Demolition Angel

by Robert Crais

  Starkey glanced at her watch.

  “I’ll be there before you leave. I want to look at it.”

  To maintain the chain of evidence, Chen or another of the criminalists would have to personally log over the components into Starkey’s possession.

  “I’ve got court, Carol. Make it later today or tomorrow.”

  He got this whiny quality to his voice that annoyed the hell out of her.

  “I’m leaving now, John. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  She was on her way out when Kelso’s door opened, and she remembered Tennant. For a few brief minutes, she had forgotten Atascadero.

  “Starkey!”

  Kelso steamed across the squad room, carrying a coffee cup that read WORLD’S SEXIEST LOVER. Starkey watched him without expression, thinking fuck it, if Olsen had made the call filing a complaint, it was too late to worry about it.

  “Assistant Chief Morgan wants to have a meeting this afternoon. One o’clock in my office.”

  Starkey felt the ground fall away beneath her.

  “About what?”

  “What do you think, Detective? He wants to know what we’re doing down here about Riggio. Dick Leyton will be here, too. You will advise them on the status of the investigation, and I hope to hell you have something to say.”

  Starkey felt her panic ease; apparently, no one was complaining to Internal Affairs.

  Kelso spread his hands.

  “So? Would you care to give me a preview?”

  Starkey told him about Claudius, explaining that Tennant had learned about Mr. Red there, and that she felt it was a possible source of information.

  Kelso listened, somewhat mollified.

  “Well, that’s something, I guess. At least it looks like we’re doing something.”

  “We are doing something, Barry.”

  Even with nothing to drink, he made her head throb.

  Starkey was still shaking when she left CCS, hoping to reach Chen before he left for court. She did, catching him coming down the stairs with a sport coat draped over his arm. He wasn’t happy to see her.

  “I told you I had court, and you said you’d be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Just get me squared away, then you can leave me to it.”

  She preferred being alone when she worked. It would be easier to concentrate if Chen wasn’t watching over her shoulder, being male and offering his help.

  Chen grumped about it, but turned and two-stepped the stairs, bringing her back along the hall and into the lab. Two techs were eating sandwiches between plastic bags containing what appeared to be human body parts. The smell of preservative was strong.

  Chen said, “They sent two devices, Starkey. It isn’t just the library device like you said.”

  That surprised her.

  “All I expected was the library device.”

  “We got that, but we also got the frag from a detonation they had down there. The reports say they’re pretty much the same design, only one was really a bomb and the other wasn’t.”

  Starkey recalled what Pell had told her about a sweatshop bombing, which was described in one of the seven reports he had provided. She had already read the Dade County report on that device and thought that having it might prove useful.

  Chen led her to a corner of the lab where two white boxes rested on the black lab table. Both boxes had been opened.

  Chen said, “Everything’s bagged, tagged, and logged. You’ve gotta sign here, then the ATF says you’re clear to do whatever you want, up to and including destructive testing.”

  Destructive testing was sometimes necessary to separate components or obtain samples. Starkey didn’t anticipate having to do that and would refer to those results that the Miami authorities had found.

  Starkey signed four federal evidence forms where Chen indicated, then gave them back to him.

  “Okay. Can I work here at your table?”

  “Just try not to make a mess. I know where everything is, so put it back in its proper place. I hate when people move things.”

  “I won’t move anything.”

  “You want me to tell Russ Daigle you’re up here? He’ll probably want to see this.”

  “I’d rather work the bomb by myself, John. I’ll get him when I’m done.”

  When Chen was finally gone, Starkey took a breath, closed her eyes, and felt the tension melting away with the glacial slowness of ice becoming water. This was the part of the job that she loved, and had always loved. This was her secret. When she touched the bomb, when she had its pieces in her hands, when they pressed into the flesh of her fingers and palms, she was part of it. It had been that way since her first training exercise at the Redstone Arsenal Bomb School. The bomb was a puzzle. She became a piece in a larger whole that she was able to see in ways that others couldn’t. Maybe Dana was right. For the first time in three years, she was alone with a bomb, and she felt at rest.

  Starkey pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves.

  The ATF had sent both devices along with their respective reports, one each from the Dade County Bomb Squad and the ATF’s National Laboratory Center in Rockville, Maryland. Starkey put the reports aside. She wanted to come at the material with a fresh eye and draw her own conclusions. She would read their reports later to compare the conclusions of the bomb techs in Maryland and Miami with her own.

  The exploded device was the usual scorched and twisted frag, the fragments in twenty-eight Ziploc bag, each bag labeled with a case number, an evidence number, and description.

  #3B12:104/galvanized pipe

  #3B12:028/detonator end plug

  #3B12:062-081/assorted pipe

  Starkey glanced at the contents of each without opening the bags because she saw no need; her interest was in the intact device. The largest fragment was a twisted, four-inch piece of pipe that flattened into a perfect rectangle, its edges as perfect as if they had been cut with a machinist’s tool. Explosions could do that, changing the shape of things in unexpected and surprising ways, ways that often made no sense because every distortion was not only the result of the explosive, but was also predicted by the inner stresses of the material being changed.

