Scars (Nevada James #2) (Nevada James Mysteries)

by Matthew Storm

  “What’s your take on Anita?”

  Jason sipped his coffee. “She’s a sweet old lady. Means the world to me. I assume you know she helped me out?”

  “Yeah.” So Jason hadn’t seen through her mask, either. The woman was good. I wondered if she’d fronted the rehab costs through her foundation because she wanted a cop to owe her a favor. That actually seemed pretty likely. “What about the bomb?”

  “Pretty standard pipe bomb. You could get the instructions to make one off the Internet.”

  “Or whatever passed for the Internet in 1993, I guess.”

  “Yeah. I think I had CompuServe back then. You could probably find stuff like that in the forums.”

  “I remember The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” I said. “I think that was just hype, though, and not anything you could actually use.” I shrugged. “I have no idea, really. I’ll probably have to do some research.”

  “Or go ask someone who makes bombs.”

  I could tell from his smirk that he’d been joking, but that wasn’t a bad idea. I knew more than a few criminals, some in prison, and some not. A few of them owed me.

  I put a $20 bill on the table when Jason was finished eating and we went to his car, where we transferred three file boxes from his trunk to mine. They were dustier than I expected. “Somehow I doubt anyone’s looked at these in the last year,” I said.

  “Besides me, probably not. And I didn’t spend a lot of time with them.”

  I slammed my trunk shut. “Anything else you can think to tell me?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen you at a meeting in a while.” He gave me a concerned look. “Are you avoiding us for a reason?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve just been really busy with not going.”

  “People worry about you.”

  I shook my head. “Jason, honestly, I don’t need to hear this. I didn’t say I’m done with it, but I’m never going to be one of those people who goes to A.A. every day. I don’t need it to stay clean. I have things to do besides talk about the steps and the higher power and…whatever else. Tell everyone I said ‘hi’ if that makes them feel better.”

  “I will. I just think people would rather hear it from you.”

  “Then they’re going to have to wait,” I said. “I have a case to work.”

  Chapter 9

  I’d told Jason I had a case to work mostly because I wanted him to shut up, but I found that saying it felt good. I finally had something to do. It was almost like having a real job again. That was new. Actually, having a job while I was sober was new. I’d been half in the bag while I’d been out looking for Alan Davies’s daughter. It was a miracle I’d managed to find her. Well, it had been either a miracle or dumb luck. Probably the latter.

  Once I got back to my motel I transferred the file boxes from the truck to my bed, then sat down and watched two episodes of a Law & Order marathon. I didn’t care for the show, but it beat Maury Povich or one of those court shows where a television judge yelled at a couple idiots who were fighting over the price of a bad haircut or something equally inane. I’d have been a terrible television judge. It would have been too tempting to start smacking people around with the gavel. Then again, doing that might have turned it into the highest-rated show on television.

  After deciding I’d procrastinated long enough, I opened the first box of files and started going through them. The first ones I read were specific to the bomb itself. From the fragments that had been recovered, the investigators had determined that it had been constructed from a piece of steel pipe about five inches long and one inch in diameter. It had been triggered by a tripwire. Photos of the burned-out car showed it had been a total loss. It was difficult to believe anyone had made it out of that pile of twisted metal alive, but Anita had.

  I looked over a list of the bomb’s components. Gunpowder had been the primary explosive agent. I knew next to nothing about pipe bombs, and I’d never have thought something that small could be so powerful. I’d figured it would have made a loud bang, and maybe you’d lose a finger if you were holding it, like an overly large firecracker.

  A curious notation included hydrogen peroxide among the bomb’s ingredients, but someone had put a question mark next to it. A chemical formula had been circled, but the string of H’s and O’s didn’t mean much to me. Hydrogen peroxide didn’t make any sense, though. It was a liquid, and it certainly didn’t explode. My parents had used it to clean cuts and scrapes I’d gotten roughhousing with other kids when I’d been younger. How could it possibly have been mixed with gunpowder? That had to be a mistake.

  Full-color photos of Anita’s naked body had been taken to catalog her injuries. Looking at them was both awkward and horrifying. I wasn’t surprised to see that burns ran down the entire left side of her body, but she’d been a lot worse than singed. In places her skin had been charred black; third-degree burns that made her look like she’d been put together from pieces of dead flesh like Frankenstein’s monster. Her face had looked a great deal worse then, but plastic surgery and time had obviously helped. There wouldn’t have been much all the surgeons in the world could have done for her torso and leg, though. I wondered how long it had taken her to heal. She must have been in the hospital for months.

  I went to my refrigerator to get a Diet Coke. The smell of leftover pizza wafted out when I opened the door, making me instantly nauseous. There was very little chance I was going to eat it now. After a moment’s deliberation over the guilt I’d feel about it, I took the box outside and threw it in the dumpster. I hated wasting food, but I didn’t want to smell it, or anything else, for a while.

