by John Lutz
They were at the front counter trying on shoes, sniffing them first and making wry faces at each other, when Harper approached.
Courtney spotted him first. The country sunshine agreed with her. The blond hair seemed a shade more golden and there was a light dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She smiled. “Hi, Will! How’re you doing?”
The others nodded and smiled. Naomi gave him a sharp, surprised look but said nothing. After returning the greetings of the others, Harper stepped closer to her and said quietly, “Are you going to have the cops run me out of town?”
“Why would I do that? It’s a free country.” She sat on a ledge and began to put on her bowling shoes. “As long as you stay away from Speed, you’re welcome to spend as much time as you want in Elmhart. How do you like it so far?”
Harper sat down beside her. “It’s true what the Democrats say; Speed is prone to exaggerate. He exaggerated about Elmhart, for instance.”
She gave him a look, but said nothing.
“This afternoon he said the town was so small the sheriff knew everyone by sight. That can’t be true. It’s a pretty fair sized town. And it’s the county seat, so you’ve got a steady stream of visitors moving through. You’ve got the airport a few miles north, and the Interstate a few miles south.”
“So?”
“So it’s not as isolated as it looks. The bomber probably feels quite comfortable operating here.”
“You make the same mistake as the Democrats, when they say that Speed exaggerates. He exaggerates only to make a valid point, and the point is that he’s perfectly safe.”
The other staffers had gotten themselves shod now. They were moving off toward the lanes. Courtney said, “You come too, Will. Show us how it’s done.” She gave him a brilliant smile before turning to run after the others.
Harper said to Naomi, “Does the staff stay at the house?”
She shook her head. “Speed puts us up at the Holiday Inn. The kids love it. They can lie around their rooms watching C-Span and they only have to take a few steps to jump in the pool.”
Harper nodded. “So the only time you’re all together—I mean Rogers and the staff—is when he’s doing the show?”
“Oh, there are occasional meetings or parties, but basically that’s true.” She peered at him suspiciously through her tiny glasses. “What are you getting at?”
“I think that’s when the bomber’s going to make his move. During the show.”
She shook her head. “Security’s as good at the studio as it is at Speed’s home.”
“You go on the air tomorrow?”
“Yes. Eleven A.M. Noon eastern time, as usual.” Naomi paused for a moment. “So you think this bomber of yours is going to try to blow the rest of us up along with Speed?”
Harper nodded. “That would fit his pattern. He doesn’t just hate celebrities; killing them isn’t enough for him. He wants to kill the people who make them celebrities. That’s why when he killed Sothern the tennis player, he tried to kill his fans along with him. When he killed Congresswoman Wylie, he got her surrounded by her aides and the lobbyists who were paying her way. And he saw to it that Buckner’s bodyguards died with him. In this instance, you’re the ones who come up with Rogers’s bright ideas. You’re responsible for his success and fame. The bomber knows that. So you have to go with him.”
Naomi didn’t reply. They sat in silence for a few moments, watching the staffers. Some of them had already lost interest in the game and were reading magazines and newspapers. A couple were playing with the computerized scoreboard. Stuart was sitting at the back, wheezing into his handkerchief. His hay fever was no better, apparently. But Howard, in a lime-green shirt that clashed violently with the Tahitian mural above him, was getting ready to bowl. He took three gliding steps and went down on one knee to launch the ball. This time his glasses slipped all the way off his nose. They clattered to the polished wood. The ball almost rolled over them. His colleagues applauded appreciatively.
“They’re having a great time, aren’t they?” Harper said. “They come up with these outrageous ideas for Rogers, and he delivers them on the air, and thousands of people call in. They’re as happy as little kids who can do tricks and get the attention of the whole room. Except they get the attention of the whole country. They’re having so much fun it doesn’t seem quite real to them. But it’s real to the bomber.”
Howard’s place had been taken by Courtney. She hurled the ball and stood watching it tensely, trying to guide it with wiggles of her shoulders and hips.
Naomi looked away from her. Lowering her bead, she said, “What do you want me to do, Harper?”
“Let me do a walk-through. That’s all I ask. Just let me go around the building with one of your security people, right before the show.”
Naomi took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Harper watched her anxiously for a long moment. She shook her head.
“Our security people don’t need you, Harper. Tell you what I will do. I’ll tell them we have reason to fear a bomb, and they’ll come in with their equipment. You should see all the stuff they have. If there is a bomb, they’ll find it. Now, will that satisfy you?”
He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I suppose it’ll have to.”
“You’re right about that.” She got up and walked away from him, toward the lanes.
As Harper got up to leave, one staffer—a muscular black man—was lifting a bowling ball one-handed as if it weighed no more than a basketball, and pretending he was going to toss it to Naomi. The others were laughing and egging him on.
Naomi didn’t seem to get the joke.
Markman sat at the desk in his motel room. The motel was located on the Interstate, a few miles out of Elmhart. The ceaseless rush of traffic could be heard in the room, as well as the tinny babble from a television set next door. But Markman gave no sign of hearing. His high forehead deeply furrowed, he was concentrating on his task.
