8

•   •   •

After Starkey dropped Pell back at his motel, she and Marzik spent the afternoon interviewing customers of the Silver Lake laundry with no success. No one recalled seeing a man in a baseball cap and long-sleeved shirt making a call. Starkey dreaded reporting to Kelso that the suspect likeness would remain unresolved.

At the end of the day, they swung past the flower shop to show Lester Ybarra the three likenesses that Starkey had gotten from Pell.

Lester considered the three pictures, then shook his head.

“They look like three different guys.”

“They’re the same guy wearing disguises.”

“Maybe the guy I saw was wearing a disguise, too, but he looked older than these guys.”

Marzik asked to bum one of Starkey’s Tagamet.

Starkey drove home that night determined to give herself a break from the gin. She made a large pitcher of iced tea. She sipped it as she tried to watch television, but spent most of the evening thinking about Pell. She tried to focus on the investigation instead, but her thoughts kept returning to Pell and their earliest conversation that day, Pell saying that he would take the bullets if Tennant filed the charge, Pell saying he would take the hits.

Starkey shut the lights, went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Not even her usual pathetic two hours.

Finally, she took Sugar’s picture from her dresser, brought it into the living room, and sat with it, waiting for the night to end.

One man had already taken the hits for her. She would never allow another man to do that again.

At ten minutes after nine the next morning, Buck Daggett called her at Spring Street.

“Ah, Carol, I don’t want to be a pest, but I was wondering if you’ve had any breaks.”

Starkey felt a wave of guilt. She knew what it was like to be in Buck’s position, feeling that you were on the outside of something so devastating. She had felt that way after the trailer park. She still did.

“Not really, Buck. I’m sorry.”

“I was just wondering, you know?”

“I know. Listen, I should call to keep you up on this. I’ve just been so busy.”

“I heard they found some writing in the frag. What’s that about?”

“We’re not sure what we found. It’s either a 5 or an S but, yeah, it was cut into the body of the pipe.”

Starkey wasn’t sure how much she should tell him about Mr. Red, so she let it go at that.

Buck hesitated.

“A 5 or an S? What in hell is that, part of a message?”

Starkey wanted to change the subject.

“I don’t know, Buck. If anything develops, I’ll let you know.”

Santos waved at her, pointing at the phone. A second line light was blinking.

“Listen, Buck, I got a call. As soon as we get anything, I’ll call.”

“Okay, Carol. I’m not nagging or anything.”

“I know. I’ll see you later.”

Starkey thought he sounded disappointed, and felt all the more guilty for avoiding him.

The second call was John Chen.

“We got an evidence transfer here in your name from the ATF lab in Rockville.”

“Is it bomb components from Miami?”

“Yeah. You should’ve told me it was coming, Starkey. I don’t like stuff just showing up like this. I got court today, and now I have to take care of all this chain of evidence paperwork. I’ve gotta be at court by eleven.”

Starkey glanced at her watch.

“I’ll be there before you leave. I want to look at it.”

To maintain the chain of evidence, Chen or another of the criminalists would have to personally log over the components into Starkey’s possession.

“I’ve got court, Carol. Make it later today or tomorrow.”

He got this whiny quality to his voice that annoyed the hell out of her.

“I’m leaving now, John. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She was on her way out when Kelso’s door opened, and she remembered Tennant. For a few brief minutes, she had forgotten Atascadero.

“Starkey!”

Kelso steamed across the squad room, carrying a coffee cup that read WORLD’S SEXIEST LOVER. Starkey watched him without expression, thinking fuck it, if Olsen had made the call filing a complaint, it was too late to worry about it.

“Assistant Chief Morgan wants to have a meeting this afternoon. One o’clock in my office.”

Starkey felt the ground fall away beneath her.

“About what?”

“What do you think, Detective? He wants to know what we’re doing down here about Riggio. Dick Leyton will be here, too. You will advise them on the status of the investigation, and I hope to hell you have something to say.”

Starkey felt her panic ease; apparently, no one was complaining to Internal Affairs.

Kelso spread his hands.

“So? Would you care to give me a preview?”