  A photocopy of the warning note Adam Collins had been sent was in the files. It was simple enough, written in all capitals and looking as if it had come off an early laser printer. NO SMART COMPUTERS, it read. STOP NOW OR ELSE. That suggested the bomber had had an agenda, but it could also be an attempt at misdirection. The “or else” sounded juvenile to me, or maybe it was just someone who wasn’t used to writing threatening notes. It wasn’t like that was something people did every day.

  The note had been found on the windshield of the car that had been bombed a month before the attack. That didn’t suggest a crime of passion. Whoever had sent it, provided it was the bomber, had given Collins time to change his ways. Apparently he didn’t believe in second warnings.

  I started looking through the suspect interviews. As Jason had said, the SDPD did appear to have rounded up a bunch of ex-hippies that had been involved in activist groups in the 1960’s. Most of them had gone on to academia. I read through the two interviews that had been conducted with the suspected 1968 bomber first. Michael Lewis had been a chemistry professor at UCSD back in 1993. He’d denied any involvement, although he’d admitted to having met Adam Collins at an academic function. He’d described them as friendly acquaintances, if not friends. Nothing in his interviews made me think he was lying, and the SDPD had come to the same conclusion. Lewis had even been out of the country at the time of the bombing; there was no way he could have placed the bomb himself, although I supposed he always could have had an associate do it. That was going outside the bounds of things that were very likely, though.

  Two other suspects were a married couple who had gone on from their activist days to become economics professors at SDSU. Again, the police had found nothing to make them suspect they’d been involved. The same held true for a fourth suspect who had gone from activism to running a hedge fund in La Jolla. Apparently he’d decided that if you can’t beat the man, you join the man.

  Other than the chemistry professor, nobody interviewed seemed to have been questioned for any reason other than their counterculture pasts. The cops had really been grasping at straws with this one.

  I took out my laptop and looked up Michael Lewis online. There wasn’t a great deal. I found a biography in a scientific journal he’d been published in that said he’d retired in 2002. There was a brief notation that he’d been part of a group called the Young Ameri
can Socialists during the 60’s, but the name didn’t mean anything to me. They’d either kept a low profile or were very bad at publicity.

  Searching for information on the group didn’t turn up much, either. They’d been involved in a few protest marches against the Vietnam War, but that seemed to be about it. They’d been among a number of groups suspected of planting a pipe bomb under a police car in 1968, but the bomb had turned out to be a dud. It seemed like a chemistry professor would be better at blowing things up than that.

  The Young American Socialists had ceased to exist by 1970. I’d have been embarrassed to admit I’d had to look up what year the Vietnam War actually ended, but luckily there was nobody around I had to admit it to.

  It might be worth looking up the professor and meeting him, just to get a sense of him. I liked to think I was fairly good at catching people when they were lying to me. If he knew anything about what had happened, maybe I could get it out of him. That was a longshot at best, though. There was almost no reason to think he’d been involved.

  I spent another hour looking through the case files, trying to come up with a plan of action. After so many years, though, there wasn’t much to be done. I had no crime scene to examine. There had been no witnesses and there was no security camera footage to look through. Google probably kept track of people who searched for things like “how to make pipe bombs,” but there had been no modern Internet back then. Besides, gunpowder wasn’t hard to get a hold of. You could even make it yourself if you knew how.

  I looked through the file until I came to the name of the lead investigator on the case: Howard Lanford. I didn’t know him; that had been long before my time at the SDPD. He’d almost certainly be retired by now, if he was still living. He’d be a good starting point, though. I picked up my phone and nearly called Jason London, but then I remembered he was supposed to be off buying a crate of drugs. I dialed Miranda Callies instead, another cop from my A.A. group. “Nevada?” she asked when she picked up. She sounded shocked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well…you’ve never actually called me before.”

  “Oh.” I thought about that. I hadn’t been keeping track, but I guessed I hadn’t. “So,” I said. “What’s new?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too. Is that enough small talk? I’m never sure. Hey, how about those Chargers?”

  “I’m a Raiders fan,” she said. “Fine, enough small talk. What’s going on?”

  I told her I was looking into an old case and needed to contact Howard Lanford. “He’s probably retired,” I said. “If you can get me a current number and an address, that would be good.”

  “He’ll be in the union directory,” she said. I heard her typing.

  “So…how are things in the gang unit?”

  “You really don’t have to make small talk, Nevada. I just figured for you to pick up the phone it had to be an emergency. I’m glad it’s not, though. Okay, here it is.” She gave me a phone number, which I wrote down. “His last known address is in Scripps Ranch. Looks like he retired in 2005.”

  I wrote down the address and tried to think of some more small talk, but I didn’t have anything good. I didn’t know anything about Miranda other than what she shared at meetings, and it hardly seemed appropriate to bring any of that up. “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem. See you when I see you.”

  We hung up. I was secretly glad she hadn’t brought up going to an A.A. meeting. It felt like a small victory. A small, stupid victory, but a victory nonetheless.

  I was getting ready to call Howard Lanford when my phone rang. Dan Evans was on my caller ID. “What?” I answered.