  She returned the bags to their box, pushed that box aside. The second box contained the disassembled parts of the device that had been recovered from the library. She laid these bags out on the bench, organizing them by components. One bag contained the siren that had sounded to draw attention, another the timer, another the siren’s battery pack. The siren had been crushed and two of three AA batteries ruptured when Dade County de-armed the device with its water cannon. Starkey thought she would not have recognized the siren if the bag hadn’t been labeled.

  When the bomb components were laid out, Starkey opened the bags.

  The two galvanized pipe cylinders had been blown open like blooming flowers, but were otherwise intact. The duct tape that had joined the pipes had been scissored, but was still in place. The scent of the glue that Dade County had used in their attempt to bring up fingerprints still clung to the metal. Starkey knew that the Dade County forensics team would have expected to find print fragments, even though they might not have belonged to Mr. Red. Salespeople, store clerks, the person who rang up the sale. But nothing had been found. Mr. Red had cleaned the components, leaving nothing to chance.

  Starkey assembled the pieces with little effort. Some of the pieces would no longer fit together because they were misshapen by the de-armer, but Starkey had everything close enough. Outwardly, the only difference between this device and the one that had killed Charlie Riggio was the addition of the timer. Red had placed the device, then, when he was ready, pressed the switch to start the countdown. She guessed by the looks of it that the timer was probably good for an hour, counting down from sixty minutes. The police report, if it was thorough, would have constructed a timeline built from witness reports to try to establish how long between the time Red was last seen near the table and the siren going off. This didn’t interest Starkey
.

  She placed her hands on the components, feeling the substance of them. The gloves hid much of the texture, but she kept them on. These were the same pieces of metal and wire and tape that Mr. Red had touched. He had acquired the raw components, cut them, shaped them, and fitted them together. The heat of his body had warmed them. His breath had settled over them like smoke. Oils from his skin stained them with unseeable shadows. Starkey knew that you could learn much about a person by the way they kept their car and their home, by the way they ordered the events of their life or covered canvas with paint. The bomb was a reflection of the person who built it, as individual as their face or their fingerprints. Starkey saw more than pipe and wire; she saw the loops, arches, and whorl patterns of his personality.

  Mr. Red was proud of his work to the point of arrogance. He was meticulous, even obsessive. His person would be neat, as would his home. He would be short-tempered and impatient, though he might hide these things from other people, often by pretending to be someone else. He would be a coward. He would only let out his rage through the perfect devices that he constructed. He would see the devices as himself, as the self he wished to be—powerful, unstoppable. He was a creature of habit because the structure of it gave him comfort.

  Starkey examined the wiring, noting that where the wires were joined, each had been connected with a bullet connector of a type available in any hobby store. The connector sleeves were red. The wires were red. He wanted people to see him. He wanted people to know. He was desperate for the attention.

  Starkey put the bullet connectors under a magnifying glass and used tweezers to remove the clips. She found that the wire was looped around the connector three times in a counterclockwise direction. Every wire. No bullet connectors from Riggio’s bomb had been found, so she had nothing to compare it with. She shook her head at Mr. Red’s precision. Every wire, three times, counterclockwise. The structure gave him comfort.

  Starkey examined the threads cut into the pipe ends and the white plastic plumber’s tape that had been peeled away. Starkey hadn’t removed the tape from Riggio’s bomb because she hadn’t thought it necessary, but now she realized that this was a mistake. The plumber’s tape was a completely unneccessary part of the bomb, and therefore potentially the most revealing. It occurred to Starkey that if Mr. Red liked to write messages, he might write them on the tape, which had started out as a clean white surface.

  She examined the tape fragments that the ATF people had stripped, but found nothing. The tape, designed to be crushed to make the pipe joint airtight, had been shredded when it was removed. Even if something had been written there, she couldn’t have found it.

  Deciding to examine the tape from the remaining joints, Starkey brought the pipes to a vise at the end of Chen’s bench. She fit rubber pads on the vise jaws so that the pipe wouldn’t be marred, then used a special wrench with a rubber mouth to unscrew the end cap. It wasn’t particularly tight and didn’t take much effort.

  The plumber’s tape was cut deep into the threads. She brought the magnifying glass over and, using a needle as a probe, worked around the root of the threads until she found the end of the tape. Working this close made her eyes hurt. Starkey leaned away, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. She noticed the black tech smiling at her, gesturing with her own reading glasses. Starkey laughed. That would come soon enough.

  Starkey worked the tape for almost twenty minutes before she got it free. She found no writing or marks of any kind. She switched the pipes in the vise, then went to work on the second tape. This one didn’t take as long. Ten minutes later, Starkey was unpeeling the tape when she realized that both joints had been wrapped the same way. Mr. Red had pressed the tape onto the top of the pipe, then wrapped away from himself, winding the tape over and down and around before bringing it under the pipe and back up again. Clockwise. Just as he had wound the wire to the bullet clips the same way every time, he had wrapped the plumber’s tape to the threads the same way every time. Starkey wondered why.

