Unsolved

by James Patterson

  “How about the presence of more than a hundred homeless people above the store? Nothing in our profile indicates he wants to kill anyone, much less people who are poor and sick.”

  She shrugs. “He overestimated the power of his blast. He wanted to blow out a couple of windows and rearrange some furniture inside the payday store, but he used too much charge.”

  “For the first time ever.”

  “Well, he’s blown up only three buildings previously. The track record’s not that long.”

  “But why this payday-loan store? There are hundreds in the Chicago area alone. Why one sitting under a hotel for vagrants?”

  “You mean, why not one in Manhattan, like you predicted?”

  Who the heck is this woman, and is she here for any other reason than to bust my chops? “We don’t know anything yet,” I say to Dwight. “You want me to hit the CCTV cameras, I take it?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll pull up everything we can on that building and the payday store.”

  He nods, his eyes bloodshot and sunken.

  “Social media too,” I say.

  “Yes. We’ll have a command meeting soon, this morning.”

  I leave the room, walk down the hallway, and hit the button for the elevator, all the while thinking through all the different possibilities here, what this could mean—

  “Dockery,” says Dwight Ross. He’s standing not far away. I didn’t even hear him follow me.

  “Yes, boss.”

  He steps toward me. “You remember when I told you this was your last chance?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “The bullshit political statements about corporate America oppressing the poor and downtrodden—you can forget all that. Citizen David is no hero. Now he’s a mass murderer.”

  His anger is plain to see, but he is more than mad. He is shaken. Citizen David is his case, in the end, and the stakes just went up considerably. While he was flailing about trying to nab this anonymous crusader, hundreds of people died.

  “If it was David,” I say. “I don’t think it was.”

  “Because if it was, then you were wrong about Manhattan. And we can’t have that, right, Dockery?”

  I start to respond, but Dwight raises a hand. “It was David,” he says. “I don’t need distractions. I don’t need my lead data analyst spending her time trying to prove she wasn’t wrong. I need her full attention focused on catching this asshole.” He drills a finger into my chest. “So catch him, and do it fast.”

  He pivots and walks away.

  “I’ll catch him, boss,” I say. “But I have one request.”

  42

  WHEN I return to my team, Pully and Rabbit are reviewing CCTV footage and calling out to each other over the cubicle dividers.

  I look at Rabbit. Behind her, on her desk, are framed photographs of her two boys—Mason, in cap and gown, the social worker in Tampa, and Jordan, who now works at a Starbucks by the Yale campus and writes poetry and who had gone to Yale but dropped out in protest because the school didn’t accept enough minority students. Rabbit’s a peace-love-and-harmony hippie who raised her two boys to be much the same way.

  “I’m flying to Chicago,” I say. “I’ll stay in touch on the jet.”

  “Good.” She sniffs. Her eyes are red; her face is streaked with tears.

  “You okay, Rabbit?”

  Bonita nods but doesn’t look up. “This feels like Kaczynski all over again,” she says. The Unabomber, she means. She worked on that investigation when she was a young data analyst in the nineties.

  “We caught Kaczynski,” I say. “And we’ll catch this guy.”

  She shakes her head, wipes at her cheek. “We caught the Unabomber after he published that manifesto in the Times, and his brother and sister-in-law recognized his rants,” she says. “Otherwise, we never would’ve caught him.” She looks up at me. “Nobody likes to admit that. But we never would’ve caught him.”

  “Hey,” I say. “We have different tools now—”

  “This guy killed homeless people,” she says, her voice breaking. “Poor people who wanted nothing but a safe, warm, dry place to sleep.”

  This is hard for all of us, but especially Rabbit. She volunteers several times a month at a soup kitchen. She’s raised money for homeless shelters. She’s on a board that advocates for the rights of the mentally ill, many of whom are homeless. This is about the worst possible crime she can imagine.

  I walk around to her cubicle and put my hand on her shoulder. “Bonita, we are going to catch this person. I promise you. Okay? I promise that. And I need your help. I can’t do it without you.”

