Conard County Revenge

by Rachel Lee

  “Except for the building itself.”

  Which was now a royal mess. From what she could see—hard to tell exactly with the bright flames, the geysers from the fire hoses and the night all around—it appeared that this bomb had taken out a huge chunk of the building.

  Calculating upward in her mind, assuming it was ANFO, she figured a much-larger container had to have been used. Or several of them. She doubted it had reached oil drum size, although it was possible.

  But this guy was being surreptitious. If he was trying out a bomb he intended to use elsewhere, oil drums could be a problem unless, like the Oklahoma City bomber, he meant to drive a truck up near a building and blow it all up.

  This explosion hadn’t been anywhere near that big, although allowing for the effect on structural elements, Oklahoma City had been exacerbated by the building’s design. Here, however, she couldn’t tell yet. The one-story high school building had been easy by comparison.

  If this bomber wanted big damage, he’d just created some. But another empty building?

  Her skin was crawling. At some point, this guy meant to do more than blow up empty buildings. The question was what and where.

  And how many would die.

  Chapter 9

  Jack’s excitement buoyed him over the next twenty miles of back roads, some unpaved. He figured he was keeping a safe distance, and when he could he turned off his headlights. Unfortunately, the night was moonless and he couldn’t travel very far that way.

  But these roads led to a few ranches, so whomever he was following could easily assume he was headed to one of them.

  Then he saw the truck turn into a driveway toward a ramshackle ranch. Figuring to be smart, Jack kept on driving. Who was it who owned that place? He couldn’t remember but felt he should.

  Farther down, he pulled over behind some brush, then backtracked on foot, keeping a quiet, slow pace. He knew this place, vaguely. Some old guy who lived alone. So old and sick he hardly seemed likely to be a bomber. But Jack wasn’t prepared to give up yet. Each one he eliminated was one less to worry about.

  When he reached the end of the drive, he could faintly pick out the truck parked beside the house. The guy was still there.

  Deciding to stick to the edge of the drive, his figure blending in with the sage that had piled up in the ditches to either side, Jack headed toward the house.

  Then his head exploded and everything went dark.

  * * *

  After a little more than an hour, the fire was out and smoldering ruins were all that could be seen under the floodlights. Darcy walked over to join the firefighters and connected with Wade and Charity. “What do you think?”

  “Bigger bomb,” said Charity. “And plenty left inside the building to burn. If we hadn’t felt the concussion, I doubt there’d be much left of anything. Anyway, it’s too hot to walk yet, so hold your horses.”

  “Fumes?”

  “Your electronic sniffer is as good as mine.”

  Taking the hint, Darcy went back to get her unit from the truck. Charity was probably exhausted from fighting the fire in over fifty pounds of turnout gear and needed a breather.

  She carried the case back with her to the edge of the burned area and brought out the detector. Turning it on, she began to sweep the sensor around. At first it looked like an ordinary fire, but then other things began to show up. Cadmium. Heavy metals. Jeez, this plant hadn’t been cleaned up very well.

  Then she got what she was looking for. “ANFO,” she said. The signature for ammonium hydroxide grew stronger in certain directions, and she was sure that it would get even stronger as she was able to approach the building.

  So the bomber hadn’t tried a different type of bomb. He’d just built a bigger bomb and tried it on an empty building.

  As she stood there, waiting to be able to move in and examine the blast area, she felt her stomach sink sickeningly.

  This was just the beginning. This guy had no intention of stopping.

  * * *

  When Jack came to, his head throbbed as if a jackhammer worked on it. The room he was in was mostly dark so he couldn’t tell its size. The most important thing at the moment was that he was bound around his ankles and he could feel his hands cuffed behind him. When he tried to move, the restraints barely gave a half inch, so he was cuffed to something. No way to move.

  He tried to stifle a groan but, even so, a small sound escaped his lips. That was when he learned he wasn’t alone.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you, boy,” said a rough voice. A voice that cracked repeatedly. “But don’t plan on going anywhere. You’re here until I’m done. You give me any trouble, and you’ll be done, too.”

  Jack tried to speak, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t. Suddenly a hand landed on his shoulder and urged him to sit up. With effort, ignoring his pounding head, Jack wiggled and managed to follow instructions. His legs straight in front of him let him know he was on a floor. The cuffs on his wrists tightened a bit at the change of position, but not enough to cut off all circulation.

  Only then did he notice a single flame burning some distance away. An old lantern?

  A cup pressed to his lips.

  “Drink,” said that ragged voice. “It’s just water. Behave and I’ll make sure you live.”

  Jack sipped the water, warm but welcome, and wondered if he was being offered a good deal or just a lie. Then the fear arrived. The grogginess from the blow to his head was easing a little, and other reactions were returning.

  He was a prisoner. He was tied up. He’d just been threatened and he didn’t believe the guy was telling the truth. He’d been taken prisoner. He was going to die.

  His heart raced and anxiety ripped along every nerve ending in his body. Terror. For the first time in his young life, he felt true terror. It dried his mouth again, silenced him and sent his thoughts skittering around like crazed mice seeking a way out of a death trap.

