by Cindi Myers
“We’re not going to get another warrant,” Rogers said. “We’ve already had complaints that we’re harassing the locals and not finding anything.”
“There’s something going on in that shed,” Jace said. “Leo is in there now. I could hear him moving stuff around.”
“Maybe he’s finally clearing out his mother’s property.”
“He’s been calling Parker Stroud, leaving cryptic messages. Something is going on.”
“Find proof then. You haven’t got enough to go on.”
Jace ended the call and sat back. He’d find the proof. He punched in another number.
Laura answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Don’t wait up. I’ll be working all night.”
“What is it? Have you found something?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet, but I need to hang around here tonight. I’ll talk to you later.”
He started to hang up, but her voice stopped him. “Jace?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
She ended the call. He sat with the phone in his hand, an unsettling tremor in his chest. It was the kind of thing anyone might say to another person. But Laura wasn’t just any other person, and when she had told him to be careful, she had sounded as if she really cared.
* * *
LAURA TUCKED HER phone back into her pocket. Why had she said that to Jace—“be careful”—as if she were his mother or his wife or something? She should have been demanding he tell her what he was up to. After all, they were partners in this investigation.
She pulled out her phone and hit Redial. “Yeah?” Jace answered.
“What is going on?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She gripped the phone harder. “Tell me.”
“I think Leo is up to something in the old garden shed behind his house—or rather, in the attached root cellar.”
“And?” There had to be an and.
“I’m going to wait until after dark and sneak in there and look around.”
“You don’t have a warrant.” If he had a warrant, he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell her. “Not only is what you’re proposing illegal, nothing you find could be used in evidence. You’ll compromise the whole case.” This was just like him, wanting to take shortcuts, thinking the rules didn’t apply to him. He’d gotten away with this kind of thing before now because he had good results, but this time he was going too far.
“I’m not compromising the case.” His voice was calm, as if they’d been discussing what to eat for dinner. “I know how to get in and out without leaving a trace, and I won’t touch anything. I just want to see if my hunch is right. Then I’ll be able to get a warrant.”
“How will you get a warrant if you don’t reveal what you find in there?” she asked.
“I’ll say I saw Leo do something suspicious, or carrying a suspicious object.” She swore she could almost hear his sly grin. “It won’t take much. I can be very persuasive.”
“But you’d be lying!” She didn’t even try to keep the horror from her voice. “You’d be manufacturing evidence.”
“I wouldn’t be manufacturing anything. I’ll only speak to what I will know is in that root cellar.”
“It’s still a lie.”
“A very small one, and for a good cause.”
That’s probably what every corrupt agent or politician or businessperson said when they started. But little lies led to big ones. And big lies led to the corruption of the whole situation. “Jace, don’t do this,” she said, unable to keep the pleading from her voice.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because you’re better than this.”
He was silent so long she thought he had hung up. “Jace?” she asked.
“I’m here.” He blew out a breath. “I need to get in there and look around,” he said. “If Leo is responsible for those bombs, he’s killed two people already. We can’t let him kill anyone else.”
“No.” She felt her convictions wavering. Was Jace right, that the ends—stopping a murderer—justified the means? But then, where did she draw the line? “You can’t lie to get the warrant,” she said.
“Let me go in and see what I find,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong and I’m wasting our time. At least then we’ll know we need to focus on someone beside Leo.”
“All right.”
“Right. Gotta go.”
“Jace?”
“What?”
“Be careful.”
* * *
THE ELGIN HOUSE was located in an older neighborhood on the edge of town. Most of the houses looked to have been built in the seventies or eighties and were occupied by older couples. By midnight, every house on the block was silent and dark. Leo had turned off the last light in his place an hour before and hadn’t moved since.
Jace, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, slipped out of the van and made his way along the side of the yard to the back, not in the bushes this time, but alongside them, concealed by deepest shadow. The night air was still and humid, like furnace exhaust, without a hint of coolness. Within five minutes, he was sweating in the heavy sweatshirt.
The shed and root cellar hunched in the back corner of the yard, looking even more decrepit in the washed-out light of a quarter moon. Jace checked the windows on that side of the house for any sign of movement, but found none. Heart pounding, he stepped into the moonlight and walked over to the door.
Using his body as a shield, he trained the beam of a small penlight on the lock, a hefty padlock, so shiny it couldn’t have been on here long. The lock was threaded through a rusty hasp—but the hasp was fashioned with new screws. What are you so concerned about locking up in here, Leo? Jace wondered. He’d have to check the records to see if this lock had been here when the FBI conducted their warranted search.
He studied the lock a moment, then took out a set of picks and went to work. The standard commercial lock popped open in less than two minutes. Jace lifted the hasp, opened the door, then hung the lock in place and slipped inside.
