Conard County Revenge

by Rachel Lee

“Who made you my mother?” she asked, half-jokingly.

  “Me.” He smiled and for an instant, just an instant, she felt as if there were no air left in the room. Wow.

  “I need to go back to my room to clean up and change.”

  “Okay. I’ll make that sandwich. See you out at the school.”

  She rose and left and wondered why she felt as if she were fleeing. And if so, from what? An attraction to the man?

  It hardly mattered. This would get wrapped up one way or the other and she’d be gone.

  * * *

  Boy, she’d taken off as if someone had lit a fire under her tail. With a private smile, Alex set about cleaning up from breakfast and making her the bacon sandwich he’d promised. Two, he decided, because he’d watched her work through lunch more than once.

  He knew she’d been considering the possibility that the bomb was a trial run, but had put the thought aside without evidence to confirm it. All very proper.

  And maybe he’d been wrong to share his suspicions with her. After all, he had nothing to go on, not really, except that when he thought about it he couldn’t begin to imagine what the bomber had hoped to achieve.

  That was all he needed to get his own mind into overdrive. He was used to considering cases from this angle, from little hints and clues. He didn’t know how it worked for her, but he knew how he operated, and his mind wouldn’t let him overlook what might appear irrelevant to others. He’d too often seen those seeming irrelevancies turn into something important.

  Ah, hell.

  He cleaned himself up for another day of poking into places he really didn’t need to go, places where he might not be especially welcome for all he knew. He had no credentials, no authority. He’d chosen to be a small-town shop teacher. He supposed he ought to be honored that Darcy hadn’t simply told him to butt out.

  She’d have had every right to. In fact, the first day, when she learned what he used to do, he could almost have sworn that she’d have loved to tell him to get out of her way.

  But she hadn’t. Whatever instinctive reaction she’d felt had been swiftly overcome and she’d made him a sort of sidekick. Even so, given his past, he should have known better than to stir his own emotional pot.

  Now he was in it up to his eyeballs—he’d ventured an “authoritative” statement he knew she wouldn’t ignore, and he couldn’t back out now.

  Although he wasn’t a quitter by nature. The only reason things had turned so bad in his personal life was because he didn’t know how to quit. Well, this was different, he assured himself. No little girls. No torture, no rape. Just a serial bomber who so far hadn’t hurt a human being.

  He ought to be able to deal with that and help. Why else had he stuck his neck out?

  He’d started with an urge to protect his students from needless suspicion, but it had grown past that. Suspecting that this bomber would strike again made it about much more than protecting his students from the relentless eye of a federal agent.

  Because sooner or later, a life would be struck by this madman. He wasn’t just about blowing up walls. Alex knew that with sickening certainty in his gut.

  * * *

  It was drizzling—a light rain. Cops in yellow slickers stood around the building with an eye for anyone who approached. Darcy stood at the edge of the cordon, staring straight into the maw the bomb had opened in the building.

  Carrying two coffees, Alex joined her. She hardly looked at him, but she already had a tall coffee in her hand.

  “You ready for a hot and fresh latte?”

  She turned and looked at him almost blankly. Then she looked at the cup in her hand. “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  She tipped her cup to her mouth, then grimaced. “Cold. Thanks for the fresh.” She pulled the lid off the cup she held, dumping mere dregs on the ground before accepting a fresh cup from him. “I was just wondering how long I’ve been standing here.”

  “I couldn’t tell you that. I thought I’d be right behind you but if your coffee’s cold...”

  She nodded, her gaze returning to the hole in the school building. “I texted my bosses.”

  “And?”

  “I shared my suspicion—our suspicion—that this was a test run.”

  “Okay.” He waited while she sipped coffee. Her slicker gleamed. She must have been standing here awhile, given the drizzle wasn’t that heavy.

  “They’re checking the samples I sent them, the fuel oil soaked into the ground was standard diesel fuel, and if I get any proof that this guy will move again, let them know. They’re swamped, Alex. It’s been a great couple of months for militia problems, gunrunning and bombers, I guess. Some terrorist activity. I was working on that, you know.”

  “So this is a step down.”

  Her gaze trailed back to him again. “No. I may have thought so at first, but I’m not buying it now. You don’t have to be a terrorist, or even a terrorist ring, to be dangerous.”

  “No.” He sipped his own coffee, then remarked, “If you ask me, anyone who sets off bombs qualifies as a terrorist.”

  “Maybe. I guess folks around here are worried.”

  “You know it. How could they not be? Bombs don’t exactly happen every day, and parents are especially worried that the school was a target.”

  “I would be, too.”

  He joined her in her study of the blast site. “What are you seeing?”

  “That nothing is right.”

  That statement intrigued him more than anything she could have said about it. The profiler in him came to attention. “How so?”

  “There are easier ways to make a hole in a wall. Unfortunately those ways are easier to trace. Have you ever tried to buy a stick of dynamite?”

  “Not lately,” he answered drily, grateful he had the coffee to drink. It was getting cold out here.

