Demolition Angel

by Robert Crais

  “No, it wasn’t like that. He’s got a converted garage here in back of the place that he kept locked. That’s where he kept the goods.”

  “You find the RDX?”

  “Negative on the RDX, but we got some TNT and about twenty pounds of black powder.”

  “We’re hoping that there might be evidence that links Tennant with his source for the RDX. This has a direct bearing on the Silver Lake investigation, Mueller. If you find anything like papers, correspondence, pictures, anything that gives us a trail, I want it secured. I’ll drive up there to inspect it.”

  “Will do, but there’s more. These people in the house said they had a prowler back here about a month ago.”

  “Wait. Someone went into the shop?”

  “They didn’t see him enter or leave the building. All they saw was some guy looking around. The old man who lives up at the house called out, but the guy takes off over the fence. My wit says it looked like he was carrying something.”

  “You’re thinking the RDX?”

  “Well, if there was RDX inside, he could have taken it.”

  “You get a description?”

  “White male between forty and fifty, five ten to six feet, one-eighty, baseball cap, and sunglasses.”

  She cupped the phone to fill in Marzik and Hooker. The man in the baseball cap had them trading high fives.

  “Sergeant, we have a similar suspect from Silver Lake. If we fax our likeness up there, would you run it past those people, see what they say?”

  “You bet.”

  “Give me your fax.”

  Starkey passed the number along to Marzik, then got back to Mueller.

  “One more thing. Was there any sign of forced entry? If the guy went in, did he have to break in?”

  “I know what you meant. No. Tennant had the place locked up with a couple of heavy-duty Yale padlocks. We had to cut’m off with bolt cutters. They hadn’t been forced. So if this guy went in there and took the RDX, he had a key.”

  Starkey couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  “Mueller, I know you didn’t have to make this call. It shows class.”

  “Well, you were right, Starkey. I might be a hardhead, but I’m also a gentleman.”

  “You are. This is good work, Sergeant. This is going to help us down here.”

  Mueller laughed.

  “How about that? I guess me and you’re just about the best two cops ever to strut the earth.”

  Starkey smiled as she hung up.

  Marzik said, “Fuckin’ A! Are we detectives or what?”

  Starkey asked Hooker to see about getting them a look at the enhanced tape. She wanted to see it as quickly as possible because the similar description of the man in the baseball cap gave weight to their 911 caller as the bomber. She had a strong feeling that the man in the long-sleeved shirt would be on the tape. If Hooker was right about the three-hundred-sixty-degree view, he had to be. He had to be within the hundred-yard perimeter to detonate the bomb.

  As Hooker set it up, Starkey filled in Kelso, then paged Jack Pell. She felt a powerful urge to share the news with him, which surprised her. She left her own pager number as the return.

  The postproduction facility was a block south of Melrose, in an area saturated with Japanese tourists and used-clothing stores. Starkey and Santos drove over together where a thin young man named Miles Bennell met them in the lobby.

  Starkey said, “Thanks for making the time for us.”

  Bennell shrugged.

  “Well, you guys are trying to solve a crime. That’s probably more important than editing a toilet paper commercial.”

  “Some days it is.”

  She was thinking that she would want Lester to see the tape, too, and probably Buck Daggett. She asked Bennell if they could have a copy when they left.

  “You mean to play on a home machine?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bennell looked pained.

  “Well, I can make a copy like that, but you’re going to lose resolution. That’s why you guys had to come here to see it. Do you know anything about how we do this?”

  “I can’t even program my VCR.”

  “A TV picture is made up of little dots called pixels. When we blow up the images on the tape, they get blurry because the pixels, which contain a set amount of information, expand and the information becomes diluted. What we do is take that pixel, break it into more pixels, then use the computer to extrapolate the missing content. It’s kind of like making high-definition television in reverse.”

  “You mean the computer just colors in the space?”

  “Well, not really. The computer measures the difference in lights and darks, determines where the shadow lines are, then makes the lights lighter and the darks darker. You end up with really sharp lines and concentrated colors.”

