The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  He was feeling mildly optimistic. Had some other cop died without the bomb maker’s help? As he backed the sequence to its start, he kept wondering. The beginning was a pretty blond woman in her forties asking a question. Then he saw that the person answering was Captain Stahl. Had he been the one to die? Was it possible?

  The bomb maker pushed Play when the police chief appeared. “It’s my sad duty today to announce that I’ve had to accept the resignation of one of the finest police officers and bravest men I’ve ever known. Captain Richard Stahl has served with the highest distinction every organization he’s joined in his adult life. In just the past two months he has been personally responsible for saving the lives of many citizens and police officers. We thank him for his service. Thank you for coming.”

  The blond woman with the smirk looked suddenly desperate. He saw her begin to talk without producing any sound. In the background another reporter could be heard yelling, “Can you tell us the woman’s name?” Another called out, “Will the woman be fired too?” But the chief was a master at evading a follow-up question. He was out the door by then.

  The blond woman was now standing close to the camera, facing it. “The chief of police appears to have followed up on our interview of Captain Stahl yesterday afternoon.” She was taking credit for what had happened. “This is Gloria Hedlund, Channel Ten News.”

  The bomb maker pressed the remote control to freeze the image and study the blond reporter’s face. Her expression—triumphant and vengeful—reminded him a little of his ex-wife, Carla.

  31

  Before Dick Stahl left the station that night he took the purse the police had been holding for Diane Hines. It contained her wallet and credit cards, her driver’s license, and her police identification. The outside of the purse was blackened on one side and had holes where metal had sliced through the thick leather.

  In the bottom he found her car keys. He used them to pick up her car at the police impound lot. The battery was dead after all the time that had passed, but the cops at the lot jumped it for him. He got in and drove it to his condominium. He packed a set of her business clothes in a briefcase and drove it to the hospital with Andy. While Andy waited outside in the driver’s seat, Stahl went into the building.

  When he reached her room and knocked, she said, “Get in here.” When he entered, she said, “Nobody knocks but you. I’m really glad to see you. I’ve been hoping to beat the reporters out.”

  “Good idea.” He lifted the briefcase. “Your clothes are in here.”

  “In your briefcase?” she said. “That’s a little odd.”

  “Your overnight bag is in an evidence room. But this is doing the job. Andy’s out in your car waiting for us. The reporters haven’t seen that car yet.”

  “You’ll get yourself in more trouble.”

  “No I won’t. Andy doesn’t work for me anymore, and he’s off duty, a guy doing a favor for two friends.”

  “Okay. You want to go away for a few minutes?”

  “I’d be happy to help you get dressed.”

  “Don’t be overconfident. It isn’t the same as taking them off. I’ve already asked the nurse to help me. She’s bringing the discharge papers.”

  He held up both hands. “I was just trying to be helpful.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I sure hope you don’t end up being sorry. When this started I wasn’t thinking of it as a long-term arrangement, and you weren’t either. If this starts to feel like a bad idea, please tell me right away.”

  “Did your mom tell you to say that?”

  “No. She told me I had no business doing this in the first place, implied that I was disgracing the family, and wants me home with her as soon as possible. She seems to have forgotten I’ve never lived in Florida, but at least it means I’ll have someplace to go when you find a new girlfriend and cast me out on the pavement outside your stronghold.”

  “Can’t hurt to have an eager parent,” he said. He took out his phone and hit a key. “It’s me. The discharge papers aren’t here yet. Have you seen signs of unwanted attention? Good. I’ll call you before we roll the wheelchair.”

  She laughed and called out: “Thanks, Andy.”

  In a few minutes the nurse arrived with a clipboard with several sheets of yellow forms, several white, several pink, and one green. Diane signed and initialed for a few minutes, and then the nurse brought in a wheelchair. Stahl left to wait outside while the nurse got her ready.

  He made a call and Andy had the car at a side entrance of the building when they arrived. In another minute or two they were on the road. Andy drove them to the driveway of Stahl’s building, and Stahl got out to punch in the codes to open the gate and the garage so Andy could pull Diane’s car into the space beside Stahl’s. Then Andy handed Diane her key chain with her car key and fob and the condominium key Stahl had put on the chain so many days ago.

  She stepped up the stairs to the garage entrance for the condo, and said, “You don’t have to do that, Andy.”

  “Do what?”

  “Hover behind me like you’re my spotter at the gym. I can climb steps again.” She unlocked the door.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Morrissey is picking me up in a minute, so I’ll leave you here. Congratulations on getting out of the hospital. I know I’ll see you soon.” He hurried off to get out before Stahl closed the garage entrance.

  In a moment Stahl caught up with her. He pushed open the door and they stepped into the kitchen. “Oh, crap,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She turned around to face him. “Can’t you smell it, or are you pretending?”

  “Smell what?”

  “It smells exactly the way the most expensive whorehouse in the world must smell,” she said. “No, I guess this perfume is even too expensive for that.” There were tears welling in her eyes. “I’m completely blindsided. Why would you make me want to come here, when you’ve had other women here with you all this time?”

