“The bomber at Trudeau Hall is still at large, and federal officers are running down leads . . .” He sat up straighter. A bombing? He turned it up a notch so he could hear the voices.
“Police sources say that a bomb threat preceded the explosion at Trudeau Hall, but the threat wasn’t taken seriously.”
Travis’s attention perked to life as the screen revealed the building he recognized, burned and gutted, and young people with soot-covered faces crying on camera.
“The bomb struck the stage and killed Ed Loran, who was running for president as a third-party candidate. We’re told dozens of others were killed, though the final number hasn’t been released yet.”
Travis stood and walked closer to the TV, as if that could provide some perspective on the news story, even though the speaker was on the remote attached to Crystal’s bed.
“But police have confirmed that a person of interest is in custody. We haven’t been able to get a name yet, but we will have more later.”
His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out and looked at the screen. He didn’t recognize the number, but he’d been waiting for the doctor to call with the results of Crystal’s latest tests. He stepped out into the hallway and answered. “Hello?”
The robot voice told him it was from the local jail. “An inmate named . . .” There was a slight pause, then Dustin’s voice said, “Dustin Webb.”
“Dustin?” Travis cut in.
The robot cut him off, “. . . would like to call you.”
“Dustin!” Travis said, but the robot continued, telling him he had to set up a prepaid account with his credit card before he could accept the call. He got out his credit card and punched in the numbers. He followed the prompts, put twenty dollars on the account, then waited for Dustin.
“Travis?”
It was a bad connection, not very loud, so Travis turned his phone up. “What’s going on, man?”
“I got arrested yesterday. Somebody planted four boxes of RDX in my trunk, then told the police. They’re trying to connect me to the bombing at Trudeau Hall.”
Travis couldn’t catch his breath. He rubbed his fingers through his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have bailed you out yesterday!”
“I was being interviewed for hours. I tried calling you a couple of times during the night.”
“I had it on Do Not Disturb from ten to seven. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. Is she okay?”
“She’s sleeping,” Travis said. “What can I do, Dustin?”
“Nothing until my bond hearing this afternoon.”
“Dustin, who did this?”
“I don’t know. I’m racking my brain. But somebody hates my guts.”
“Nobody hates you,” Travis said. “This is ridiculous.”
“I just wanted to let you know. You might get interviewed again. And check your trunk.”
“You think this is related to the break-in at ChemEx?”
“Has to be. They stole RDX and TNT. They set me up.”
“Let me know what I can do. Anything, Dustin. Seriously, just call.”
“Okay, man. Talk to you soon.”
Travis hung up and stared into the air as the news sank in. Dustin in jail? A bombing at Trudeau Hall? This didn’t make sense. The sad ache of tears welled in his eyes. His heart pounded in triple rhythm, threatening to overcome him completely. But he didn’t have time to be overwhelmed.
One crisis at a time.
12
Jamie couldn’t make herself take Dude to the kennel that morning, so she put his food and water in her backyard and left him there.
The county prosecutor’s office was open at seven thirty in the morning, but the secretaries and receptionists weren’t in yet. Jamie stepped inside the small lobby and texted her old colleague.
Louis, it’s Jamie. I’m in the lobby.
Come on back, he texted.
She went up the hall toward the bank of cubicles and offices where she had once worked. Louis met her halfway and gave her a warm handshake and a pat on the back. “Good to see you, Jamie. Sorry I couldn’t meet you for breakfast, but I had another commitment.”
“I know you have a lot going on,” she said, following him into his office.
He went behind his desk and sat down, and she took the seat across from him.
“Look at you, sitting at the helm.”
“I know, right? Who would have thought?”
“I figured you’d be in private practice by now,” she said.
“Making the big bucks, like you? Congratulations on the Ash case, by the way. That’s a real feather in your cap.”
“Yeah, it was a big relief.”
“So you’re representing Dustin Webb?”
“Yes. You’re the lead prosecutor, right? Since ATF is involved, I wasn’t sure.”
“There might be federal charges, but right now I’m the lead.”
She pulled her laptop and notes out of her briefcase and gave him a serious look. “The thing is, I know him. I’ve known him since he was a kid. We grew up next door to each other.”
“Really.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of surprise.
“He didn’t do it. He was framed, and I can prove it.”
She didn’t wait for his reaction, because he heard that all the time. Instead, she pulled up the video of Dustin parking his car at the hospital, his going in and getting filmed inside the lobby, where his face showed. Then she fast-forwarded to the point where the van drove slowly up the parking lot row where he was parked, and two men loaded boxes into his trunk.
“How do we know that he isn’t one of those men?” he asked.
“I’m sure you’ll pull the same video. You’ll see that he didn’t come out. Here’s the time stamp,” she said, pointing to it on the video. “At the exact same time, we have footage of him sitting in the waiting room on the fourth floor. His business partner had a crisis with his wife that night. She’s a cancer patient, and they didn’t think she was going to make it through the night. Dustin was there for several hours.”
