Demolition Angel

by Robert Crais

  He had done this before. He had done it many times and was scared because the time between bouts was shrinking. He knew what that meant, and it scared him more than anything in his life had ever scared him.

  He sat on the floor, breathing through the wet towel until the floating monsters that haunted him vanished. When they were gone, he took out the piece of metal he had stolen and read the letters there, squinting to make his eyes work.

  Pell hadn’t told Kelso and Starkey everything about Mr. Red. He hadn’t told them that Mr. Red didn’t just kill random bomb techs. He chose his targets, usually senior techs with headline cases under their belts. He didn’t kill just anyone; he killed only the very best.

  When Pell learned of the S, he thought it would be from CHARLES.

  It wasn’t.

  Pell read the fragment again.

  TARKEY

  Red Rage

  CRIME BOSS DIES IN FIERY BLAST

  INNOCENTS DIE ALSO

  By Lauren Beth

  Exclusive to the

  Miami Herald

  Diego “Sonny” Vega, the reputed chief enforcer of an organized Cubano crime empire, died early Thursday morning when a warehouse he owned was destroyed by a series of bomb blasts. The explosions occurred just after three A.M. It is not known whether Mr. Vega was intentionally murdered, or if his presence in the building was coincidental.

  The industrial park warehouse was the site of a “knockoff” apparel operation, employing undocumented workers to manufacture counterfeit designer goods. Five of these workers were also killed, and nine others wounded.

  Police spokesman Evelyn Melancon said, “Obviously, this was a sweatshop operation. We do not at this time know if Mr. Vega was the intended target, or if the warehouse itself was the target. We have no leads at this time as to who planted the bombs.”

  Arson investigators and bomb technicians from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms are sifting through the rubble in an effort to—

  John Michael Fowles was disappointed that the article was on page three, but decided not to show it. He was also pissed off that there was no mention of Mr. Red, nor of the fine work he had done in destroying the building. He folded the newspaper and handed it back to Angelo Rossi, the man who had put him in touch with Victor Karpov.

  Rossi looked surprised when John returned the paper.

  “There’s more on the next page.”

  “It’s just an article, Mr. Rossi. I’d rather be readin’ the papers you got in that bag, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, sure.”

  Rossi nervously handed over the bag with the money Karpov owed John. Karpov himself had refused to come meet John here at the library. He claimed illness, like a kid cutting class, but John knew the real reason: He was scared.

  As before, John didn’t bother to count it, or even open the bag. He put the money into his backpack, and lowered the pack to the floor. When John had told Rossi to meet him here in the periodicals section of the West Palm Beach Public Library, he had had to explain what “periodicals” were.

  John gave Rossi the cracker’s hayseed grin as he leaned back against the reading table.

  “Take it easy, Mr. Rossi. We’re okay. You don’t have an overdue book, do ya?”

  Rossi glanced over his shoulder as if the book police were hot on his trail, clearly nervous and out of place. John wondered if the fat bastard had even been in a library except when he’d been sent there on high school detention.

  “This is foolish, Red, meeting in a library like this. What kinda mook talks about shit like this in a library?”

  “A mook like me, I guess. I like the order you find in a library, Angelo. It’s the last place left where people behave with manners, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Why’d you do your hair like that?”

  “So people will remember it.”

  Rossi’s eyes narrowed. John pictured rusty gears turning in Rossi’s head, and had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing, though he knew Rossi to be a smart man.

  “Don’t you worry about it, partner. Mr. Red has his reasons.”

  “Oh, I get it. Mr. Red. The red hair.”

  “There you go.”

  Today, John’s hair was cut way short and dyed a vivid red the colorist had called Promise of Passion. Contact lenses gave him green eyes. His sideburns were long and pointed, and he’d fit cotton wads into his lower cheeks to make his jaw appear more square. He was also wearing lifts that made him three inches taller.

