by Kirk Russell
‘Bruce, come take a look.’
And then Ortega was standing next to him saying, ‘Khan’s a bomb maker.’
Raveneau didn’t go there yet. He was still taking it in. Each was well machined, similar if not identical. This was production manufacturing. He turned to Ortega and asked, ‘Who’s the bomb guy we hired that was with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan?’
‘Yeah, I know who you mean. They call him Hurt Locker but I can’t think of his real name. Hagen knows him.’
‘Let’s get Hagen to call the bomb squad. Let’s see if we can get him here without the rest of the squad and before we call the Feds or anybody else.’
NINETEEN
The captain who oversaw the bomb squad told Hagen, ‘No way, it’s not going to happen.’ Raveneau was close enough to overhear. He refused to send Juan Garcia, the ex-Army technician alone.
Raveneau mouthed, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and Hagen stared hard at him before saying, ‘I’m going to put Inspector Raveneau on the line.’
When Raveneau brought the phone to his ear Captain Dixon asked, ‘Raveneau, are you ever going to fucking retire?’
‘I’m waiting you out. You go, and then I’ll go.’
‘What would I do every day?’
‘You’d do the same thing you do now, you’d sit around.’
Dixon laughed. Raveneau didn’t know him well but they liked each other.
‘Here’s the problem we’ve got,’ Raveneau said. ‘We’ve discovered what look like bomb casings and we don’t want to alert the owner yet. We need to keep this very quiet. We need a discreet look at them.’
‘Are you staying well away from them?’
‘We are.’
‘You need to get everyone out of the building. What’s the address again?’
Raveneau gave it to him and kept talking.
‘We can’t risk our suspect finding out we’ve discovered this.’
‘We have a very clear protocol, Ben, and I think everyone in the department knows it, you included.’
‘I understand, but we can’t risk the word getting out. If you can’t send him and give us a look and an opinion, we’ll go at it a different way.’
‘No, don’t call the Feds, we’ll get down there. Don’t touch anything and we’ll come in as quietly as we can.’
‘It’s plywood that’s been moved around with a forklift. It rode here on a lumber delivery truck. It can’t be that sensitive. Look, I’ll email you a photo of what we’ve got. I’ll do that right now.’
Ten minutes later Dixon called back, saying he was sending Garcia, the Hurt Locker guy.
While they waited Raveneau made a call to a friend who worked for a company called Shelter Products up in Portland. He figured if there was anyone who could trace where the plywood came from it was Ridge Taylor. He got through to Taylor and after the hellos said, ‘I can’t tell you why but I need to know. I’ve got an order and a delivery tag number. We can fax to you and I can tell you what’s stamped on the wood.’
No one told a joke better than Taylor, but he was quiet and serious as Raveneau went back and forth with him. Shelter Products sold point-to-point. They sold lumber as it was still rolling on a train. They sold into any number of states and after they were clear on the forty-two pieces of finish grade larch he asked Taylor about Branson Trucking, thinking they might know who to call if they didn’t know anything directly.
‘Why don’t I put you through to Hutton and let him tell you. Your plywood came out of a plant in British Columbia. Here’s the address and phone number.’
Taylor gave him that and a website, then put him through to Kurt Hutton. Hutton asked, ‘Are you building a wooden jail?’
‘No, and I can’t talk but I need to know anything you can tell me about Branson.’
‘I can tell you they appeared out of nowhere about four years ago with lower prices than anybody. The CEO, if you want to call him that, was somebody we did business with and he ran into hard times and went under. I don’t know when he connected with the investor money behind Branson. He’s not really the type to go out and find money like that, but obviously he did.’
‘If they’re less expensive why don’t you use them?’
‘They did do some hauling for us, but they couldn’t possibly have made money at the prices they charged us and it was hurting others we work with. They’ve got a good idea with their website though. On the website is a truck and you click and drag and as you load the truck it gives you the weight and you punch in the destination and it gives the hauling price.’
‘I’ve been to it.’
‘With their prices they had to be cutting corners other ways, so we backed away.’
He thanked Hutton as Hurt Locker showed up. He was probably no more than twenty-five but with a quiet walk and manner that made Raveneau remember his son. He watched how Garcia approached the casings and studied them. Ten minutes later he straightened, turned, and looked at them.
‘You’ve got yourself some pretty slick IED casings, except that they don’t look very much like improvised explosive devices. You’ve got four Cadillacs, depending on who puts them together from here. Anyone of these would make one hell of a bomb. See how the nose is shaped, directs the blast.’
He fixed on Raveneau.
‘These are some seriously bad dudes and they aren’t one-off deals. They’re producing them. This is one scary thought.’
‘What would one of these do to a cable car?’
‘Oh, I think you’d be looking for pieces and parts four blocks away.’ He paused. ‘You want to find the bomb maker like right now, pronto.’
TWENTY
Raveneau moved his car so the bomb sniffing dogs and the X-ray robot could enter through a loading bay. Still, you couldn’t fool the street. The neighbors quickly noticed the vehicles and a couple of people walked up to ask what was going on.
