Déjà-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  140

  I was moved to another posh room while the CSI unit processed the crime scene in my old room. Detective Jan Corritore sat on one side of me. Carter was on the other, holding me in his arms.

  Corritore closed her spiral notebook and put her pen in her jacket pocket. “I guess that’s about it. I’ve been asking you all the questions here. Do either of you want to know anything?”

  “Where was the sniper when the shot was fired?” Carter asked.

  She pointed over her shoulder. “In the hospital’s hotel across the street. The shooter checked in the same day you did, Tina, and checked out before we could find him or her.”

  “Any fingerprints in the shooter’s room?” Carter asked.

  “It was wiped clean. No shell casing. Nothing.”

  “What about the bullet?” I asked. “Will you be able to identify it?”

  “The medical examiner said the bullet exploded when it blew through Doyle’s skull. Nothing was left except a few small metal fragments.”

  “Sounds like a pro,” Carter said.

  “That’s what Tina told me before you arrived,” Corritore said. “She thinks it was a terrorist, but I gotta wonder about David John.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I know how hard I smashed his face against the floor. I doubt he’ll be able to see out of his swollen eyes for a month.”

  “Possible,” she said.

  “Fourteen years ago, Doyle funneled his profits to the Vakili Corporation, which was a front for terrorists,” I said. “He was one of them, so he had a lot of information about how their system worked. I think he got tired of prison and opted to roll over on his terrorist buddies to get an early release.”

  “I guess he was willing to take the chance that they might not find out he ratted them out,” she said.

  “But it seems as if they did,” Carter said.

  “If that’s true, thank God they went after him when they did,” I said.

  “I’ll call the feds and see if they have any insight into any of this.” She patted my knee. “You’ve had a rough time of it lately. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “No more so than I am, Detective,” Carter said. “I think Tina is done writing dangerous stories.”

  Corritore stood up. “I’ll check on you in a couple of days, if that’s okay.”

  “You can check on me every day,” I said. “Right now I feel like I need that.”

  She stepped out and Carter wrapped his arms around me again. “I love you so much. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  “Me, too, honey. Me too.”

  141

  Carter had brought my laptop to me. He knew journaling was the way I’d processed my emotional problems when I was blown up in Arlington, and he realized this was what I needed to do now.

  First, I went over all my files on David’s story. It took me a couple of hours and several emails to various agencies to give me the entire story.

  Next, I reviewed my old files on Dr. Mick Doyle. I’d lied to Corritore about the sniper being a terrorist. I did it to cover for David. He was a bomber and a killer, but he was also my friend, and I was sure he was the shooter who had saved my life.

  The cameras and listening devices weren’t his, so he knew from the start I was in danger from another source. He saved me from Doyle. When I needed him most, he was there for me. He had proven himself to be a Hamlin Park Irregular.

  The world needed to know about him, even if the only place his story would ever be published would be in my private journal, the one I started five years ago to deal with PTSD after he blew me up.

  A Bomber.

  A Killer.

  And a Friend.

  By

  Christina Edwards Thomas

  Have you ever run into someone in your neighborhood who looked completely harmless ⎼ like a leprechaun? I did. He was a man who became my friend and running companion.

  And who saved my life.

  He also detonated a bomb in an abortion clinic in Arlington, Virginia, five years ago, which nearly killed me. I was in the building when he blew me up. But he didn’t know me then…

  Part 7

  142

  Thursday morning, I was discharged from the hospital. I called Carter and told him I wanted to see Linda and her baby before he picked me up.

  I was still in my room when Cas and Molly walked in.

  “How are you feeling?” Cas asked.

  “Better,” I said.

  “You must have had a really bad case of food poisoning,” Molly added.

  I opened my mouth to correct her, but Molly kept talking.

  “Wow,” she said. “This is even nicer than Linda’s room.”

  “POTUS did it for me,” I said.

  I saw the blank look on Molly’s face.

  “The President of the United States.”

  “IKR,” she said.

  Now, I had the blank look. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I know, right? I use it all the time when I’m texting.”

  “Good to know.”

  “When do you get to go home?” Cas asked.

  “My doctor just discharged me,” I said. “Because of my previous emergency surgery after David blew me up in Arlington, the doctor wanted to keep me here an extra night.”

  “David?” Cas asked. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “Why don’t we go down to Linda’s room? I want her to hear this, and I want to see her baby.”