Starkey told him about Claudius, explaining that Tennant had learned about Mr. Red there, and that she felt it was a possible source of information.

Kelso listened, somewhat mollified.

“Well, that’s something, I guess. At least it looks like we’re doing something.”

“We are doing something, Barry.”

Even with nothing to drink, he made her head throb.

Starkey was still shaking when she left CCS, hoping to reach Chen before he left for court. She did, catching him coming down the stairs with a sport coat draped over his arm. He wasn’t happy to see her.

“I told you I had court, and you said you’d be here in twenty minutes.”

“Just get me squared away, then you can leave me to it.”

She preferred being alone when she worked. It would be easier to concentrate if Chen wasn’t watching over her shoulder, being male and offering his help.

Chen grumped about it, but turned and two-stepped the stairs, bringing her back along the hall and into the lab. Two techs were eating sandwiches between plastic bags containing what appeared to be human body parts. The smell of preservative was strong.

Chen said, “They sent two devices, Starkey. It isn’t just the library device like you said.”

That surprised her.

“All I expected was the library device.”

“We got that, but we also got the frag from a detonation they had down there. The reports say they’re pretty much the same design, only one was really a bomb and the other wasn’t.”

Starkey recalled what Pell had told her about a sweatshop bombing, which was described in one of the seven reports he had provided. She had already read the Dade County report on that device and thought that having it might prove useful.

Chen led her to a corner of the lab where two white boxes rested on the black lab table. Both boxes had been opened.

Chen said, “Everything’s bagged, tagged, and logged. You’ve gotta sign here, then the ATF says you’re clear to do whatever you want, up to and including destructive testing.”

Destructive testing was sometimes necessary to separate components or obtain samples. Starkey didn’t anticipate having to do that and would refer to those results that the Miami authorities had found.

Starkey signed four federal evidence forms where Chen indicated, then gave them back to him.

“Okay. Can I work here at your table?”

“Just try not to make a mess. I know where everything is, so put it back in its proper place. I hate when people move things.”

“I won’t move anything.”

“You want me to tell Russ Daigle you’re up here? He’ll probably want to see this.”

“I’d rather work the bomb by myself, John. I’ll get him when I’m done.”

When Chen was finally gone, Starkey took a breath, closed her eyes, and felt the tension melting away with the glacial slowness of ice becoming water. This was the part of the job that she loved, and had always loved. This was her secret. When she touched the bomb, when she had its pieces in her hands, when they pressed into the flesh of her fingers and palms, she was part of it. It had been that way since her first training exercise at the Redstone Arsenal Bomb School. The bomb was a puzzle. She became a piece in a larger whole that she was able to see in ways that others couldn’t. Maybe Dana was right. For the first time in three years, she was alone with a bomb, and she felt at rest.

Starkey pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves.

The ATF had sent both devices along with their respective reports, one each from the Dade County Bomb Squad and the ATF’s National Laboratory Center in Rockville, Maryland. Starkey put the reports aside. She wanted to come at the material with a fresh eye and draw her own conclusions. She would read their reports later to compare the conclusions of the bomb techs in Maryland and Miami with her own.

The exploded device was the usual scorched and twisted frag, the fragments in twenty-eight Ziploc bag, each bag labeled with a case number, an evidence number, and description.

Starkey glanced at the contents of each without opening the bags because she saw no need; her interest was in the intact device. The largest fragment was a twisted, four-inch piece of pipe that flattened into a perfect rectangle, its edges as perfect as if they had been cut with a machinist’s tool. Explosions could do that, changing the shape of things in unexpected and surprising ways, ways that often made no sense because every distortion was not only the result of the explosive, but was also predicted by the inner stresses of the material being changed.

She returned the bags to their box, pushed that box aside. The second box contained the disassembled parts of the device that had been recovered from the library. She laid these bags out on the bench, organizing them by components. One bag contained the siren that had sounded to draw attention, another the timer, another the siren’s battery pack. The siren had been crushed and two of three AA batteries ruptured when Dade County de-armed the device with its water cannon. Starkey thought she would not have recognized the siren if the bag hadn’t been labeled.

When the bomb components were laid out, Starkey opened the bags.