  If Rossi knew the real reason John had made himself up this way, the man would shit a Buick.

  “Listen, my friends up in Jersey got another job I wanna talk to you about.”

  “Down here or up there?”

  “We got a fuckass Cuban pirate knocking over our ganja boats down off Key West.”

  John shook his head before Rossi finished.

  “No can do, Mr. Rossi. I’d like to oblige, but things are gonna be heating up for me around here now, so I’ve gotta split.”

  “Just listen a minute, okay, Red? What I’m talking about here won’t take long at all. We just wanna kill a nigger, is all.”

  “So go shoot him. You done it before.”

  Rossi seemed agitated, and John wondered about that. He hadn’t expected Rossi to pitch him another gig, and he was growing concerned with all the time he was wasting. He wanted Rossi to leave so that he could get on with his business. The real reason he had come to the library.

  “Well, it’s more than just walking up to some nigger and shooting him. I could get one’a these kids around here to do that. We wanna get him, his family, the whole damned nest of’m, you know. Kinda send a message, the way you’re good at doing.”

  “Can’t help you, Mr. Rossi. You had a job in another state, we could talk about it. But not here. I got some personal business I wanna take care of.”

  Rossi nervously glanced around again, then scooted his chair closer. He wasn’t taking the hint to leave, which made John figure that he’d probably already told the Jersey people that Mr. Red would go along.

  “Shit, the cops got nothing on you, and no way to connect you to that bastard Vega. You saw the paper. They don’t know shit yet.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read, Angelo. Now I got other stuff I need to do, so if you’ll excuse me, get the fuck outta here.”

  In fact, John knew far more than Rossi or the press about what the blast investigators had gathered. At some time around eleven P.M. the night before, the Broward County Sheriff’s laboratory had found his little calling card. They had entered their preliminary lab results and materials findings into the FBI’s Bomb Data Center computer system. The BDC’s computer had matched these findings with other known explosive devices that had been used around the country, and an alert had been kicked back to the sheriff and the local ATF office, as well as to the national FBI and ATF offices in Washington. John did not know, but he surmised, that while he and Angelo Rossi sat here in the coolness of the air-conditioned library, agents from the local ATF field office were scrambling to act on this information. Which was exactly what he wanted them to do.

  “Look, Red, please. I’m telling you you can make a sweet buck here. How’s twice what Karpov paid you sound?”

  “Sorry, sir. Just can’t.”

  “You got us over a barrel.”

  “Nah. I think you’re the one over a barrel, right? You shot off your mouth to those wops up north, and now you can’t deliver.”

  Rossi glanced around again.

  “Do me this as a favor, okay? I can give you everything you need to know about this nigger right now. Shit, I’ll drive you there myself, you want.”

  “Nope. No niggers on the menu today. Now get the fuck outta here, okay?”

  Rossi’s nostrils flared and his hand slipped beneath his jacket. Ninety degrees and a hundred percent humidity, and this dumb guinea was wearing a sport coat like he just came out of a double bill of GoodFellas.

  J
ohn rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, please, Mr. Rossi. Let’s not be small. What the fuck you think you’re gonna do with that here in the library? Here in ‘periodicals’? Jesus Christ, you’re so dumb you think ‘periodicals’ is something a whore gets.”

  Rossi’s jaw worked as if he was chewing gum.

  John grinned wider, then let the smile fall away and leaned toward Angelo Rossi. He knew Rossi feared him. He knew Rossi was about to fear him more.

  “Here’s a tip, Angelo: Pretend that you dropped something on the floor and bend down to pick it up. When you’re down there, you look up under the bottom of this table.”

  Rossi’s eyes flickered.

  “What you got down there?”

  “You look, Angelo. You won’t get bit.”

  John took the newspaper from the table and let it slip to the floor.

  “You go on and look now, okay? You just look.”

  Rossi didn’t bend down for the paper. Slowly, never taking his eyes from John, he slipped from the chair and squatted to the floor. When he rose again, Rossi’s face was white.