  I told the nurses I would come back to get my stuff. The three of us took the elevator down two floors to Linda’s room.

  I entered her elegant postpartum room with Cas and Molly right behind me. I walked up to Linda’s bed. She held her newborn in her arms.

  “He is so cute,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “We finally decided on Jason.”

  “We” decided?

  I was certain Howard didn’t have a vote in the name game. Linda’s parents were a different story. They would be the major donors to Jason’s financial future, which gave them naming rights.

  It’s what family money does.

  Linda looked like she’d been up all night scrubbing the floors of the hospital with an old toothbrush.

  “You feeling okay?” Cas asked.

  “This emergency C-section was way harder than the other way,” Linda said. “I’m having excruciating abdominal pains, both from my C-section incision and the gas building up in my as yet non-functioning bowels, so I need to walk in the hall.”

  “I had the same thing after I was blown up,” I said. “Before you do that, there’s something I need to tell all of you about David and the truth about why I’m here.”

  I told them everything about David and what had happened between us at the United Center.

  143

  “Wow,” Molly finally said.

  “Unimaginable,” Linda said.

  “Who would’ve thought?” Cas asked.

  “Not me, that’s pretty obvious,” I said.

  “I can’t even begin to tell you how many laws he’s broken,” Linda said.

  “Yeah, about that,” I said.

  I told them about the gag order from the feds forbidding us to tell anyone about David.

  “So, we can’t ever talk about this?” Molly asked, after I finished.

  “You can, but then your family will get to visit you in a federal prison,” I said.

  “Then this is the only time we should talk about this, right?” Cas asked.

  “It is. Right here, and right now. I’m going to tell you guys what the FBI told me in exchange for not publishing David’s story.”

  “I want to go first,” Cas said. “With such tight security around Micah’s lab, how did David sneak the bomb in there?”

  “Initially, he helped the Hogan Company set up security in Micah’s lab. That’s when he did it.”

  “Made it easy for him,” Cas said.

  “It did. Planting the bomb in the bathroom was his si
gnature to let the world know he was responsible. He hid the bomb in the ceiling so it wouldn’t be discovered before he was ready to detonate it.”

  “And you said there were C4 bombs hidden in the United Center too,” Linda said. “How did he get them in there?”

  “The same way he brought in pieces of his sniper rifle. When he found out the president was coming to Chicago, he got a job working night security in the United Center. With his background at Hogan, they were thrilled to hire him. He hid the C4 high enough in the roof that the bomb dogs didn’t find them. He waited to assemble the rifle until the moment he needed the gun.”

  “Why did he shoot Tony?” Molly asked.

  “The FBI lab sent a report to Tony that the C4 residue from the other abortion clinic bombings matched that found on the trash I stole. Tony realized the only way it could have gotten there was for it to be planted by the bomber. David hacked into the Chicago PD computers and discovered where Tony was headed in his investigation. He shot Tony before he figured out David and the bomber were the same person.”

  “Why did David plant the C4 in the trash you stole?” Cas asked.

  “To push me into writing about what Micah was doing in his lab.”

  “Then the world would reject Micah’s embryonic stem cell research,” Cas said.

  “That was David’s plan.”

  144

  “How did he shoot Tony and blow up the bomb in Micah’s lab when he was in the room with us when both things happened?” Molly asked.

  “David had the final shift, which gave him time go into the last apartment on our floor, assemble a special sniper rifle, and attach it to a moveable tripod,” I said. “The tripod was controlled from his computer. The view from the rifle’s scope was displayed on his computer screen. He fired the weapon using his computer one minute after he detonated the bomb in Micah’s office bathroom, which he also did from his computer.”

  “But if he was this good with his computer, why was the bomb next to Tony on a timer?” Cas asked.

  “He shot Tony and planned to detonate the bomb when the SWAT team arrived to save him. He wanted to ensure a maximum killing field, but the view through the rifle’s scope was too small to allow him to see well enough to do that. His only option was to set the detonator on a timer and guess about how long it would take the SWAT team to get to Tony.”

  “That’s why you had time to grab the detonator and throw it away from the C4,” Cas said.

  “It was, but the timer was also the reason David freaked out,” I said. “He never anticipated you or me running downstairs to help Tony. He was afraid we were going to be blown up along with the SWAT team.”

  “As we ran down the stairs, David went crazy yelling at us to stop,” Cas said.

  “Yep, he saw what happened and got sick and ran to the bathroom,” Molly said. “Brittany saw him do it too.”