The two galvanized pipe cylinders had been blown open like blooming flowers, but were otherwise intact. The duct tape that had joined the pipes had been scissored, but was still in place. The scent of the glue that Dade County had used in their attempt to bring up fingerprints still clung to the metal. Starkey knew that the Dade County forensics team would have expected to find print fragments, even though they might not have belonged to Mr. Red. Salespeople, store clerks, the person who rang up the sale. But nothing had been found. Mr. Red had cleaned the components, leaving nothing to chance.

Starkey assembled the pieces with little effort. Some of the pieces would no longer fit together because they were misshapen by the de-armer, but Starkey had everything close enough. Outwardly, the only difference between this device and the one that had killed Charlie Riggio was the addition of the timer. Red had placed the device, then, when he was ready, pressed the switch to start the countdown. She guessed by the looks of it that the timer was probably good for an hour, counting down from sixty minutes. The police report, if it was thorough, would have constructed a timeline built from witness reports to try to establish how long between the time Red was last seen near the table and the siren going off. This didn’t interest Starkey.

She placed her hands on the components, feeling the substance of them. The gloves hid much of the texture, but she kept them on. These were the same pieces of metal and wire and tape that Mr. Red had touched. He had acquired the raw components, cut them, shaped them, and fitted them together. The heat of his body had warmed them. His breath had settled over them like smoke. Oils from his skin stained them with unseeable shadows. Starkey knew that you could learn much about a person by the way they kept their car and their home, by the way they ordered the events of their life or covered canvas with paint. The bomb was a reflection of the person who built it, as individual as their face or their fingerprints. Starkey saw more than pipe and wire; she saw the loops, arches, and whorl patterns of his personality.

Mr. Red was proud of his work to the point of arrogance. He was meticulous, even obsessive. His person would be neat, as would his home. He would be short-tempered and impatient, though he might hide these things from other people, often by pretending to be someone else. He would be a coward. He would only let out his rage through the perfect devices that he constructed. He would see the devices as himself, as the self he wished to be—powerful, unstoppable. He was a creature of habit because the structure of it gave him comfort.

Starkey examined the wiring, noting that where the wires were joined, each had been connected with a bullet connector of a type available in any hobby store. The connector sleeves were red. The wires were red. He wanted people to see him. He wanted people to know. He was desperate for the attention.

Starkey put the bullet connectors under a magnifying glass and used tweezers to remove the clips. She found that the wire was looped around the connector three times in a counterclockwise direction. Every wire. No bullet connectors from Riggio’s bomb had been found, so she had nothing to compare it with. She shook her head at Mr. Red’s precision. Every wire, three times, counterclockwise. The structure gave him comfort.

Starkey examined the threads cut into the pipe ends and the white plastic plumber’s tape that had been peeled away. Starkey hadn’t removed the tape from Riggio’s bomb because she hadn’t thought it necessary, but now she realized that this was a mistake. The plumber’s tape was a completely unneccessary part of the bomb, and therefore potentially the most revealing. It occurred to Starkey that if Mr. Red liked to write messages, he might write them on the tape, which had started out as a clean white surface.

She examined the tape fragments that the ATF people had stripped, but found nothing. The tape, designed to be crushed to make the pipe joint airtight, had been shredded when it was removed. Even if something had been written there, she couldn’t have found it.

Deciding to examine the tape from the remaining joints, Starkey brought the pipes to a vise at the end of Chen’s bench. She fit rubber pads on the vise jaws so that the pipe wouldn’t be marred, then used a special wrench with a rubber mouth to unscrew the end cap. It wasn’t particularly tight and didn’t take much effort.

The plumber’s tape was cut deep into the threads. She brought the magnifying glass over and, using a needle as a probe, worked around the root of the threads until she found the end of the tape. Working this close made her eyes hurt. Starkey leaned away, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. She noticed the black tech smiling at her, gesturing with her own reading glasses. Starkey laughed. That would come soon enough.

