by Thomas Perry
“Probably,” he said. “But I was just thinking I was glad we didn’t.”
Nicole smiled. “Thank you, Ed.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We would have just been sitting up here for, like, two extra hours.”
“God. You really are a dope.”
He turned his head and grinned at her, and then returned his eye to the scope.
Nicole felt better. Ed could hardly ever resist acting like a big, stupid guy who could barely be bothered to put his shoes on the right feet. It seemed to be a lot of fun for him. But she had been watching him for too long to buy it. She had seen him use exceptional, not intelligence, exactly—because that implied an ability to think about things that were abstract, and he apparently never tried—but mental acuteness. He was keenly observant. His eye was focused to pick up the subtlest changes in the visible, substantial world that might tell him something he could use—a weakness, a vulnerability, a tell. Whatever tigers had, he had.
“Something’s happening,” he said.
“At the house?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I hope you’ve got it wired right.”
“I always do,” she said. “That one time when it didn’t work was because it was there so long the phone battery got weak. This time I looked everything over before we left. The phone battery is new and fully charged. It’ll work. So what do you see?”
“A guy just drove up and got out. I’m pretty sure it’s Abel. Different car, of course. The last one had a lot of holes in it.”
“Is he going in?”
“No. He’s standing by his car. He seems to be waiting for somebody.”
“Can I see?”
Ed lifted the scope on its tripod and moved it to her side of the dashboard. She adjusted it and then stared into the eyepiece and adjusted it some more. “That’s Sid Abel all right. But this doesn’t look good.”
“It looks pretty good to me,” Ed said.
“There’s a truck coming up. Looks like a big UPS delivery truck. It’s pulling up in front of the house. We can’t do anything until that guy’s made his delivery and left. Wait. Something else coming up behind it—oh, shit—a cop car. Two of them. One’s going around the truck to this end of the block, and the other is staying back on the other end. Abel’s talking to somebody in the truck. It’s not a delivery truck. A guy’s getting out the back. He’s carrying one of those protective suits. Bomb squad.”
“Damn,” said Ed. He was uncharacteristically quiet.
“How do they know?”
“We must have missed one of the cameras the other night.”
“You want to look?” she asked.
“Okay.” He took the spotting scope back, readjusted it, and watched.
Thirty seconds passed, and then Nicole said, “What’s going on now?”
“It looks like they’re getting one of the guys ready to go into the house. They’re getting him into the bomb suit. This will take a few minutes. The thing weighs, like, eighty pounds. They also have to do something to clear the area of people in case he screws up. It looks like the cops at both ends of the street are out of their cars and knocking on doors.”
“What do you think we should do?” Nicole asked.
“See if Abel goes into the house to show the guy where to look. Dial the first part of the phone number. All but the last digit, and get ready. I’ll spot for you.”
She put in the area code and the first six numbers and waited.
* * *
Ronnie sat in the back of a police car with a sergeant from the police department bomb squad. They were a full block from the rented house. The sergeant said, “This is a nice neighborhood. Did you have a hard time finding a house?”
Ronnie said, “We used a realtor, but even so, we were pretty lucky. We wanted it to be a long distance from where our own house is—was. This one was for rent furnished, and it was available right away.”
“Not bad. If it weren’t for this little problem you have right now, I wouldn’t mind living around here.”
“It could be a big problem,” said Ronnie.
“Well, don’t worry too much. The bomb squad gets a lot of calls—about four a day, but on the average only one-fifth of those calls are anything that would blow—”
The police radio interrupted. “Squad one. Officer Rylands is out again. There’s a device upstairs in the bedroom.”
The sergeant said, “Can you describe it?”
“The device is a pipe bomb. It’s attached to the back of the mirror on the female dresser about four feet above the floor. The pipe is about eighteen inches long and three inches in diameter, capped on both ends with regular threaded plumbing caps, one of them drilled for wire. There’s duct tape wrapped around the side to hold ball bearings. The device appears to be correctly wired to be triggered by a cell phone, and the double wire coming out looks to Rylands like the lead to a blasting cap.”
“Give your present location.”
“We’re back in the van and we’re preparing to move it back to a safe distance as soon as Andros is deployed.”
“Roger.” He switched frequencies to normal police band and said, “This is Bomb Squad Unit One. We have a Code Five Edward at the location 3-1-3-2 Bluff Street.”
“Copy, Unit Three.”
The sergeant switched back to the bomb squad frequency. Ronnie knew that Code Five Edward meant they were going to try to render a bomb harmless in an open area. Other units, and especially aircraft, were to stay far away.
She took out her phone and hit a preprogrammed number. “Sid, will you please get in the car and get out of there?”
“On my way,” said Sid’s voice.
The sergeant put his microphone back in its holder. “Now all we can do is wait while the guys do their job.”
Ronnie said, “I heard the name Andros. They’re using the robot?”
“Yep,” said the sergeant. “Pipe bombs aren’t usually too complicated, but there are some awful exceptions. This one is wired to a cell phone, so it can get tricky.”
