The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Can you render aid?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Theresa repeated, knowing as she said it that the dispatcher would not accept that from anyone except professional EMS, especially not when it was a cop, so she didn’t bother pointing out that Davis’ brains were now coating the driveway. She also didn’t confess that she’d never felt more reluctance to touch a dead body in her life, probably because up until now she’d never been chatting with one just a few minutes before he became one.

  ‘Can you get him on his back? We’re going to need to try CPR.’

  ‘Sure,’ Theresa said. ‘OK.’ At least he was already on his back. She couldn’t help but fret about moving the body before photographing it; the policy had become that ingrained.

  The dispatcher had a question first. ‘Are you in a safe location?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is the shooter still there? Who shot him?’

  Theresa did a hasty three-sixty, scanning the area for movement, a flash of color, a madman with a smoking gun aimed at her, but the trees were alone and the only sound came from a now-relaxed chickadee. The lake breeze ruffled her hair.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said into the phone.

  FOUR

  Leo, her boss, showed remarkable compassion when she returned to the office, which meant he gave her a cup of coffee before starting in with the questions. ‘You didn’t see anyone?’

  ‘Peaceful as a cemetery, and just as tidy.’ She took another sip to lubricate the lump in her throat. It had begun to rain again and the dampness settled into her bones, only aggravating the leftover aches and pains from the explosion.

  A frown had long since become permanently etched into the skin over her boss’s bushy eyebrows, and he had clothed his skinny frame with ill-fitting pants and a long-sleeved shirt in unfashionable plaid. With a tie. ‘And no casings, no tire tracks?’

  ‘No casings, concrete clean and dry.’

  ‘Any reporters there?’

  ‘Channel 15 showed up just as we drove away. Everyone else is still at the Bingham, I’m sure.’

  ‘Did the officer fire?’

  ‘He hadn’t even unsnapped the holster strap.’ The twenty-three-year veteran had not been concerned. The assailant had either caught Officer Davis completely by surprise – difficult to do in the middle of a driveway with yards of visibility all the way round – or had appeared utterly unthreatening.

  ‘What did you collect at the scene?’

  Only Leo would leave unconsidered that perhaps she might not have felt up to working the scene. They spent every day hip-deep in dead bodies and had no reason to be freaked out by one. But she knew about and prepared for the dead people she encountered in her job. Stumbling on a body without expecting to, especially one she had met, spoken with … that turned out to be another category of experience altogether.

  Of course, she had worked the scene.

  ‘Only what I found right around the body – a hair that looks like mine, a cigarette butt that’s probably been there since last summer, a piece of foam or lint or something, and a few pieces of dirty plastic. I processed his car, got some prints. I swabbed a sample of the blood from the driveway, even though it’s obviously his. Officers searched the rest of the driveway and the lawn and into the trees, but didn’t find anything worth collecting. I had no indication that he, the cop, had walked any distance – no shoe prints, no crushed grass in the yard or path through the trees.’

  ‘Weird,’ Leo summed.

  She leaned one elbow on her desk. Blue-covered lab reports swam up against a photo of Rachael’s high school graduation and a framed cross-stitch reading Non illegitimi carborundum est. (Don’t let the bastards grind you down.) ‘That’s one word for it.’

  ‘What if he came from the house?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The killer. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear a car.’

  She thought she’d finished freaking over the incident, but the idea of some malevolent being moving silently through the house she’d been in prompted a few last shudders.

  Leo indulged the theory for a moment. ‘The family has a lunatic son they keep hidden in the basement, and the father can’t take it any more. He swallows all his pills, distressing the son, who sees a stranger in the driveway and decides to defend the household.’

  ‘And overlooks me, though I’m actually inside.’ Theresa swallowed hard, and felt stupid for doing so. ‘Besides, they cleared the house.’

  ‘Yeah, it was just a thought. Probably some scumbag this cop put away, who just got out.’ Leo dismissed it, moved on. ‘I drove by to get a look at the Bingham, but it’s still a pile of rock. It will take the Feds another day or two before they get close to uncovering what’s left of our stuff.’

