“Have you made a thorough check of her client list?”
“I haven’t,” Horatio admitted. “But I will.”
“So there might be some surprises on it yet.”
“Anything’s possible.”
Asher gave a shrug. “I still don’t get the doctor. Gregg? No connection at all that I can turn up. You’re right, it’s a break from his usual pattern.”
“There’s a lot that I don’t get yet, Special Agent. Why don’t you tell me precisely what makes you think the Greggs house bombing was one of his?”
“He’s like Jack Benny,” Asher replied, a hint of admiration creeping into his voice. “A master of timing. This one’s the same thing. He likes to hit when he knows he’ll do the most damage. A residence, he hits at night when there will be people sleeping inside, instead of off at work or school or whatever. A business, like this law firm, during the day. When people are working there. Chances are in this case he wanted to kill the lawyer as well as whatever staff members he could, so he attacked her place of business.”
“What if Karen Platt had been in court? Or at an off-site meeting of some kind?”
“Then we probably wouldn’t be standing here. He tries to find out what people’s schedules are. I think he uses public records and close observation for most of it, but there have been a couple of occasions when he has paid people off for the information. Insiders. I interviewed a janitor at a clinic who’s probably still having nightmares—he earned a hundred bucks for providing a schedule, and then everybody the guy worked with got killed in the blast. Only reason the janitor was spared was that he worked nights after everyone else went home.”
Horatio swiveled around to look at the house. Members of the bomb squad filtered out through the front door, returning to their van to doff their protective gear. “It looks like they’re wrapping up,” he said. “What else can you tell me?”
“He always uses C-4. I don’t know where he gets it—offshore somewhere. But bombers tend to stick with what works for them, and that’s his favorite.”
“I gathered that from the case files I saw. And he always uses timing devices?”
“Yes. By the time one of his bombs detonates he’s far away. Unlike some bombers, he’s not one of those guys who likes to watch.”
“I see.”
“The Baby Boomer uses bombs instead of bullets because he wants his killings to make a statement,” Asher continued. “Political, religious, moral, call it what you will. He has a strong sense that what he’s doing is right, that he’s following a law that’s above the laws of men and governments. But he’s not a showboat. Make no mistake, Lieutenant Caine. Bombers know their devices will get attention, but if it was just about sending messages, they’d use Western Union. Or Yahoo, I guess, to update the old saying. His intent is to kill the people he believes are doing bad things, not just to scare them. That accomplishes two things—it scares the ones he can’t get to physically, and it ensures that the ones he does reach stop whatever they’re up to.”
“Death has a way of doing that.”
“So it does.”
Jorge Ortiz was walking toward him, so Horatio turned his attention away from the FBI agent and toward the bomb-scene manager. Ortiz was short and sturdy, with unshakable hands and shoulders you could rest the planet on. “We meet again,” he said.
“I like to see you, Jorge, but not this often.”
“Same goes for me. Give me a lazy day any time, sitting around with nothing to do except polish our robot.”
“How does it look in there?”
“One device, seated near the center of the building. Inside the office of the lady who owns it, the lawyer.”
“Karen Platt.”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Victims?”
“Four that I saw.”
Frank had been talking softly into his phone, but he put it away and joined the other men. “Makes sense,” he said. “I got hold of a part-time legal researcher who said there would have been four people working today. Platt, her legal secretary, and two paralegals. Young lady I talked to would have been here today too, but she’s got a cold and stayed home.”
“I know how she feels,” Asher said, rubbing his nose. “Wish I had that luxury.”
“Look on the bright side,” Horatio said, barely able to rein in his anger. “At least your place of employment hasn’t been blown up, with your friends and coworkers inside.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Maybe you’d better not.” Horatio walked away from the other men. “Mister Wolfe,” he called.
“Grab our kits from the Hummer, please. We’re going in.”
Crime was usually messy. Horatio was accustomed to that—years as a patrol cop, a detective, and a member of the bomb squad didn’t leave a person with any illusions on that score. He liked the clean precision of crime scene investigation, the fact that science didn’t muddy the waters but cleared them, that it led the way to definitive answers. Science organized things.
Bombs did the opposite.
By the time he crossed the barrier tape for a quick meeting at the command post—a trailer that had been hurriedly brought to the scene—with Jorge Ortiz, Frank, Asher, a paramedic, a city building inspector, a structural engineer, and representatives of the affected utility companies, twenty-two people had already signed the access control log book. A crime scene was supposed to be preserved in as pristine a state as possible, but a bombing scene, in addition to being thrown into disarray by the underlying crime itself, was further contaminated by all the people who had to go in before the CSIs could.
When he finally got inside the law office, he found the expected ruin and wreckage. Someone had carefully tagged potential hazards, like an interior wall that sagged dangerously inward and could collapse at any time. While Horatio did his first walk-through, Ryan busied himself with a camera and Frank coordinated the interviewing of neighbors who might have witnessed someone coming or going from the house.
