by Scott Frost
He held up a finger in front of my eyes and moved it back and forth. “Can you follow this?
I nodded. “I’m all right,” I said.
He reached up and pulled the piece of glass from my scalp and covered the wound with a compress. I looked at Dave, who was now completely surrounded by the yellow jackets of firemen and paramedics. More than a dozen officers were now on the scene securing the bungalow. I heard one of them call for the bomb squad. My head began to hurt for the first time, and there was a pounding in my ears almost as if I was finally hearing the explosion. I looked at the bungalow and tried to focus on the blown-out doorway. I sensed there was something I had to remember. What was it? My mind was stuck, unable to find a gear.
Another officer knelt next to me and began talking.
“What can you tell me about . . .”
The fireman was asking me questions.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
More sirens arrived filling the air with sheets of sound. I stared at the doorway, trying to remember, trying to escape the swirl of voices flooding my head. The fireman helped me to my feet and put a silvery space blanket over my shoulders.
“You may have a concussion and you’ll need some stitches.”
He began walking me toward one of the ambulances. And then it struck me. I turned and looked at the shattered doorway. How did a man whose criminal history extended no further than forging signatures on checks manage to build a sophisticated explosive device? It didn’t fit any more than the possibility that he was the man in the mask pulling the trigger at the florist’s.
A group of firemen carried Dave past me toward a waiting ambulance, strapped to a backboard and wearing a neck brace. I watched them load him into the ambulance, then I looked back at the bungalow.
If Sweeny didn’t have the ability to build the device, then who was the bomb for? Us . . . or was it for him? The only things that were clear were right in front of me: the officers stringing yellow evidence tape, Dave’s brown shoe sitting on the stoop as if waiting to take its next step, the rich aroma of the carnitas, and the rain washing away the sickening smell of explosives.
“IF TRAVER had stepped in through the door instead of stopping on the threshold and calling ‘police’ he would have been killed instantly,” the bomb squad officer said. “The device was designed for a very specific purpose with a very small kill zone. His leaving the door open and not stepping in dissipated the effect of the blast over a much wider area than intended.”
It was five P.M.—seven hours after the explosion. Dave was in intensive care with a hairline fracture of the skull as a result of being struck by the door as it was blown off the frame. He was heavily sedated but no longer unconscious. He wouldn’t know whether the vision in his right eye would be the same until the swelling went down. The attending physician suggested that for a man who had been blown across a driveway by a flying door, he was lucky. I suggested to the doctor that he stay away from Vegas if that was his understanding of odds.
I had four stitches in my head, ringing in my ears, dirt all over me, and blood-soaked cotton stuck up one of my nostrils. It was the nightmare my mother had always feared when I became a cop—not that I would be killed, but that I would become unattractive and therefore an unsuitable wife. If she had only understood that I was an unsuitable wife long before I ever had cotton stuck up my nose, our relationship would have been a lot easier.
I called Dave’s wife from the emergency room and told her what had happened and that he would be all right. She asked for specific details as if trying to find a hole in the story because I was avoiding the really terrible news. I could hear her holding back tears.
“I thought when he left patrol he would be safe. . . . Detectives aren’t supposed to get hurt.”
After that I left a message for Lacy that I was all right, in case she had heard something on the news.
I wanted to curl up in an afghan and lie down, but instead I was back standing in the middle of the bungalow wearing plastic booties over my shoes and talking with Detective Dylan Harrison of the bomb squad. He was thirty-seven years old and I suspect a genius who liked things that went bang in the night, day, or anytime in between. Like most of the men on the bomb squad he had found a home there because he never quite fit in anywhere else in the department. He was good-looking, though he didn’t seem to know it. In fact at times it appeared a burden to him, almost like he was embarrassed by it. He moved through a room like a deer that is being stalked, each step carefully considered to arouse the least suspicion or attention. He had blond hair, green eyes, and an unimposing but strong body that he inhabited as if it were a stranger’s that he was temporarily in custody of. In these times of dysfunctional body image, he reminded me of many women I’ve known.
Though there was nothing on his department record, I imagine he was once severely wounded or traumatized either physically or emotionally, maybe both. He masked the pain with his good looks. And everything else he hid by working with explosives.
I walked over to the door where Traver had stood at the moment of the blast and looked back in. Both the walls and the floor of the bungalow were covered with tiny circles made with markers where fragments of the device had come to rest after the explosion. I looked over at Harrison, realizing that I had already forgotten what he had just said.
“The point you are making is . . . ?” I asked.
“The device was designed to kill a person walking all the way in without hesitation and closing the door behind them.”
He studied me as if waiting to see if I could complete the puzzle he had just laid out for me. He was giving me a test, something I wasn’t used to in junior officers, but he wasn’t just any officer.
“Like a person coming home,” I said.
He nodded.