  “Wait,” he said. “You’re jumping to conclusions,” he said. “It’s—”

  “It’s what?”

  “I think he means it’s a misunderstanding.” It was a woman’s voice, and Diane knew instantly it was a woman about fifty years old. A thin, attractive woman about that age came out of the spare bedroom wearing a dark suit and carrying a covered hanger. Her makeup was heavy, as though there were some kind of daytime party in the spare room. “The perfume is mine. And don’t worry, dear, they never replace you with an older model.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m May Hedges. Bloomingdale’s asked me to serve as your personal shopper. Mr. Stahl explained your predicament. Having your apartment blown up is bad enough, but having your closet destroyed is unthinkable.”

  “I’m Diane,” she said, her face reddening.

  “Would you like to have a look at what I’ve picked out for you?” She put her arm around Diane and ushered her into the hallway to the spare bedroom. “This is sort of a starter wardrobe. Mr. Stahl showed me the clothes that survived, so I knew your size and the sort of thing you liked.”

  The bed was covered with clothing boxes, all opened and tipped upward to display blouses and sweaters, lingerie and T-shirts. The closet was hung with about a dozen outfits—dresses, suits, skirts, pants, jeans, jackets—and there was a row of about a dozen pairs of shoes, boots, sandals, and sneakers. “If there’s anything you don’t love, I can take it with me when I go, then bring better choices tomorrow.”

  Diane looked at the clothes, and then at Stahl. “No, there’s nothing here that I don’t love.”

  “Mr. Stahl explained you were still recovering, so I included sets of sweatpants and T-shirts and comfortable things for wearing around the house. They’re in the drawers.”

  “Thank you,” said Diane. “I love it that you brought jeans and things, which are what I wear most of the time.”

  “I’m glad you like them. But I’ve presented you with a lot to think about as soon as
you walked in the door.” She pointed at the business card on the dresser. “There’s my card. Just give me a call if anything isn’t right, or you’d like something I haven’t thought of, or for any other reason.”

  Stahl said, “We appreciate your care and your excellent taste. Do you have a tally now, or—”

  She laughed and held up her hand. “Your bill will reach you soon enough, Mr. Stahl. Meanwhile, here’s a card for you too. I’ll be happy to come back anytime.”

  When she was gone, Stahl joined Diane in the bedroom. She was sitting on the bed staring at the wall. “Oh God,” she said. “I made such a fool of myself.”

  He shrugged. “My fault. That’s the danger of surprising people.”

  “I was just so shocked. I couldn’t figure out why. If you’d just said nothing, I would have been on a plane to Florida, but you talked me into coming.”

  “Did you actually like the clothes, or were you just trying to get rid of her?”

  “Some of each. Give me a while to look at them after I pull myself together. Right now I kind of want to start over.” She stood up from the bed.

  “Take your time,” he said. “Right now I’m going to pour myself a drink. You want one?”

  “I’m off the pain medicine, so I guess I could. But aren’t you on duty until eight?” She followed him out to the living room.

  “Not anymore. That’s why I want a drink.”

  Her eyes followed him as he walked toward the kitchen cabinet where the bottles were kept. “So what you’re saying is that I’m going to want one too?”

  “Yes.”

  32

  Gloria Hedlund held her handbag and briefcase on the sides of her body, as she had when leaving work for the past twenty-five years. She had still been getting work as a model when she started at Channel Ten, and she had kept up all the tricks—use the loads you have to carry as free weights for exercise, watch your posture, think about the wrinkles your face is making, never forget what sun and alcohol did to skin. You never had to have anything repaired if you didn’t damage it first.

  Her modeling agents had taught her to make her body a temple, and she still worshipped at it. She was long past modeling anything, but it didn’t matter because the money would have been negligible compared with what she made now. But she still did dance exercises, still ran, and still worked out on the machines. On her days off she did the things that took time—swimming and riding a bike.

  Even on nights like tonight she never neglected her skin. She followed the same regimen of cleansing, hydrating, and lubricating with lotion that she did on the early nights. The days like today were the ones that did the most damage. They made a person’s forehead hold those washboard wrinkles for extended periods of time, and she’d always had to fight that habit of pursing her mouth that made more wrinkles appear above her upper lip. She was about ten years older than she looked.

  Today had been one of the hardest for personal reasons. She was hired twenty-five years ago as just another beauty contestant who would be sent out into the rare rainy weather in Los Angeles to behave as though standing around in the rain made sense. They used to send her to spots like Mulholland Drive or the Griffith Observatory or the beach, even though it was raining just as hard on the sidewalk outside the station. Each year when the ski slopes opened they sent her two hundred miles into the mountains so she could interview people stopped along the uphill highway to buy gas or put on tire chains. And when that happened she had always liked it, because at least she was talking to real people on camera.

