The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  This one opened his coat so she could see his captain’s badge, and said, “Hello, Sergeant Hines. I’m Captain Bart Almanzo, Homicide Special. I wondered if we could talk for a few minutes. I promised the nurse I wouldn’t tire you out.”

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ve heard of you, of course. Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m in charge of the murder of the fourteen bomb technicians,” he said. “We’ve got a few issues that came up recently, and I thought it would be better to talk to you here instead of waiting. Do you think the person who put the bomb in your apartment is the same one who killed the fourteen at the house in Encino?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I imagine you’ve already talked with Captain Stahl about the technical stuff.”

  “Captain Stahl was here last night, but we didn’t get into that too deeply. I was kept unconscious until a day or so ago, and I’m just sorting out impressions and memories. We’ll talk more about it later on, I’m sure.”

  “Did he agree it was the same bomber?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why are you both sure?”

  “In this city we have lots of scares and a small but steady supply of actual bombs. Most of the bombs we see are rudimentary—black powder in a pipe, or a few sticks of dynamite, or nitrate fertilizer mixed with motor oil. Sometimes there will be a grenade from some old war. I got a land mine once, and someone I know got a mortar shell. Now suddenly we have a few that are all complicated, well designed, insidious, and psychologically astute. The bomb in my apartment was one of those.”

  “What sort of bomb did he use in your apartment?”

  “He built an initiator that looked like a small version of the fuzes they put on bombs they drop from airplanes. It was cylindrical, and it had a little piece of metal like a propeller that spun around. In the real ones, when the bomb is locked onto the plane’s rack, there’s a length of stiff arming wire attached to the bomb rack that keeps the propeller from spinning around. When the bomb leaves the rack, the arming wire stays, and then the propeller on the fuze is free to turn. As it spins, it lines up a striker with the initiator. You can set the fuze to go off when it hits the ground, or just spins a set number of times. The wire keeps it from blowing up on or near the plane.

  “He hid a small bomb inside the glass fixture for the ceiling light in my living room. He had a couple of ways to make the bomb go off. When I stepped inside and turned on the light, it didn’t go on, but there was no pop sound or flash. That didn’t seem right. So I used the flashlight attached to my Glock to scan the dark room for traps and triggers. When I was looking for the actual bomb it occurred to me there was one place I was sure not to look—in the burned-out light fixture. When I raised the flashlight to look, I saw a propeller spinning inside the glass dome. I’d started the initiator’s arming sequence when I turned on the light switch. By then all I could do was take cover.”

  “Should we be contacting the manufacturers of military fuzes?”

  “No. I’m positive he made this one. I’m not sure what turned the propeller. There might have been a small electric motor spinning it on a screw, or it might have been the spring mechanism of an old-fashioned metal windup toy. The spinner seemed to be the kind of thin, cheap metal that those toys had—usually tin.”

  “How did you take cover?”

  “I dashed to the next room—the dining room—dropped to the floor, and rolled under my antique wooden sideboard.”

  “Is that what all the wood in the photographs came from?”

  “I haven’t seen any pictures, but probably. The sideboard was made of maple planks over an inch thick. It’s so heavy that when I had it delivered, it took five men and two wheeled dollies to get it into the building. And I had it full of stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “Things everybody has but seldom uses. I had a few metal trays—pewter, brass, stainless steel, some candlesticks, the good silverware in its carrying case, some pots and pans, and a waffle iron. And of course, all the good tablecloths and napkins and trivets and things you use once a year.”

  “Do you think the sideboard is what saved you?”

  “I don’t really know, but it couldn’t have hurt. I’d have to look at the blast pattern, see what’s embedded in the floor and walls and furniture, and maybe figure out what quantity of explosive would have fitted in the light fixture. You should probably ask Captain Stahl about that. I’m sure he will have looked, and his judgment is much better than mine.”

  “I’ve heard he knows his explosives. Is he a pretty good boss?”

  “We all have the greatest respect for him.”

  “That reminds me. There’s another bit to clear up, and now is probably as good a time as any.”

  She waited. He behaved as though he were approaching a small, wild creature that might get away if he moved too quickly.

  They stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, and then he said, “You had a leather bag jammed into the space under the sideboard between you and the bomb. That may have helped too. You remember it? It seemed to be an overnight bag.”

  “A travel bag. Yes,” she said. She sounded like a liar, even to herself. This suddenly seemed to be going in a bad direction.

  “It contained some of your clothes. Can you tell me why? You were at work all that day, and you were scheduled to do a full shift the next day.”

  “I was going downstairs to do laundry later. It made a good laundry bag.” She kept her eyes on him as she added, “The net ones you can see through make me uncomfortable. I don’t like people looking at my underwear and everything. It’s just a bit too much sharing.”

  Almanzo looked at her sympathetically. “You understand that when the crime scene people arrived, there was good reason to believe you were another homicide victim, not a survivor. Your apartment was a crime scene, and they had to go over everything carefully.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is there anyone other than the bomber who might have entered your apartment that day? Another male?”