As Ortiz had described, the seat of detonation had been in Karen Platt’s own office. The blast had cratered a hole through the tile floor, exposing foundation below. It had punched out most of the wall separating her office from her law library, and in that room bookshelves had been toppled and books blown from the shelves still standing. Loose pages with torn edges covered the floor, like a blizzard of giant snowflakes had struck.
Horatio established a path that any subsequent visitors to the building would use, getting down on his hands and knees and carefully inspecting a route from the front door to the seat of detonation to ensure that no evidence would be compromised or destroyed by the comings and goings of others. Next he cleared a secondary path, in case the first one was clogged and someone needed to get in or out in a hurry. This secondary path led to a back door. Once that was done, he breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the evidence still inside the building wouldn’t be going anywhere. Time remained a critical factor, as it always was in this sort of investigation, but at least he wasn’t fighting to preserve endangered evidence now. The building’s roof seemed intact, so even if it started raining, the scene wouldn’t be compromised.
In the office where the detonation had occurred, a woman had been sitting at a desk. The blast had been centered on the wall opposite her, the device hidden inside a glass-fronted lawyer’s bookcase. The bookcase had splintered, and wood fragments and glass were embedded in all the remaining walls and ceiling, as well as in the victim herself.
The pressure wave had blown her backward, and her head struck the floor, but she was probably already dead by then, Horatio guessed. Her face was ruined, its bones crushed and shattered by pressure that might have hit her at 8,500 meters per second. No one could survive slamming into a brick wall at that speed, and the effect was the same. She had been sitting close enough to the bomb to take the full brunt of the thermal effect, as well, and even some frag.
To make it worse, the blast pressure had flipped her desk onto her w
ith the force of a semi truck, its edge nearly cutting her in two. Blood had pooled around the body and lazy flies helped themselves to it. What was left of her body was curiously shapeless, because the bones, muscles, and organs that dictated structure had been pulped inside the broken bag of her skin. In a blast like this, muscles and ligaments could be ripped from their anchors, bones torn from their joints. Surviving a major explosion could be worse punishment than a swift death.
Horatio scouted around the office and found her purse, butter-soft leather and expensive, thrown from a desk drawer and half buried under rubble. Inside her wallet was a Florida driver’s license, showing a picture of a smiling Karen Platt, with neat blond hair and stylish red plastic glasses. He hadn’t seen the glasses yet, but the body on the floor had the hair—not so neat anymore but the right color where it wasn’t singed—and she looked like the five-seven height and one-forty-five weight probably applied.
Somewhere in the building were three more bodies. Before he got busy processing the scene, Horatio went to look for those.
To remind myself, he thought, what I’m doing here.
16
FINISHED DOCUMENTING the scene photographically, Ryan went to work near the seat of detonation, on hands and knees, looking for bomb casing fragments. More than the usual crime scene, bombing scenes challenged his resolve to control his OCD. The chaos gnawed at him like a rat chewing on his nerve endings, and he had to fight to keep his focus on the task at hand.
This one wasn’t as bad as the Greggs house, where the firefighters’ water had covered the floor in a layer of ashy muck. The only thing worse than crawling around through the detritus left behind by a bomb was doing it in liquid that he couldn’t even see through. Although no accelerant had been found at the Greggs place, the old, dry wood of the house itself, combined with antique furnishings and plenty of rugs and curtains, had made it a firetrap. The law office, though, was all tile and stone and stucco, which had retarded the blaze instead of fueling it.
Still, it was a struggle to ignore the mess and concentrate on searching for the minute fragments that could contain valuable evidence.
Bomb casings performed multiple functions, he had learned. First, containing explosives made the release of pressure more—well, explosive. Pour a bunch of gunpowder into a pile and light a match, and you got a bright flare-up, some smoke, and some sizzle. Compress the same load into a tight casing and light a fuse, and you got a boom.
Casings also helped to disguise the elements of a bomb. A timer might include elements of a digital clock, for instance, and the explosive material might be sticks of TNT—all of which would be extremely noticeable in the average home or office. But combine it all inside a small black box and it could easily sit in the shadows, the box muffling any sounds the timer might make, for hours without being spotted.
Finally, fragments from the casing made the bomb even more destructive, flying everywhere and injuring people or damaging property even if the pressure wave didn’t.
Ryan began his search for casing fragments at the seat of detonation—or as close as he could get to it, since the floor had caved in beneath it. Even where the floor was solid, the blast had charred and roughened the surface. There were two phases to blast pressure—positive, the shock front that blew outward from the original explosion, and negative, when air rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the initial outflow. Bomb fragments, tiny and already airborne, were often sucked back by that vacuum, landing close to where they’d started.
With his kit open on the floor beside him, Ryan studied the floor inch by inch. He placed a photographic scale next to each minute piece of unidentified something that might be bomb casing and took its picture, then moved the scale and put a numbered cone beside the fragment. He would have to shoot the whole scene again when he was finished with an area, with the cones in place, and plot their locations on a CAD—computer-aided design—program. Wearing the usual latex surgical gloves, he used forceps to lift each piece of jagged black metal and examine it closely. Later he would check each one for prints, or more likely, partial prints that he would try to put together using the puzzle pieces of the fragments. For now, his priority was trying to determine what was probably bomb fragments and what was something less sinister.
