by Kirk Russell
“Does it mean anything that I’m coming in on my own?”
“It doesn’t change the questions, but it says something about your character.”
“And you’d bring a lawyer, that’s what you’re telling me. But you’re good with me not having one. You’re FBI to the core, you know that.”
Beatty stood, glanced up at the air war, then back at me.
“I’m like you, Grale. I want whoever did this found and killed. I want them dead. I know you do too. You just won’t say it.”
“Are you ready to go in? If you are, I’ll follow you.”
Beatty flinched and looked out through the gate at his bike then back at me.
“I’m angry about what happened. I’m angry I have to do this, but I’ll do it.”
“I’d be angry too.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“I can’t answer that this morning. You’ll have to go in there and solve it on your own. You know what’s true, and that’s all they’re really after.”
“You’re right, and I’m sorry, Grale. You don’t need to think about it at all, but thank you for meeting me.”
Beatty fired up his bike and left. Half a dozen agents would trail him to the field office, and four or five more would burn a day questioning him. There was nothing I could do about that, and it didn’t really matter that I sat awhile longer before heading to the Alagara.
12
I walked around outside first. No vehicles were left in the lot, which was wrapped with crime tape. Las Vegas Metro patrol units sat on the street. I crunched through tiny fragments of broken glass and debris. From memory of the CNN video, I found the spot where I thought Jane Stone was when the pickup bomb detonated. Then I moved to where the For Sale vehicles had been parked. The paving was gone and the desert soil underneath churned. A four-foot-deep crater was under where the pickup had sat. I saw flowers on the sidewalk, a lone desert rose and two or three bouquets of roses and yellow chrysanthemums. It meant something to me that people had already reached out.
When I turned back, I realized the hole the smoke poured out of last night was where a skylight had been. The balled-up black aluminum frame of the skylight was somehow still attached to the roof. A Metro officer standing guard opened a padlock for me on a temporary one-inch-thick plywood door and let me in. First smells were char, blood, and dust. A darkening trail of blood mixed with grit marked the path of first responders and everyone who’d followed. I stared at the blood trail with no sense of investigative detachment, only sorrow and anger. I felt incapable of focus.
Overhead, sunlight filtered through a blue tarp draped across the roof hole. Blood spatter stained the white-painted walls and the ceiling seventeen feet above. Just before leaving to meet Beatty, I’d read that the bomb was likely in a new wine refrigerator swapped out with an existing one that had failed several weeks ago. The swap-out occurred during several hours of minor construction work yesterday afternoon. That much was already known. Fragments of a detonator were found last night. I stood over the scarified patch of concrete at the bar where the bomb had detonated and visualized the unmarked van arriving, the man installing the new refrigerator, rolling it in here on a dolly, his movements and look telegraphing normal, the refrigerator wrapped in plastic.
After steady thefts of liquor and a bartender who made a habit of undercharging friends, Omar Smith told agents last night he’d made the decision to install video cameras that operated 24/7. The cameras filmed the wine refrigerator swap-out, but the face of the man who did the changing was largely hidden. Nonetheless, this morning, segments of that video were running through every facial-recognition program available.
Toward the back, temporary lights had been strung in the corridor leading to the restrooms, the food-prep area, kitchen, and Omar Smith’s office. I stood for several minutes in each room before returning to the ruined bar. A long, thick thread of ropy dried blood tracked along a wall. I looked at it and remembered the first Fourth of July parties.
They were outside and uncomplicated. The kids usually had a pool or a park to play in, and there was no Facebook chatter leading up to it, just a few calls and a “see you there.” Then a stop at the store for hot dogs and beer and whatever else was needed. Maybe it wasn’t as connected and efficient, but it had been simpler.
I stood near the destroyed bar and patch of scoured concrete that was ground zero. The shattered pieces of the bar were hauled to the airplane hangar where we were storing all debris, but I could picture the former bar. Like Beatty, I’d eaten tacos here several times. The face had been plywood. The owner once told me he’d stained and lacquered it himself. He was proud of his work and had put his heart into making his restaurant-bar work. I heard he had lost everything, including his house.
He’d also stained and waxed the concrete floor where his customers were, and it was easy to see where that line of stained and waxed floor ended at the bar. I looked at the line of the color difference of the concrete and pictured a table out in front of it, one about ten feet long, sitting directly before the bar but not blocking people from getting drinks. The table was for the children and would have a red, white, and blue paper tablecloth. It was a thing Melissa always did at the Fourth of July party. She liked the kids front and center. They made her happy. She didn’t care if they screamed and made a lot of noise.
So the kids there and excited as the cake arrived and adults nearby watching as Jim and the Hullabaloo driver, Juan Menderes, carried the cake over to the table. “Happy Birthday” was sung, not for the country, but for two of the kids, one born on the Fourth, one today. Menderes sends a text while still on the lot and passes by me in the intersection, going in the opposite direction, about a mile away.