The shed smelled of mildew and weed killer. The penlight revealed a shovel, rake and hoe on nails along the far wall. Bags of potting soil and several five-gallon buckets crammed with wood scraps and bits of rusty metal crowded the floor. A leaning metal shelf against the side wall held flower pots, bags of fertilizer and enough weed killing concoctions to poison half the town. If one of them had been found in the Stomach Soothers, Jace would have been suspicious Leo had decided to take out his own mother.
The root cellar was on the other side of the back wall. Jace played his light over the rough wood siding, looking for any kind of opening. It couldn’t be obvious or the previous searchers would have found it right away. They would have found most hidden doors as well, so this had to be something especially clever.
A big copper pot, the kind once used for boiling clothing over an outside fire, took up most of the back corner of the shed, filled with tangled fishing gear and an old tarp. Recalling the noises he had heard when Leo first entered the shed, of something heavy being moved, Jace dragged the pot out of the way and shone his light into the corner.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The weathered boards of the shed appeared firmly nailed in place. One rusting nail stuck out of the wood a scant quarter inch. When Jace tugged at the nail, it didn’t move. But when he grasped the nail like a handle and attempted to pull it, the whole section of siding slid toward him, and a wave of cooler air washed over him, smelling of machine oil and damp.
He stilled, ears straining for any sound, but all remained silent. He stepped around the pot and ducked into the opening. The root cellar was not large, perhaps five feet deep and seven feet wide, like a large closet, the ceiling so low he had
to hunch to keep from brushing the top of his head against the chicken wire that had been used as a frame to support the sod laid over it. A wooden work bench took up most of the space, with a small drill press, scales, and various hand tools littering its top. Cardboard apple boxes filled the space beneath the bench. Jace nudged the lid off one box and let out a soft whistle as he played his light across the collection of wire, fuses, blasting caps, and a hefty bundle of dynamite.
The other boxes contained metal pipes, and some electronics he thought must be part of timing mechanisms. If the bomb-making materials matched those used in the Stroud explosions, there was enough evidence here to put Leo away for a very long time. He switched off the light and backed out of the root cellar. He had just shoved the copper pot back into place and was moving toward the door when the clank of the padlock against the hasp and a soft curse made his heart stop beating.
He had just enough time to dive into the front corner and pull a tarp over his head before the door opened and Leo stepped inside.
Chapter Ten
Jace couldn’t see through the tarp, which smelled of mud and decay. He crouched beneath it, one hand on the gun at his hip, his body tensed to spring if Leo discovered his hiding place. But Leo’s footsteps moved away, toward the back corner. The copper pot scraped across the floor, a faint sliding sound announced the opening of the secret door, and something rattled on or beneath the workbench.
Jace risked rearranging the tarp so that he could peer from beneath it. Leo had switched on a light—maybe a battery-operated lantern—inside the root cellar, and its yellow glow illuminated the back of the shed as well. Jace had a limited view of a space just to the right of the secret door. He could hear Leo moving around in there, jostling boxes, rearranging tools. Unable to sleep, had he decided to build another bomb?
Seconds later, Leo emerged from the root cellar, carrying one of the apple boxes. He exited the shed, footsteps retreating across the yard. Jace’s ears rang in the silence that followed. He remained still, counting to one hundred, giving Leo time to return to the house. He waited for the sound of the door opening and closing, but it didn’t come. Instead, just as he was debating throwing off the tarp and making his way back to his van, a car started somewhere very nearby. Was Leo leaving the house, taking the apple box somewhere?
But instead of growing fainter as Leo drove away, the roar of the car’s engine grew louder, until the vehicle was idling right outside the shed door. Then the engine died, the car door slammed, and Leo was inside the shed once more. He retrieved a second box from the root cellar, carried it to the car, then returned a third time.
Jace shifted beneath the tarp. He couldn’t risk leaving his hiding place. But he couldn’t let Leo move his bomb-making operation out of the shed without trying to stop him. He eased his phone from his pocket and tapped out a text to Laura: SOS I NEED YOU HERE ASAP.
* * *
ADRENALINE SURGED THROUGH Laura as she read Jace’s text. She traded the shorts she was wearing for jeans, pulled on her weapon harness and boots, and grabbed a big flashlight that could double as a truncheon. In the truck, she called Ramirez. Though she had probably been asleep at this late hour, Ana sounded alert. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I just got a text from Jace,” Laura said. “He’s at Leo’s place and it sounds like he’s in trouble.”
“What was he doing at Leo’s at this hour?”
“He said something about a shed in the backyard. He’d seen suspicious activity around it.” She didn’t want to get Jace in trouble with the complete truth, and she didn’t want to jeopardize their case.
“We’ll be right there,” Ramirez said.
Laura pushed the truck hard across town through the darkened streets, mind racing. Jace had planned to search the shed behind Leo’s house. Had Leo surprised him? Had Leo shot him? Pain squeezed her chest at the thought, and she pressed harder on the gas, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
She turned onto Leo’s street and spotted Jace’s van right away. She parked behind it, then ran to Leo’s house. She drew her weapon and, keeping to the darkest shadows, she headed for the backyard, where Jace had said the shed was located.