A small box of some light wood lay on the desk in front of him. A lot of work had gone into it already: The smoothness of the corners would have called for careful dovetailing and hours of sanding. Now Markman was painting it. He laid on a coat of medium-blue, so fastidiously that not a brushstroke showed. But evidently the result did not satisfy him. He picked up a piece of stiff, heavy cloth and compared the shade of blue to the one on the box. Then he mixed some gray paint in with the blue, and put another coat on the box. Comparing the box to the swatch of fabric, he found that the shade was now an exact match. He did not smile or give any sign of satisfaction, merely put the tops back on the cans of paint.
Getting up from the desk, he stretched and yawned. The yawn was as noiseless as a cat’s. Then he began to tidy up.
The box was left to dry on a sheet of newspaper, but everything else got put away. His large toolbox with its many shelves and compartments was packed up and placed near the door. The shoebox containing the toy car and the remote control went into a suitcase, along with the cheap metal tackle box in which Markman kept his plastic explosive. The paints and brushes he took out to the motel Dumpster. By the time he was finished, the room was neat. Impeccable, in fact. At a moment’s notice he could pick up his luggage by the door and walk out, leaving no trace of himself behind.
There was one exception, though—one possession with which he had furnished the impersonal room. It was a color photograph, small but rather expensively framed, which stood on the night table between the telephone and the Gideon Bible.
The photograph was of a woman in her early thirties. The car she was getting out of, and the cut of her elegant black tailor-made suit, suggested that the picture had been taken around 1970. The woman had short blond hair and a lovely, vivacious face. She was smiling up at whoever was holding the car door for her. One high-heeled foot was just touching the curb. Her dress had ridden up above the knee, revealing a long, shapely leg.
Markman didn’t glance at the photograph as he moved around the room, tidying up. As he sat down on th
e bed he almost seemed to be avoiding the blond woman’s smiling gaze. He reached in his pocket and carefully unfolded a piece of paper on his lap.
It was his calendar. He drew one of his neat X’s across today’s date, April 21. The next space was colored in solid red.
Tomorrow was the day.
17
The Old Courthouse had long been the most imposing building in Elmhart. But it had been closed five years before, when the new Government Center opened on Route 17, outside of town. A Wal-Mart also opened on Route 17, and swiftly drove the old downtown stores out of business. Courthouse Square, the center of Elmhart, was in a bad way.
But the Old Courthouse meant a great deal to Speed Rogers. Generations of Rogers men had transacted business and argued cases there. One had even sat as a judge. So when he announced that he was bringing his phenomenally popular radio show back to his hometown, he also announced that he was buying and restoring the courthouse to make it his headquarters.
All this had been told to Harper by various grateful or envious townspeople. There was no question that Rogers had spent freely to restore the building to its former splendor. Harper had had plenty of time to study it. He’d been sitting in his car parked in Courthouse Square since dawn, and it was now quarter to eleven. The Speed Rogers Show was about to go on the air.
The courthouse took up half the block and rose six stories. Even today it dominated the town, and its ornate cupolas could be seen across the fields from a long way off. It had been built in the 1880s, when the Romanesque style was popular, and public buildings were made to look as if they could stand up to a long siege. Its walls consisted of massive rough-hewn stones. The figure of Justice, with her scales and sword, loomed over the main doorway.
Rogers’s broadcast studio was somewhere in the building. A large disk on the roof, hidden from view by the cupolas, sent the signal to an orbiting satellite, which bounced it back to the hundreds of stations across the country on which it was heard. The offices of his merchandising, investing, and other operations took up most of the rest of the building. Some space was empty, but Rogers was in no hurry to rent it. He hardly needed the money.
Harper had come to see if Naomi would do as she’d promised and order a security sweep of the building. And she was as good as her word. The vans arrived at seven. The name on the doors of the vehicles was one he recognized as that of a top-flight private security firm.
He watched uniformed people unload metal detectors, spectrometers, fluoroscopes, and other high-tech equipment, some of it so new as to be unfamiliar to Harper. As the security people lugged their gear up the steps, another van pulled up. The back doors opened and two German shepherds leaped out, so eager they practically dragged their handlers up the steps.
Harper waited tensely across the street.
An hour and a half later, the doors opened and men, women, and dogs trooped down the steps and back to their vehicles. They looked bored. Even the dogs’ tails were drooping. No bomb had been found.
There was no reason for Harper to stay any longer, but somehow he didn’t feel like leaving. He got a cup of coffee from the McDonald’s around the corner and returned to his car, where he sat and watched the building.
Nothing happened until nine, when a small caravan of vans and station wagons rolled up. Naomi and the rest of the staffers got out and went in the building. A few minutes later, a black limousine stopped at the foot of the steps. A uniformed bodyguard got out first and scanned the street. The man was probably looking for Harper. Harper remembered Naomi’s warning that he wasn’t to come near her boss. Rogers came into view, gingerly easing his bulk out of the car. The two men climbed the stairs and disappeared into the building.
Harper continued to sit in the parked car, watching people come and go, debating with himself.