  The cup touched his lips again. This time he had the sense to guzzle it. Who knew when he’d get another drink?

  “Guess I gave you a concussion,” the voice said. “Hardly surprising. What’s wrong with you, boy? Following people at night. What were you going to do? Kick an old man to death for the fun of it?”

  “No!” The word escaped Jack’s terror. Then his voice shut down.

  “No, huh?” The creaky voice didn’t say any more for a while. Jack thought he saw a shadow moving in the darkness. A bent man, not standing straight. Why? Was the roof too low?

  Then something scraped and the shadow sat down, out of reach of the flame’s light.

  “So you weren’t out to beat up an old man. What were you doing?”

  Jack didn’t dare answer. The truth might make the guy even madder.

  “I knew you were following me,” the voice continued. “Don’t know why, but you’re not good at it if you thought I wouldn’t know. I’ve been followed by people with a whole lot more skill and I knew it. You crazy, boy?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said hoarsely. Right now he wondered if he was. All Darcy had asked him to do was listen in case someone around him said something. She’d never suggested anything as stupid as following a guy in the middle of the night, certainly not someone running from the scene of an explosion. Suddenly he wasn’t at all sure he’d make a good ATF agent. Darcy spent all her time studying evidence and relying on local law enforcement to do the footwork of finding other clues.

  But him? Oh, he’d thought he was a superhero who was going to catch this guy and solve the whole bombing. Sheesh, why hadn’t it occurred to him to just call the cops and tell them what he’d seen?

  Stupid!

  “So, boy, what were you doing out there?”

  Jack licked his lips. He doubted a lie was going to work here. He’d never been a good liar anyway. “I saw the explosion. Saw you leaving.�
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  “So you thought I was the bomber and you were going to catch me?”

  Jack didn’t answer. It sounded even more stupid when this guy said it.

  “Well, don’t worry about it now,” the creaky voice said after a few minutes. “You won’t do me any harm here, and when I’m done, I won’t care anymore.”

  “What are you doing?” The words burst from Jack and he nearly winced as a fresh spear of pain hit his head.

  “Getting even,” the man said. “Just getting even. I’m dying, boy. So you can trust me when I say I won’t give a damn what happens when it’s over. But you’re going to talk to me a little later or you won’t see another sunrise.”

  * * *

  “Let’s go home and catch a little sleep,” Alex said.

  Darcy didn’t want to leave, but Wade chimed in. “That mess isn’t going to be safe to walk on for hours yet. You can’t do a thing until well after dawn. How about I give you a call when we’re sure there aren’t still fires burning under the rubble, when you won’t fall into a weak hot spot?”

  He had a point, Darcy thought. They both did. She nodded reluctantly, bowing to reality. She needed to be fresh when she started pawing through this mess.

  “We’ll make sure no one moves anything unnecessarily,” Wade added. “If we have to move something, we’ll keep track of where it was from, okay?”

  Well, that settled it. Nothing more she could do here except kick her own butt for failing to solve this case sooner.

  “But no one was in there?” she said for at least the tenth time.

  Charity shook her head. “No guards in the last eighteen months. The fence keeps most people out. If a trespasser was in there...well, God rest them. We’ll find out.”

  From the way Charity’s eyes pinched in her smoke-stained face, Darcy guessed she’d found remains at other scenes. Never something you wanted stamped in your mind’s eye.

  She and Alex strode back to the road in silence. Vehicles lined the shoulders, the fire trucks had gone right through the fences that had once been topped by concertina wire. Yellow tape fluttered from metal poles around a huge area.

  It had been bigger, all right. How much bigger only examination would tell.

  She paused, looking back. “Wade?”

  He turned in the midst of wiping his forehead with his filthy sleeve. It didn’t help much. “Yeah?”

  “You’ve got the blueprints for this place, right?”

  “Everything we need for firefighting. I’ll show you in the morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  Alex spoke as they reached the car. “Wouldn’t the city have the blueprints, too? They had to be approved by Code Enforcement at the very least.”

  “The fire department will have a better version,” she answered. “They make plans for having to deal with fires in every building in their area. Those are the plans I want. They’ll have an idea of how the structure would respond to fire and what pitfalls to avoid.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Very useful to their job and mine.”

  When they got back to Alex’s house, they simply walked in, dumped their jackets and began to head back to the bedrooms.

  But Alex astonished her. He grabbed her hand and tugged her with him. “Not a night to be alone.”

  She didn’t argue, although she supposed she should have. She let him draw her to his room and sit her on the edge of his bed. He knelt and pulled her boots off, then said, “Curl up.” He drew the comforter over her as she lay back. Moments later, he’d dumped his own boots and came to rest atop the comforter beside her. He wrapped his arm around her waist and drew her close until she faced him.

  She felt as if she were numb to her very soul, beyond the warmth or the cold. Just empty. Going through the motions. But with his arm around her, his comforting presence, her walls began to crumble.

  “It’s my fault.”