“Okay, but he had everything he needed to break into that ammunition plant the week before.”
“So did a lot of people who worked there. The night that happened he was at home from eight thirty to seven the next morning. Home security cameras at his house prove this.”
“Video can be doctored. And who’s to say he didn’t get those people to load that stuff in his car?”
“Evidence still matters, doesn’t it, Louis? There isn’t any, or your charges would be different. And you don’t have any evidence that he was at ChemEx the night it was robbed.”
“You know this is about way more than the ChemEx robbery. What is it you want, Jamie?”
“The arraignment’s at two. I’m asking you not to stand in the way of his getting bond. It’s important that we get him to safety before the press learns about this.”
He chuckled. “Do you know how much flack I would get from my constituents if I let a potential terrorist out on bond?”
“He’s not a potential terrorist. Terrorist statutes require two acts of violence, and they have to impact public policy. Dustin Webb doesn’t have a history of violence or any other criminal behavior, he isn’t a political person, and there’s no connection between him and the theft or the bombing.”
“I don’t want him out, Jamie, and I don’t want to protect him from the media.”
“Do you want riots in your city? Outside your office? In front of the jail? Do you want to deal with the vigilantes who would demand his head?”
He sighed and rubbed his face, as if to say he didn’t want those things either.
She drew in a deep breath. “I’d be willing to take full responsibility for him as his attorney. I’m willing to take him into my recognizance. That’s how sure I am that he’s innocent. I wouldn’t have him around my daughter if I had any doubt.”
He sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin. “I don’t know. I
’ll give it a look, but I can’t promise anything.”
“You know me, Louis. You know I’m a good judge of character.”
“Not always,” he said with a grin.
She knew what he was referring to. She had told him way too much about her husband’s addictions. The comment irritated her. “Well, that’s a low blow.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you’re a good attorney.”
She knew that was as close as she could get for right now. “A few other things before I go. I need the inventories of what you took during his home and car searches.”
“I can get you those sometime today.”
She gathered her things and started to leave.
“Jamie,” he said as she got to the door.
She turned back.
“You might want to get a short-term rental whether he gets out or not. The press is going to come down hard on you, too.”
“Yeah, I’ve considered that.”
Leaving the building, she felt a knot in her stomach. She had no idea what Louis would recommend to the judge. It was likely that he would ask him to withhold bond.
Convincing the judge to set bond without being able to present evidence would not be easy. She had her work cut out for her.
13
“Shouldn’t you get off the computer for a while?”
Taylor sat on the floor, her laptop on her coffee table. She turned from her screen and looked up at her sister but didn’t answer. She’d been poring through social media, studying pictures of the concert, and reading news articles that came up on her platforms. Much of the news was about the band members, all of whom survived, and Ed Loran’s death and his popularity since he’d declared his third-party candidacy. He was being celebrated like a national hero.
The television played on the wall, its volume low. “The forty-eight-year-old Libertarian was the former CEO of Cell Three Therapeutics,” a reporter was saying, “a controversial biotech company engaged in a decades-long class-action lawsuit . . .”
“You haven’t even slept,” Harper said. “This isn’t healthy.”
“I just need to do this,” Taylor said. “I keep going over and over it in my mind, trying to figure out if there is some other direction I could have gone or some way I could have turned back.”
Harper sat down on the couch behind her and looked over her shoulder. “They’re just pictures of crowds. You can’t tell anything from that, can you? “
“Maybe. With all the cameras in the room, somebody could have gotten an image of the bomber.”
“You can’t relive this and make it come out different. It happened the way it happened, and it wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have saved Mara and Desiree, no matter how you wish you could.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Harper sighed. “Taylor, have you taken your meds today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Taylor—”
“I’ll take it in a minute.”
“Because you’re doing it again.”
Taylor turned around. “Doing what?”
“Obsessing.”
“Excuse me, but I was in a bombing yesterday. My friends are dead. My OCD has nothing to do with that.”
“I’m just saying that when you’re this stressed, things can get worse. You have to be consistent with your medication.”
“All right, I’ll go take it.” She got up and went into her bathroom, poured the pills into her hand, and swallowed them. She stared at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t being OCD, was she? She was just doing what any other survivor was probably doing today.
This wasn’t like in her late teens, when her life had begun to revolve around her rituals. When her parents had started noticing her growing anxiety and actions they couldn’t explain, they had gotten her into therapy. Only then had she admitted to her anxious, fearful thoughts that were relieved only by her ritual compulsions. This is what’s going to kill me had been one of those obsessions that she’d repeated to herself hundreds of times a day, and it was always followed by cleaning counters with bleach, wiping light switches and doorknobs, pencils and pens. Those rituals made her late for everything, and even then, she still had to wipe down the steering wheel and console.