Starkey worked the tape for almost twenty minutes before she got it free. She found no writing or marks of any kind. She switched the pipes in the vise, then went to work on the second tape. This one didn’t take as long. Ten minutes later, Starkey was unpeeling the tape when she realized that both joints had been wrapped the same way. Mr. Red had pressed the tape onto the top of the pipe, then wrapped away from himself, winding the tape over and down and around before bringing it under the pipe and back up again. Clockwise. Just as he had wound the wire to the bullet clips the same way every time, he had wrapped the plumber’s tape to the threads the same way every time. Starkey wondered why.

Starkey’s eyes were killing her, and the beginnings of a headache pulsed behind her forehead. She peeled off the gloves, got a cigarette, and went out to the parking lot. She leaned against one of the blue Bomb Squad Suburbans, smoking. She stared at the red brick garages at the back of the facility where bomb techs practiced aiming and firing the de-armer. She remembered the first time she had fired the de-armer, which was nothing more than a twelve-gauge water cannon. The noise had scared the hell out of her.

Mr. Red thought about his bombs and built them carefully. She suspected that he had a reason for wrapping the tape clockwise around the pipe threads. It bothered her that she didn’t see it. If he saw a reason that she couldn’t see, it meant he was better than her, and Starkey could not accept that. She flicked away her cigarette, pretended to hold the pipe and wrap it. She closed her eyes and pretended to screw on the end cap. When she opened her eyes, two uniformed officers heading out to their cars were laughing at her. Starkey flipped them off. The third time she assembled her imaginary pipe, she saw the reason. He wrapped the tape clockwise so that when he screwed on the end cap—also clockwise—the tape would not unwind and bunch. If everything went clockwise, the cap would screw on more easily. It was a small thing, but Starkey felt a jolt of fierce pride like nothing she had known in a long time. She was beginning to see how his mind worked, and that meant she could beat him.

Starkey went back inside, wanting to check the taping on the sweatshop bomb, but found only a fragment of an end cap. There would be a sample of joint tape in the threads, but not enough to tell her the direction of the winding. She went downstairs to the Bomb Squad, looking for Russ Daigle. He was in the sergeants’ bay, eating a liverwurst sandwich. He smiled when he saw her.

“Hey, Starkey. What are you doing here?”

“Upstairs with Chen. Listen, we got an end cap off Riggio’s bomb, right?”

He took down his feet and swallowed as he nodded.

“Yep. Got one intact and a piece of another. I showed you the joint tape, remember?”

“You mind if I take apart the one that’s intact?”

“You mean you want to unscrew it?”

“Yeah. I want to look at the tape.”

“You can do whatever you want with it, but that’s going to be hard.”

He brought her out to his workbench where the pieces of the Silver Lake bomb were locked in a cabinet. Once Chen had released them, they were Daigle’s to use in the reconstruction.

“See here? The pipe is still mated to the cap, but they bulged from the pressure so you can’t unscrew them.”

Starkey saw what he meant and felt her hopes sag. The pipe wasn’t round; it had been distorted by gas pressure into the shape of an egg. There was no way to unscrew it.

“Can I take it upstairs and play with it?”

Daigle shrugged.

“Knock yourself out.”

Starkey brought the cap upstairs, fit it into the vise, then used a high-speed saw to cut it in half. She used a steel pick to pry the inner pipe halves away from the outer cap halves, then fitted the two pipe halves together again in the vise. Daigle would probably be irritated because she had cut the cap, but she couldn’t think of another way to reach the tape.

It took Starkey almost forty minutes to find the end of the tape, working with one eye on the clock and a growing frustration. Later, she realized that it took so long because she thought it would be wrapped overhand like the tape on the Miami device. It wasn’t. The tape on this joint had been wrapped underhand.

Counterclockwise, not clockwise.

Starkey stepped away from the bench.

“Jesus.”

She flipped through the report that had been sent from Rockville and found that it had been written by a criminalist named Janice Brockwell. She checked the time again. Three hours later in D.C. meant that everyone back there should have returned from lunch, but not yet left for the day. Starkey searched through the lab until she found a phone, called the ATF’s National Laboratory, and asked for Brockwell.

When Janice Brockwell came on, Starkey identified herself and gave the case number of the Miami hoax device.

“Oh, yeah, I just sent that out to you.”

