Then She Vanished

Three

Special Agent Mike Lark was in his late twenties, with a boyish face, a budget haircut, and raptor’s eyes. We sat in a windowless conference room in the new FBI building off Vista Sorrento Parkway in San Diego. It was afternoon but you wouldn’t know it.

Lark swiveled the monitor so we both could see it, then anxiously spun the cursor about the screen. Mike, all energy. We had a history, brief but intense.

“Not the best quality pictures,” he said. “What is it about post office security cameras?”

“The cameras in the Fallbrook post office are old-school,” I said. “I watch them as I stand in line.”

Lark moved the cursor some more. “Bomb makers are rodent secretive,” he said. “Kaczynski up in Montana. McVeigh at the lakeside compound. Or our very own terrorist Caliphornia in his Chula Vista storage unit. The city hall bomb came from the Fallbrook post office, Roland. We have two almost decent images of who dropped it off. So maybe you can help us. Maybe she’s a neighbor of yours.”

“She.”

“Why not a she?”

“Well, the post office has the return addresses in their computer,” I said. “So just knock on her door.”

“Her alleged return address is a Fallbrook gift shop whose owner has never seen this woman.”

The cursor finally stopped and Mike clicked the mouse.

In the macro shot, a young dark-haired woman wearing skinny jeans and a dark sweater. Thick shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, partially obscuring her face. Jackie O sunglasses. In the closer-up shot her expression looked pinched, as if she was in a hurry. Impatient. Again, the quality was poor. She could have been almost any dark-haired woman — Latina, Greek, Italian, Armenian, Semitic, or Arabian.

“I’ve never seen her,” I said.

“Take your time.”

“I don’t need time.”

“There were showers in Fallbrook that morning,” said Lark.

“But she’s got sunglasses,” I noted.

Mike nodded. “Sure, spring showers — they come and go fast. Okay. Maybe she needed sunglasses. But if she knew what was in that box, maybe she was wearing them for curious people like us.” I thought. “Maybe the mailer was running an errand for a friend or employer. Part of a job, or a favor. Had no idea what it contained.”

“Of course. It happens.”

Mike cued up three more pictures, none more helpful than the first. The longer I looked at the screen the more I was sure I hadn’t seen the woman.

“What can you tell me about that bomb?” I asked.

“Smart, thrifty, and reliable. Commercial gunpowder, ground match-heads for ignition and a rubber-band striker that went off when the package was opened. Common materials, hard to trace. This is interesting: there wasn’t enough charge in it to do more than blow off a finger, maybe take an eye. Not even enough to destroy the return address on the box. The pipe was hardware store PVC, not metal — less pressure to build the blast. So we figure that’s what they wanted to do. Frighten and maim, not kill. The restraint worries me as much as the anger behind it.”

“They? Do you believe this committee stuff? Bombers like working alone.”

“They almost always have help,” said Lark. “I sense organization here, Roland. Planning. This isn’t some moron living out of a van. This committee’s the real deal — one guy or a hundred. The surest way to miss the possible is to close your mind to it.”

I liked Lark’s young, federal, not-afraid-to-state-the-obvious kind of thinking. He handed me an enlarged copy of the Chaos Committee letter that was published by the Union-Tribune. It was marked up with notes and questions in his condensed, fast-forward handwriting.

I’d read it before but I read it again. A little grandiose for a pipe bomber, but not unintelligent. Angry but reasoned. Nothing misspelled. A call for the end of the two-party system, the end of politics, the necessity of anarchy as a prelude to a new America. Familiar. The old Unabomber, eco-terror stuff. Death to technology. Back to nature and farming. Luddites with explosives.

“What about a signature in the device?” I asked. “Some kind of taunt or gamesmanship?”

“Good,” said Lark. “And you can’t know this but one of the end caps on the bomb wasn’t plastic at all. It was threaded metal, like they used for irrigation before PVC. ‘CC’ was carved into the top.”

Still on the screen: the indeterminate young woman apparently impatient to mail off a bomb to San Diego city hall.

I looked up to find Mike’s sharp eyes on me.

“So, Natalie Strait has been missing since Tuesday,” he said. “And it’s not the first time she’s gone missing like this.”

“No. She’s had some problems.”

“You could say they have had some problems,” said Lark. “You fought with him in Fallujah, didn’t you?”

“Concurrently. Not beside. Why?”

Mike gloved the mouse again, did his annoying ritual with the cursor. Closed in and clicked: two images side by side. One well-focused picture of Dalton Strait going through the Main Avenue door to my office, and another of him coming back out.

“We’re surveilling the politician, not you.”

“Looking for what?”

“Irregularities,” said Lark. “Sorry, but that’s all I can say right now. I suspect he hired you to locate his wife.”

I shrugged, countering his evasion with one of my own. The door opened and an older man in a gray suit leaned in. An outdoorsman’s craggy face and a crown of hair that matched the suit. He looked surprised.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said. “Ten minutes, Mike.”

Lark nodded irritably and the man vanished with a soft close of the door.

“Anyway, we’re taking a look at the Strait family businesses in East County,” he said. “The formerly Honorable Virgil Strait’s solar farms, crook Kirby’s possible cartel connections, Tola Strait’s stake in Indian reservation pot palaces. A wide net.”

“What’s Dalton got to do with any of that?”

“Damned little, he better hope.” Lark smiled. “How is he taking the disappearance of his wife?”

“Unhappily.”

“She’s done this before,” said Lark.

“That’s kind of an open family secret.”

“So you didn’t know Dalton in Fallujah?”

I shook my head, studied the pictures of him on the monitor again.

“Silver Star and Purple Heart,” said Lark. “I never served. I do have some regrets about not serving.”

“You all say that.”

“You’re right. I don’t have any regrets. I’m not so sure I could hobble around on one leg the rest of my life. Not sure I have the stamina for that.”

I asked Mike to get the post office woman back on the screen. He scrolled through the pictures and we studied her again in silence.

I looked at him and shook my head.

“Thanks for coming in and trying,” said Lark. “Old man Taucher asked about you. I told him you were fine.”

Old man Taucher was Joan’s father, and Joan was a woman who touched both Mike’s and my lives, in deep but different ways. Mike’s boss — and, as it turned out, his lover. But my responsibility. In my mind, at least. She’d died in the line of duty, in my arms, not quite a year and a half ago, a bloody and terrifying December for San Diego.

I glanced down at the just arrived message on my phone, a text from Dalton Strait.

“Tell old man Taucher hello from me,” I said.

Lark stared off as if through a window with an interesting view, but there were no windows in the room.

“I have to see a man about a horse,” I said, standing.

He came back from his reverie with a sharp-eyed stare.

“What’s going on?”

“Irregularities. Sorry, but that’s all I can say right now.”