My conclusion? The direct force of the bomb blast had blown into the lobby from the thick reinforced concrete of the elevator shaft, which focused its explosive intensity like a lens. The bomb had not been placed in the lobby.
I remembered the cascading bricks tumbling from what appeared to be four or five stories up. The bomb had exploded about halfway up the elevator shaft of the eight-story building.
I poked my head through the opening that was created by the damaged elevator doors. One of the two elevator cars, the left one, was below me, in the building's only basement level. The other car had to be somewhere high above me, invisible in the lingering dust. I sniffed the air in the shaft, recognizing nothing but the nasty tang of hot electrical motors. The air was unusually pungent with an odor that wasn't familiar. The explosive?
I glanced down again. The elevator car that was below me sat cockeyed in its concrete channel, the top collapsed on one side, its cable curled on top of it like a sleeping snake.
I listened for motion in the shaft, but heard nothing. The elevator on the right side was still somewhere high up the concrete cavern.
I yelled down to the damaged car that was in the basement, "Lauren! Cozy!"
I didn't hear a reply.
I yelled up into the darkness.
Nothing.
Behind me someone said, "Hey!" Through the dust I could see a firefighter in full regalia. An ax in one hand, he stood silhouetted against the morning brightness on Fourteenth Street.
The firefighter would soon see what I'd just seen and he would either evacuate the building until the bomb squad checked it out, or he would participate in an immediate effort to rescue anyone caught in the car that had fallen into the basement. I didn't know which option he would choose. If Lauren and Cozy were in the fallen car, I could only pray that the firefighters would get down there as soon as they could. But if Lauren and Cozy were still in the other elevator car, the one high in the shaft, I knew that I had work to do.
I spun and pushed open the door to the stairs. Inside the stairwell, a locked door blocked my path to the basement. Another steel door led directly outside to the alley, and safety.
The firefighter called after me, "Sir? This way out! This way! We need to evacuate the building. Sir!"
Ignoring him and the pain in my butt, I took off up the stairs, taking the treads two at a time. At the landing between the first and second floors, I met two women descending furiously toward the exit. One of them carried her high heels in her right hand while her left was gripping the handrail. The two women were so focused on their retreat from danger that they paid no attention to me as I raced past them.
I passed no one else in the stairwell as I climbed. The other people working in the building must have been using good judgment and exiting the building down the south stairs, as far as possible from the site of the explosion.
At the fifth floor I ran from the stairwell to the elevator lobby. The damage to the elevator doors was much worse than I'd witnessed downstairs. They were peeled back from the center like flower petals seeking the morning sun.
A number of psychologists and social workers I knew and liked had offices down the hall on the fifth floor. I prayed none of them had been arriving at work when the bomb went off.
It took some effort to get close enough to the shaft to try to find the location of the elevator car in the right side of the concrete tower. From that vantage, I spotted the car easily. It was above me, maybe fifteen or twenty feet. I yelled, "Lauren! Cozy!" but heard no reply.
I sprinted back into the stairwell. My destination was the seventh-floor elevator lobby.
From there, it was clearly apparent that the top of the elevator car was about eight or ten feet down the shaft, somewhere between the sixth and seventh floors. A series of steel treads formed a ladder on the east side of the shaft. I stepped gingerly through the opening in the damaged doors and balanced myself on the narrow stainless-steel threshold above the shaft. Four or six inches at a time I shuffled sideways closer to the steel treads that would lead me down to the car. When I reached the far end of the threshold, with little room for error, I lurched for the closest tread and sealed my fingers around it, allowing my feet to swing down and find purchase below.
It was at that moment that I began to worry what would happen if the elevator suddenly began to rise.
I was down to the roof of the car in seconds. I paused before I left the relative safety of the ladder to check the cable for obvious signs of instability. I couldn't see any, but then, if the thick cable wasn't cut or frayed, I didn't have a clue what I was looking for, nor did I know whether the elevator was operated by counterweights or hydraulics or both.
Gingerly, I stepped to the roof of the car and made my way to the hatch that led to the inside. It took me a moment to free the latch and lift the cover.
A dim light bathed the interior of the car in a glow that reminded me of the lighting inside an aquarium at night. At first all I saw below me was a tableau composed of six legs and five shoes. I counted two wingtips, two New Balance athletic shoes, and one black Cole Haan slide.
My heart jostled my soul. The slide was Lauren's.
"Lauren," I said. "Cozy?"
The wingtips had to be Cozy's.
I lowered my head into the hatch.
Cozy was on his back, his head propped unnaturally against the wall of the car, a trail of blood running from one ear down his neck and disappearing below the collar of his perfectly starched shirt.
A woman dressed in cutoff carpenter's pants and a tight sleeveless T-shirt was resting on her side. At first I thought she was covered with blood, but I spotted a pressed cardboard tray and three toppled cups and realized she was covered with spilled coffee.
She squirmed on the floor and a brief grimace spasmed across her face. Her eyes were open and she appeared dazed.
Lauren was against a back corner in a position that approximated sitting, but her left hand and wrist were caught in the elevator's railing at an angle that was painfully unnatural.