Omar Smith has owned the Alagara for two years. He holds the keys. He determines who gets in and when. There are regular cleanings. There’s upkeep and in recent weeks, repairs in the bar and bathrooms. A scrutinizing of the subcontractors here yesterday was well under way. The tile setter who spoke only Spanish didn’t see anybody. A plumber did. The plumber was here when the wine refrigerator swap-out was made. He’d talked to the man changing the refrigerator and said the guy wasn’t happy about working the holiday. Described him as a normal dude.
The plumber had answered most questions straightforwardly but had danced around others. I’d watched that interview video this morning. Thought about how the plumber had gotten squirrelly, then my thoughts flickered through my impression of Omar Smith the night before. Smith claimed that he didn’t return in time to meet with the tile setter and plumber and sign off on their work because of a business trip to Houston. Did that mean anything? Did it matter?
Smith was a media artist. Opening his records and house to us last night was like live TV. In a Hullabaloo ad that played often on a Vegas AM radio station, Omar Smith, with an exaggerated accent, struggled to pronounce his name. The gag went on for maybe twelve seconds, right to the edge of being too long, and then cut to a smooth, crystal-clear voice saying, “This is the Turk and this is Vegas. Parties should never be hard in Vegas.”
Then came the Hullabaloo pitch for his party-rental business. Hullabaloo vans were sherbet tricolors. In Vegas you saw them enough to conclude the business was successful, but already investigative reporters were turning up griping vendors and unpaid bills and the shadow of lurking bankruptcy. That was news this morning, and we had agents questioning those same vendors. We also had agents in conversation with Turkish police in Istanbul, where Smith was from.
I heard footsteps, turned, and was surprised to see Venuti. Maybe because of how emotional I felt in the restaurant, seeing him unsettled me. Dan looked tall and gaunt, his face hawklike and gray, shoulder bones sliding under a thin, dark blue suit coat. But everyone looked beat this morning.
“Didn’t hear you come in.”
“I need your help clearing out Jane’s condo before the family gets there. I picked up food for lunch. You probably haven’t eaten since it happened,
have you?”
I hadn’t.
“You’ve got to eat. How long are you going to be in here?”
“Not much longer.”
“I’ll be in my car making calls. We need two agents present if we remove anything. We also just got test results back on the explosive used here. We can talk about that. You were right. It was C-4.”
We left my car parked near the LVPD patrol that was watching the lot, and I ate the turkey tortilla Venuti handed me as he drove. I was grateful for it. I hadn’t thought much about food, and, despite everything, it felt good to eat. I was hungry.
“The C-4 in the Alagara bomb and in the pickup bomb came from a batch made for the army in 2009,” Venuti said.
“That’s coming from the manufacturer?”
“Yes.”
“That was fast.”
“They’re more ready nowadays.” Venuti added softly, “They have to be. All of that batch shipped to Afghanistan.”
“And some of it disappeared and didn’t turn up.”
Venuti nodded.
“You got it. It made it to Kandahar Airfield where 311 pounds disappeared. The CIA is saying they tracked the C-4 through the Haqqani network to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At some point ISIS got involved too.”
“A joint operation? Is that believable?”
“They say it is.”
“Then what?”
“Then by boat from Africa to South America, where operatives working for the Sinaloa cartel moved it north. We’ll get more on that today, but not hard details. The CIA made that clear this morning. Either they don’t want to share all of it yet, or they don’t have the full path it tracked north on. But you could say they administered delivering it to a Phoenix warehouse. It then disappeared from that warehouse. Apparently we were helping watch over it when it vanished.”
“Why were we there?”
“We got briefed once it was obvious that it was coming here. It got here and we took over and had surveillance teams rotating at the storage facility in Phoenix.”
I nodded. That made sense.
“So we were waiting to see who would pick it up and where they were taking it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not clear.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the briefing I was in only went so far. Our guys are saying we had it under surveillance the whole time. A batch match had already been made with an earlier sample, so we knew when the C-4 was made and where. Our agents went into the Phoenix warehouse at 3:30 a.m. this morning and didn’t find any C-4.”
I thought about that and said, “Okay, but we do know C-4 shipped to our army in Afghanistan and 311 pounds were stolen, sold, and made their way into the hands of AQAP and ISIS and then were brought all the way back across the world. Same batch.”
“Yes, so now it’s a very high probability that it was a terrorist attack involving Mideast actors and recruits here.”
“Are they speculating homegrown recruits here?”
He nodded, and I asked, “Why would they move this C-4 halfway around the world?”
“Lot of debate over that too. The going theory is the symbolism of getting it from an American military base and using it to attack America made it worth shipping. I don’t see that, but that’s what I heard this morning.” He added, “The army wants to control how it goes public.”
“I thought AQAP and ISIS were at each other’s throats.”
“They mostly are.”
I wiped my hands on the greasy napkin and crumpled the paper bag as we pulled into the garage beneath the condo complex. Venuti used a swipe card to get into the elevator room, holding it against the reader then showing it to me before slipping it into his wallet.