  Starkey didn’t understand what he was saying and didn’t care. All she cared about was whether or not it worked.

  They walked along a hall past other editing bays, from which she could hear the voices of popular television series, and into a dark room with a console facing a bank of television monitors. The room smelled of daisies.

  “How much tape do we have?”

  “Eighteen minutes.”

  Starkey was surprised.

  “Out of almost six hours, we got just eighteen minutes?”

  Bennell sat at the console and pushed one of the green back-lit buttons. The center TV monitor flashed with color bars.

  “If the only people who were in the shot were the two Bomb Squad guys, we cut it. That was most of the tape. We only get to see bystanders when the cameras changed angles or the helicopters rotated out of position.”

  Starkey remembered that from when she viewed the tapes.

  “Okay. So what are we going to see?”

  “Short clips. Anytime an angle caught a view of the crowd, or the people hiding behind buildings, or things like that, we clipped them. That’s what we enhanced. We got kinda lucky with the angles, too. Jorge said you guys wanted to see pretty much the entire perimeter.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Between the different helicopters, I think we’ve got that. You’re looking for a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, right?”

  “That’s right, wearing a long-sleeved shirt.”

  Starkey put the likeness drawing on the console for Bennell to see.

  “Hey, that looks like my roommate.”

  “Your roommate been to Miami recently?”

  “Nah. He never gets out of bed.”

  Bennell continued adjusting his console.

  “We’ve got a couple guys in caps, I can tell you that. Let’s see what they look like. I can go as fast or slow as you like. We can freeze frame. When we freeze, it will appear to lose some clarity, but I can help that.”

  He pressed another button, and the tape started. There was a hyper-real quality to the image that Starkey thought made the objects in the picture look metallic. The blues were a brilliant blue; the grays almost glowed; the shadows were as sharply defined as the shadows on the moon.

  Santos said, “It looks like a Maxfield Parrish painting.”

  Bennell grinned.

  “You got it, dude. Okay, I left a few seconds lead on the camera swings to give our eyes time to keep up with the picture. See, right now there’s no one but the cop—”

  “His name is Riggio.”

  “Sorry, Officer Riggio. Now, watch, the camera is about to move.”

  The angle suddenly shifted, revealing several people clumped behind the cordon tape north of Sunset Boulevard by the Guatemalan market. Starkey recognized the landmarks she noted when she was pacing off distances. The people she was seeing were within that distance and therefore could have been the bomber.

  The technician froze the tape, then tickled a joy stick to brighten the image.

  Santos pointed at a figure.

  “Here. Man here in a cap.”

  Starkey counted eight people in th
is slice of the crowd. The image quality was still indistinct, but far crisper than the images she’d seen on her television when she was half in the bag from too many gins. The man Santos pointed out was wearing a red or brown cap with the bill forward. Lester Ybarra had described a man in a blue cap, like a Dodgers cap, but Starkey had enough experience with eyewitnesses to know that this meant little. It was easy to misremember a color. Because of the angle, it was impossible to see if the man was wearing sunglasses or a long-sleeved shirt.

  Starkey said, “Does the shot stay on these people for long?”

  Bennell checked a clipboard with his notes.

  “They’re in the frame for sixteen seconds.”

  “Let’s advance it and see what happens. I want a look at this guy’s arms if we have it.”

  Bennell showed her a large dial on the console for controlling the frame advance.

  “Here, you can advance it however fast or slow you want by twisting this dial. Clockwise is forward. You want to back up, turn it the other way.”

  Starkey turned it too much on her first try, making the tape blur forward. The technician brought it back and let her have the knob again. The second time went better. Twelve seconds into the shot, the man in the hat turned to look at the man behind him and could be seen wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

  They worked back and forth through the tape for almost an hour, isolating on everyone within the perimeter. Finally, Santos had to pee. Starkey called a cigarette break and was standing in the parking lot, smoking, when her pager buzzed. She felt a jolt of excitement when she saw that it was Pell. Santos stuck his head out the door.