  “I know.” She breathes in, nods. “I’m here. I’m okay.”

  I look into Pully’s cubicle. “No word online from David?”

  “Nope. Nothing.” He throws up his hand. “Nothing. I don’t get it. If someone copycatted him and killed a bunch of people while doing it, you’d think David would rush to distance himself from it, right? Deny it. Condemn it. Something.”

  He’s right. It doesn’t make sense. If Citizen David wasn’t the one who did this, where is the outrage from him?

  “I’m off,” I say. “Keep in close touch with updates. Anything at all. Both of you.”

  I head outside to the car that’s waiting to take me to the jet. As I get into the back seat, I see a pair of crossed legs.

  “You’re late,” says Elizabeth Ashland, her carry-on bag at her feet. “And don’t look so excited to see me.”

  43

  AN FBI town car drives Elizabeth Ashland and me from O’Hare to the scene of the bombing on Chicago’s northwest side. A two-block perimeter has been set up. The air is black, and even inside the town car, we can smell a sickening chemical odor, a toxic barbecue. I close my eyes at the thought of what was barbecued.

  “Confirmed it was TATP,” says Ashland, putting down her phone. She looks at me with eyebrows raised.

  Triacetone triperoxide—TATP—is the explosive of choice of ISIS in Europe, because it doesn’t contain nitrogen and can pass through explosive-detection scanners. But nobody thinks this was the work of ISIS.

  She’s saying this was Citizen David, who has also used TATP.

  “Doesn’t make it David,” I say. “All you need is access to a Home Depot and a beauty salon.”

  “David’s use of TATP was never leaked to the press,” she responds. “We’ve kept a lid on those details. So it’s just a coincidence?”

  For someone who wasn’t working on Citizen David until this morning, she sure is a quick study. Or was she on the case earlier, and I didn’t know?

  “It wouldn’t be hard to guess,” I say. “And it wouldn’t be hard to copy.”

  We get out of the car, and I find myself holding my breath. I can see the bomb site under plumes of smoke. It’s still smoldering. Rescue trucks line the street, leaving a path down the center for rescue workers to haul away bodies and then return and search for more. The FBI has taken over the investigation, but it looks like a multijurisdictional effort, Chicago PD and Cook County Sheriff, firefighters and Illinois State Police.

  Storm clouds darken the sky. That’s not a good development. Rain might cool off the bomb site, but it will hamper investigatory efforts.

  “Assistant Director Ashland?” A man approaches; he’s wearing a heavy fire coat, goggles, and a white mask that covers all of his face save his eyes. “I’m George Wilson, assistant special agent in charge. We met once at Quantico.”

  “Sure, Agent.” She shakes his hand and introduces me. He nods like he recognizes my name.

  “Put these on,” he says, handing the two of us coats, masks, goggles, and booties. We do.

  “I want you to come see something,” he says. We follow him through the barricades. He talks as we walk, shouting so we can hear him through the mask and over the din of the workers. “I don’t know what you know or don’t know. It’s been pretty chaotic.”

  “Start at the beginning,” shou
ts Ashland.

  There is a sense of urgency among those searching through the rubble for bodies and for anyone who might somehow have survived. Workers in heavy fire coats and boots and gas masks scurry over scorched brick like ants on a picnic basket, calling out to one another, furiously pulling away debris.

  It’s a mass grave in which dozens if not a hundred bodies are still buried.

  “Gas line was busted in a room on the south side of the payday-loan store,” he says.

  “Sabotage?” asks Ashland.

  “Can’t be sure, but presumably, yeah. Otherwise it’s a helluva coincidence.”

  “Okay, what else?” she shouts.

  “He had a tray of TATP on a timer. It went off at three sharp this morning.”

  “A tray?” Ashland asks. Something sinks inside me.

  “Some kind of tray, like you’d serve food on, put a burner under to keep warm.”

  An aluminum catering tray. The same thing Citizen David used. Ashland turns in my direction to be sure I heard it.