  “You crazy fuck.”

  “That might be, Angelo. Now you go on and kill your own damned nigger. Me and you will work together again another time.”

  Rossi showed his palms and backed away, bumping into two teenage girls who were trying to figure out how to use a reference computer.

  When Rossi was gone, John considered the people at the surrounding tables. Mostly old people, reading newspapers and magazines. A group of preschool kids here on some kind of kindergarten field trip. A soft-looking man behind the research desk, reading a Dean Koontz novel. All of them just going along with their lives, oblivious.

  John swung around to face the library’s Internet research computer and tapped in the address for the FBI’s web site: www.fbi.gov.

  When the home page came up, he clicked on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives icon and watched the page load.

  Ten small pictures appeared, each with a link to its own page. John had checked the site before Rossi arrived, hoping to find his picture there. It wasn’t then, and still wasn’t.

  A perfect example, John felt, of government inefficiency.

  Disappointed, John went back to the home page, and clicked on the Unknown Suspects icon. Nine pictures appeared, three of which were artists’ sketches. One of the sketches showed a studious young man with a balding pate, rim of brown hair, brown eyes, and dorky glasses. John had starved himself for two weeks before letting himself be seen that time, and the witnesses had certainly noticed: The sketch showed him to be gaunt and undernourished. He was also shown wearing a white button-down shirt and thin dark tie. It was a sketch that looked nothing like his true self, just as today he looked nothing like his true self.

  He clicked on the sketch, which brought him to a page showing a brief (though inaccurate) description of himself, along with a catalog of the crimes he was suspected of committing. These charges included multiple counts of criminal bombing and murder. John was pleased to note that the feds considered him extremely dangerous, and that he used “sophisticated explosive devices for criminal gain.” It wasn’t as cool as being in the Top Ten, but it was better than getting piss on your shoe.

  John felt that the FBI’s refusal to include him on the Ten Most Wanted List was both cheesy and disrespectful. And lazy. The Top Ten was loaded with raghead terrorists, right-wing political kooks, and drug addicts who had murdered police officers. John had killed far more people than most of them. He believed himself to be the most dangerous man walking free in open daylight, and expected to be treated as such.

  John guessed he would just have to up the stakes.

  Beneath the table was a small device he had built for this library, specifically to be used as a message. It was simple, elegant, and, like every device he built, bore his signature. The local authorities would know within hours that Mr. Red had come to call.

  “Excuse me. Are you finished using that?”

  An older woman with a body like a squash stood behind him. She was holding a spiral notebook.

  “You want to use the computer?”

  “Yes. If you’re finished with it.”

  John flashed the big grin, then scooped up his backpack and held the chair for her. Just before he stood, he reached beneath the table and turned on the timer.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am. You sit right here. This chair’s so comfy it’ll make your butt smile.”

  The older woman laughed.

  John left her there and walked out into the sun.

  4

  • • •

  Starkey woke the next morning on the couch, her body clenched into a fist. Her neck was stiff, and her mouth tasted as if it were lined with sheep’s wool seat covers. It was four-twenty in the morning. She had gotten two hours sleep.

  Starkey felt disquieted by the dreams. A different quality had been added. Pell. In her dreams, he chased her. She had run as hard as she could, but her movements were sluggish and slow, while his were not. Starkey didn’t like that. In the dream, his fingers were bony and sharp, like claws. She didn’t like that, either. Starkey’s dreams had been a constant since her injury, but she found herself feeling resentful of this addition. It was bad enough that the sonofabitch was invading her investigation; she didn’t need him in her nightmares.

  Starkey lit a cigarette, then gimped into the kitchen, where she found a small amount of orange juice that didn’t smell sour. She tried to remember the last time that she’d been to the market, but couldn’t. The only things she bought in quantity were gin and cigarettes.