“It was designed to kill the person who lives here,” Harrison said.
“He could have been expecting someone. Like us.”
I didn’t believe it myself but I was curious to watch his thought process.
“Why go to all the trouble of a sophisticated device unless you are certain of the results?”
“Maybe killing wasn’t the point; maybe he was making another point. Bombers have been known to do that,” I said.
“Yes, but in public places, in cars, mailboxes, department stores, bus stops, shopping malls, abortion clinics.”
“Like the Unabomber.”
He nodded. “This was supposed to be an assassination.”
“I prefer the term ‘murder.’ ”
“Yeah,” he said, as if the word made him uncomfortable.
I thought about it for a moment. “So it’s doubtful Sweeny made the bomb, unless he had a very dramatic flair for suicide.”
“People don’t kill themselves with booby traps.”
What Harrison didn’t know about the ways people were capable of exiting the planet was a lot, but I still didn’t disagree with him.
“If Sweeny was the intended victim, why not just kill him with a gun?” I asked.
“Blood,” he said simply.
“You lost me.”
“It’s too intimate. Bombers don’t like to be close to people. The use of an explosive creates a kind of fiction for them that the pulling of a gun’s trigger can’t produce.”
“Fiction?” I said.
“An explosion is an act of creation. The use of a gun is an act of finality.”
“You’re talking about control.”
“Exactly. Someone who uses a gun is just a killer. Someone who uses a bomb is after more than death.”
I glanced at the 9mm in Harrison’s waist holster and wondered if he was in some part talking about himself. Would he be capable of using it if push came to shove? Could he point a weapon at a suspect and pull the trigger even if it meant saving his own life? I couldn’t answer that.
“What can you tell me about him from the bomb?”
He knelt down and looked over the flash point on the floor where the device
had been placed. I wondered if a part of him admired what he was looking at. You can’t be an explosives expert if some part of you doesn’t love it.
“He’s very skilled, very dangerous, and he enjoys his work. He’s also very careful; everything he used could have been bought at any hardware or hobby store, there’s nothing to trace. Chemical analyses of the residue will probably tell us that he made it himself or it was a readily available explosive.”
“He?” I said. “So you think it’s a man?”
The question surprised Harrison. He even smiled. “Women don’t blow people up. It’s a guy thing. A woman would have used a gun.”
His eyes darted uneasily about for a moment like he was searching for a way out of the room. I was right about Harrison. He had been wounded, probably right in the heart by Mary Jane Doe, whose eyes still locked on him in his sleep. But he was right. A woman would have pulled the trigger, not lit a fuse. For some reason I took a small amount of solace in that, though I’m not sure why.
When Forensics had finished going through the debris from the explosion, we combed through every piece of Sweeny’s life that was left behind in the bungalow. But beyond discovering that he wore boxers and bought cheap clothes, there was little to tell much of a story. There were no family pictures, no letters, address books, bank statements, checks, nothing that even remotely appeared personal. No favorite pen by the phone, nothing stuck to the door of the refrigerator. Nothing on top of the small cheap dresser next to the bed. Even the food in the fridge was all prepackaged dinners that appeared designed to obscure any sense of the individual. The sum total of my knowledge about him was that he had a thirty-four-inch waist and liked bland food, which sounded a lot like most of the men I had dated in my life.
But what I did know about Sweeny and maybe all that really mattered was that he knew something about the shooting of the florist Daniel Finley, and because of that knowledge someone had tried to kill him. And if the young genius Detective Harrison was right, the man who planted the bomb was probably not the same person who so intimately put a bullet in the back of Daniel Finley’s head, which meant I might be looking for two killers instead of one.
“I’m going to need a partner on this investigation to replace Traver. You want it?”
“I’m not Homicide.”
“And I’m not an explosives expert.”
I could see him working it out in his head like he was tracing the intricate wires of an explosive device: the red one here, the blue one there, don’t ground this one, and for God’s sake, don’t touch the two leads together or that’s the end of the party.
“I don’t . . . I don’t really like being around bodies,” he said.
“No . . . just small unidentifiable pieces of them.”
His face pained for a moment as if replaying a bad memory. “It’s just—”
“I wasn’t asking if you want it. . . . You’re it,” I said.
“You don’t have to get this approved?”
“The supervising detective of Homicide is responsible for all assignments in the division.”
“And you’re the supervising detective.”
“Right.”
He was the first cop I had ever met who took being asked to work Homicide as a form of punishment. He had the appearance of a man who had just been tossed out into the light of day after living in a cave for years. The world was a big place and it was all out of his control.
“It’s a temporary assignment.”
“Good,” he responded, his eyes betraying no emotion, retreating to the hideout of his good looks.
I stepped out into the drive between the bungalows and walked to the edge of the taped perimeter. The rain had stopped, though the pavement was still wet and the dark clouds still hung low on the mountains. I removed the plastic booties from my shoes and handed them to one of the forensic investigators.