“That’s right. I have it here now.”

“How can I help you?”

“Are you familiar with the first seven devices?”

“The Mr. Red bombs?”

“That’s right. I read those reports, but don’t remember seeing anything about the tape on the pipe joints.”

Starkey explained what she had found on the library device.

“You were able to unwrap the tape?”

Starkey could hear the stiffness in Brockwell’s voice. She felt that Starkey was criticizing her.

“I unscrewed one of the end caps, and the tape darn near unwrapped itself. That got me to thinking about it, so I worked the other loose. Then I started wondering about the caps on the other bombs.”

Starkey waited, hoping her lie would soften the sting.

The defensiveness in Brockwell’s voice eased.

“That’s a pretty cool notion, Starkey. I don’t think we paid attention to the tape.”

“Could you do me a favor and check the others? I want to know if they match.”

“You say they’re clockwise, right?”

“Yeah. Both windings were clockwise. I want to see if the others match.”

“I don’t know how many intact end caps we have.”

Starkey didn’t say anything. She let Brockwell work it through.

“Tell you what, Starkey. Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you, okay?”

Starkey gave Brockwell her number, then returned the bomb components to their boxes and locked them beneath Chen’s bench.

Starkey arrived back at Spring Street with ten minutes to spare. She was harried by the rush to get back, so she stopped on the stairs, smoking half a cigarette to give herself a chance to calm down. When she had herself composed, she went up and found Marzik and Hooker in the squad room. Marzik arched her eyebrows.

“We thought you were blowing off the meeting.”

“I was at Glendale.”

She decided that she didn’t have time to tell them about the Miami bomb. They could hear it when she went over it for Kelso.

“Is Morgan here yet?”

“In there with Kelso. Dick Leyton’s in there, too.”

“Why are you guys still out here?”

Marzik looked miffed.

“Kelso asked us not to attend.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The prick. He probably thinks his office will look smaller with too many bodies in there.”

Starkey thought Marzik’s guess was probably true. She saw that she still had a minute, so she asked Marzik and Santos if they had anything new. Marzik reported that the Silver Lake interviews were still a bust, but Santos had spoken with the postproduction facility and had some good news.

He said, “Between all the tapes, we’ve got pretty much of a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the area around the parking lot. If our caller is there, we should be able to see him.”

“When can we have the tape?”

“Day after tomorrow at the latest. We’re going to have to go see the tape on their machine for the best possible clarity, but they say it’s looking pretty good.”

“Okay. That’s something.”

Marzik came closer to her, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear.

“I want to warn you about something.”

“You’re always hearing these things you warn me about.”

“I’m just telling you what I heard, all right. Morgan’s thinking about turning over the investigation to Robbery-Homicide.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? A man died. It’s a murder. You have Homicide investigate. Look, I’m just telling you what I heard, is all. I don’t want to lose this investigation any more than you.”

Starkey could tell by Santos’s expression that he took it seriously, too.

“Okay, Beth. Thanks.”

Starkey checked her watch again. All this time she’d been worried about losing the case to a federal task force, and now this. She decided not to think about it because there was nothing that she could say. She would either convince Morgan that she was on top of the case or she wouldn’t. She popped an Altoid and a Tagamet, then steeled herself and knocked on Kelso’s door exactly at one o’clock.

Kelso answered with his smarmiest smile, putting on a show for the A-chief. Dick Leyton smiled as he greeted her.

“Hi, Carol. How you doing?”

“Fine, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

Her palms were wet when she shook his hand. He held onto her an extra moment, giving her hand a squeeze to show his support.

Kelso introduced her to Assistant Chief of Police Christopher Morgan, an intense, slender man sporting a charcoal suit. Like most officers, Starkey had never met Morgan, or any of the other six assistant chiefs, though she knew them by reputation. Morgan was reputed to be a demanding executive who micromanaged his domain with a violent temper. He had run in twelve consecutive Los Angeles City Marathons, and he demanded that his staff run, also. None of them smoked, drank, or were overweight. Like Morgan, all of them were immaculately groomed, wore charcoal suits, and, outside the office, identical military-issue sunglasses. Officers in the lower ranks called Morgan and his staff the Men in Black.