She spotted the car first, the driver’s door and the trunk open, spilling light onto the weedy space in front of a leaning wooden shed. She froze as someone emerged from the shed. Leo, carrying a cardboard box.
A car passed in front of the house. Leo didn’t even look up. He stowed the box in the trunk of the car and returned to the shed. Her phone vibrated and she pulled it from her pocket and glanced at the screen. Where are you? From Ramirez.
North side of the property, toward the back. Leo is at the shed.
Moments later, two dark shapes moved toward her. She waited until they were almost on her before she whispered, “Over here.”
Ramirez moved in close behind her, followed by Rogers. “What’s going on?” Ramirez asked.
“Leo’s moving something out of that shed.”
“Any sign of Jace?”
Laura shook her head. She could try to text him, but what if he wasn’t in a position to answer her?
Leo emerged from the shed again with another box. “What’s he got?” Rogers asked.
“I think we should find out,” Laura said. She pulled the big Maglite from her belt, aimed it toward Leo and pressed the on switch.
“FBI!” Rogers shouted. “Drop the box and put your hands in the air.”
Leo dropped the box and looked around wildly. “Put your hands up!” Rogers ordered, his voice booming.
Leo tentatively stretched his hands up. Ramirez and Rogers raced forward. Laura hung back, keeping the light trained on Leo and her face in the shadows. If possible, she and Jace needed to protect their cover.
While Ramirez and Rogers dealt with Leo, she slipped past them into the shed. “Jace?” she called.
“I’m over here.”
She turned toward the sound of his voice as he emerged from beneath a brown tarp. Something loosened in her chest as he moved toward her, no sign of blood or injury, only a smear of dirt across one cheek. “Where’s Leo?” he asked, looking toward the open shed door.
“Rogers and Ramirez have him. What’s going on?”
He switched on a penlight and shone the beam on an opening in the far wall. “There’s a workshop in there full of bomb-making materials,” he said. “Or there was, until Leo started moving them out.”
“Leo is the bomber?” The knowledge didn’t surprise her, but it did disappoint her. Leo had seemed more pathetic than evil to her. Yet he had murdered two people.
Ramirez joined them in the shed. “Rogers has Leo cuffed in our vehicle and the local police are on their way,” she said.
“What was in those boxes?” Laura asked.
“Electronics, wiring, fuses and explosives,” Jace said. “Everything you’d need to make a bomb. Lots of bombs, I’d guess.”
“Has Leo said anything?” Jace asked.
“Only that he didn’t kill anyone. Then he asked for his lawyer and shut up.” Ramirez shrugged. “We’ll get the whole story, eventually.” She looked Jace up and down. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He gestured toward the shed. “I saw Leo in here moving around and got curious. I came to get a closer look, then got trapped when he started moving in and out. I texted Laura for help.”
“He didn’t resist,” Ramirez said. “I don’t even think he was armed. We’ll wrap things up here. You two should go before your cover is blown.”
They headed back toward the truck and the van. “You could have arrested him yourself,” Laura said. “Why did you call me? To preserve your cover?”
“That, and to make sure there were plenty of witnesses to catch him red-handed with those bomb-making supplies.” He grinned. “I wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of taking short cuts and jeopardizing the case.�
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She wanted to give him a good shove. She also wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him how glad she was that he was safe. Instead, she moved away from him, toward her truck, before she let emotion get the better of her.
* * *
“I DIDN’T KILL anyone.” Leo Elgin, in an orange jumpsuit with PRISONER in large white letters stenciled across the front and back, sat across the table from Ana and Rogers at the Mayville Police Department, his wrists and ankles shackled, his court-appointed attorney on one side of him, a police officer on the other.
“Leo, we can match materials we found in your workshop to both the bombs that exploded at Stroud Pharmaceuticals,” Ana said. “The bombs that killed Lydia Green and Angela Dupree.”
“Did Angela or Lydia put that poison in the Stomach Soothers?” Leo asked, more desperate than defiant. “The poison that killed my mother?”
“Is that what you think?” Ana leaned across the table toward him. “That Lydia and Angela killed your mother, so you planted the bombs to kill them?”
“Did they?”
“We haven’t found anything to link either of them to the poisoned medication,” Rogers said.
Leo buried his face in his hands and began to sob.
“My client is clearly distraught,” said the attorney, a motherly woman in her midfifties, with silver curls and tortoise-shell bifocals. “He has nothing else to say to you at this time.”
Ana and Rogers rose. “We have more questions for you, Leo,” Ana said. “We know you made those bombs. That makes you guilty of murder, whether you put them at the plant or not. If you didn’t, as you say, kill Lydia and Angela, then who did?”
She followed Rogers from the room. The chief of police, Gary Simonson, met them at the end of the hall. “Did you get anything out of him?” he asked.
Rogers shook his head. “But Leo made those bombs. I don’t have any doubt about that.”
“But did he plant them at the factory?” Ana asked.