Harrison emerged from the bungalow and was examining the door that had stuck in the wall of the adjacent bungalow. He looked like a man better suited for an archaeology dig than a crime scene. He didn’t want his new assignment, which as far as I was concerned made him perfect for it. Beware of someone who wants something too much. I think my mother told me that, though she was talking about sex, not ambition.
I got in my car and began driving through the wet streets past old Craftsman cottages and Spanish ramblers with terra-cotta-tiled roofs. I would stop by the hospital to check on Dave, then go home to see if my relationship with my daughter was in any better shape than Sweeny’s bungalow.
4
LACY WAS HOME when I pulled into the garage on Mariposa. As I stepped into the kitchen, I could hear the sound of the television in her room at the other end of the house. There were the remains of a salad on a plate next to the sink. What she ate couldn’t sustain a small dog, in my mind. Maybe if I cooked more. I could take a class. I could. I really could. Yeah.
I walked through the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hallway to her door, where I stood silently. I didn’t knock, I didn’t say anything. I just stared.
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah,” came the reply.
I opened the door and stepped in. I saw her eyes stop on my blood-encrusted nostril and then raise up to the stitches just above my temple. She opened her mouth as if she were clearing back pressure in her ears, then her face flushed and lost all color.
“It was you . . . in the explosion,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion.
“I’m fine.”
“I saw the news. They said a policeman was hurt. Was it Dave?”
I sat down on the bed and nodded. “Yes, his skull was fractured, he’s pretty banged up. The doctors say he’ll be okay, though.”
“You could have called.”
“I did, I left a message.”
“There wasn’t one on the machine.”
“The machine probably didn’t get it,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever.”
I sat there for a moment, thinking about the phone machine, but couldn’t stop myself. Had Lacy heard the message and was just turning the screws on me for leaving her the night before? I tried to push the thought aside before I said something I would regret. Lacy saved me from myself.
“I was on the news,” Lacy said. “They interviewed me. They wanted to know why I did what I did.”
I took a deep breath. “We might have talked about it before you talked to the press.”
“It’s not about you, it’s about me.”
Ignition.
“That’s not what I meant. It can be tricky, that’s all. You have to be careful you don’t get manipulated.”
“I think I’m the one doing the manipulating.”
“You’re right there.”
Blastoff.
“Meaning?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did because you got hurt,” Lacy said.
“No, you should apologize to me because you didn’t tell me what you were going to do last night.”
“If you knew about it beforehand, you would have been an accomplice.”
“If I knew beforehand I would have stopped you.”
“Case closed. Direct action only works in secrecy.”
The words “direct action” hung in the back of my throat like a strep virus.
“Direct action?”
“That’s what it’s called.”
“By whom? You sound like you were trained for this.”
“And you sound like a cop. It’s just a beauty pageant, give me a little credit.”
“Credit isn’t the first thing that comes to my mind.”
“Thanks, Mom. I did what I believed in and I would do it again.”
“I haven’t had a very good day. I don’t want to argue.”
“I’m not the one arguing.”
“You’re the one who lied.”
“When?”
“Silence is just as good as a lie.”
�
�Well, you would be the expert on that.”
Jesus.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Just stop!”
She took a breath and steeled herself. She was working real hard at being the tough one, but I could see the cracks showing. She had already lost a father, and I had promised her years ago that nothing would happen to me because I was a cop. Now my partner was in the hospital and I had come closer than I wanted to admit to breaking that promise today. The weight of that landed right on my shoulders. I felt like I had betrayed her trust, and had acted impossibly irresponsible. Looking at her now, I couldn’t imagine how I could take even the smallest of risks.
“I was scared,” she said.
My eyes welled up with tears. “I’m sorry.”
I reached out, put my arms around her and held her for as long as she would let me. She buried her head in my shoulder, trying to let herself be a little girl again, and me a mom, if just for a moment. I was out of practice. . . . We both were.
Lacy let go and looked at me as if she was about to say something, but instead hit the mute button on the television and stared straight ahead. I stood up thinking that if I could gather up the conversation in my hands and toss it out of the room, I would. I could start over by telling her that I love her and go from there, but instead I turned and walked out into the hallway and closed the door.
I went into the kitchen, tore a paper towel off, and blew my nose. I was hungry but too exhausted to do anything about it, so I just nibbled on the remains of Lacy’s salad. And then, just because I couldn’t help myself, I walked over and took a look at the answering machine. I had called, I was certain of that, but as Lacy had said the display read “0 messages.” I pressed play to be sure but just as it read, there was nothing there. It could have been the machine, but it had never done this before. Was I being a mother now, or a cop? And to what end? Let it go, I quietly told myself. Wrap yourself in the afghan, go to bed, and forget it.