Morgan shook her hand without emotion, bypassing pleasantries by asking her to bring him up to date.

Leyton said, “Carol, why don’t you start by describing the device, since your investigation stems from there?”

Starkey briefed Morgan on the Silver Lake bomb’s configuration, how it had been detonated, and how they knew that the builder had been on the scene within one hundred yards. She used these descriptions to brief him on Mr. Red. When she was explaining his use of radio detonation and why they believed he had been within one hundred yards of the bomb, Morgan interupted.

“The TV stations can help you with that. They can provide videotape.”

Starkey told him that she had already acquired the tapes and was currently having them enhanced. Morgan seemed pleased with that, though it was hard to tell because his expression never changed.

It took her less than five minutes to describe everything that had been done, including their development of Claudius as a possible source of information about RDX and Mr. Red. All in all, she felt that she had done a pretty good job.

“This bomb couldn’t have been placed in Silver Lake as a threat to one of the businesses there?”

“No, sir. Detectives from the OC Bureau and Rampart did background checks on all the businesses in the mall, and the people who work in them. Nothing like that came up. No one was threatened, and, so far, no one has taken credit for the bombing.”

“So what’s the line of your investigation?”

“The components. Modex Hybrid is an elite explosive, but it’s not complicated to make if you have the components. TNT and ammonium picrate are easy to come by, but RDX is rare. The idea now is to use the RDX as a way to backtrack to whoever built the bomb.”

Morgan seemed to consider her.

“What does that mean, ‘whoever’? I thought it was understood that Mr. Red built the bomb.”

“Well, we’re working under the assumption that he did, but we also have to consider that it might have been built by someone else, too.”

Dick Leyton shifted on the couch, and Kelso frowned.

“What are you talking about, Starkey?”

Starkey described comparing the joint tape from both end caps of the Miami device and the surviving end cap from the Silver Lake device.

“Each of the bombs that has been linked to Mr. Red has been designed and constructed the same way. Even the way he binds the wire to the bullet connectors, three clockwise twists. Same way every time. He’s a craftsman, he probably even thinks of himself as an artist. There’s something different about the Silver Lake bomb. It’s small, but people like this are creatures of habit.”

Dick Leyton appeared thoughtful.

“Was that noted in the seven earlier bombs?”

“I called Rockville and asked about it. No one thought to check the direction of the wrapping before.”

Morgan crossed his arms.

“But you did?”

Starkey met his eyes.

“You have to check everything, Chief. That’s the way it works. I’m not saying we have a copycat; the security around the Mr. Red investigation has been tight. All I’m saying is that I found this difference. That bears consideration.”

Starkey wished that she’d never brought it up. Morgan was frowning, and Kelso looked irritated. She felt like she was digging a hole for herself. Dick Leyton was the only one in the room who seemed interested.

“Carol, if this were the work of a copycat, how would that affect your investigation?”

“It expands. If you assume that this bomb wasn’t built by Mr. Red, you have to ask who did build it? Who knows enough about Mr. Red to duplicate his bombs, and how would they get the components? Then you start to wonder, why? Why copycat Mr. Red? Why kill a bomb tech, or anyone else, especially if you’re not taking credit for it?”

Morgan heard her out, his face an impenetrable mask. When she was done, he glanced at his watch, then at Kelso.

“This sounds like a Homicide investigation. Barry, I’m thinking we should let Robbery-Homicide take over. They have the experience.”

There it was. Even with Marzik’s warning, Starkey’s breath caught. They were going to lose the case to the Homicide Bureau.

Kelso wasn’t happy with that.

“Well, I don’t know, Chief.”

Dick Leyton said, “Chief, I think that would be a mistake.”

His statement surprised her.

Leyton spread his hands reasonably, looking for all the world like the calm, assured professional.

“The way to get to this guy is through a bomb investigation. Following the RDX, just as Detective Starkey is doing. It takes a bomb investigator to do that, not a homicide cop. Starkey’s doing a good job with that. As for this difference she’s found, we have to recognize it, but not get carried away with it. Serial offenders like Mr. Red undergo evolutions. Yes, they’re creatures of habit, but they also learn, and they change. We can’t know what’s in his mind.”