  “We’re ready to go, Carol.”

  “Be there in a minute.”

  She called Pell from the front seat of her car and told him what Mueller had found in Tennant’s shop. When she was done with that, there was a silence on the phone until she said, “Pell, listen, you got the pizza last time. I’ll take care of dinner tonight.”

  She thought that he was going to say no or bring up what she’d said last night, but there was only a silence for a time that grew until he finally broke it.

  “What time you want me over there?”

  “How about seven?”

  When they ended the call, Starkey asked herself what in hell was she doing. She hadn’t intended to bring up dinner or get together with Pell or any of that; that she said those things had surprised her as much as they had probably surprised Pell.

  Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to the editing bay. Watching the eighteen minutes of enhanced tape took almost two hours. As they worked through the clips, Starkey charted the remaining perimeter landmarks, and, by the time they finished, was satisfied that they had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the scene, and a fairly complete picture of everyone within the maximum range of the radio transmitter.

  But she was also disappointed because the man in the baseball cap was not to be found.

  They finished on a wide shot that showed most of the area. Riggio was over the bomb in the instant before the detonation. Buck Daggett was by the Suburban. The parking lot looked wide and emtpy. Starkey crossed her arms and considered that this particular search had come to nothing.

  Santos looked crestfallen.

  “I was sure he would be here. He had to be.”

  “He is, Jorge. Somewhere. If he took off his cap and rolled up his sleeves, he could be any of these people, and we wouldn’t know it, but he has to be here somewhere.”

  Bennell seemed as disappointed as Santos. With all his work enhancing the film, he wanted to be a part of cracking the case.

  “He could be on the other side of any of these buildings. He could be sitting on the sidewalk behind one of these cars, and we’d never see him.”

  Starkey shrugged, but she knew that wasn’t likely. The representative from the radio-control manufacturer had said that the transmitter had to “see” the receiver, which meant that it had to have a clear line of sight.

  Bennell said, “Do you still want a copy of the tape?”

  “That would be good. Maybe I’ll look at it again later.”

  “It won’t be as sharp on your home machine.”

  “Right now, the sharpness isn’t helping much.”

  Bennell made a copy for each of them.

  Starkey and Santos drove back to Spring Street in silence, the enthusiasm of only three hours ago diminished, but not gone. Mr. Red had to be somewhere. The only question was … where?

  Starkey’s Mirror

  John Michael Fowles was liking the Beverly Hills Library just fine except for the Arabs. It didn’t matter if they called themselves Arabs, Iranians, Persians (which was just another name for the goddamned Iranians), Iraqis, Saudis, sand niggers, dune coons, shade spades, or Kuwaitis; a raghead was a raghead. John hated the goddamned camel jockeys because they had such an easy time getting on the Ten Most Wanted List. You take an Arab, he farts sideways, and the feds put him on the list. A real American like John had to bust his ass to get there. Beverly Hills was crawling with Arabs.

  John closed his eyes and meditated, trying to manage the stress. He pretended that the Arabs weren’t swarming through the stacks like Guccied locusts. It wasn’t easy being the world’s most dangerous man walking free in open sunlight. You had to cope.

  John knew where to find the remains of the RDX now and would soon recover it, though that would keep for a day or two. Tennant had been helpful that way, the creepy doof. John hated the socially disgusting, fingerless misfits like Dallas Tennant who inhabited his world. They gave the serious explosives hobbyist a bad name.

  After John had learned what he needed to know about the RDX, he had enjoyed hearing about Carol Starkey. Tennant described her as a tough cookie, which John liked a lot. Tennant talked about her so much that John found himself asking questions, and even looking in Tennant’s book just to see the articles on Starkey. After he had finished with Tennant, John had driven back to Los Angeles and here to the library. He spent several hours reading old newspaper stories about Starkey, searching for pictures of her, wondering if she was as good a bomb technician as the stories portrayed.