  TATP—Citizen David. An aluminum tray—Citizen David. The explosives, like I told Ashland, could have been a guess. The aluminum tray? That detail was never released to the public.

  “How’d he get in?” I ask.

  “Side door, we think. Front of the place was caged up, best we can tell. And he would’ve tripped the burglar alarm if he went through the front of the store.”

  “No alarm on the side door?” Ashland asks.

  “Side door opens with a code only, and the business had been closed for hours. So he got past the code somehow. Inside, there’s no motion sensor until you get into the main offices. He didn’t go that far. He stopped at the utility room near the side door. That’s where he put down the explosives. He knew not to trip the alarm.”

  So he dropped the explosives next to a busted gas line?

  That doesn’t sound like an accident.

  We walk down Broadway Street on the east side, across from the bomb site. It’s like passing an open oven—the heat is still radiating off it over nine hours later. It is now entirely black, like burned wood in a fireplace, a twelve-story building nothing but a pile of ash and rubble.

  I feel helpless. Through a blur of tears, I watch the heroic but presumably fruitless efforts of the rescue workers, who must know how unlikely it is that anyone sleeping in that building last night is still alive.

  The sidewalk across the street is a bed of shattered glass and debris. We crunch over the glass, step carefully around pipes, an air-conditioning unit, a wooden frame that probably once held a mirror. Decay and death fill my nostrils and mouth despite the mask.

  “You said it was on a timer?” Ashland asks the agent, then she looks at me. And, yes, I know, David did the same thing.

  “That’s what I wanted to show you,” says Agent Wilson.

  We walk in silence through the debris on the sidewalk, passing a rescue worker who’s sitting on the curb and pouring a bottle of water over his hair, streaking the dirt and ash on his face.

  Agent Wilson stops. “Here,” he says. “I wanted you to see this.”

  He steps into the street and we follow, my head swimming, my mind trying to focus on the facts amid the horror and chaos.

  David used TATP. David used an aluminum tray. David used a timer.

  None of that was disclosed to the public. But none of that is particularly novel. There is only one thing about David that is so unique as to be his unequivocal signature.

  “We found the timer,” calls out Agent Wilson.

  He stops about thirty yards from the blast. A small metal barrier frames a spot on the street, a heavy top over it, an evidence flag waving there.

  He removes the top, reaches down, and holds up a wristwatch with a portion of a wire hanging out of it.

  It’s a child’s wristwatch with a red band, its face bearing the image of Garfield the comic-strip cat.

  “That mean anything to you guys?” Wilson asks.

  It certainly does. It’s the same timer Citizen David always uses.

  44

  ONE BLOCK northwest of the bomb site, the FBI has taken over the vacant ground floor of a commercial three-flat to use as its command center. Better than driving downtown to the Bureau’s Chicago field office. We have to stay close to the crime scene.

  Elizabeth Ashland and I have removed our protective gear and we’re walking with our heads down as we pass an endless gaggle of reporters, local and national, all shouting out to us for comment. One of them recognizes me and calls me by name, which doesn’t seem to sit well with Ashland, my superior.

  We cross the press barricade and walk into our makeshift headquarters, brown brick with a purple awning and a dingy storefront window, formerly a bakery. Ashland lets out an audible sigh, takes down her hair, and runs her fingers through it. It’s blond, although it doesn’t look it anymore, not today. Most of her face, like mine, was protected by the mask and goggles, but her hair and the exposed parts of her face—her forehead, the tops of her cheeks—are covered in greasy soot. She looks like some variety of raccoon, and I’m sure I do too.

  Inside the vacant store, electrical cords are everywhere; computers have been set up on card tables and on every other available flat surface. A map of Chicago is taped on the lavender wall, and there are thumbtacks on the bomb site and on the perimeter of interest. I glance at a clock on the wall, which features a painted birthday cake in the middle of it. Could it really be six o’clock at night? It doesn’t seem possible.

  In one corner, some chairs have been set up, and a number of people are gathered there, most of them law enforcement but some civilians too. Wilson, the assistant special agent in charge for Chicago, locks eyes with us and waves us over.

