After spending two years in prison, Louie Denbo had been stabbed to death by a fellow inmate. The prison authorities never found the man responsible.
“Anyway,” Bruno said, “I just thought you should know. We warned him. And he got his, the stupid prick.”
And now, for the first time, Justin realized what had happened. He knew what Bruno was telling him. It wasn’t an accident—or even a prison brawl—that caused Denbo’s death. It was a hired hit. Retaliation for crossing the line and disobeying orders.
Justin was surprised that this news didn’t change anything inside him. There was no sudden gratification or sense of closure. The man who’d ruined his life was dead, had been for several years. It didn’t matter to Justin how he’d died or who’d killed him. It didn’t bring back the people he’d killed. So he just nodded at Bruno, acknowledging the info, and took another sip of the superb red wine.
The food came and they shifted the talk to more normal topics: cop and killer talking about movies and music—Bruno enthused about the new Roman Polanski movie and the live bootleg Phish CD of their farewell concert; he was a major Phish fan and until they’d broken up he’d followed their concert schedule whenever possible—and sports and politics. Eventually, the conversation got around to the bombing of Harper’s.
“I saw the guy, you know,” Bruno said, polishing off the last of his side of broccoli rabe.
“What guy?”
“The bomber. The guy with the briefcase.”
“What do you mean, you saw him?”
“We were shootin’ a couple of blocks from the restaurant. Second unit crew, buncha extras, couple of the actors. He walked right by.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“Well, I didn’t know fuck-all when I saw him. But I been readin’ about it. They traced the guy’s path. So I know I seen some Arab guy with a briefcase walkin’ past the shoot. I noticed him ’cause I saw him stop when he saw all the extras dressed as cops. It scared him. He must’ve thought they were real. I remember thinkin’ he was a guy who was doin’ something wrong somewhere or other. Some people look at stuff, know how much it’s worth. That’s their skill. Some people see things, tell you whether they’re beautiful or not. Me, I know when people are scared. It’s my talent. Useful in my line of business. And I noticed this guy ’cause he was scared. But I’ll tell you somethin’ else. Guys who do shit like this, I mean, ready to kill themselves for whatever, they don’t get scared when they see a bunch of cops. They think, ‘Fuck them, they hassle me I’ll take ’em with me.’ This guy was scared. Too scared to blow himself up.”
“You don’t think he did it?” Justin sounded incredulous.
“I’m just saying there’s more than meets the fucking eye, Jay. There usually fucking is.”
“You tell this to the police or . . . ?”
“Oh sure. I waltzed in to the FBI and explained all my theories to them ’cause we’re such good buddies.”
“Bruno, if you’re convinced you’re right, this is the kind of thing you have to tell somebody.”
“What? My hunch that the guy was too chickenshit to blow himself up? Anyway, I’m tellin’ you. You pass it along. You’re goin’ up to see your FBI buddy tomorrow, ain’t ya?”
Justin let his fork clatter down to his plate. “How the hell do you know that?”
Bruno sat back in his chair, let an easy grin spread across his wide face. “Gimme some credit, Jay. I know a lot of stuff.”
“What, do you have the Feebies’ phones bugged up there?”
Bruno kept the grin on his face. “Hey, they bug us, don’t they? It’d only be fair if we did.”
Justin regained his composure enough to signal the waiter and ask for a double espresso.
“You eatin’ dessert?” Bruno asked.
“I’m trying to watch my weight.”
“Yeah, me too.” Bruno turned to the waiter. “So just bring me one piece of cheesecake instead of two, okay?”
9
Justin met Chuck Billings at eleven o’clock the next morning, two blocks from Harper’s Restaurant.
“I’m just here as a consultant,” Billings said. “I’m the only outside expert. Everyone else, at least everyone in my area of expertise, is from inside the Bureau.”
“Why you? I mean, other than your natural genius.”
“Signatures,” Billings told him, and when he saw Justin’s puzzled expression he said, “Not like handwriting. Bomb signatures. Things that tell us who’s responsible. Let’s say I’m kind of obsessed with that sort of thing.”
“How does one get obsessed with bomb signatures, exactly?”
“I’ll explain when we’re inside. I want to prepare you for what you’re gonna see,” Chuck said. “That’s why I thought it’d be better if we walk a little bit first.”
“It’s been cleaned up already, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s clean. Well . . . it’s clean compared to what it was. You’re not gonna see any body parts or anything. But it’s still pretty disturbing.”
“Okay. I appreciate the preparation.”
“I want to prepare you for some other stuff, too.”
“Such as?”
Billings slowed down a bit. His walk turned into more of an amble. “I’ve never been involved with anything like this. I mean, I’ve worked with the Feds before, I know the kind of assholes they can be, but this is something different.”
“Different how?”
“I can’t explain it. I’m going against strict orders by bringing you into this restaurant, but one of the reasons I’m doing it is ’cause I hope you can explain it.”
“What is it I’m trying to explain, Chuck?”
“I don’t want to say anything more. Let me just show you around, give you my impressions of what happened, then you tell me what you think. Fair enough?”