Sid Abel’s car drove by the police car and parked fifty feet past it. Far down the street they saw the robot roll down the ramp at the back of the bomb squad truck on its tank treads and wheels. The van pulled back about five hundred feet. A man inside the truck was guiding the robot using its onboard video camera, but the man in the bomb suit walked with it. The robot whirred steadily along the street, up the driveway to the front steps, and then ground its way up the three low concrete steps onto the porch. The man opened the front door and straightened the robot so it could ascend the last step into the living room. He closed the door and took a step.
In an instant, the morning air seemed to harden into something solid, and a shock hit the ears, the stomach, the skin. The bomb technician was blown off the steps to the ground, and all the windows of the house shattered outward at once. The car where Ronnie and the sergeant sat jumped a few inches and bounced. Instantly there was debris in the air, a mixture of glass, dust, and bits of wood, some of it flying upward, so for a few seconds it rained onto lawns and sidewalks. Before the last pieces had come down, there were two police officers sprinting toward the fallen man in the bomb suit.
The sergeant had the microphone in his hand. “Squad One, give me your status.”
There was a slight delay, and then someone said, “No injuries. Repeat, no injuries.”
“Copy, Squad One.” He turned to Ronnie Abel. “Your suspects aren’t giving up. You must be getting close.”
12
Sid and Ronnie spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon at the North Hollywood station being interviewed by a team of federal investigators from Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI. After they were satisfied that the Abels knew nothing they hadn’t learned from the police bomb squad, they left, one by one. The last one to leave was an FBI agent who said to Sid and Ronnie, “I don’t know what to advise you except to watch where you step, what you eat, and change cars a lot. I can’t t
hink of a good way to convince these people you’re giving up.”
“That’s okay. We’re not giving up,” said Ronnie. “But thanks.”
A few minutes later the Abels were down the hall at Homicide. They sat in front of Detective Miguel Fuentes’s desk while he looked at the video they had just watched over and over with the federal agents. “This is definitely a break,” Fuentes said. “There are very few women in that business. But there are so few that I don’t know offhand what to do with the information.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ronnie.
“About ten percent of killings are done by women. About three percent of all murders are done for hire. So how many women around here are in the business of doing wet jobs for money? I don’t know of any right now. Are there five? Ten?”
“At the moment we’re only interested in the one,” said Sid. “These people have managed to keep us so busy defending ourselves that we haven’t been able to do any investigative work on the case. We’re leaving to go out of town to do an interview. While we’re gone, if you can find any women in the system anywhere in the country who have a history of murder for hire, we’d obviously be interested.”
“Since the Ballantine murder is now one of my cases, I’ll do my best to help you help me. But this is the same problem we’ve always got with killers,” said Fuentes. “You both know that. It’s hard to find repeat offenders. If we know they’ve done it before, they’re probably in jail.”
“It might also be a good idea to give us any violent male offenders who have been known to work with a female,” Ronnie said. “And the pinhole camera footage shows that she was the one carrying the black bag with the bomb in it. So you might want to pull the active list of women who have used explosives.”
Fuentes said. “Okay. Of course, carrying it doesn’t prove she was the maker.”
“I think there’s a pretty good chance she was, though,” Sid said. “It was a big black powder pipe bomb wrapped with ball bearings and set off electronically. I can’t see a bomb maker letting somebody else carry that bomb, when he was going to be in the same room with that thing.”
“All right. I’ll put in a separate inquiry with ATF. They may have some female candidates. Any other signifiers we should try?”
Ronnie said, “The night they shot at us from a car out at the housing development, it was the passenger firing a rifle from some distance—one shot, no misses. A few seconds earlier we had seen what we’re pretty sure was a man in the driver’s seat.”
“So the woman was the sniper?”
“That’s what we think,” said Sid. “The other two times, both fired at us. But when it was only one shooter, she was the one. Maybe there’s a woman in the system who’s a great shot.”
“It’s possible. How about weapons? Anything distinctive?”
“At the construction site what they used was a .308 rifle. The casing got ejected and the officers found it on the road. There are a million of those around. The night they burned us out of our house, they had full auto rifles, 9mm. Something like an Uzi, Tec-9, or MP5.”
“I don’t have much hope for that one either,” said Fuentes. “I’ll get a look at the list of legal compact assault weapons that people grandfathered in when the California ban took effect, but killers are not likely to have registered any guns. Maybe we’ll do better with the list of people who’ve been caught bringing assault rifles into the state or restoring them to full auto.”
“That can’t hurt,” said Ronnie.
“What should I put down for a description of the female?”
“Small and thin,” said Ronnie. “Five two to five four, a hundred to a hundred twenty.”
“Her hair was hidden under her ski mask, and she wasn’t close enough to the camera to pick up her eye color,” Sid said.
“In other words, just some young woman,” Fuentes said. “I’ll call you if one turns up. In the meantime, let’s hope you don’t get a closer look. Stay safe.”
Nicole and Ed Hoyt sat in the bleachers beside the baseball field in the park. They were at least a hundred yards from the nearest person. The only one Nicole could see right now was a young woman in shorts and a tank top walking the path with a big black Labrador retriever.