  Tough break, that earthquake.

  John had laughed aloud when he’d read that, causing a couple of Iranians to look. Man, John had thought, if there is a God, He is one mean-spirited sonofabitch.

  A goddamned earthquake.

  Only in California.

  John was fascinated that Starkey had actually been killed by a bomb and had then returned from death. He marveled at the experience, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. To have been so close to the blast, to have been washed by the energy, to feel it press over the totality of her body like some insane kiss, to be lifted and caressed that way.

  He thought that he and Carol Starkey might be soul mates.

  When he left the library, John returned to his room at the Bel Air Hotel, a lovely romantic bungalow renting for eight hundred dollars per night, thanks to his latest American Express Gold card and false identity. He signed on to Claudius. The past few days he had noticed an increased number of posts about himself, and about RDX. Several of the posters were even spreading the same rumor that Jester had said, that Mr. Red was behind Silver Lake. John didn’t like that. Now that John knew Tennant had told Starkey and Pell about Claudius, he realized what was happening: Starkey thought that he had killed Riggio and was baiting him. She had fallen for the copycat’s ploy. John was both annoyed and elated. He enjoyed the idea of Starkey thinking about him, of her trying to catch him.

  John read through the new posts and found that they were no longer only about him. Many were about Starkey, some saying that the former bomb tech and poster girl of the bomb crank crowd was now in charge of the investigation. It was like she had her own cheering section.

  John scrolled through the thread of posts until he came to the last one:

  Subject: Showdown

  From: KIA

  Message-id: >136781.87@lippr<

 
; They caught the Unabomber. They caught Hicks, and McVey, and the rest. If anyone can take Red down, it’s Starkey. I heard he already tried to get her, and missed.

  Ha. You only get one shot.

  Good-bye, Mr. Red.

  John wondered what Kia had heard that made him think Mr. Red had tried to kill Starkey. Did these people shit rumors when they woke in the morning? John snapped off his computer and sulked. These people were out of their friggin’ minds. Starkey was becoming the star and he was becoming … the other guy.

  After he calmed down, John rebooted the iBook and dialed on to his site in Minnesota. When he had the software he wanted, he hacked into the local telephone company and downloaded Carol Starkey’s address.

  The bathroom window was louvered glass, dark green and pebbled, one of those narrow windows from the floor to the ceiling that you opened to let out the steam from your bath. It had probably been in the house since the fifties. He used a shim to slip the latches on the screen, set it aside, then worked out the first piece of glass. The first was the hardest; he anchored the pane with a loose strip of electrician’s tape so it wouldn’t fall, then worked it free using a screwdriver and his fingertips. When the first was out, he reached inside, groped around until he found the lever, then opened the window. After that, the other panes came easily.

  John Michael Fowles took out enough of the panes to make an opening about two feet high, then stepped through the window and was inside Carol Starkey’s home.

  He took a breath. He could smell her. Soap and cigarettes. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy the feeling of being here in her personal place. Here he was in her house, her home. Here he was, smelling her smells, breathing the air she breathed; it was like being inside her.

  First thing John did was take a fast pass through the house, making sure there were no dogs, no guests, nothing that he hadn’t foreseen. The air conditioner running made him edgy; he wouldn’t be able to hear a car pull in, or hear a key slipping into a lock. He would have to hurry.

  John unlocked the back door in case he had to leave fast, then returned to the bathroom. He pulled the screen back into place, latched it, then replaced the panes. That done, he gave himself a longer moment; he took a deeper breath. The bathroom counter was a clutter of jars and bottles: Alba Botanica lotion, cotton puffs in a glass jar, soap balls, a basket of dusty pinecones, a blue box of Tampax Super Plus, an LAPD coffee mug holding a toothbrush and a wilted tube of Crest. The mirror above the lavatory was spotted and streaked; the grout between the tile dark with fungus. Carol Starkey, John thought, had not paid attention in Home Ec. He found this disappointing.