A bit of copper wire could have been from a bomb, but it also might have been part of the power cord for a lamp or TV or have been blown out of a wall outlet. A stray battery terminal, on the other hand, was almost certainly from the bomb. Ryan measured, shot, and coned it. The work was the very definition of painstaking, and before long his knees were sore and his lower back aching, and he really, really wanted a hot shower.
Times like this, he sometimes remembered, with bittersweet emotion, that he could have chosen a purely scientific career. He could be standing in a spotless lab somewhere, with the air temperature just right and no aches or pains anywhere.
Then he remembered the pleasure he got helping to put bad guys away.
It’s worth the aching back and the shooting pains in my legs, he thought. And the mess…
It’s worth all of it.
17
“THANK YOU FOR COMING in today,” Natalia Boa Vista said. “I know it’s an inconvenience, and I really appreciate it.”
“You said it might, like, help figure out who killed Wendy. If it will, I’ll do whatever I can.” Bridget Ehrens slouched on a chair in the lab’s interview room, a honeycomb pattern from sunlight through the window falling on her. In her early thirties, she had not fared as well financially as her old friend Wendy Mies, who had become Wendy Greenfield. Her jeans were worn at the hem, stained with something black, and her T-shirt had a tobacco company logo on it, probably something given away for free at a bar. She wore cheap fake leather sandals and the wristwatch encircling her skinny wrist was from a discount store. Her eyes showed the telltale creases of a heavy smoker, and even if Natalia hadn’t been able to tell from that and her nicotine-stained teeth, the smell of tobacco that clung to her like a coat of paint would have. She had bottle-blond hair showing a couple inches of brown root.
“It might,” Natalia said. “You never can tell what’s going to crack a case.” She was on uncertain territory here. She had been hired on a federal payroll to work at the lab, using contemporary technology to review past convictions and unsolved cases. Items stored in evidence could retain DNA for years or decades—DNA that couldn’t have been tested when an original conviction was handed down but could be now. Every innocent person her research set free was a source of great personal pride for Natalia. And the Justice Project grant that brought her into the lab had financed the lab’s extensive redesign, so it benefited all of its personnel. But that job had gone away, and now she worked for the MDPD Crime Lab. She was still primarily a lab technician and didn’t spend much time in the field or interrogating suspects.
Bridget Ehrens wasn’t a suspect, however. More of a witness, although not actually to the crime. Horatio had told Natalia to find out what she could about Wendy, and she had dug around, found a high school teacher back in Fort Myers who remembered Wendy Mies and Bridget Ehrens as inseparable. A little more research had revealed that Bridget now lived in Plantation, in an apartment that she couldn’t have paid for on her salary as a manicurist in a Fort Lauderdale beauty parlor. She suspected that Wendy helped her with the rent, but wanted to find out for sure.
“Do you have any suspects?” Bridget asked.
“We’re working on some leads,” Natalia replied.
“What I really need from you is a sense of who Wendy is. I mean, she’s in the news sometimes, but it’s always as Mrs. Sidney Greenfield, the golfer’s wife. There’s got to be more to her than that.”
“Oh, there is,” Bridget said. “Definitely.”
“You’ve known her for a long time?”
“Since junior high.” Bridget scratched the side of her mouth with a long nail that had a silver star decorating its tip. “Can I smoke in here?”
“No,
sorry.” Natalia wasn’t really sorry, but she thought it never hurt to be polite.
“Okay, well, in seventh grade, my folks moved to Fort Myers. I met Wendy the first day of school, and we’ve been tight ever since.”
“Do you know any reason anyone would want to hurt her?”
Bridget considered this for a minute, tapping on the tabletop with those claws and squinting toward the window. “Well, she and I, we ran with some rough crowds back in the day, you know?”
“What kind of rough crowds?” Natalia asked.
“Tell me about it.”
“We were always in some kind of trouble, I guess. Hanging out with older boys, right? I dropped out of high school in tenth grade, and she stayed in, but both of us started, you know, messing around with some drugs and made some bad choices where men and jobs were concerned.”
“What kinds of choices?”
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was a dancer for a while. Stripper, y’know, not like ballet or anything. Wendy didn’t do that for long, but she did it for a year or so. Always scored bigger tips than me, too, shaking those moneymakers of hers and all that platinum hair. We met some guys who were on the wrong side of the law, I guess you’d say. Bad boys. I’m no shrink or nothing, but maybe if her dad had hung around, she wouldn’t have been looking for love from every male she saw. Then again, my dad was always around and I wasn’t so different.”
“How did she wind up with Sidney?”
“She always claimed they met at a restaurant, but I think he saw her dance once, and they made up the restaurant story to protect his reputation. Clean-cut golfer dude, right? Couldn’t be known as a guy who visited strip clubs. But she stopped dancing right after the so-called restaurant meeting, when they started dating.”
“Did he know about all the bad boys?” Natalia asked.
“I don’t think she ever told him how bad they were. He knew there had been other men, but probably not that some of them had done jail time. The few times I met Sidney, she told me not to mention that.”
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