  “You guessed he did it because he thought Cas and I had died,” I said.

  “So did Brittany,” Molly said.

  “But you were wrong,” I said. “He used that time to dismantle the gun.”

  “When did he do that?” Cas asked. “Detective Corritore returned to the room with both of us. Where was the gun?”

  “Still in the shooting room. Our first move after we returned to our room was to go down to the bathroom, where we heard David throwing up. He opened the door and returned to the room with us. I saw Corritore check the bathroom after he stepped out. She never did again.”

  “How did he take down the gun and remove it without being seen by any of us, including a trained police detective?” Cas asked.

  “When we were back in our room, Corritore began questioning us. The answers became graphic. None of us were surprised when David became queasy and went back to the bathroom where we heard him dry heaving.”

  “Or thought we did,” Cas said.

  “Exactly, but he didn’t go directly to the bathroom. He grabbed one of the computer carriers he’d left outside the room. He packed the dismantled rifle into the bag and then hauled it into the bathroom. He shut the door and hid it in the bathroom.”

  “Then, we came out of our room to check the other rooms for the shooter,” Cas said.

  “But he stayed in the bathroom while we did that,” I said. “While Cas and I watched Corritore rush into the third room, he snuck back into our room with the rifle components in the computer carrier. He also carried the second empty computer bag into the room so that none of us would think twice about what he was doing.”

  “How did he get the rifle to the car?”

  “I think I helped with that,” Molly said.

  “You did,” I said. “When we left, he said he needed help with his computer equipment. He carried the dismantled gun and some of his equipment in one bag. You hauled the rest in the other.”

  145

  “Do we know who David really is?” Molly asked.

  “Or if that’s his actual name?” Cas asked.

  “He always wiped down anything he touched — except for the DVDs he picked up in my house. According to the FBI, the prints on the DVD cases matched the partial print on the wall of the clinic in Arlington, Virginia. And I had his blood on me when I was admitted to the hospital. That matched the blood found in Arlington too.”

  “So?” Cas asked. “Who is he?”

  “The FBI agents think he’s a priest who morphed into an increasingly violent abortion protester.”

  “If he had stopped after shooting Tony, it could have been the perfect crime,” Linda said.

  “But he didn’t, and he won’t.”

  The Hamlin Park Irregulars looked at each other.

  “Do you mean he’s still out there?” Cas asked.

  “Before I shot him, he told me his plan was to shoot Micah and, if he had time, Hannah. Then he was going to detonate bombs in the far end of the building above the stage. I shot him in the center of his chest, but it didn’t kill him, because he wore a Kevlar vest.”

  “How do you know he’s still alive?” Molly asked.

  “Internal security cameras outside the suite recorded a man in a janitor’s outfit holding his head and staggering toward the escalator. The outside security cameras showed the same man climbing into a white minivan.”

  “And he’s disappeared,” Cas said.

  “Not exactly.”

  I told them about Dr. Mick Doyle.

  This time my friends really freaked out.

  Linda hugged Jason closer to her chest. “That happened here?” she asked. “In this hospital?”

  “Two floors up,” I said.

  “I always thought that lab tech was creepy,” Molly said.

  “And you would be right,” I said.

  “And you think David fired the shot,” Cas said.

  “I’ll never know for sure, but — strange as it sounds — I think he did.”

  “Did he ever work for Hogan?” Linda asked.

  “He started to work for them five years before the bombing in Arlington. The job gave him the perfect cover to convince us he was a real security expert. It also gave him access to all national security databases so he could easily monitor what they knew about him.”

  “With that computer access, it would have been impossible for any law enforcement agency to ever catch him,” Linda said.

  “At least we don’t have anything to worry about ever again,” Molly said.

  “What do you mean?” Linda asked.

  “Our little leprechaun guy will always be out there to protect us. Kind of a green insurance policy.”

  “If he has time when he’s not bombing abortion clinics,” I said.

  146

  I saw Cas glance out of the window in Linda’s room. She quickly walked out to the nurse’s station before she even had a chance to hold baby Jason.

  What’s this all about?

  I saw that Linda was beginning to get uncomfortable. “Molly, why don’t you help Linda walk around in the hall?” I asked. “I’ll watch Jason.”


  They left, and I slowly picked up the baby, trying to avoid any stress to my sore belly. I walked around the room with him, and when I looked up, I saw Cas talking to a doctor.