“More than fair. Anything you want to give me is fair. Like I told you, I’m just trying to get some info so I can help a friend sleep a little easier.”
“Good,” Chuck said. “Maybe you’ll wind up helping two friends.”
Chuck Billings had been right. He flashed his badge, told the two FBI agents at the front that Justin was with him, then they stepped inside. And despite the extensive cleanup, Justin almost burst into tears when he walked into the building that had, just a few days ago, been Harper’s Restaurant. Justin had seen death and death didn’t frighten him. But the bombed-out restaurant did frighten him. It sent a deep chill throughout his entire body and filled him up with sadness. This was much worse than being surrounded by death. It was as if the room they were standing in was filled with ghosts.
“Yeah,” Billings said, looking at Justin’s expression. “A bomb site can be pretty overwhelming.”
Justin took a deep breath, swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to show me?”
“I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for,” Billings explained, “so I’m just going to show you what happened, or what I can pretty much deduce happened. Things we’ve picked up from surviving witnesses, from people who saw the bomber on his way to the restaurant, from bomb fragments, a few other pieces of physical evidence.” He was all business now, he didn’t even wait for Justin to respond. He launched into his recitation. And Justin thought it was just that: this was something Chuck Billings had been practicing.
“Okay,” Billings said. “We believe the guy walked here from several blocks away. Maybe as many as eight or ten.”
“Where was he before that?”
“Let me go through this, Jay. Hold your questions until after I’m done. But remember ’em. You’ll see why when I’m finished.” Justin nodded and Billings continued. “What we know for sure is that our guy walked in the door carrying a briefcase. That was the bomb. He talked to the hostess, went to a specific table”—Billings walked to a spot in the restaurant, stood there as if trying to visualize the room intact—“right about here. We
narrowed it down to four possible tables. Our job is really to determine three things: the quality of the explosive, the type of explosive, and the location of the blast. So we got the location. This baby went off right here, give or take a couple of feet.”
Billings walked away from the spot, as if it were dangerous to stand on it for too long. “Okay, we know he talks to someone at the table, leaves the briefcase on the floor next to the guy he’s talking to. Takes a couple of steps away, like he’s walking out of the restaurant, his cell phone rings.”
“His cell phone rang?”
“Yeah. Hold on. You got a pen and paper? Write down your questions if you have to, but lemme go through the whole thing.”
“Go ahead. I don’t need a pen. I’ll remember.”
“His cell phone rings,” Billings repeated. “And then . . . boom.” The head of the Providence PD bomb squad shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, as if he were trying to block the sound of the explosion. “You know anything about explosions?”
“Am I allowed to interrupt you with an answer?”
“Don’t be a wiseass.”
“No,” Justin said. “I don’t know anything about explosions except they’re loud and they kill people.”
“Look around you. You see this room?” When Justin nodded, Billings made a circle in the air with his left hand. “All right,” he said, indicating the invisible circle. “This is water. You smack your hand down right in the middle of it, you get a depression. Can you picture that?” Justin nodded again. “Think of the water as the atmosphere. The atmosphere in this room. When a bomb goes off, the blast scatters the atmosphere the way your hand scatters the water when you smack it. It pushes it away. That’s the initial effect of an explosion. It pushes everything away. Blows the windows into the street, sends tables flying, all that other shit. But nature abhors a vacuum, as we know from our sixth-grade science class, so there’s a negative pressure that replaces the atmosphere. Right? You hit the water, it swirls, moves away, but then it comes back, fills up the vacuum. That’s what happens with a bomb. This negative phase sucks things toward it. Lighter things like paper, clothing, debris are sucked back toward the explosion. It all happens instantly, it’s why things get so surreal. All this pushing and sucking. It’s why that table wasn’t touched, the one next to it was pulverized. But the closer you are to the point of the explosion, the better chance you have of being pulverized. We call it a kill ratio. Within ten feet of a pound of a high explosive, like a grenade, you’ll have a hundred percent kill ratio. With three pounds, it’s approximately twenty feet. This bomb was about three pounds. You want to know about the actual explosion? I mean, what happened in here?”
“Yeah. I think my friend might want to know that.”
“It was a hell of a bomb. Like I said, about three pounds. They used Semtex. It’s an ex-Soviet bloc explosive. They still make it. The Czechs still make it, too. Not so easy to smuggle in, but it can be done. It’s basically the equivalent of our C4. Al Qaeda uses it. So do the Colombian cartels. Used to be big with the IRA, but I guess they’ve cleaned up their act. Anyway . . . the bomb went off right over there. Anything within twenty feet, forget it. The primary fragmentation on this was brutal.”
“Sorry, you have to explain that.”
“Primary fragmentation? That’s pieces of the bomb that are intended to hurt. You read about it all the time when stuff goes off in the Middle East. If it’s a pipe bomb, they’ll stuff the pipe with rocks or glass or nails. The explosion drives those things outward, scatters them. They’re like mini-missiles. They’ll rip through just about anything—walls, flesh, bone.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah. Know what our genius used here?” Billings didn’t wait for an answer. He walked over to the nearest wall and pointed to a small object embedded in it. When Justin squinted, not sure what he was looking at, Billings pulled the fragment out of the plaster and held it in the palm of his hand.”