Another one was, They hate me. She would tell herself that whenever she met someone’s eyes or had a conversation. It had flattened her senior year of high school and her first year of college. After that, she’d been put on medication. She’d spent the past three years in exposure and reaction therapy, where she learned to stop responding to her anxious thoughts by doing those rituals. The medication had helped her control those thoughts and actions until eventually her problem was like a distant voice in the background, rather than a constant blaring in her ear.
But yes, yesterday had been a trigger. Maybe Harper was right. She had to be careful.
She went back into the living room. “Consider me medicated. Now I’m going to go back to what I was doing, and I’ll pay careful attention to myself so I don’t spiral.”
Harper’s eyes were locked onto the TV. “Have you heard this?”
Taylor looked at the TV. “What?”
Harper turned the sound up and backed up the segment on the DVR so that it would replay the report she’d been watching.
The local news anchor on Fox 5 Atlanta was speaking. “Investigators are now saying that the bombing at Trudeau Hall that killed Ed Loran and at least twenty-four others, and injured fifty-three, could have been planted beneath the building.”
Taylor grabbed the remote and turned it up even more. An investigator at a press conference came up on the screen. “We now believe that the bomb was not planted inside the building, which explains why no one saw anything. But to create that kind of explosion would require a much greater volume of explosives than was first believed. For it to have exploded from below and do that much damage to the floor above it in the auditorium, it would have been a bomb similar to that used in the Oklahoma City bombing. And that was achieved with a truckful of explosives, as we know. So they’re looking now at the possibility that the explosives may have been strategically parked under the building.”
Taylor caught her breath. She started to shake. Her heart began pounding.
Trucks under the building.
“Wait. I saw something!” She went to the photos on her phone and clicked through the pictures that she and Desiree and Mara had taken last night. She scrolled back twenty or thirty pictures to just before they went in.
They had taken some outside the concert hall near the bay where celebrities turned into the driveway to be dropped off under the building. The three of them had hung around there for a few minutes, hoping to get a shot of the guys in Blue Fire when they pulled in. They had taken four or five selfies, then finally gave up on seeing the band and went inside.
She studied each picture. The three of them were in the foreground, smiling for the camera. But what was in the background?
Finally she saw something—a U-Haul truck turning into the entrance for unloading, where VIPs and talent were known to enter the building.
She sucked in her breath and enlarged it to see if the person behind the wheel was visible. But the truck’s interior was too dark.
“Here!” she said.
Harper took her phone and studied the picture.
“That could be the truck,” Taylor said. “I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I only remembered it just now as I was going through them. But it may be important.”
Harper covered her mouth, then let her fingers slide down her chin. “I still can’t believe you survived. But this explains some things. Nobody could have seen the bombs if they were hidden underneath, packed in a truck that big.”
“I’m going to the police.” Taylor got up and headed to her bedroom.
Harper followed her. “Taylor, why?”
“I need to show them this picture.”
“You could call them or email i
t.”
“Are you kidding? They’re probably getting a million false leads right now.”
“And this could be another one. That U-Haul could have been a food vendor or concessions supplies, or even roadies for the band.”
“But it might not be. I need to show up in person to make sure they see it. I don’t want them to take days to get around to this. It could be significant. You said yourself I should get off the computer and get out of here. I’m doing that now. Come with me if you want, but I have to do this.”
Harper gave one more of her classic sighs. “All right, I’ll come. But we might be there for hours before you can see anyone.”
“I’m willing to wait,” Taylor said.
She quickly changed her clothes, brushed her teeth, and grabbed her purse, her computer, and her phone.
Then they hurried out to the car and drove to the police station.
14
The law firm of Lewis, Brackton and Devereux was humming when Jamie pushed through the glass doors after her meeting with the prosecutor. Assistants rushed down the halls, phones rang and were answered, and messengers popped in and out the front doors, documents in hand. Lawyers and paralegals clustered in the coffee room, around the water cooler, and in the doorways of their colleagues’ offices.
Too distracted to interact with the others, Jamie hurried past all of it to her office. She looked around at the plush room that spoke so eloquently of the progress she had made in becoming a respected member of the firm. Last night she had hardly thought about her win in court yesterday, though she was sure her firm had.
She sat down behind her desk, quickly scanned her messages, and decided none were pressing enough to distract her from Dustin’s case. She had to concentrate. There was no room for a slipup now. She wanted him out of jail this afternoon.
There was a knock on the door, and Max Devereux, her mentor and a full partner in the firm, stuck his head in. His youthfully styled, gray-sprinkled hair was perfectly groomed, though fatigue lines beneath his eyes revealed his middle age. “Congratulations, Powell,” he said. “Great job in court.”
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