The room seemed to spin as she stepped into the cool building, and she stood there a moment, taking it in until the spinning stopped. She didn’t feel well. Maybe she should go home.
But no, she had to do this. She tried to clear her thoughts and headed toward the back of the store. There were too many people here, and they seemed oblivious. Didn’t they know about the explosion? Didn’t they realize it could happen here?
Her phone vibrated as she walked through the store. She glanced down again. Still her sister. She ignored it. Then a text popped up on the screen.
Where are you? Why won’t you answer?
She sighed and texted back. Her hands trembled, so she misspelled it, but she deleted and tried again.
At Walmart. Can’t talk on phone from inside.
She hoped her sister bought that. She’d heard it was hard to get cell calls inside a big box store, but she had taken calls from here many times.
Why did you just leave? Are you okay?
Taylor didn’t even want to answer that. She wasn’t okay. How could she be? Dustin Webb was walking around free to do it again. How could anyone be okay?
She saw a mother and child shopping for a bike, and the kid was bouncing up and down and trying to get it out of its slot in the bike section. She wanted to ask the mom why she would bring her child here, in public, where anyone could ram a truck into the side of the building and set off a mushroom cloud.
She kept her jaw clenched and went to the area where she’d seen guns being sold before. Now it only had sports and camping equipment.
She saw a clerk and walked toward him.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I want to buy a gun.”
He shook his head. “We don’t sell them here anymore. But there’s a gun store right up the road.”
She felt like an idiot, and as she walked toward the doors, her intrusive thoughts assaulted her again. They hate me here. That came from out of the blue, she knew. No one hated her. But on her way out, she saw two more people staring at her. Watching her. They knew what she was trying to do. But she couldn’t let them stop her.
She must have scratched at her arm as she walked back to her car, because by the time she was behind the wheel, she had blood on her fingertips. She sanitized again. Why hadn’t she bought some itch medication?
The thought left as quickly as it had come. The gun. She had to get the gun. She pulled out, going north, and found the store about a block from Walmart.
She checked the small parking lot. There was no one hanging around, looking for her. She went inside, and the bald, chubby man behind the counter greeted her. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
She glanced beyond him. There was no one else here. “I need to buy a handgun,” she said.
“Do you know what kind you’re interested in?”
She scratched her arm again. “I’m not sure.”
“Do you want it to fit in your purse, or does it matter?”
“Yeah, maybe. But I want it to be powerful.”
He unlocked the counter and pulled out one. “This is popular with women, for self-defense. It’s small and easy to carry.”
She took the gun in her hand and slipped her finger through the trigger guard. “When I was a kid, my dad took us to the shooting range sometimes. I used to like firing a .44 Magnum.”
“Oh, so something bigger.” He pulled one of those out, and she took it in her hand. “It has a kick,” he said.
“I don’t care.” She would gladly let it knock her down. She just didn’t want to miss.
As she held the gun in her hand, her gaze strayed to the shotguns and rifles on the wall behind him. That was what she needed. Something she could shoot from a distance. But who was she kidding? She didn’t have the skills to be a sniper.
“I’ll take this one,” she said. “Do I have to apply for the license here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a sixty-day waiting period to get a license in Georgia. You can buy it today, but you can’t legally carry it until sixty days is up.”
She hesitated, then realized no one would know unless she used it. If she decided to do that, it wouldn’t matter anyway. She filled out the necessary forms, then bought .44 Magnum cartridges and allowed the sales clerk to escort her from the store.
She sat in her car for a minute after he went back in. Now what? She had to find Dustin Webb. If the police didn’t care enough to keep him locked up, she would take matters into her own hands.
43
Dustin knew he had wasted the time with Jamie today, but he’d been counting the hours until he could get out of there. When she finally gave up on him, he went to his car and headed where he’d been wanting to go all day. He had to get to his office and see if he could find anything else in Travis’s things.
The phone was ringing when he got inside. He waited for it to go to voicemail, but it immediately began ringing again. He went to the phone at his desk and unplugged it from the wall. Then he went to Travis’s desk and did the same.
He stayed at Travis’s desk and opened his drawers, taking a mental inventory of everything he found there. Nothing seemed unusual.
He grabbed Travis’s wastebasket and dumped it out. There wasn’t much, since neither of them had spent much time in the office this week. Nothing stood out. He went through each of the trash cans in the building, then looked through boxes and file cabinets.
Finally he sat down at Travis’s desktop computer and scrolled through his emails. Nothing there caught his attention. He closed the email and checked all the files that had been saved in the last month. They were all work-related.
He returned to his desk and sat staring for a moment. If he worked backward from the bombing, was it possible that Travis could have carried out these crimes? There was no way he had gone out to rent a U-Haul truck the day before the bombing, much less taken the time to fill it with explosives. He hadn’t left the hospital that whole day and night. Crystal was too fragile.