  “Exactly. Which brings me around to the choice of ANFO. Lots of bang for the buck, as they say, but so fussy to make. Anyway, detonators, dynamite, blasting caps...everything you buy gets recorded. You’re limited in what you can buy and how much without a special permit, unless you have a hookup on the black market, and a lot of that is traceable back to military sources. But ANFO is virtually untraceable. Possible to make with items you’d find on almost any farm in the country.”

  He was sure they’d covered this. Where was she going? He sipped more coffee and kept silent, waiting, certain she must be working through something. After all, he’d run around the same Maypole dozens of times last night.

  “I’m looking at that hole and thinking nothing went right for this guy. Yeah, he got his explosion but he really didn’t get much else. Like you said, unless all he wants to do is blow down walls, it’s a failure.”

  She raised her cup to her lips, drank deeply and continued to stare at the hole in the wall. As if it were speaking to her.

  Maybe it was speaking, he thought as he stared at it, too. After all, it had his mind running down an avenue that said there would be more.

  “A learning experience,” he remarked.

  “So I fear. And I keep thinking about his choice of target. The school is isolated enough to make it easy to set up his bomb. Easier than in town. But the structure...”

  She faced him. “I’m getting out of my bailiwick here, but I think he wanted to know what the impact would be on exactly that kind of wall. Problem is, millions of buildings have the same kind of construction. Probably dozens or more even around here. Cheap modern construction basically. Sturdy, durable, but cheaper than wood framing and drywall.”

  “You’re right. I know something about that.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “It’s not just materials, it’s labor. It’s maintenance later. You don’t usually have to patch cinder block walls because someone bumped into them, for example. That’s the reas
on you see it in so many institutional buildings.”

  “So...” She drew the word out. “Is he after an institutional building?”

  The question went a few steps too far, and she knew it. He could tell it by the way she sighed, sipped her coffee and resumed.

  “Anyway, Alex, I don’t like what I’m seeing. I’ve seen all kinds of bombings. I’ve even seen some accidental ones. This is no accident and everything about it says it was a trial run.”

  Then she started walking. “Come on. Let’s go to the gym and give what we’ve got another look over.”

  He followed willingly enough, although he was sure he wouldn’t be able to tell much himself from the detritus. But you never knew, he reminded himself.

  Another glance at the hole in the wall, before they rounded the corner, gave him a sudden chill.

  No, this wasn’t over. By no means.

  Chapter 6

  Jack wasn’t grounded, thank goodness. His folks weren’t feeling quite so angry this morning, and then they’d decided that nailing him to the ranch might look like he was in real trouble—an appearance they didn’t want making the rounds, not after last night.

  So with no school, he was free to drive the old Chevy that he kept running with his auto-shop skills into town and wander around.

  Briefly, he ran into some of his friends, who wanted to hear all about what had happened last night.

  For the first time he wondered how that news had got out. He doubted the agent or the deputies would have gossiped about it, but last night his sort of girlfriend had even texted him about it while the search was still ongoing.

  Clearly someone had blabbed, and he wasn’t exactly happy to find that a lot of suspicion was being directed his way. Most of his friends just thought it was cool, but he couldn’t miss the way some of the adults were looking at him.

  Oh, man, his parents were going to be upset if this continued. He had to find out something about the bomber. Anything to direct the suspicion away from him.

  Taking a risk, he drove out to the school. The deputy out front, Sarah Ironheart, stopped him. “You know you can’t go in there, Jack.”

  “You must be cold,” he remarked. He hated slickers. Sooner or later they made him just as wet inside as they got on the outside. “I know I can’t go in, but I need to talk to Agent Eccles.”

  “Why?”

  He liked Sarah a whole lot, so he just told the truth. “Because the whole town thinks I’m the bomber. Because the ranch was searched. Deputy, somebody talked.”

  Sarah’s cool expression turned into a frown. “That shouldn’t happen. But what can Agent Eccles do about it?”

  “Maybe not her. Maybe you. Somebody needs to clear me publicly or my folks are going to ground me until I die.”

  That brought a smile to Sarah’s face. She had kids of her own. “Hang on, kiddo. I’ll see if I can talk to her, but she’s really busy right now. We may have to turn to Sheriff Dalton.”

  “He’d be good, too,” Jack agreed.

  So he waited. Sarah didn’t leave him hanging around alone, though. Nope. Deputy Conroe replaced her as guard.

  Damn. Who would have thought so much trouble could come from a bit of curiosity?

  * * *

  Darcy was sitting back on her heels with a length of wire in her hand, maybe four inches long. One end had a small blob. “Alex?”

  He made his way to her side, walking carefully between the gridded squares that had been laid out to match the outdoor locations where everything had been found.

  “Yeah?” He squatted next to her.

  “I found one of these the other day about forty feet from the blast. Now another one. At first I thought the end of the wire had been melted by the blast, especially since it burned a hole in the grass it passed through.”

  He nodded. “I seem to remember.”

  She passed him the wire. “You work with this stuff. Has this been soldered or just melted by heat?”

  He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, like hers, and held the wire up, then surprised her by pulling a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from his breast pocket.

  “I didn’t know you needed those.”