  “Okay, let’s start,” says Wilson. He has the same raccoon face from the soot that everyone else does. Nobody who got within a city block of that crime scene came away unscathed.

  “I’m going to introduce some folks,” he says, looking at a clipboard. He gestures to a number of people and gives their names. The payday-store owner. The store manager. The security guard. The cleaning-service crew. The armored-truck employees. The manager of the Horizon Hotel for Men.

  Everyone, to a person, looks exhausted and traumatized but also energized at being a part of something this big.

  Each employee of Cash 4U Quick tells us that nobody set off alarm bells in terms of suspicious behavior over the past week. It’s possible the bomber actually entered the store at some point during his reconnaissance, so we have to ask, but I doubt he did. He only needed to access the side door to get in and plant his bomb in the utility room, and the online architectural drawings of the building would have told him where that was. If he’s any good, he would never have set foot in that store.

  “We did the cash transfer at six, like always on Saturday,” says the security guard, Ron Sims. “I locked up a few minutes later. Didn’t notice anything funny.”

  “The door to the utility room was always locked?” asks Wilson.

  “Yeah, lock and key. I have a key. But I never went in there.”

  “You passed by that utility room, though, on your way out?”

  “Yeah, I left through the side door to the alley. The utility room was right there.”

  “You didn’t look inside the utility room Saturday night, I assume?” asks Wilson.

  He shakes his head. “No, wouldn’t have done that. But I didn’t smell gas. And if the door had been broken open, I sure would’ve noticed that.”

  We haven’t had much access to the bomb site because of the heat and because it remains a rescue situation. But what we believe was the door to the utility closet was found across the street from the payday store and half a block down, and from what can be discerned from it, it appears the lock was busted, not picked. The handle was missing altogether. Had it stayed in the wreckage, we might have thought it had just melted, but it blew clean from the site. So we’re assuming the bomber, alone in the store, busted it off to ac
cess the utility room.

  The older of the two cleaning-service people, Alice Jagoda, who has gray hair pulled into a bun, confirms in halting English that they didn’t enter the utility room either because they didn’t clean inside that room and they bring their own cleaning supplies. But like the security guard, she came and went through the side door to the alley and passed right by the utility room. “The door…not broken,” she says. “I notice if broken.” She looks at her partner, a young Latina named Acevedo, who concurs.

  When a timer is involved, as it was here, you always consider the possibility that the bomb was planted days, even weeks, in advance. But because a gas line was cut, it wouldn’t have been weeks—somebody would have smelled the gas and called the gas company—and it likely wouldn’t have been days either.

  But the fact that nobody saw a busted-open utility-room door closes the window even further. The cleaning-service women were the last ones to leave, at approximately 9:30 p.m. Saturday, and the bomb detonated at 3:00 a.m. Sunday. A five-and-a-half-hour window of opportunity for the bomber to plant the device.

  “CPD Officers…McBride, Howse, Ciomek, and Gordon,” Wilson says, reading off a clipboard. “Patrol officers assigned to this precinct on Saturday.”

  “There’s a fair amount of foot traffic up here,” says McBride, one of the two female officers. “And the car traffic—y’know, it’s Broadway, it’s a busy street. Pretty steady volume of cars all the time. But in terms of pedestrians, someone walking up and down the street, casing the place, wouldn’t stand out. And this weekend is hot. Joggers, bikers, that sort of thing. People want to be out.”

  “What about any kind of vehicle parked in that alley?” asks Elizabeth Ashland.

  Another officer, Howse, a tall African-American man with an amiable face, shrugs. “People park in alleys. We tell them to move, or we tow them, but it happens all the time. But a vehicle parked next to the payday store at night, after hours? Ten o’clock, midnight, two in the morning? It would have stuck out. We would’ve inquired.” He shrugs again. “We have a big area, and Saturday night, we get a good number of calls and incidents. However long he was parked in that alley, we probably didn’t pass by the store during that time.”