She glanced at Ed. He was watching the woman too. She knew that Ed’s thoughts were different from hers, but she didn’t blame him for that any more than she blamed the Lab for his thoughts, which were probably more lofty than Ed’s. She had listened to a lot of women complaining about the way men looked at them, but she had said nothing. She had only laughed to herself. What the hell did these women think made a man give them all his money and attention—somebody to sit next to them at church?
She glanced at Ed again. He was staring still, but she wasn’t bothered. Ed couldn’t see the girl any better than she could at this distance. She looked in the other direction, along the trees by the wall along the freeway near the end of the park. There was Boylan, walking along in his hooded sweatshirt. He must have approached on the path beside the concrete bed of the Tujunga Wash, and then slipped through a gap in the fence.
“So that’s how he does it,” she said.
Ed turned his head to watch Boylan approach. “He’s a weasel. I suppose if he comes and goes that way, he’s hard to spot and harder to follow. There are about eight ways he can go once he’s out of the park, and his car could be waiting just about anywhere.”
“From here he could even take the subway,” she said. “The Red Line station is right over there past the parking lot.”
“Or a bus. There’s a bus station above the subway.”
Nicole said, “We should be glad he’s that careful I guess, but I don’t really feel glad.”
Ed shrugged. “He’s no harder to kill than anybody else.”
Nicole patted his knee. Words would have added nothing.
Boylan walked along inside the line of trees until he reached the bleachers. He stopped at the foot below the Hoyts and looked up at them.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” asked Nicole.
“Bear with me. I’m a little bit upset.”
Ed said, “Did we call you? I’m pretty sure you called us.”
Boylan said, “You don’t seem to understand what’s happened. You set off a bomb in a house in Burbank. A bomb. Think about it.”
“It worked pretty well,” said Ed. “They said on the news that the only reason the bomb guy spotted it was that the back of the mirror was dusty so the tape on one of the wires didn’t stick right. Otherwise, they would have been scraping Abels off the walls with putty knives.”
“You set off a bomb and think everything’s going to be the same?” said Boylan. “The federal government is interested in bombs. LA has one of the best bomb squads in the world, and they catch people. Bombs make the TV news.”
“I just said that. We had to detonate it because they were sending a robot in there to disarm it. We didn’t want to leave them anything to trace.”
“And you think you succeeded at that?”
“Pretty sure. The blasting cap was from a tool shed on a road-building project in Montana eight years ago. The pipe and end caps were from a going-out-of-business sale for a plumbing supply store at least five years ago. The cell phone was a prepaid one I lifted from a shopping cart in a parking lot. Nothing has any connection to us.”
“Do you know that dynamite has identifying tags mixed in when they manufacture it?”
“Yes, we do,” said Ed. “Black powder doesn’t.”
“You used gunpowder?”
“Yeah,” said Nicole. “We wanted to take out two people in a bedroom, not strip-mine a mountain. We keep a supply around.”
Boylan was fuming, his mouth a thin horizontal line and his eyes bulging as his breaths came through his nose in snorts. After a few seconds, he seemed to contain himself. He said, “The Abels are both alive and unhurt, after you’ve made three tries. And I wish you hadn’t used explosives. You’ve got everybody looking for
you.”
“We’ll just have to watch out for those folks,” said Ed. “It’s going to be part of this job, I guess. But we won’t charge for the extra risk.”
Nicole raised her hand to cover her mouth so her laugh wouldn’t be too big, and she tapped Ed’s thigh with her other hand.
Ed took the hint. “We didn’t intend to put you or your clients in danger, and we’ll be sure not to. The rest is our problem.” He stood. “We’ll let this settle down a bit, and then finish the job. We’ll get in touch with you afterward.”
Ed and Nicole climbed down from the bleachers and walked past the backstop of the baseball field to the parking lot. Nicole said, “I can’t help wondering about Boylan. We’ve done three jobs for him this year, and all we know about him is a cell phone number, and a name he probably made up.”
Ed said, “We can follow him home if you want.”
“What could we say if he saw us?”
“We saw a suspicious, weaselly-looking man and followed him. Glad it was only you, Boylan.”
She laughed. “It’s stupid, but I feel like it.” They approached their small gray car.
“Get in.”
They drove up the long road from the lot out to Lankershim Boulevard and turned left, and then turned left again. Ed pulled into the parking lot behind a small restaurant and sat still.
“What’s here?” she asked.
“If he came by car, he will have parked it in the lot on this side of the wash, by the rec center and the other baseball fields. This is the way out of there. If he didn’t bring a car, we’ll know that too.”
They waited. Nicole tapped her feet, listening to a tune that her memory was playing in her head. She looked at the back windows of the restaurant, which had been reinforced with plywood and bars so that nobody could break in. She wondered if the windows had been dirty before they had been boarded, or dust had somehow gotten in a grain or so at a time over the years. If people spent time behind restaurants, nobody would ever go out to eat. “He’s taking a long time,” she said.
“He is. But he’s afraid we’re bringing the wrath of God down on him, so he’ll want to be sure we weren’t caught leaving the park before he comes this way.”