  At least Leo had abandoned the idea of having her and Don camp out as a twenty-four-hour guard for the evidence stored in the lower levels of the building. Technically, the chain of custody had been broken for every bit of it, since the location could no longer be considered secure – as if an intrepid criminal could get underneath the crushing layers, first to find and then to tamper with the evidence relevant to his or her case. But Leo wasn’t exaggerating their concern. In any older case that came to trial the defense attorney would waste no time in pointing out, accurately, that a building had fallen on the clothing, slides and items of evidence stored there, and if that could not be defined as contamination, what could?

  The thought made her heart sink, and she thought she saw a tear glisten in Leo’s eyes. The loss was personal to him, she knew. Unmarried, childless, and without any hint of a family, a hobby or a social life, the M.E.’s lab defined his existence. Just because this consuming devotion failed to translate into some kind of a work ethic did not lessen its sincerity.

  Then he shrugged and suggested she carry on. ‘Any minute now the samples from the Bingham building bodies are going to be coming up here, so clear your desk.’

  ‘How’s Christine doing with strangers in her autopsy room?’

  Leo chuckled, always vocal in his belief that the assertive doctor was too smart for her own good. ‘Not happy at all. But apparently one of them is both unmarried and good-looking, so she decided to cooperate. Work. Now.’

  Theresa swallowed the last of her coffee; it had not warmed her. She put on her windbreaker, noted the tears and blood, and took it off again. In the process she discovered the rock she’d put in its pocket the previous day, and walked across the hall to the Toxicology department, heading for the cluttered desk in the rear.

  If Oliver, rotund and ponytailed, had heard of her recent misadventure he gave no sign of it. The boundaries of his fortress had been composed using tanks of compressed gas, a cluttered desk and the mass spectrometer, and visitors were not welcome. So Theresa stood respectfully at its entrance and waited for acknowledgement from the pasty white behemoth.

  Oliver ignored her, typing the narcotic levels of victims’ bodily fluids into a report.

  She held out her scratched and torn fingers with her version of the Trojan horse. ‘I found this at the building site yesterday.’

  ‘You mean the exploded building? The one that’s now lying on the ground, the one that pulverized all our archives? That building?’ Oliver spoke without turning from his desk.

  ‘Yes, the Bingham. I noticed this weird smell—’

  ‘A building that old is probably composed of little else but weird smells.’

  ‘—almost like a cleaner, or disinfectant or something. Then I stumbled – literally – on to this little stone and it seems to smell the same way. I wondered if you could tell me what it is,’ she finished, abject humility being the only way to Oliver’s center.

  He sighed with great forbearance and put down his pen. His chair squeaked as it swiveled. ‘Terrific. If you’re not bringing me something that stains, it’s something that stinks.’ He leaned forward and examined her hand, gave it a tentative sniff, then suddenly jumped back nearly on to his desk, crushing the keyboard under his mas
sive buttocks and scattering his swivel chair. ‘Shit!’

  Then she saw something in Oliver she would never have expected to see.

  Fear.

  Her hand, still holding out the crystal, began to tremble.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Oliver ordered as soon as he caught his breath. ‘And don’t sweat.’ He rummaged through a drawer before coming up with a small metal tray, which he cleaned with an alcohol wipe. All the while she stood frozen in place like Lot’s wife. Don’t sweat?

  ‘Now listen to me very carefully, Theresa. I am going to set this tray on my counter, like this. I want you to pick up that crystal with the fingers of your free hand and set it on this tray. Do not drop it even a fraction of an inch. Do not shove it into the metal. Don’t squeeze it hard. Just place it there as gently as you possibly can.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘You don’t want to know about or right now.’

  She then violated the sweating ban. She used the fingers of her left hand to pluck the small stone from the palm of her right, and took two cautious steps to the workbench. Then she placed the stone on the tray, as carefully as instructed.

  Oliver heaved a sigh of relief as she stepped away. She sighed as well, without even knowing why, and demanded, ‘What is that?’