  “Not that I know of. I haven’t given any friends a key, and the landlord has to notify me before he comes in.”

  “Did you have your boyfriend over, or anything like that?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “You understand that nobody on the force wants to embarrass you. But the specialists went over everything. There was male DNA on some of the clothing in your bag. What your cell phone bill showed was that at ten on the night after the bomb was removed from the gas station in Studio City, you called three one zero, five five eight—”

  “Yes I did,” she interrupted. “Do you know whose number that is?”

  “I told you, every lead gets checked.”

  “I was calling the commander of my unit, who is also the supervisor of my three-person team. I had never met him before that day, but we had both been through a horrific, scary experience, and I wanted to talk to him about it.”

  Almanzo looked at her for a second. “Good enough for me,” he said. “That is as far as I go. I respect you for immediately telling me the truth. But I’ve got to say one more thing. A secret is something only one person knows. In a homicide investigation everything gets collected, and a lot of eyes get to see it. Even on the smallest matter, do not get caught saying anything that contradicts the evidence.”

  “I won’t. Thank you for letting me know about this.”

  “I’m leaving my card on the table here. I’ll also give one to the nurse at the counter out there. If anything I need to know comes to your attention, give me a call, night or day.” In a moment he was out the door.

  She wasn’t sure what to feel about her relationship with Dick Stahl. When she woke up from her coma she wondered if she’d dreamed what had happened. This morning she felt confused about it, but unable to think about anything else for long periods. She knew she had been very interested in Dick Stahl before she was hurt, but now the whole thought of the relationship se
emed distant, as though her injuries had made her into someone else.

  She had begun to think about him again after they’d talked. But then Captain Almanzo had drifted in and taken the oxygen out of the air. She felt alone and in trouble. She felt an urge to call Dick, and maybe that meant she still had real feelings for him, but she didn’t have a phone except the hospital phone. If she used it, Dick’s number would be listed on her hospital bill. She began to think about ways to get a new secret cell phone.

  Diane knew she had to get her mind under control, and not make things worse for her or Stahl. But it seemed to her the world wasn’t paying attention to the right things. The whole police force was looking for a mass murderer who was not even close to being identified or located. But they were not too busy to go after two police officers who might be getting too close.

  When the nurse came back and gave her the tiny plastic cup of the nauseating purple liquid to put her to sleep, she was glad to drink it.

  22

  Stahl had just arrived at the office after a late lunch hour and sat down at his desk when a call on his radio distracted him. Team Four was on its way to a school in Brentwood, where someone had found a suspicious package in the cafeteria. Stahl stood and walked from his office and through Andy’s on his way out.

  “I’m going out with Team Four to that call at the school.”

  “Got it,” said Andy.

  As Stahl hurried toward the elevator to the parking lot he was already thinking about the fastest way to Brentwood in mid-afternoon. He had chosen to go to the scene because a school was the sort of place this bomb maker might pick for his next attack. Stahl was aware that a school was also the most likely place for a false alarm. Kids made crank calls and staged misguided hoaxes, and only a very tiny number planted homemade devices. This was most likely a kid’s backpack with his sneakers and the remains of his lunch inside. But if it wasn’t, he wanted to see it.

  Stahl got into his unmarked police car and drove. During the weeks since Diane was injured he had been going to the scenes of bomb calls more and more often. He’d carried a tool kit and a bomb suit in the trunk of his car in case he wanted to go downrange and examine the device that prompted the call.

  Diane’s injuries had made him try to do everything and be everywhere. Part of the reason was that without her, he felt anxious and restless. Another part of the reason was that in the back of his mind he believed that not even an expert bomb technician was going to be as good as he was.

  He had spent years at Eglin teaching military Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialists how to spot and defeat the most sophisticated devices, and since then he’d gone back for the refresher courses required to stay certified. He had kept up with whatever was newest and most formidable. Other people were almost certainly doing that too, but they couldn’t match the breadth of his experience.

  This bomber seemed to him to require his personal attention. Everything he did was odd—eccentric and unfamiliar, but at the same time teasing and sadistic.

  Diane’s bomb had been like that. The bomber had wanted to do more than just hurt her. He wanted to fool her, make her stand still where the bomb would be most powerful, and give her a moment or two to realize she had caused her own death. What Diane’s attack seemed to have done was change the bomber’s rhythm. Maybe he had been so pleased with his work at her apartment that he hadn’t been feeling the need to hurt anybody else right away. He had gone quiet for over a month.

  All that time Stahl kept waiting and wondering what the next attempt would be. Stahl had gone on around twenty bomb calls and found nothing that seemed to be the murderer’s work. There was no device that would have presented a problem for any of Stahl’s twenty-seven technicians. The devices that weren’t fake were so crude that they would not have detonated if they’d been left in place forever.