But nothing more was discovered and the X-ray was negative on anything else hidden in the plywood. Hurt Locker Garcia operated the X-ray robot. He determined the casings weren’t booby-trapped and removed them slowly. After that, the only metal the robot picked up were the screws sandwiching the plywood together. Garcia nodded at Raveneau’s guess the end pieces threaded on after the explosive was inside.
Other than Garcia no one touched them and Garcia wore gloves. A CSI team was on its way here and the hope was they’d pull something off them that would help.
Raveneau asked Garcia, ‘They looked heavy when you picked them up.’
‘They are. They’re some sort of alloy.’
Raveneau took photos and then stepped back as the CSI crew arrived and tried to figure out how to approach this. Meanwhile, Raveneau, Ortega, and the canine crew helped load the X-ray robot back into the van. When the bomb squad left Ortega called a meeting in Khan’s office. He wanted to caucus on how to proceed. One idea was to restack the plywood, reband the unit, and set up surveillance cameras before turning the building over to Khan. Raveneau favored that idea but disagreed with Ortega over bringing in the FBI.
‘You’ve got to bring them,’ Raveneau argued. ‘There’s really no choice.’
‘Raveneau, you know as well as I do what’s going to happen. They’ll trample our murder investigation. By noon they’ll have a press release out saying they’re working a significant terrorism investigation in San Francisco. The murders here will become a sidebar. They’ll tuck Khan away somewhere. We can wait a few days.’
‘I know who to call.’
‘Who?’
‘Mark Coe.’
‘I don’t even know him.’
‘You’ll meet him today. You’ll be able to work with him.’
Hagen jumped in. ‘Couldn’t disagree more,’ he said, and they continued on like this, but knew the call was going to get made. Ortega would have cut this debate off awhile ago if it wasn’t. Half an hour later, Ortega asked for Coe’s cell number.
Thirty-five minutes later Coe and two other agents were in the building looking
at bomb casings. More calls got made and a bomb expert an hour and a half down the coast at Fort Ord got in his car. Another boarded a plane in LA. With Coe there Raveneau stepped back. He listened to Ortega sketch out his video surveillance idea.
‘We’re going to pull the crime tape anyway. We can put the bomb casings back in their nests, reband the plywood, give him the building back and watch what he does. His attorney keeps telling us his client will lose his business and they’ll sue if we don’t let him back in here soon.’
Raveneau knew Coe couldn’t decide on his own. He’d have to call his ASAC at a minimum. That call got made now and late in the afternoon Raveneau left the building to buy a banding tool and steel tape at a lumberyard. A clerk showed him how to use it. When he got back to Sixteenth Street he called Celeste to let her know he was going to be late.
‘Let me guess,’ she said as she picked up, ‘you aren’t going to make it tonight.’
‘I’ll be late. We found something very disturbing.’
‘That sounds scary.’
‘It is.’
Coe got a wiretap warrant and the FBI tested and retested their video system trying to get at a bug in it as Raveneau stacked plywood with Ortega. Every three or four sheets they stopped to make sure everything was lining up correctly. Lining up the creases the former banding tape made on the edge of the last sheet was hard. It needed to align perfectly and Raveneau struggled with the banding tool. But finally he figured it out and when he finished the stack looked pretty much like it had. One by one, they backed out of the building and as Raveneau stood with Ortega down the block and outside his car, Coe called from back in the Fed field office.
‘Everything is working, you’re good to go.’
Ortega turned to Raveneau and said, ‘Here goes.’ He called Khan’s lawyer. ‘This is Inspector Ortega. Mr Khan can have his building back. If he needs someone we can give you the names of several firms who do crime scene cleanup.’
‘Does that mean he is no longer a suspect?’
‘We’ve never called him as a suspect.’
Raveneau smiled as Ortega said that.
‘You’ve treated him as one. You prevented him from reopening his business and cost him a great deal of money. Who is going to compensate him for that?’
‘You tell me. I have no idea. Good night.’
TWENTY-ONE
Eight months ago near the end of spring last year, Celeste told him, ‘I’m forty-eight. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.’
She had two hundred seventy-one thousand dollars saved over seventeen years for the sole purpose of opening a restaurant. But the tipping point was when her mother died about a year ago and Celeste inherited $185,000, and with that felt sure she had enough money. Her mother’s death also made life much more finite for Celeste. That started the summer of eating and looking at other restaurants and places for lease.
They had fun with it right up to the point where she signed a lease and the clock started. The second thoughts arrived then and the fear she was in over her head in a competitive city woke her at night. She planned to serve food at the bar but had last cooked professionally twenty-five years ago when she imagined a career as a chef before becoming a bartender and later a wine broker.
During the heatwave last September when city temperatures broke one hundred degrees for the fourth day in a row, she had an anxiety attack that almost derailed the project.
She wept and shook as she told him, ‘I’m wasting everything I inherited and all the money my mom saved on a vain idea. I’ll get panned in the first reviews and will never be able to compete.’
But by then she was committed to the lease and had already spent fifteen thousand on architectural drawings. She broke out in hives. She fought panic with manic focus on restaurant design and construction and by testing drink recipes at home. But the low point was yet to come. It arrived a month later as she got the first construction bids from two general contractors, both of whom had come highly recommended.