None of the three people looked coherent. Only the other woman's eyes were open.
I didn't know what to do.
I heard a faint moan and prayed it was Lauren's.
Fighting every instinct that made me want to drop down into the car to be with my wife, I made my way back to the ladder and climbed away from her. I don't know exactly how I managed to get from the ladder to the elevator lobby. I'm pretty sure I set a world record for descending stairs before I literally ran into three firefighters near the second-floor landing.
I grabbed one of them on his arms and much too loudly, much too breathlessly, I stammered, "The east elevator-the one on the right-it's caught just below the seventh floor. There are three people in it. They're all hurt. Please help them."
CHAPTER 47
S am Purdy found me almost instantly after one of the firefighters escorted me from the building.
"You okay?"
I nodded. "I'm fine. Lauren and Cozy are hurt, Sam. They're trapped in an elevator near the seventh floor."
Sam put a hand on my shoulder and nodded. He didn't bother with platitudes. He didn't tell me that he was sure Lauren and Cozy would be fine. I barely noticed the fact that he was leading me down the sidewalk on Fourteenth toward the Mall. We stopped just beyond two parked ambulances, just outside the record store, still well within the confines of the yellow tape that had been stretched far beyond the north side of the Mall.
"Where's Marin?" I asked.
"She's still here. Couple of detectives are putting some pressure on her to find out what's coming next. We really need to know if there's a secondary in there."
"What's a secondary?"
"A second explosive device. Sometimes these assholes set off one device to draw cops and firefighters close, then they set off a second device to kill them."
I kept looking back at the lobby entrance, hoping to see Lauren emerge through the doorway. I wanted to see her walking out wit
h a firefighter at each of her elbows. I was willing to see her being wheeled out on a stretcher.
But I wanted to see her.
"It's started, Alan. The bomb here. Another one already this morning in Denver. She and Ramp have started their spree."
"What about Lucy?"
"No sign of her yet. Not a trace."
"What happened in Denver this morning?"
"It's kind of baffling. Some ride at Elitch's. Don't see how it has anything to do with the criminal justice system, unless the kid is trying to be metaphorical in some way I'm too tired to comprehend. I don't get it."
I wasn't looking for metaphor. I asked, "Somebody was hurt in the Denver explosion, weren't they?"
"It only happened half an hour ago. They've just started to sift through the mess."
Sam stepped away from me and stopped a patrol officer who was hurrying toward one of the ambulances. I stayed a step behind Sam.
He asked the officer, "What's up?"
"Hey, Detective. One of the elevators had its cable severed by the explosion. They just found a body in the car in the basement."
"Dead?"
"Yeah."
I thought about my friends on the fifth floor.
Sam asked what I was too stunned to ask. "Who is it?"
The officer said, "It's some guy named Bob. He's like the super, the maintenance guy in the building. He fell from fifty, sixty feet up, maybe more. Apparently everybody knows him."
"I don't," I said.
Sam's phone tweeted in his pocket. He pulled it out, hit a button with his fat thumb, and said, "Purdy."
A few seconds later he turned his head away from me and said, "Yeah, of course. What's up, Walter?"
I waited until Sam shut off the call before I asked, "What did Walter have to say?"
He flashed a how-the-hell-do-you-know-about-Walter look until he recalled our conversation wandering the aisles of the grocery store. He said, "The Denver Police just found an apparent explosive device in the center of the stage at Red Rocks. Bomb squad is responding."
I was focusing most of my attention on the lobby entrance to the Colorado Building, waiting for Lauren and Cozy to emerge. What could be taking the rescuers so long? Sam's words registered on the boundaries of my awareness. I said, "What?"
"There's a bomb, or something that looks like a bomb, right in the center of the stage at Red Rocks."
"The amphitheater?" Red Rocks was Denver's world-famous outdoor concert venue. It was set in a gorgeous sandstone bowl in the foothills west of the city. Although totally surrounded by Jefferson County, Red Rocks was technically a Denver city park facility.
"Yeah. The bomb squad's on the way to evaluate it. It doesn't look good; they want to X-ray it."
"Is there a concert or something up there?" I asked.
"On a weekday morning at this hour? Hardly."
A yellow-suited firefighter emerged from the front of the Colorado Building, waving one arm back and forth across his chest to clear a wide path from the lobby to the ambulances waiting nearby. I started toward the doorway as though I were on a moving sidewalk.
The end of a stretcher broke the plane at the front of the building. Thick rubber wheels. Tubular aluminum frame.
I saw sneakers. The woman who had been carrying the coffee.
An eternity passed before a second stretcher breached the doorway.
Wingtips the size of dinghies.
Even from thirty feet away, I could almost count the little holes in the leather.
Cozy.
Sam's fingers curled over my left shoulder. He was providing comfort. He was also preparing to keep me from rushing the door.
A third stretcher began to emerge from the door as though the building were giving birth to it.
Triplets.
I held my breath and waited to see one black Cole Haan slide and one elegant, very pretty, bare foot. Lauren's toenails were painted. I tried to recall what color she'd used. I couldn't.