He felt very tired. He’d slept badly, tormented by dreams of the blast in which he’d been maimed. It was more vivid in his dreams than in his waking memories: the roaring in his ears, the eerie sensation of whirling through the air as if he were a leaf caught in the wind; then lying there stunned, looking up at the streaks and splatters of his blood on the wall.
He’d given up on sleep at four in the morning. He wanted to call Laura, but what right did he have to ask her for comfort? She’d known somehow where his path was going to lead and warned him against taking the first step on it. He hadn’t believed her.
And now here he was.
Rogers’s security people weren’t good enough to stop the bomber. Harper felt certain of that. But what made him think he was good enough? All his training and experience had been in dismantling bombs. He didn’t know how to find a bomb that was still lying hidden.
But that was what he was going to have to do. There was no other choice.
He got out of the car, stretched his stiff back, and crossed the sunny, quiet street. It was possible the bomber would try a terrorist-style attack, using a crude but powerful bomb concealed in a vehicle to try to bring down most of the building. But considering the structural integrity of the building, such a bomb would take up a lot of space. The explosive would have to be packed into several large metal drums and to transport them the bomber would have to use a truck or at least a closed van. The cars parked in front of the courthouse were ordinary passenger cars, or pickups with open beds. Harper wasn’t surprised. Such a crude method of destruction wasn’t the bomber’s style.
He turned and walked along the front of the building. There were no openings at street level, only massive rough-cut stone blocks. The first row of windows was a good ten feet above the sidewalk. Squinting, he could see the thin silver wires of the alarm system running through the glass.
He came to the end of the building, where there was a narrow, dim alley. It was a good place to make an unseen entry, Harper thought, and turned in.
Rogers’s security experts must have thought so too, because the windows along the alley wall were covered with iron gratings. Harper walked deeper into the alley. Now that he was out of the sun, the sweat felt cool on his brow. He came to a narrow doorway set in the side of the building. It was solid wood. He reached for the knob to make sure that the door was locked.
The knob was yanked from his hand as the door swung open. Harper’s heart lurched. He stumbled forward but recovered quickly.
Squinting into the bright light from the interior of the building, he saw Naomi Glidden. She smiled wearily at him.
“Okay, Harper. Enough already.”
Harper turned and looked up. Now he could see the small television camera, trained on the door from a high ledge. He said, “How long have you been watching me?”
“Since you parked across the street. I’ve been getting full reports. You should have more than coffee for breakfast, Harper. It’s the most important meal of the day.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve been patient with you. But the show goes on the air in three minutes, and I don’t want any distractions. So you’re leaving.”
She made a gesture and two fit-looking guards appeared in the doorway beside her. They were smiling, but Harper didn’t think it was friendliness. They were looking forward to frog-marching him to his car.
Naomi stepped aside and the guards moved into position, flanking Harper. He said quickly, “The sweep didn’t find anything suspicious? Anything at all?”
“Relax. The building’s clean, Harper.”
“It was clean three hours ago. But what about now?”
“We have a show to do. Good-bye.”
Harper felt the guards’ hands clamp down on both his arms. He said, “The bomber could’ve gotten in after the sweep.”
“There have been no unauthorized entries to the building. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”
The guards were pulling Harper back. Naomi was closing the door. Taking advantage of the light from inside the building while he still had it, Harper glanced quickly around the alley.
It was only five paces away—a hatch with an iron cover, low down on the wall of the building
. He shouted, “Naomi, wait!”
She swung the door back open. “Now what?”
Harper couldn’t point. The guards were still clutching his arms hard enough to cut off the blood flow. He nodded his head toward the hatch. “What about that?”
She looked at it and back at Harper. “So? It’s an old coal chute.”
“It’s big enough for a man to slide through. Have you got it wired into the alarm system?”
Naomi’s eyelids still looked heavy with boredom. She glanced from one guard to the other. The larger of the two spoke up in a rich Kentucky accent. “I kinda doubt it’s wired, ma’am. Wouldn’t be no point. They stopped burning coal thirty, forty years ago. That door’s welded shut.”
“Try it,” Harper said.
He was looking Naomi straight in the eye. She hesitated, glancing at her watch. Then she stepped out into the alley, walked over to the hatch, bent down to grasp the iron handle in her slim pale hand, and pulled.
The door swung smoothly open.
18
Letting go of the handle, Naomi jumped away from the coal chute door. She looked at Harper wide-eyed.
“Not welded shut,” he said. “Only painted shut. The bomber finds out things like that. He was probably here weeks ago. Even months ago. Pried the door open with a crowbar. Straightened out the bend. Painted over the chips. Then left it, knowing he’d be able to get in the building when he wanted to. Which was probably this morning.”
Naomi pointed at the chute and said to the guards, “Get in there.” Then she turned to Harper. “Come with me. We’re going to the security desk.”
The guards were hesitating, looking at each other. Naomi swung round on them. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, get in there.”
“Shoot, ma’am,” said the Kentuckian. “That’s like sticking your arm down a snake hole.”
“You’ve got guns, don’t you? So get in there.” She strode rapidly toward the street. Harper rushed to catch up with her. As he was about to go around the building, he looked back. The Kentuckian was standing with his gun drawn. The other guard was wriggling headfirst down the hatch.