  Starkey downed the juice, then a glass of water, then got herself together for the day. Breakfast was two aspirin and a Tagamet.

  Marzik had left word on her voice mail that they could meet the wit, a kid named Lester Ybarra, at the flower shop when it opened at nine. By five-thirty, Starkey was at Spring Street, climbing the stairs to her office. Spring Street was quiet. Neither CCS, Fugitive Section, nor IAG maintained a night shift. Their commanders and sergeant-supervisors were on pagers. They, in turn, would contact the officers and detectives in their commands on an as-needed basis. Fugitive Section, by the nature of their work as manhunters, often started their days as early as three A.M. in order to bag their mutts in bed. But today the stairs were empty, and her steps echoed in the silent altar of the stairwell.

  Starkey liked that.

  She had once told Dana that she enjoyed being awake before everyone else because it gave her an edge, but that had been a lie. Starkey enjoyed the solitude because it was easier. No one intruded. No one stared behind her back, thinking that she was the one, the tech who’d been blown apart and stitched back together like Frankenstein’s monster, the one who had lost her partner, the one who had escaped, the one who had died. Dana had called her on it, offering Starkey the truth by asking if Carol ever felt the weight of their stares or imagined that she could hear their thoughts. Starkey, of course, denied all of it, but she thought about it later and admitted that Dana was right. Solitude was a spell that freed her.

  Starkey opened the CCS office, then put on the Mr. Coffee. As the coffee dripped, she went back to her desk. Like all the CCS detectives, she kept reference manuals and sourcebooks for explosives manufacturers, but, unlike the others, Starkey also had her texts and manuals from the FBI’s Redstone Arsenal Bomb School, and the technical catalogs that she had collected during her days as a bomb technician.

  Starkey brought a cup of coffee back to her desk, lit a fresh cigarette, then searched through her books.

  Modex Hybrid was a trinary explosive used as a bursting charge in air-to-air missles. Hot, fast, and dangerous. Trinary meant that it was a mixture of three primary explosives, combined together to form a compound more powerful and stable than any of the three alone. Starkey took out her case notebook and copied the components: RDX, TNT, ammonium picrate, powdered aluminum, wax, and calcium chloride. RDX, TNT, and ammonium picrate were high explosives. The powdered aluminum
was used to enhance the power of the explosion. The wax and calcium chloride were used as stabilizers.

  Chen had found contaminants in the Modex, and, after consulting with the manufacturer, had concluded that the Modex used in Riggio’s bomb wasn’t part of a government production. It was homemade, and therefore untraceable.

  Starkey considered that, then searched through her books for information on the primary components.

  TNT and ammonium picrate were available to the civilian population. You could get it damned near anywhere. RDX was different. Like the Modex, it was manufactured for the military only under government contract, but, unlike the Modex, it was too complicated to produce without industrial refining equipment. You couldn’t cook up a batch in your microwave. This was the kind of break Starkey was hoping to find in her manuals. Someone could make Modex if they had the components, but they couldn’t make the components. They would have to acquire the RDX, which meant that the RDX could be traced back to its source.

  Starkey decided that this was a good angle to work.

  She brought her notes to the NLETS computer, poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, then punched up a request form asking for matches with RDX. By the time she finished typing the form and entering the request, a few of the other detectives had begun to drift in for the start of the shift. The silence was gone. The spell was broken.

  Starkey gathered her things and left.

  Marzik was loading Amway products into her trunk when Starkey parked behind her outside the flower shop. Marzik carried the damned stuff everywhere and would make her pitch at the most inappropriate times, even when interviewing witnesses and, twice, when questioning potential suspects.

  Starkey felt her stomach tighten. She had decided not to call Marzik on ratting her out to Kelso, but she now felt a wave of irritation.

  They met on the sidewalk, Marzik saying, “Is the ATF going to take over the case?”

  “He says no, but we’ll see. Beth, tell me you weren’t in there with the Amway.”