  Starkey’s eyes were killing her, and the beginnings of a headache pulsed behind her forehead. She peeled off the gloves, got a cigarette, and went out to the parking lot. She leaned against one of the blue Bomb Squad Suburbans, smoking. She stared at the red brick garages at the back of the facility where bomb techs practiced aiming and firing the de-armer. She remembered the first time she had fired the de-armer, which was nothing more than a twelve-gauge water cannon. The noise had scared the hell out of her.

  Mr. Red thought about his bombs and built them carefully. She suspected that he had a reason for wrapping the tape clockwise around the pipe threads. It bothered her that she didn’t see it. If he saw a reason that she couldn’t see, it meant he was better than her, and Starkey could not accept that. She flicked away her cigarette, pretended to hold the pipe and wrap it. She closed her eyes and pretended to screw on the end cap. When she opened her eyes, two uniformed officers heading out to their cars were laughing at her. Starkey flipped them off. The third time she assembled her imaginary pipe, she saw the reason. He wrapped the tape clockwise so that when he screwed on the end cap—also clockwise—the tape would not unwind and bunch. If everything went clockwise, the cap would screw on more easily. It was a small thing, but Starkey felt a jolt of fierce pride like nothing she had known in a long time. She was beginning to see how his mind worked, and that meant she could beat him.

  Starkey went back inside, wanting to check the taping on the sweatshop bomb, but found only a fragment of an end cap. There would be a sample of joint tape in the threads, but not enough to tell her the direction of the winding. She went downstairs to the Bomb Squad, looking for Russ Daigle. He was in the sergeants’ bay, eating a liverwurst sandwich. He smiled when he saw her.

  “Hey, Starkey. What are you doing here?”

  “Upstairs with Chen. Listen, we got an end cap off Riggio’s bomb, right?”

  He took down his feet and swallowed as he nodded.

  “Yep. Got one intact and a piece of another. I showed you the joint tape, remember?”

  “You mind if I take apart the one that’s intact?”

  “You mean you want to unscrew it?”

  “Yeah. I want to look at the tape.”

  “You can do whatever you want with it, but that’s going to be hard.”

  He brought her out to his workbench where the pieces of the Silver Lake bomb were locked in a cabinet. Once Chen had released them, they were Daigle’s to use in the reconstruction.

  “See here? The pipe is still mated to the cap, but they bulged from the pressure so you can’t unscrew them.”

  Starkey saw what he meant and felt her hopes sag. The pipe wasn’t round; it had been distorted by gas pressure into the shape of an egg. There was no way to unscrew it.

  “Can I take it upstairs and play with it?”

  Daigle shrugged.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Starkey brought the cap upstairs, fit it into the vise, then used a high-speed saw to cut it in half. She used a steel pick to pry the inner pipe halves away from the outer cap halves, then fitted the two pipe halves together again in the vise. Daigle would probably be irritated because she had cut the cap, but she couldn’t think of another way to reach the tape.

  It took Starkey almost forty minutes to find the end of the tape, working with one eye on the clock and a growing frustration. Later, she realized that it took so long because she thought it would be wrapped overhand like the tape on the Miami device. It wasn’t. The tape on this joint had been wrapped underhand.

  Counterclockwise, not clockwise.

  Starkey stepped away from the bench.

  “Jesus.”

  She flipped through the report that had been sent from Rockville and found that it had been written by a criminalist named Janice Brockwell. She checked the time again. Three hours later in D.C. meant that everyone back there should have returned from lunch, but not yet left for the day. Starkey searched through the lab until she found a phone,
called the ATF’s National Laboratory, and asked for Brockwell.

  When Janice Brockwell came on, Starkey identified herself and gave the case number of the Miami hoax device.

  “Oh, yeah, I just sent that out to you.”

  “That’s right. I have it here now.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Are you familiar with the first seven devices?”

  “The Mr. Red bombs?”

  “That’s right. I read those reports, but don’t remember seeing anything about the tape on the pipe joints.”

  Starkey explained what she had found on the library device.

  “You were able to unwrap the tape?”

  Starkey could hear the stiffness in Brockwell’s voice. She felt that Starkey was criticizing her.

  “I unscrewed one of the end caps, and the tape darn near unwrapped itself. That got me to thinking about it, so I worked the other loose. Then I started wondering about the caps on the other bombs.”

  Starkey waited, hoping her lie would soften the sting.

  The defensiveness in Brockwell’s voice eased.

  “That’s a pretty cool notion, Starkey. I don’t think we paid attention to the tape.”

  “Could you do me a favor and check the others? I want to know if they match.”

  “You say they’re clockwise, right?”

  “Yeah. Both windings were clockwise. I want to see if the others match.”

  “I don’t know how many intact end caps we have.”

  Starkey didn’t say anything. She let Brockwell work it through.

  “Tell you what, Starkey. Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you, okay?”

  Starkey gave Brockwell her number, then returned the bomb components to their boxes and locked them beneath Chen’s bench.

  Starkey arrived back at Spring Street with ten minutes to spare. She was harried by the rush to get back, so she stopped on the stairs, smoking half a cigarette to give herself a chance to calm down. When she had herself composed, she went up and found Marzik and Hooker in the squad room. Marzik arched her eyebrows.

  “We thought you were blowing off the meeting.”