  “Always nice to hear your voice, Nevada,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Hi, Dan. How are you? I’m fine. How about that sports team you like, that does all the sportsing? How are they doing?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Look, I want you to hear this from me before you see it on the news. We’ve got another body.”

  “The copycat? Did the Laughing Man already catch up with him.”

  “No, it’s another victim.” He paused. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you Nevada, but I think you should take a look.”

  “I’m busy with all the things,” I said.

  “Nevada…”

  “These things aren’t just going to do themselves, Dan.”

  “For god’s sake, will you come take a look at this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When I see the body and don’t start wailing are you going to give me a bunch of shit about how I don’t react to things enough?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, but from his breathing I could tell he was trying to keep from losing his temper. “Fine,” he said finally. “I’m not going to give you shit. Maybe I was wrong to give you shit before.”

  “You think?”

  “Don’t push it, Nevada. I’m not apologizing for caring about you.”

  He’d gone for his trump card. “I guess all these things can wait for later,” I said. “Give me an address.”

  He gave it to me. “Look, Nevada, this is just a heads up. This one isn’t like the last one. I think you’re going to react this time.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty hard to impress.”

  Chapter 10

  It took me twenty minutes to reach the address Dan had given me, which turned out to be an abandoned community park in the hills northeast of the city. Rusted play structures sat at one end of it, with a picnic area at the other. Chain-link fence posted with signs for a local construction company surrounded the entire thing. This lot was probably going to be bulldozed at some point in the near future to make way for a new strip mall, or something equally as unnecessary.

  The park held so many police officers one might have thought they were having a convention. That was probably what had attracted the media, who already had their cameras trained on the scene, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was inside. I ignored them as I made my way past the uniforms guarding the entrance. I’d rather they not get a shot of my face this time.

  Dan Evans was easy to spot; with his size he’d have stood out in any crowd that wasn’t made up entirely of professional football players. Sarah Winters and Brad Ellis stood at the bottom of a children’s slide nearby, looking at something I couldn’t see yet.

  Dan moved to intercept me as I headed for the slide. “I don’t want you to freak out,” he said. “This one’s different than the other.”

  “You said that already. I’m not exactly known for freaking out, Dan.”

  “Yeah, except for that one time you did, and you wound up in the psych ward.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like to do things halfway.” He still looked nervous. “What?” I asked. “You don’t really think this is the Laughing Man?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Then I’ll be able to rule it out pretty quickly,” I said. “There’s no way this is him.”

  “You haven’t even seen the body yet,” he said.

  “I don’t need to. The Laughing Man isn’t going to start the game when there’s an impostor sitting at the board.”

  Dan’s brow wrinkled. “Huh?”

  “Oh, forget it. Show me what you’ve got.”

  Dan led me over to the slide. Sarah and Ellis stepped aside so I could see the victim lying on her back at its bottom, as if she’d just come down from the top and stopped to look up at the sky. This one was a woman in her twenties. She wore a set of flannel pajamas and had her brown hair pulled back in a bun. I couldn’t see the knife wound that was almost certainly in the back of her neck, but I had a great view of her face, which had been mutilated into the Laughing Man’s signature smile. The cuts were cleaner; I was willing to bet they’d been made with a straight razor this time. The marks weren’t nearly as expert as the ones the Laughing Man would have made, though. Straight razors we
ren’t as easy to use as a precision weapon as a person might have thought. I’d spent a lot of time practicing with one when I’d worked his case all those years ago. There was a learning curve.

  And beyond that, there was the obvious problem. I chuckled. The absurdity of it was just too much for me.

  Sarah nearly turned white when she heard me laugh. “Good god, Nevada,” she said.

  Ellis watched me curiously while Dan put a hand on my shoulder. “Nevada, it’s okay,” he said. “Come away now.”

  I shook his hand off and turned to the crowd on the other side of the fence, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Hey! You dumb fuck!” I shouted. “Are you watching this? Can you hear me?” I looked around, then started yelling again. “This isn’t even close!”

  Dan grabbed me by the arm. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he snarled. On the other side of the police lines I could see television cameras filming our position. Odds were I was going to be on the news again.

  “Oh, get off me, Dan.” I shook myself free and pointed at the body. “Don’t any of you see it?”

  Dan looked at the body, and then back at me. “Okay. What are we supposed to see, Nevada?”

  I held out my hands in front of me in a square shape, my thumbs touching like a movie director framing a shot. “Look at the piece, Dan. What do you see?”

  “The piece?” Sarah asked. Ellis just scowled at me.

  “I see a body on a slide,” Dan said.

  “But what does it say to you?”

  Dan looked at me like he was trying to figure out if I’d taken up smoking crack. “It says some lunatic killed a woman.”

  “It doesn’t say anything!” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s garbage. This is some kid playing with daddy’s tools in the garage.”

  Dan put his hands in his pockets and glared at me. “Okay, I’ll give you it wouldn’t be the Laughing Man’s best work…”

  “What you have here is someone who wants to impress the Laughing Man so much that he’s making crude caricatures of what the Laughing Man actually does. It’s a little better this time, I’ll give him that much. He’s learning. But it’s still garbage.”