“A jack?” Justin asked. “A kid’s toy?”
“Pretty fuckin’ deadly kid’s toy when it’s packed into three pounds of explosives. It’s the perfect thing. Doesn’t matter which direction it’s facing, there’s a little spike on every surface. They’re small enough, you can squeeze a shitload of them into the container, and the more there are, the more damage can be done. These things were flying at people at about two thousand feet per second.”
“Jesus, Chuck. Who the hell would think of that? Jacks . . .”
“Really pretty brilliant. In a sick kind of way. And if this isn’t a one-time thing, he’s gonna use ’em again, I guarantee you. It’s what I started to tell you before. Bombers can’t resist their little signatures on their work. Everybody’s got a different one. When you know what they are, it’s pretty much as defining as fingerprints. And this is one of the most distinctive signatures I’ve ever seen.”
“You ever seen it before?”
“Never even heard of anyone using jacks.”
“Would you?”
“Jay, I told you I was obsessed with this kind of thing, right? You know what the hell I do with my free time?”
“Do I want to know?”
“I’m on the weirdest fucking Internet bomb sites, shit you can’t even imagine. I’m on crackpot blogs about explosives. Some psycho blows up a cat somewhere in Kansas, I’m looking into it, checking out the signature. It’s why they called me in here.”
“All right. So you’ve got a signature: jacks. And they did a lot of damage. What’s next?”
“Well, that’s just the primary fragmentation. You’ve still got a secondary. Like all the window glass that was in this place. The glassware, silverware, all that stuff. That stuff was slicing the shit out of everything and everybody. The secondary fragmentation was devastating. What you have to remember is that it’s not like in a movie. A bomb isn’t static. There’s a huge amount of bleeding. The lights are out, it’s smoky, the noise is literally deafening, it’s almost impossible to hear anything. Here, it was particularly bad because it was a restaurant. So it didn’t just start a fire, there were live electrical lines that went down, there were gas and water leaks. When the fire hit the gas, that was worse than the initial explosion. It must have been a fucking nightmare. The only thing I can tell you that might help your friend . . . according to the seating charts, which we got off the computer, her husband was about eight feet from the blast. He wouldn’t have felt a thing. Some comfort, huh?”
“I don’t know what to say to all this, Chuck.”
“You want to indulge me a minute, Jay? Lemme guess the questions you’ve been storing up.”
“Go for it.”
“Okay,” Billings said. “First has got to be about the bomber.”
“I’ve got a few about him,” Justin admitted.
“First is: Did we get a description? Yes, we did. A pretty decent one, from people who are pretty sure they saw him on the street before he arrived, and from a few survivors in the restaurant. We know at least a few of the blocks he covered to get here. I might have partial fingerprints, too, from recovered bomb fragments.”
“So—”
“So what’s being done to track him down? Nothing.”
“Chuck . . .”
“I got your next question, too, Jay, ’cause I know you’re a good cop. If it was a suicide bombing, why the hell was he moving away from the blast when it went off? Another few feet, he would have been out of range of the hundred percent kill ratio.”
“You’re two for two.”
“How about the cell phone? You probably want to know about that, too.”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “Like—”
“Can a phone be used to trigger a bomb? Yes. It’s a delightful new technology. The tones can be programmed to set the thing off.”
“Okay, so—”
“So was it the trigger? I think it was. I’m pretty damn sure it was.”
“But—”
“But, then, does that mean it wasn’t a suicide bo
mbing? And if the phone was the detonator, what are we doing to find the guy who made the call?”
“You got the questions down cold, Chuck. Now, you got any answers?”
“No.”
Justin couldn’t decide which was getting the best of him at the moment, his confusion or his anger. “Why the hell not?”
“Jay . . . remember I told you I couldn’t figure out the Feds on this one? Well, let me try out another question on you: Why wouldn’t they want answers to all of the questions we just asked?”
“Because they don’t want to know the answers,” Justin said. But even as he said it, he didn’t believe his own words.
“Or?”
“Or”—and now Justin spoke very slowly, as if he wanted to hear exactly what he was saying, trying the words out to see if they could possibly make sense—“they already know the answers. And they don’t want anyone else to find out what they are.”
Billings stayed silent for a few moments. Then he said quietly, “There are four or five guys working the bomb angle. I was partnered with a very good guy, a Feebie, Dorell Cole. We were making some headway, he knows a lot about signatures, too. As soon as we thought we might be getting somewhere, Dorell got yanked off. A new guy came in to oversee the whole thing, and believe me, this guy was a total asshole. He’s the head of the New York bureau.”
“Fuck me. Was it Rollins? Agent Len Rollins?”
“No. This guy’s name is Schrader. Hubbell Schrader. Who’s this Rollins character?”
“Someone I had a run-in with, about a year ago. He was the New York bureau chief then.”
“A run-in, Jay?” Billings’s left eyebrow rose, the first relaxed gesture Justin had seen since they met.
Justin shrugged. “I told him if I ever saw him again I’d kill him.”
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