The bids were nearly double what her architect had estimated. She found a third contractor and got another bid, then two more before realizing that she needed to scale back her plans radically. She kept the idea that you could still eat at the bar or a bar table. Not a restaurant style meal, and very casual eating, with the idea there would be six to eight small plates and always pizzettas. You’d get paper napkins not cloth but food would be part of the draw. She focused on the mixology, on bartending, on a culture that would treat customers like friends.
She didn’t have to but she also focused on sustainable. She found recycled materials. She bought used bar equipment and chairs and tables. She refinished the tables with Raveneau’s help. She found a used pizza oven and the architect came up with a way to capture waste heat from the bar dishwasher, running plastic Pex lines embedded in the concrete bar top so if you rested your elbows on the bar top concrete they would stay warm.
She fought. She negotiated. The flue rebuild became yesterday’s problem. The Health and Building Departments signed off. A local advocate for handicap rights came by and measured the bathrooms. Then Bo Rutan pulled up in his old El Camino with Louisiana plates saying he had in fact trained in Rome not New Orleans. He was in chef whites making pizzas when Raveneau walked in tonight.
‘It’s really up to the bar,’ Celeste had kept saying. ‘The bar will make or break the place.’
There were twenty-five small tables and rattan chairs, a floor of reclaimed bamboo. The old beams of the ceiling were exposed, the walls white-painted and softly lit. He caught her eye now and she waved for him to come around the back. Her forehead was moist with heat from the oven, face flush, eyes lit with excitement and happiness. People looked happy and it felt right to Raveneau. She pulled him around the corner out of sight of the bar.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s going to work.’
‘You like the bar.’
‘Yeah, it’s got a good feel.’
‘I’ll come out in a few minutes. It’s been crowded like this since we opened the doors at five thirty. Kiss me and tell me some of these people will come back.’
‘They will.’
Raveneau saw la Rosa walk in. She spotted him immediately, looked at his clothes and asked, ‘Did you even go home?’
‘Never got a chance.’
‘How did it go?’
‘It’s all set up. It’s working.’
‘How long before the media gets it?’
‘My guess is a week at the most.’
‘I’ll bet it’s out in less than three days.’
‘Let’s get you a drink and then let me introduce you to someone.’
When Raveneau touched his shoulder Ryan Candel turned from his friends. He looked drunk. He looked puzzled. He asked, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘This is my partner, Inspector Elizabeth la Rosa.’
Candel waved one of the smooth rounded glasses Celeste had searched for months to find. It held a dark rum drink.
‘Hello, Inspector Elizabeth.’
The drink slipped through his fingers, almost fell, and one of his friends said, ‘That would have sucked.’
Candel gestured with his glass toward his friends. ‘These are my drinking friends.’ He turned and pointed with the glass at Raveneau. ‘This detective here is looking for my dad. Together we’re going to prove he was a murderer. Isn’t that right, Inspector? We’re hunting the fucker down.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Dad. We’re coming for you.’
On his left la Rosa said, ‘The place is beautiful. Introduce me to Celeste. Let’s get away from these guys. I don’t need this tonight.’
TWENTY-TWO
Raveneau was groggy as he answered the phone. He recognized Secret Service Brooks’ voice and looked at the time, 5:30 on a dark cold morning.
‘Hope I didn’t wake you up,’ Brooks said. ‘Special Agent Coe called me.’
‘Good.’
‘But why didn’t I hear f
rom you?’
‘Why would you?’
‘Those weapons are for targeting vehicles. They were sent here for the President’s visit.’
‘You’re good at big leaps, Nate.’
‘I wish I was. It’s just a different business, Inspector. In yours you like to have a body to work with. Then you can sit around and try to figure out who killed the victim even if it takes twenty-two years. In ours the game is keeping everybody alive so that means we have to work a little harder.’
‘Sure, that’s why you brought two other agents to the meeting with me.’
‘Are you talking about the meeting where you went out for coffee in the middle of it?’
‘It was either that or watch you read. I’m still waiting by the way for a copy of your file on Alan Krueger. Remember, you were going to messenger it over the next day’
‘I want to meet with you this morning.’
‘So you’ll bring the personnel file with you. Is that what you’re saying? In that case, let’s meet. What’s convenient for you?’
He met a different Nate Brooks at ten that morning and by then he had also cooled down. Brooks alluded to the pressure on him and Raveneau wasn’t sure about himself. He was surprised he’d gotten into it with Brooks earlier this morning. Could be that the bomb casings troubled him on a lot of levels. He knew the investigation would go full-throated at Khan’s roots. Ortega told him this morning the FBI was forming a task force and sending two teams to Pakistan.
Brooks held his hands out in front of him, palms down, fingers spread wide.
‘I can feel it coming,’ he said. ‘I can feel something is going to happen. It’s getting closer and closer and I’m not getting anywhere. The only thing I’m getting is more worried. Let’s take a drive and I’ll show you what I worry about. Come on, let’s go. We’ll get coffee and I’ll show you.’