  “I knew you were feeling that way.” He moved his arm, rubbing her back. “Thing is, I’m pretty sure you were with me this evening, so I don’t remember when you went out there to place the bomb and detonate it.”

  “Oh, stop it,” she said irritably. “You know what I meant.”

  “Of course, I know what you meant. I’m merely pointing out that you can hardly be responsible for what someone else did. Would it have been nice to catch him before he did this? Sure. But we don’t have a whole lot to go on yet. It’s not like you haven’t been working the scene and trying to put the pieces together. Diligently, I might add. Everyone in this county is trying, too. Want to blame everyone? You can start with me.”

  She stirred, some of her irritation giving way to the comfort he offered, but nothing dispelling her sense of failure. “I’m supposed to be the bomb expert.”

  “And you are. But you’re not also expected to find the bomber, are you? How many jobs have you worked where the FBI has come in to look for the suspects? How many where local LEOs help with that. And how many where ATF has been purely alone on an investigation?”

  “Few enough,” she admitted.

  “You understand bombs. I don’t see someone from ATF here to help you with the suspect part. Besides, you’ve been around long enough to know how hard it can be to find a bomber.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “But this bomber didn’t leave anything behind to identify him. Nothing I’ve found yet anyway. Remember McVeigh?”

  “How could I forget? Arrested by accident for not having a license plate and carrying a concealed weapon. Might have got well away except for delays in his hearing date. Then what, Darcy? What happened next?”

  She sighed. “They found the truck axle. The serial number was still legible. The FBI did that.”

  “See? And you’re here all alone. I hope they send you some help when you call your boss in the morning. This is getting bigger. If he doesn’t have someone to spare, maybe the FBI will. Anyway, my point is obvious. Unless the perp leaves something behind at the scene, what have you got? Nothing. So quit kicking yourself.”

  “The ammo cans,” she said after a minute. Hardly realizing it, she snuggled closer to the comfort he offered. At once his arm tightened around her and with the comforter between them he still managed to press her close enough to remind her she felt other things besides despair and failure. Womanly feelings.

  “Yeah, maybe they’ll turn out to be the something if they are ammo cans. Regardless, we’re going to do a whole lot of looking tomorrow, right? We’re far from done.”

  Far from done, she repeated to herself. Far from it. “Locard’s exchange principle,” she murmured.

  “Exactly. The perp always leaves something behind or takes something away. Those cans may be forensically important. So might the det cord. You know something, Darcy?”

  “What?”

  “There’s not a whole lot of need for explosives around here. Ask the sheriff sometime. No mining, whatever. There was an attempt to build a resort on the mountainside but an earthquake put paid to that before they built the foundation. As for the semiconductor plant this jackass just blew up...I seem to remember hearing it didn’t have a basement. Placed on a floating slab. Don’t ask me why, but the point is there hasn’t been any need to blast anything around here in recent memory as far as I can tell.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you’re not going to get confused by a whole lot of people in possession of det cord, for one thing. And if anyone around here knows of someone who has the wherewithal to make a bomb, sooner or later memory will nudge them into talking. Probably sooner than later after this explosion.”

  She hoped so, but his embrace was softening her, allowing weariness to emerge through the anxiety that had been driving her.

  An axle with a serial number. Maybe an ammo can this time. It didn’t always take much. Something always got left behind.

&n
bsp; “Now, sleep if you can,” Alex said, his voice deepening. She could almost feel the sexuality awakening in him, though he did nothing about it. “I’ll be here, Darcy. I’ll hold you all night.”

  Eventually she fell into a deep sleep with dreams made more pleasant by the strong arms that held her. Dreams about a Viking lover.

  * * *

  Jack was woozy, probably because he wasn’t sleeping and because of the blow to his head. He kept pulling himself back to the present, however, because he couldn’t risk missing a chance to escape.

  His arms had begun to hurt from being cramped behind him for so long, and he used the pain as a focal point for keeping his mind as alert as possible.

  Gradually he became aware that gray light had begun to filter into his prison. A huge room in an old structure of some kind. Light seeped between boards, but not much of it.

  When his captor returned, he had his face covered. “Hungry?” he asked Jack.

  “My arms hurt.” It sounded like a whine but he didn’t care. Maybe he’d get his chance.

  “I knew boys your age who got tied up for a whole lot longer and beaten while they were. Never heard them whine.”

  What was this guy talking about anyway? “Who were they?”

  “Soldiers.”

  For some reason that made Jack’s spine prickle even more than knowing this man was a bomber. A soldier. A vet like Darcy and Alex had been concerned about. But why would a vet do any such thing?

  He didn’t dare ask, however. His captor drew closer and even in the poor light Jack suddenly noticed he was carrying a pistol. “I’m going to untie just one arm,” the man said. “You try anything and I’ll pull this trigger. Read me?”

  “I read you.”

  When the man moved behind him, Jack realized he was tied to a post, not to something buried in a wall. That ripped at any hope of being able to break loose.

  In spite of every effort not to, Jack let a sigh of relief escape him as his right hand was freed. Aware of the pistol pointing at him, he moved slowly. His captor backed up and sat on the vague outline of a chair.