  Sometimes Stahl concocted stories to account for the bomber’s inactivity. The man had to be living somewhere far from other people, where his neighbors didn’t see or hear any of his testing or smell the chemicals, many of which had to be heated and cooled and reheated—and mixed with extreme care causing no friction, no buildup of static electricity, and no percussion. The bomber had been on a trend since his first crime, making and using more and more unusual and undependable mixtures in his bombs. Maybe on the day after rigging Diane’s apartment he had been making his next bomb and suffered an accident. Maybe he had neglected to ground himself often enough and shuffled his feet. That could build up a static charge in his body. Maybe this time he had sent stray voltage along the metal housing of his device, set off the bomb in his hands, and blown himself to atoms. Stahl hoped so.

  Every morning when Stahl woke up he spent a second or two hoping that when he turned off his phone’s alarm he would see a text or an e-mail on the screen telling him a bomb maker had blown himself up. So far there was no such message.

  It was Stahl’s job to assume the bomber had been busy preparing something bigger and more lethal. One possibility was that he was building many Semtex-powered devices. What was stopping him from planting fifty bombs in fifty places at once? Stahl knew this man was more likely to plant a hundred bombs than fifty. Each scene would have one to cause preliminary damage and a second one to kill the technicians and paramedics who would come later.

  All the bomber had to do was keep the members of the squad moving fast from one call to the next to the next, until somebody got too tired to think and made a small mistake.

  This bomb maker was versatile too. He could make bombs that looked exactly alike, but were triggered in vastly different ways. He could put one in plain sight and another under the only path to it. If he wanted to he could attach very sensitive bombs to immovable surfaces—bridges, staircases, large stone or steel monuments in public parks—with epoxy cement. There was no limit to what this kind of bomb maker could do. Each time a bomb was found, a bomb tech would have to walk up to it and decide what to do with it.

  Stahl turned onto Williford Avenue and saw Team Four’s bomb truck just pulling up to the front of a large brick building that a sign identified as John Jay High School. The truck turned into a driveway and a police car that was parked across the entrance backed up to let it pass. Stahl approached before the officer could move back across the entrance, held up his identification, and followed the truck in.

  He parked some distance from it and walked the rest of the way to join Team Four, who were climbing down from the truck and taking out equipment before entering the school. As Stahl approached he considered what he could see. This was a rich neighborhood. The houses he passed on the way were big and shaded by tall old trees.

  He spotted Sergeant Paul Wyman, the supervisor of Team Four. Wyman was barely out of the truck when a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue business suit stepped up to him.

  Stahl heard her say, “I’m Julia Cortez, the principal. All of the students have been evacuated to the next street over, where they’re waiting with the faculty in the supermarket parking lot. We’ve activated the phone tree to call their parents to pick them up.”

  Paul Wyman said, “Very good. But we’ll need to double-check that the building is empty before we deal with the device.”

  “I thought you might,” she said. “I can take you to where it is.”

  “No, thank you,” Wyman said. “Just describe what was found and the exact location and we’ll take it from there. We have procedures that we need to follow.”

  Stahl was pleased with the way Wyman was handling it, so he stayed a few yards off and kept listening. The principal said, “It’s in a black gym bag in the school cafeteria, which is in the back wing of the main building. This morning the teacher who was going to monitor the first lunch session saw the bag. He opened it to see if he could find the name of the owner and return it. Usually there will be something with the student’s name. This time what he found was a kind of bundle with a cell phone and wires and batteries. He left the bag and locked the cafeteria doors, then called me.” She han
ded Wyman a key. “This is the master key. It should open every door.”

  As the members of Team Four prepared to enter the building, Stahl said, “Mind if I go in with you and take a look?”

  “Not at all,” said Wyman. “We can use the help.”

  “Good.”

  The four police officers put on bomb suits and went in the front door of the main school building. Wyman sent Neil and Welsh to the main hallway to begin the search for stragglers or possible additional suspicious objects. They opened doors on either side of the main hallway and walked the perimeters of the first pair of classrooms, then moved on to the next pair of rooms. From time to time, one would call out: “This is the police. The school building has been evacuated. If you are still in the building come to the front door and gather in the parking lot. This is the police …”

  Wyman and Stahl checked the rooms off the side corridors. When the four had made it all the way through the building they met where they had started. “The main section is clear,” said Welsh.

  “The side sections are all clear,” Wyman said. “The captain and I will head for the cafeteria while you and Neil check the other buildings.”

  “The cafeteria is down this hall near the back door,” said Welsh. “The doors are on the right.”

  “All right,” Wyman said. “The captain and I will take a look and then we’ll meet at the truck.”

  The two technicians went out the front door while Stahl and Wyman walked to the cafeteria. The room looked like the cafeteria of the middle school Stahl had attended over thirty years ago. There was a stainless steel and glass hot table three feet out from one wall, and the rest of the room was filled with long synthetic veneer folding tables that looked like blond wood, with five stackable molded plastic chairs on either side. They were all arranged in perfect order, with twenty tables to accommodate two hundred students at a time. Only one chair was pulled back from its table at an angle. It was on the far side of the room near where the hot food line would have been in an hour.