  “Usually no. Nonprescription reading glasses. Magnifiers. For small things like this.”

  He turned the wire, studying it carefully. “Soldered,” he said finally, then pointed to the melted end. “See the discoloration of the metal right next to the bulb? Only one end of this wire was heated, most likely by soldering.”

  “Bingo,” she said and gave him a smile. “We have struck gold.”

  He passed the wire to her and watched her seal it in a sample bottle. “How so?”

  “Someone made their own timer. No other reason to solder a damn thing, unless it was blown out of your shop.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t do a lot of soldering in there. We’re working with wood, which means a whole lot of flammable dust. Anyway, any soldering we do happens in the other shop. Plus, I’m a real devil about everything being spotlessly clean.”

  “Good habit to have,” she said almost absently, turning the bottle in her hand and peering at it. “Well, since the whole wire didn’t get heated, my guess is the detonator was some distance from the bomb itself. I can confirm that by finding more wires. Or... He might have had some det cord.”

  “Explain,” he said. What he knew about this stuff would fit in a thimble.

  “Det cord, short for detonating cord, is a plastic-wrapped, high-explosive cord that can be used as an explosive itself or used to send a detonating wave along its length to set off a bomb at a distance. Highly flexible, and it can detonate multiple explosions. But that wouldn’t be any easier to get than a blasting cap. Damn.” She shoved the evidence bottle into one of her pockets.

  “Unless he had some lying around for some reason,” Alex said.

  Her head turned sharply toward him. “What are you thinking?”

  “You’d be surprised what someone can bring home in a backpack from a military exercise. Det cord would be easy to conceal from the way you describe it.”

  “Yeah, it would. It also has a good shelf life, in some cases up to ten years. But let’s not limit our suspects to a certain group. Not yet. Too many unanswered questions.”

  He agreed with her. It was just that the thought had arisen and he’d naturally shared it. Ignoring any sense of what might be meaningful could hamper investigations. Especially this kind.

  “I also need to find what kind of container he used for his device. ANFO doesn’t explode well at all in the open air. It needs to be contained in something. A pipe, a metal box, a barrel, depending on how much ANFO you’re using. We’ve got some pieces of PVC pipe—splinters, really—but I guess you had water pipes in your shop.”

  “Yeah, we had sinks. Overhead piping.” He paused. “Darcy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The ceiling was fairly undamaged in the shop. That pipe could easily have come from outside. We need to check the damage to the sink area.”

  “Yeah.” But she didn’t immediately move. He felt as if she were taking a mental picture of the debris before her. He wondered if she could actually do that, or if she was scanning for anything that stuck out.

  Just as she straightened to her feet, Sarah Ironheart’s voice reached them. “Darcy. You wanna give Jack Castor a minute? Unexpected complication.”

  Darcy appeared taken aback by the request, a reaction that didn’t surprise Alex. She was here to do a job, not maintain relationships or solve other problems.

  But without hesitation, she wiped her hands on her overalls and began to pick her way toward the door where Sarah waited. Alex followed because he was useless when it came to the shattered remains scattered on the floor. Might as well see if he could be useful in some other way.

  “What’s up?” Darcy asked Sarah as she
reached her.

  “Seems news about the search has made the rounds. Jack wants some help if you can provide it.”

  Darcy blinked, seeming to drag herself back into the present. “Me?”

  “For starters. I’m not exactly full of ideas myself, but at least hear him out. He did get a bad deal.”

  “What deal?” Darcy asked as she pushed through the door. Alex already had a pretty good idea what might be going on.

  Jack stood waiting on a spring day that felt more like approaching winter, a ball cap protecting his head from the ceaseless drizzle. “Thanks for seeing me,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “The town thinks I’m involved with the bombing. Somehow word has got around that our ranch was searched last night.”

  Darcy frowned. “That shouldn’t have happened. Nobody’s supposed to talk, and it wasn’t even official. No paper trail, no warrant.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s what I thought, but word got out pretty fast. At first I didn’t make the connection, but my girlfriend texted me last night and she already knew about it. My folks are going to hit the roof.” He looked down. “All because I got curious. This isn’t fair to them.”

  “No it’s not,” Darcy agreed. She looked at Alex, then at Sarah. Alex shrugged. He had no idea how to stop a rumor. In his experience, very little could.

  “I wonder who blabbed,” Sarah murmured. “I suppose I could tell Gage, the sheriff, and he could have us pass the word somehow. How maybe we were looking for something that had nothing to do with your or your...”

  Darcy’s head snapped up. “I have an idea. You wanted to help, Jack?”

  He nodded.

  “Guess who might get annoyed if you’re getting credit for his bomb. Guess who might actually let something slip.”

  Jack looked at her, wide-eyed. “You think he’d talk to me?”

  “I think he might talk to someone. Just go about your ordinary life. I’m sure Sarah will confirm the cops have every ear to the ground.”

  “We sure do.”

  “Darcy.” Alex had to object. “This could put Jack in danger.”

  She shook her head. “If anyone asks him about this bomb he’s going to deny he had anything to do with it. He’s not the one the bomber would want to convince.”