Assembling the explosives into a bomb before loading it into a truck would have taken days. For the driver to have gotten away before the bomb went off, he would have had to have a detonator. That took wiring and work. It was virtually impossible for Travis to have spent any time doing that, even before Crystal wound up in the hospital.
But Travis was involved. Why else would he have had that diagram? He had known when Dustin was going to be at the hospital. He even had access to his car key. Was he working with someone else? If so, who?
He wanted to give his friend the benefit of the doubt and not report anything so flimsy as a piece of paper with a sketch that could have been the result of Travis speculating after the bombing. It could be as simple as that.
So why didn’t that explanation give him any peace? He vowed to keep digging until he got to an answer that satisfied him.
44
Jamie spent the rest of the day researching each of the people on the list of those who had access to ChemEx, but none of the information she gathered shed light on the case. She pulled into her mother’s driveway to pick up Avery and glanced next door, where Dustin used to live. Pat’s house hadn’t changed much, even though so much time had passed. She heard water spraying in the backyard, and over the fence she saw the top of Pat’s straw hat.
She decided to talk to Pat before going into her mother’s house. She went to the gate and knocked, then opened it partially. “Miss Pat, it’s Jamie.”
Pat looked up from scrubbing out the planters that held the potted flowers she had tended for years with much more love than she’d ever offered Dustin. “Jamie! How are you doing?”
Jamie hugged her. Pat grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “Come in, honey. We’ll have some coffee.”
“I can’t,” Jamie said. “I just came to pick up Avery. I heard you back here, so I wanted to come over for a minute and talk to you about Dustin.”
Pat stiffened and went to turn off the water. “I really have nothing to sa
y on that subject, Jamie.”
Jamie sighed and sat down at the picnic table where she and Dustin had sat so many times. She recalled the few times she had eaten here with them for barbecues, when between each bite, Dustin had suffered Pat’s scathing, critical orders. “Sit up straight, Dustin,” or “Don’t gulp your food,” or “Put your napkin in your lap,” or “Get your elbows off the table.” Jamie had always been self-conscious when eating in front of the woman, even though Pat’s tongue-lashings seemed directed only at Dustin.
“I know you’ve heard about Dustin’s charges,” she said.
“Yes, the police interviewed me. Then I heard it on the news. Imagine my pride.”
“He didn’t do this. I have ample proof.”
Her smile was tight and strained. “Dustin always could convince you of anything.”
Lightning flashed in Jamie’s brain. “And you were always quick to believe the worst about him.”
Pat turned back to the planters and continued scrubbing. “I gave him a roof over his head, I fed him, and I bought him clothes to wear. I shouldn’t be faulted for not being able to control him. There wasn’t one thing I was ever able to do about it.” She twisted to look Jamie. “You know, I never had one minute of trouble from my own children. That ought to tell you something.”
Again, Jamie tried to keep her voice even. “It does tell me something. It tells me that your own children knew they were loved and appreciated. Dustin’s parents died when he was six, and he was in and out of foster care until he came to you. He didn’t have the luxuries your kids had.”
“You don’t think I accounted for that? I did. But he was in trouble every time I turned around. He never came home on time; he sneaked out of the house after everyone had gone to bed; he skipped school at least once a week. I never asked to raise him!” Pat blurted. “But all those years of raising my children to be exemplary went out the window the first time Dustin humiliated our family.”
Tears stung Jamie’s eyes, and she realized she’d made a mistake in coming here. She stood up. “I feel sorry for you,” she said in a cracked voice.
“Me?” Pat asked.
“Yes, you. Because you’ll never have the chance to know what a good man Dustin is. You cheated yourself out of finding that out.”
“I did the best I could,” Pat bit out.
“What you did was make him an outcast in your home. Did it ever occur to you that Dustin got into so much trouble because of that? That it was easier for him to think you didn’t like him because he was a troublemaker? That maybe he couldn’t bear the idea that, in your eyes, he was unworthy of your love?”
‘‘You tell that to the judge when you get to court,” Pat said. “See how your psychoanalysis of him stands up against an exploding bomb and dozens of dead bodies.” She banged her fist on the table, shaking her whole body. “I won’t take responsibility for the kind of person he is! I won’t do it!”
“Well, you won’t have to!” Jamie said, and before she had to hear another word, she left Pat’s yard. She wouldn’t bring Pat up to Dustin again.
45
Dustin was no closer to finding answers to his questions about Travis, despite his efforts to get to the bottom of it today.
When Jamie got home with Avery, she brought Chinese food and spread the boxes out on the counter. She seemed quiet and distant, and Dustin wondered if it was a response to his mood.
Avery took up the slack. “Be sure to check my backpack,” she told Jamie. “I brought some good art home. And a note that I’m an awesome kid.”
Dustin smiled.
“You did?” Jamie glanced at her. “Seriously?”
“No, not seriously,” Avery said. “But I deserved one.”
“I bet you did,” Jamie said. “You’re definitely an awesome kid.”
“I got in the talent show.”
“You did? Why didn’t you call me?”
