Far From True

Fifteen

Barry Duckworth booted it back up to the drive-in site, where he met Michelle Watkins, the bomb expert the state police had sent in to assist.

“So what happened here?” he asked her as they stood amid the rubble. “The demolition guy screwed up, or are we looking at something else?”

Michelle Watkins said, “I’m saying that guy Marsden, the one who was hired to drop this sucker a week from now? He told you he hadn’t even started on this job? He’s not lying. This is not his work. At least, it’s not the work of any professional demolition expert.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a big difference between how a pro would bring down a structure like this and how it was actually done. This is amateur hour. From what I can tell, we’re looking at IEDs.”

“Improvised...”

“Yeah. Improvised explosive devices.”

“So more than one,” he said.

“Walk with me,” she said, then glanced down at his feet. “You got some proper shoes like I’m wearing?” She pointed to her own feet, which were protected with thick-soled steel-toed boots. “You go walking through this in those loafers and you’ll end up with half a dozen spikes through your feet.”

“In the car,” Duckworth said.

“Go get ’em.” She took out her phone. “I’ll check my messages.”

He was back in five minutes, the legs of his suit pants tucked into the tops of his boots.

“You still have to watch your step,” Michelle said, moving gingerly over the wreckage. Duckworth noticed this woman — all five and a half feet of her — seemed to be entirely muscle. “First thing we had to do, of course, was be sure there weren’t any other bombs planted in here that hadn’t gone off. Hate to be poking about, then kaboom, there goes your left tit.”

“Sure.”

“We sent in some sniffer dogs this morning, poked around with a camera, and as far as we can tell, there’s nothing else.”

“As far as you can tell.”

Michelle grinned. “Hey, nothing in life is a hundred percent. Except that, at some point, it will end. Oh, and that everything that tastes good is bad for you.”

“What’s your background?” Duckworth asked, stepping carefully over broken boards.

“I was a bomb disposal officer with the army. Iraq, Afghanistan. When my tours ended, and I’d had enough, I put my skills to work over here, got a job with the staties.”

“Like that movie,” Duckworth said. “What was it called?”

“The Hurt Locker.”

“That’s the one. Was it like that over there?”

“Meh,” she said, shrugging. “Movies. If it hasn’t got George Clooney in it, I don’t much care. Okay, so our Marsden friend would have rigged this thing to drop nice and neat, rigging charges there, there, and there.” She pointed. “But the guy who did this wasn’t quite so tidy. Not that he did a completely terrible job. He did bring the damn thing down, after all.”

“IEDs, you said.”

“Yeah, homemade bombs.”

“You’re saying the same kinds of explosives you encountered in Iraq are what was used here? Some folks, they started wondering if this was terrorism or something, and my first thought was, Promise Falls can’t be high on the list of targets for Islamic extremists.”

“I wouldn’t disagree with you there,” Michelle said. “IED is just a fancy acronym for a bomb you build yourself. Doesn’t mean it’s a bomb made by some Middle Eastern terrorist group, but then again, it doesn’t mean it’s not. But there’s plenty of places online where you can find out how to make one. Plenty of yahoos over here can figure out this stuff. Remember Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City? He was a fan of fertilizer. You get someone reasonably smart, pretty handy — they can put one of these together, do a lot of damage. Whoever did this did have some engineering smarts. He knew where to plant the devices to make the screen fall the way it did. Assuming he did, in fact, want it to fall on the audience.”

She did some more pointing as they continued their slow trek over the remains of the screen. “The screen had four main supports, and my guess is there were four bombs, each attached to one of those supports, on the parking lot side, so the screen would drop in that direction.”

“Would the bomber have had to be here? Close by? Maybe in one of the cars?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m guessing what we’ll find is there was a common timer for all four, so they went simultaneously for maximum impact.”

“So he could be anywhere. He could have been a thousand miles away when the bombs went off.”

“Yup.”

“And they could have been planted anytime.”

“Double yup.”

Duckworth felt a wave of hopelessness wash over him. Interviewing all the people present at the time of the explosion wasn’t likely to produce anything helpful.

“No advance warnings, no threats, no one claiming responsibility?” Michelle Watkins asked.

“No,” he said.

“Well, we’re going to start pulling together bomb fragments. Once we get a handle on what it was made of, how it might have been put together, we’ll cross-check that with other bombings, look for similarities. That may end up pointing us in the right direction.”

“Appreciate it,” Duckworth said. He was panting.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t usually spend my day climbing over a mess like this.”

“You might want to think about taking up jogging or something,” she said. “Get yourself in shape.”

“Thanks for that,” Duckworth said.

“Maybe cut back on the Big Macs.”

“I said thanks.”

Michelle continued. “It’s clear to me our bomber was hoping to hurt some people, having this thing come down at twenty-three twenty-three, when it was known there would be people here for the drive-in’s last night. You ask me, it was lucky only four people got killed. If more people’d parked in that first row, there’d—”

“Sorry. What was that?”

“What was what?”

“When it came down?”

Michelle grinned. “Once you’ve been on military time, you’re on it forever. More precise, at least to me, than saying a.m. or p.m. I’m always thinking of a twenty-four-hour clock. The screen came down at eleven twenty-three p.m. Twenty-three minutes past twenty-three hundred hours.”

Duckworth had stopped.

“You out of breath again?” Michelle asked.

“No, I’m okay.”

“What is it? You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

“Something just stopped being a bunch of coincidences,” he said.