  The toxicologist ignored her, picked up the phone and dialed a number. He told whoever answered: ‘I need your bomb squad.’

  ‘Oliver! What is that?’

  He covered the phone with his fingers. ‘That, my dear, is either nitrogen or ammonium triiodide. It probably blew up your building.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Explodes when it decomposes, as when it’s shaken, crushed or comes into contact with water. Where exactly did you find it, and what on earth possessed you to touch it? Did you sleep through your chemistry classes?’

  ‘But I’ve been carrying it around in my coat pocket since yesterday!’

  ‘I’m still on hold, do you believe it?’ he complained with a tinge of hysteria in his voice. ‘I’m glad this is merely a deadly explosive and not a real emergency. You’ve been walking around with this in your pocket?’

  He made her feel as if she’d been strolling down dark alleys, trailing hundred-dollar bills. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then be glad you continually disappoint the male sex by not wearing tighter clothing, or you would probably have blown off one or both of your legs. Hello, I have to report an explosive. Who am I speaking to? Sir, do you have at least a working knowledge of chemical compounds?’

  ‘Oliver—’

  She had to wait until he finished explaining the situation to the bomb experts at the police department. To her horror they agreed completely with his assessment, so that then she had to wait further, until the building had been evacuated and all her co-workers were standing outside under a gray sky. Most fretted about the work they had had to abandon, while some, especially the smokers, greeted the interruption as an unplanned break and used it as such.

  The Medical Examiner, Elliot Stone, did not find it a lark. He stalked up to Theresa in a swirl of expensive, weatherproofed khaki. ‘Do I have you to thank for this?’

  Theresa, still trying not to picture losing a leg, stammered. ‘No—’

  ‘Yes,’ Oliver said.

  ‘It was evidence,’ she added.

  Leo intervened. ‘It’s not our fault your tubby toxicologist overreacts at every opportunity.’

  ‘You ask those guys in the full body armor if I overreacted!’ Oliver shouted.

  The M.E. moved away to do just that.

  Leo went on, nearly nose to nose with Oliver and clearly unimpressed with both the toxicologist’s assessment of the situation and the extra two hundred pounds the man had on him. ‘Just so I have this straight – you called out the marines over a little rock that she’s been carrying around in the pocket of her windbreaker?’

  ‘It’s nitrogen triiodide. I don’t expect you to understand what that means.’

  ‘It’s made by soaking iodine crystals in pure ammonia and filtering until they’ll explode at the slightest amount of heat, pressure or shock. It’s a high school prank, something for nerds to cook up in second period. You honestly think they took the Bingham building out with nitrogen triiodide? No one could have enough of the stuff in one place without—’

  ‘Without blowing themselves off the map,’ Oliver finished. ‘Which is exactly what they did.’

  ‘They couldn’t have accumulated enough to take out a building,’ Leo repeated.

  ‘Maybe it was only the detonator, used to set off another explosive,’ Theresa thought aloud, though both men ignored her, as usual. Dark shapes appeared in the third-floor windows, the bomb squad invading Oliver’s assigned territory. They moved promptly until they reached his counter, then stopped, obviously regarding the silver tray and its burden. Had Oliver been wrong?

  Oliver said: ‘It must have impurities. That’s why it didn’t blow up little missy, here. They used household ammonia instead of reagent grade.’

  ‘Then how could it be powerful enough to destroy the Bingham?’

  The heavily armored men on the third floor still hadn’t moved, or were moving very slowly. She took this to mean that Oliver had not been wrong.

  He said, ‘Not having been to terrorism school, I haven’t learned all their tricks, one of which is obviously stabilizing nitrogen triiodide.’

  ‘There’s about a million more convenient explosives to use,’ Leo insisted.

  ‘More convenient, perhaps, but not easier to make. It’s got two ingredients, iodine and ammonia.’ Oliver’s voice dropped, and he began to look thoughtful.

  The bomb squad guys moved away from the window – very, very slowly, prompting Theresa to picture herself losing both legs. ‘But if it’s so stabilized, then why did it explode downtown?’