“Everybody got in.” Avery shrugged. “But it’s still fun.”
“So what’s your talent? Singing?”
“No!” Avery said, as though that idea was ludicrous.
“Dancing?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” Avery said. “I’m still trying to think what my best talent is. I have a lot to choose from.”
“That’s right. You do.”
“Like, I could draw or tell a joke.”
Dustin couldn’t help meeting Jamie’s grinning eyes.
“Well, you have a lot to think about.”
“Jordan Harris is gonna do gymnastics. Mom, can I take gymnastics?”
“We can talk about it. It’s kind of late to think all that through tonight.”
Avery got quiet for a moment, and Dustin wondered if she was imagining herself doing triple flips in the air.
“You know what I wish?” she asked suddenly. “I wish I had a big brother.”
Jamie got up and took her plate to the sink. “Where did that come from?”
Avery shrugged. “Amberlyn has a big brother, and one time he beat up a boy who tripped her in the cafeteria.”
Dustin chuckled softly. “How did we go from a talent show to Amberlyn’s big brother?”
“He takes gymnastics, too.”
“Oh,” Dustin said, as if that made perfect sense.
“Eat,” Jamie said. “We have homework.”
Dustin watched Jamie load her dish into the dishwasher. She seemed fatigued and distracted, as if she’d been as immersed in this puzzle as he had. But she was lacking one of the pieces.
He thought again of sharing it with her, but this wasn’t the time. Not yet.
When Avery begged him to let Dude sleep with her, Dustin made sure it was okay with Jamie and let him go. When Avery and Jamie went upstairs to do homework, taking Dude with them, that dark cloud of Travis’s duplicity fell over him again. He wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. He would wait until they were asleep and slip out. He had things to do. He wanted to get to the bottom of this tonight.
When the lights upstairs went out, Dustin left the house and walked out to his rental car. He started it, hoping the sound wouldn’t wake them.
He drove for fifteen minutes to the long, sparsely inhabited street where GreyWebb’s storage units were. They’d rented them two years before when they’d needed more storage space.
He unlocked the first door, then went into the hallway of the air-conditioned, multiunit building. The doors to the individual units were lined up down the hall, all in a temperature-controlled environment. He went to their first unit and slid up the door. Turning on the light, he stepped inside.
The equipment they were going to install on their current job was stacked where he had put it when it came in a couple of months ago. He wandered among the boxes, looking for anything that shouldn’t be here.
Everything looked as he expected.
He stepped back out, relocked it, and went next door to the other unit. There were a few TV monitors and some other equipment left from their last project. Behind those, at the rear of the unit, he saw an unmarked box. He didn’t remember putting it there. He opened the top—and sucked in a breath.
The box was full of detonator caps.
They were the kind of detonators that fit on canisters of explosives like the ones found in his car. Heart pounding, he looked around for anything else. Travis had set up two sawhorses with a piece of plywood on top. What had he done there?
There was a trash can in the back corner that hadn’t been emptied in some time. Dustin dug through the trash and found some wadded papers. He smoothed one out. It was a sketch that looked like an earlier draft of the diagram Dustin had seen yesterday. He smoothed another one—it was a more intricate diagram explaining how to connect all the canisters to one detonation point that could be controlled by a phone.
Dizziness spun his thoughts. He squatted, trying to calm his mind. He sat there for a moment, staring at the diagram, as a million brutal thoughts stam
peded through his head. Travis was involved. He had played a part in the bombing at Trudeau Hall. There was no way around it.
His best friend had set him up. Travis was deliberately sending him to prison.
But Crystal . . .
For a moment, Dustin considered getting rid of it all, burning the diagram, cleaning up the evidence. But he thought better of it. He took a picture of the diagram and more photos of what he’d found, then dropped the wadded page back into the trash can where he’d found it.
Leaving things as he’d found them, he locked the unit and left the building. He sat in his car for a moment, trying to think. He had to do something, but what? Go to the police? Call Jamie?
But what would that mean for Travis? Would they swarm the hospital to arrest him in front of Crystal? The thought sickened him.
He made a U-turn and headed in the opposite direction.
He rolled down his windows and let the wind blow through his hair as he sped through town, heading for the hospital where his best friend sat like a mourning husband rather than a deceitful jackal who was leading a second life. Dustin’s eyes stung, and he didn’t know or care if it was from the gritty wind or the even grittier truth scratching at his soul.
All he knew was that it was time to bring this to an end.
46
The hospital corridor was quiet at midnight, except for a nurse outside a room typing on a laptop computer that sat on a rolling stand. At the nurses’ station, Dustin saw another nurse glued to her computer. He straightened his cloth mask to cover his face so he wouldn’t attract anyone’s attention—that suspected terrorist whose face had been all over the news—and slipped past them, unnoticed.
He went to the isolation room with Crystal’s name on the handwritten sign next to the door. He knocked quietly, then opened the door and looked inside. There was a plastic curtain inside the room, cordoning off Crystal from the germs that might be brought in.
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