?”

“They’re beautiful, Jack.”

“They’re for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t move.”

“I’m here.”

He followed her voice, edging around the bed to her. He would have missed her by a couple of feet, so she touched his arm.

Pell had been living with her since he left the hospital. His eyes were gone. That was it. Neither of them knew if his staying here would be permanent, but you never know.

Starkey pulled him close and kissed him.

“Get in the bed, Jack.”

He smiled as he eased himself into the bed. She went around, pulling the shades. It was still light out, but with the shades down, the candles cast them in a copper glow. Sometimes, after they had made love, she would make shadow creatures in the candlelight and describe them to him.

Starkey took off her clothes, dropping them to the floor, and moved into his arms. She allowed his hands to move over her body. His fingers brushed her old scars, and the new scars. He touched her in places where she liked being touched. She had been frightened, their first time together, even in the dark. He saw with his hands.

“You’re beautiful, Carol.”

“So you say.”

“Let me prove it.”

She gasped at his touch, and at the things he did for her. Starkey had come a long way; there was farther still to go. Getting there would be a better thing with Pell in her life.