  Leo had begun to look thoughtful as well. ‘It depends on how it’s stabilized. It might just take more to detonate it, but once it does—’

  ‘Boom,’ Theresa finished.

  They watched the armored men come out of the building, towing a small but apparently very heavy square box. They parked it on the loading dock where their vehicle could back up and use a built-in forklift to take the box into its interior. Slowly. The M.E. office personnel scattered, giving the whole operation a wide berth.

  ‘It can’t be done.’ Leo decided, refuting the theory with all the fervency of a man whistling in a graveyard. Bad enough to lose the Bingham building, but a threat to his lab, his fiefdom, could not be imagined without abject horror. ‘There’s nothing to the stuff but iodine and ammonia.’

  ‘Nothing else could bond to it,’ Oliver admitted, ‘without changing the compound—’

  ‘And then it wouldn’t be explosive.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Couldn’t be done.’

  Theresa said, ‘Do we care? Something blew up the Bingham building. Whether it was this or something else, what difference does it make, unless it can tell us who did it, why and what they’re planning to do next?’

  Oliver and Leo glanced at her, then back at the armored vehicle, now closing its doors. Slowly.

  ‘It only has two ingredients,’ Oliver said for the third time.

  ‘Which can be more or less easily obtained,’ Leo added. ‘From any chemical supply company, even a school lab—’

  ‘It’s not like plutonium or something. Then, they only need to be mixed, and passed through any all-purpose filter paper. You wind up with an explosive that can be carted around or used without any special equipment. Other than a death wish, I mean.’

  ‘Just one problem,’ Leo said. ‘It’s not possible.’

  Oliver ignored him. ‘Nor will it show up on a metal detector.’

  Theresa said, ‘But wouldn’t airport “sniffers” pick up the nitrogen?’ Sniffers looked for residues from explosive compounds on people and luggage, and most such residues were nitrogen based.

  ‘Nitrogen compounds. Nitrogen triiodide decomposes into nitrogen gas,
which is already present in the air.’

  Leo apparently thought, considered and rejected. ‘It’s impossible. It might be a similar compound, I don’t know, probably detonated with an electrical charge.’

  All three fell silent as the bomb squad vehicle left the parking lot and the bomb squad. An errant beam of sunshine lit the area and warmed the bomb squad members until they pulled off helmets and gloves and guards. The sudden brightness didn’t cheer anyone, however, and the M.E. staff waited in a somber silence to see what would happen next.

  The bomb squad commander said something to the M.E., and Theresa pressed forward to listen in.

  ‘So it is an explosive?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. If your chemist decided to start his analysis by chipping off a piece, well, it might not take out the wall but it would have broken a window or two, and put a hole in your counter. And killed him.’

  Theresa shuddered, long and hard. Behind her, Leo harrumphed.

  ‘Having the compressed gas tanks right next to it might not have turned out so cool either.’

  ‘It’s nitrogen triiodide?’ she asked.

  He had black skin and caramel eyes and seemed rather young for a commander. ‘We’ll test it to make sure, but it looks and smells like it. I haven’t seen it for about ten years, not since some kid at West Tech made a mess of his chemistry lab. You see similar compounds in meth labs, but crystals like that are, well, rare.’

  ‘Is it the same stuff as what blew up the Bingham building?’

  ‘Ye—’ he began to say, and then stopped himself with a wry frown. ‘I don’t know. There’s no official report out yet. You’ll have to ask Homeland freakin’ Security.’

  ‘But you’ve heard rumors?’ she guessed.

  Again, the frown. ‘There’s always rumors.’

  ‘Were they really after the Lambert place?’ Oliver asked, letting his supercilious persona slip for one unguarded moment to admit there was something he didn’t know. ‘The Channel 15 anchor seems to think they were.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he’d know,’ the commander said, with wry and admirable restraint. Then focused on Theresa. ‘That’s the only amount brought back from the site, isn’t it? There isn’t any more on the premises?’