  Gloria Hedlund had outlasted the others of her era, and she had thrived. After the years of being part of “team coverage” she had gotten to be one of the occasional weekend anchors at the studio desk when the first-string news readers had their nights off. Then she spent another eight years as a weeknight anchor before she got to where she was now, not just a news reader, but a real journalist.

  Lately she had begun looking professionally at Dick Stahl. When she first learned of him about five years ago, she sensed something about him she didn’t like. Was he a real person? He had started out as a soldier, then became an army explosives expert, then the head of the LAPD Bomb Squad, and finally the owner of a private security company. His bio had the clean smell of omission that life stories of public figures in Los Angeles sometimes had.

  Even her first search of the newspaper archive had been very LA. Stahl had a clientele that included a lot of Hollywood people, a few high-profile defendants in court cases, the principals in nasty big-money divorces. There were photographs of him in the backgrounds at parties that huge real estate companies or banks held, and there was no question he was there working.

  As far as Gloria could tell, Stahl had never been willing to speak to reporters. That alone had made her suspicious of him. He was an expert in the false politeness that cops used to ensure not that they would never give offense, but that they could never be accused of it. He was also sure of what he could do to get a press reporter, photographer, or television newsperson out of his way when he was leading a client somewhere. When she was doing her research about him she had seen it on unaired video. Some large male reporters tended to use their size and weight to keep a celebrity or a suspect blocked where he was for questions or pictures. Dick Stahl was not someone who made that easy. He simply kept going, never quite stopping, his hand on the client’s upper arm, always smiling.

  She had watched footage of Stahl taking a client out past David Wainscott from Channel Seven a couple of years ago. David was very big and intimidating, and he had planted himself in the only path through a crowd, the space between a car and the curb. Stahl came along smiling and saying: “Excuse us please. Excuse us. Thank you. Thank you very much.” At the last moment, David Wainscott seemed to realize he had put himself in a position that should have been effective, but also made him very vulnerable, and Stahl wasn’t reacting the way Wainscott had expected. He wasn’t stopping.

  There was nowhere for Wainscott to sidestep or even turn his body, because his feet were too long to let him pivot in the narrow space. He was going back or he was going down. The camera showed Wainscott wince in pain as Stahl stepped on his instep, and then David staggering backward and bumping into the reporters behind him, stepping on their feet and then falling backward onto two of them. Stahl never stopped, simply kept up his progress, stepped past Wainscott and around the car, put the client into the backseat, and slid in beside her. The door slammed and the car pulled ahead and picked up speed. A careful slow-motion examination of the footage showed nothing actionable. Stahl hadn’t hit, pushed, threatened, or even stopped smiling.

  Her distaste for him five years ago wasn’t hatred. She just filed him in the back of her mind as one of the cops and former cops who knew how to avoid letting his client be trapped and forced to respond to uncomfortable questions. She made sure there was never any mention of his name on her airtime to give him free publicity, and went on.

  As soon as Stahl had returned to her attention two months ago with his odd history and insider connections she began to keep track of him. She wasn’t after him. And as he helped rebuild the Bomb Squad and began to take apart bombs that she was assured would have killed anyone else, Channel Ten had to give him the adulation everyone else was giving him. But she kept watching and listening.

  And when she realized what the rest of the story was, what he had been hiding, the information clarified everything for her. She had seen this kind of thing before. God, had she seen it.

  This was just like what had happened in her first job after college. The news director at Charlotte was a handsome man about forty years old named James, who had once been a reporter at the network. When he hired her, things had seemed just fine. He worked with the reporters as a team leader. He occasionally took the evening news staff out before the show. After a while, sometimes it was after the show. But inevitably, there came a time when there were only four of them, and then one at a time, the others left. After a couple of dri
nks, he said he wanted her to date him. She had begun to walk the tightrope—not rejecting him outright, but not agreeing. She said she was too busy, and then she was too tired, and then she had plans. He never gave up, never missed a chance.

  Then one day she was called into the owner’s office. The owner said, “I’m truly sorry, Gloria. We had hoped Jimmy had started growing up, but apparently he hasn’t. He’s been bothering and pressuring you, hasn’t he?”

  She was so relieved she nearly cried. She hoped they weren’t going to fire him, but as time passed he had become more insistent. She said, “Yes. I didn’t want to complain about him, because most of the time he’s nice.”

  The owner sighed. “Well, we can’t have that stuff going on here. I’ve ordered your severance check and included a bonus for the extra trouble. Melinda has it out at the desk, along with some things for you to sign.”

  “My check?”

  “We can’t fire Jimmy. His contract is too expensive, and it has penalties. We’d be paying him to keep the station in court. Look, there won’t be any blame for you. We’ll make sure you have terrific references.”

  It had taken her three years after that to work her way back up through two small stations in Kentucky to a major station in Atlanta. By then she was twenty-six. Even though Atlanta was a place where she could make extra money modeling, she took few assignments. She worked over sixty hours every week and learned everything she could. She became a good reporter. She also kept everything professional. Even in the one instance when she was attracted to someone in the newsroom, she turned him down.