The stretcher came out the door empty.
A sound emerged from somewhere deep in my tissues. Somewhere that knows no sound. It was part groan, part yelp, part plea.
Sam's fingers tightened on my shoulder. He said, "Wait."
It was an order.
I didn't know it at the time, but Sam's eyes were flitting between the doorway and Scott Truscott, the Boulder County coroner's assistant. Scott's vehicle was across the street and Scott was waiting to be invited inside the building to assess the casualties whose injuries were so monumental that they didn't require an ambulance ride to anywhere.
"Where is she?" I said to God.
Another stretcher began to come into view.
I saw black hair and I started to cry.
CHAPTER 48
T he long trip from Denver's Platte Valley to the foothills near Morrison perplexed Lucy. She was able to track the journey from her cramped lair on the floor of the welding supply truck by reading the overhead highway signs on the Sixth Avenue Freeway.
When Ramp stopped the truck, he didn't bother to restrain her further. He told her he wouldn't be gone long and that she shouldn't move. She could feel the truck shudder as he did something in the back. The movement stopped; she guessed that Ramp had moved away.
She considered her options. Despite the restraints on her wrists and ankles, she thought that she could manage to get the truck door open, tumble outside, and try to hop away. It was possible that Ramp had parked the truck in a location that would allow a passerby to see her and come to her rescue. Possible, but not likely.
Not at that hour.
She raised herself up from the floor and, bracing her bound wrists on the seat, lifted herself up high enough to look out the back window of the truck. Eight or ten tall green oxygen tanks almost completely blocked her view. She looked out to the side and was thrilled that what she was seeing was slightly familiar.
She couldn't quite place it. The huge rocks. The dust. The flat-roofed building. Wait, wait, wait. Could this be Red Rocks?
"I told you not to move."
Ramp's voice was admonishing but not angry, the kind of tone someone might use to correct a curious puppy.
"Get back down. We're leaving."
Lucy thought, No explosion? She fell heavily to the floor of the cab.
As though he'd read her mind, he said, "This one's different from all of the others."
The highway signs told her they were going back into Denver. The noise told her that traffic was starting to accumulate. Ramp played a Dave Matthews CD, not the news, and didn't seem at all concerned about his rearview mirrors.
The light to the east told her it was dawn.
T he next place that the truck stopped was somewhere near Sixth and Santa Fe, and Lucy's promise to stay down-the alternative was having her wrists duct-taped to the center console-earned her coffee and an egg-and-chorizo burrito. She wasn't hungry but she forced herself to eat a few bites.
While the gag was still off her mouth, she asked him, "What exactly are you doing?"
"Making this memorable. I want people to talk, remember?"
"Dialogue."
"That's right."
"So you're going to blow up Red Rocks?"
He smiled at her. "That would piss people off, wouldn't it?" She couldn't read his eyes.
He replaced the gag, pausing when he was done to caress the soft skin below her temple. "Don't worry, I don't have enough explosives to blow up Red Rocks. Anyway, I like Red Rocks."
S anta Fe all the way to Speer, Speer north toward I-25. As soon as they were on the freeway, southbound Lucy thought, they exited again. She wished she knew Denver's geography better. She thought that they must have been somewhere near the Children's Museum.
Only thirty seconds or so after they turned off the freeway, they turned again. Soon the truck came to a stop.
Ramp put the truck in park and killed the engine. He said, "I like this view. You want to see it?"
She nodded. He leaned over and helped he
r pull herself up onto the passenger seat.
She looked out the windshield. Ramp had parked in one of the big lots flanking the banks of the South Platte River just east of Denver's new aquarium, Colorado's Ocean Journey. On the river, a couple of hardy early-season kayakers were slicing across the abbreviated rapids at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek. On the other side of the river was Six Flags Elitch Gardens, and beyond it, the downtown skyline.
Ramp lifted some binoculars from the floor in front of his seat and raised them to his eyes. To Lucy, it appeared he was examining something in the sky that was just above the jagged profile of the amusement park. In the early-morning light the park looked forlorn and insincere, the way a saloon looks afterhours when the cleaning floods are on bright.
He sighed. "There he is. Right on time. My grandfather loved punctuality more than he loved almost anything in the world other than me and my grandma. He would have loved this guy; he's always on time."
"What guy?" Lucy mumbled into the cotton sock. Lucy thought he was pointing at the Ferris wheel.
Again Ramp reached down to the floor in front of his seat. He raised a complicated black plastic device and extended an antenna from the top. Without looking toward Lucy, he said, "It's for model airplanes. Good range."
He placed the transmitter on his lap and raised the binoculars to his eyes. He held them in place while he studied a narrow slice of the Colorado sky. When he lowered the glasses, he said, "He's getting pretty high up there. It'll be just a couple more minutes."
She wanted to ask, Till what? but didn't bother. She knew. Or at least she thought she knew.
He mused, "You know how easy it was to get what I needed for all this? Anything I can't get at Toys 'R' Us, I can get at Radio Shack. Except for the explosives, of course. For that, you need a relative in the demolitions business."
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