“Jane gave this to me. We sometimes met here. It’s on the way from my house, and it was a good place to talk.”
“Her condo was a good place?”
Venuti glanced at me.
“It was convenient.”
Venuti hit the fourth floor button and the elevator rose. He unlocked her door as if he’d done it a thousand times. In the main room I looked through the windows to the deck and at the desert beyond the city. The city of Las Vegas looked like an overnight guest in this view of the desert. Jane had made a good buy when the market was down in ’09. She got it very cheap, but it was like her to be unafraid when others were fearful. I knew she liked to sit on the deck with a glass of wine and unwind.
Venuti cleared his throat.
“I was here with Jane when the first bomb went off. Louise thought I was at work on a minor emergency and wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and then we would celebrate the Fourth of July. I was here having a drink with Jane first. That’s how I’ve treated the mother of my three children, the woman I’ve been with since I was twenty. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”
It took me a beat to register what he was communicating, but I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to hear a confession.
“When the bombing happened and the DOD called, I realized you couldn’t be the lead on-site. Jane didn’t feel qualified to run the crime scene after the bombing, but I talked her into it. She’d be alive otherwise.”
“You thought it would help her career.”
“That’s not why.”
The fuck it wasn’t.
“It’s because she was ready, and I knew I had to pull you,” he said.
“She was a good choice, but you didn’t need to pull me. It may as well get said now. You didn’t need to. There was no reason to.”
He ignored that and said, “I talked her into it, and it got her killed.”
“You didn’t get her killed.”
Jane once told me she liked unraveling the frauds, the money launderers, and cybercriminals. She loved sophisticated criminal types in twenty-thousand-dollar suits who were confident they were smarter than everyone else. She didn’t want a career dealing with the psychopaths, murderers, righteous zealots, and nihilistic bomb-building freaks.
She’d said, “The bombers and stone-cold killers are all yours, Grale. You can hold hands with them and stare into the abyss together. I’ll move off the DT squad in a couple of years. I don’t want anything to do with bombers. I want the guys who dream of cleaning out J.P. Morgan in under sixty seconds.”
“Jane and I talked about letting the bomb squad clear the vehicles first,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“If you’d been there, no one would have gone near those vehicles.”
“Jane knew to stay back. It was just bad luck she was crossing the lot. I’m sure she had a reason and it was a calculated gamble.”
“You wouldn’t have forgotten there could be somebody holding a cell phone and watching.”
“She didn’t forget either.”
“But for that bastard washed-out drone pilot, you would have been there. You would have kept everyone back.”
“You didn’t get her killed.” I came a breath from launching into him for pulling me from the Alagara, but decided not to. Couldn’t tell you why, maybe because it wasn’t going to get us anywhere. But neither did I want to hear him talk about himself. “How do you want to do this?” I asked.
“Check her computer and look for flash drives.”
Jane carried flash drives like some people carry gum, and there was also a pretty good chance her computer had case files. Not bringing home a case file was a regulation she had exempted herself from, another thing I liked about her.
“She used the second bedroom as an office. Her computer is in there. There might be things on it you would recognize and I wouldn’t, so start in there, Grale.”
I walked into her office, pulled her chair back, and sat at the desk. Jane and I worked together a lot. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to, but I had the four-digit security number she used on her laptop. She had mine. I typed in hers and found various work files; the most recent concerned Denny Mo
ndari, an FBI informant. Mondari, or Mondi, as Jane whimsically called him, had provided a casino-bombing extortion tip in June. I didn’t see anything new there but copied the file onto a stick. I copied others and looked up to see Venuti standing in the doorway.
“Anything?” Venuti asked.
“A few files and the hard drive will need to be wiped. It’ll have to come with us.”
We didn’t find anything else in this room or her bedroom. But just before leaving, Venuti found a red-and-black memory stick, a SanDisk Cruzer Glide USB 16G in a coat pocket in the front closet. He acted as if it were significant when he handed it to me. The gesture felt fake and theatrical. It was as clumsy as his explanation for having the elevator swipe card, and it left me uncomfortable as we drove away.
“What do you know about this memory stick?” Something hard crept into my voice as I asked.
“Only that I recognize it.”
“From where?”
“She had it with her a lot lately.”
“And you were with her a lot lately, so you saw it and knew it was important.”
“I saw her every day, same as I see you.”
“You knew to look for it in a coat in a closet in the middle of summer, but you have no idea what’s on it? What did she tell you was on it?”
“She was as bad as you about not talking until she was ready.”
“You know something more about this memory stick.”
“Watch yourself, Grale.”
“Watch myself?”
When Venuti dropped me at my car, I asked again. I held the memory stick between two fingers and said, “Are you really telling me that you have no idea what’s on this?”
“I don’t know what’s on it.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“That’s what makes you good at what you do. See you at the office.”