Starkey stared at him, feeling a warmth that embarrassed her.

Morgan seemed thoughtful, then checked his watch again and nodded.

“All right. We’ve got a cop killer out there, Detective Starkey.”

“Yes, sir. We’re going to find him. I am going to clear this case.”

“I hope so. Those are all fine questions you raise. I’m sure you could spend a very long time finding answers for them. But, considering what we know, it seems like a long shot. Long shots are enormous time wasters. All the evidence seems to point to Mr. Red.”

“The tape was just something that didn’t fit, that’s all.”

Her voice came out defensive and whiny. Starkey hated herself for saying it.

Morgan glanced at Kelso.

“Well, as long as we don’t get sidetracked chasing theories that don’t pan out. That’s my advice to you, Detective. Listen to Lieutenant Leyton. Keep your investigation moving forward. Investigations are like sharks. If they stop moving forward, they sink.”

Kelso nodded.

“It will move forward, Chief. We’re going to lock down this sonofabitch. We’re going to get Mr. Red.”

Morgan thanked everyone for the fine jobs they were doing, then glanced at his watch again and left. Dick Leyton winked at her, then followed Morgan out. Starkey wanted to run after him and kiss him, but Kelso stopped her.

Kelso waited until Morgan and Leyton were gone, then closed the door.

“Carol, forget this copycat business. You were doing fine until you said that. It sounds like nonsense.”

“It was only an observation, Barry. Did you want me to ignore it?”

“It made you sound like an amateur.”

Southern Comfort

John Michael Fowles bought the 1969 Chevelle SS 396 from a place called Dago Red’s Used Cars in Metairie, Louisiana. The SS 396 sported a jacked-up rear end, big-assed Goodyear radials with raised letters, and rust rot along the fenders and rocker panels. The rust rot was extra; John bought it because the damned thing was red. A red car from Dago Red’s for Mr. Red. John Michael Fowles thought that was a riot.

He used the Miami money, paying cash with a false Louisiana driver’s license that gave his name as Clare Fontenot, then drove to a nearby mall where he bought new clothes and a brand-new Apple iBook, also for cash. He got the one colored tangerine.

He drove across Lake Pontchartrain to Slidell, Louisiana, where he ate lunch at a diner called Irma’s Qwik Stop. He had seafood gumbo, but didn’t like it. The shrimp were small and shriveled because they’d been simmering all day. This was the first time John Michael Fowles had been to Louisiana. He didn’t think much of the place. It was as humid as Florida, but not nearly so pretty. Most of the people were fat and looked retarded. Too much deep-fried food.

Irma’s Qwik Stop was across a narrow two-lane road from a titty bar called Irma’s Club Parisienne. John was going to meet a man there at eight that night who called himself Peter Willy, Peter Willy being a play on Willy Peter, military slang for white phosphorous explosive. Peter Willy claimed to have four Claymore antipersonnel mines to sell. If this was true, John would buy the mines for one thousand dollars each in order to recover the half pound of RDX housed in them. RDX, which he needed for the Modex Hybrid he used in his bombs, was harder than hell to find, so it was worth the effort to come to Louisiana for it, even though Peter Willy was probably full of shit.

John had “met” Peter Willy, as with many of his contacts, in an Internet chat room. Peter Willy purported to be a death-dealing ex-Ranger and former biker who now worked the offshore oil platforms for Exxon, two weeks on, two weeks off, and occasionally spent his off time hiring out as a mercenary in South America. John knew this was bullshit. Using what was known as a “Creeper” program, John had backtraced Peter Willy’s screen name to an Earthlink member named George Parsons and to the Visa card number with which Parsons paid for his account. Once John had the Visa number, it was easy to establish Parsons’s true identity as an FAA flight controller employed at New Orleans International Airport. Parsons was married with three daughters, had never been convicted of a crime, and was not a veteran of military service, let alone being a death-dealing ex-Ranger and part-time mercenary. Maybe he would show tonight, but maybe he wouldn’t. People like Peter Willy often chickened out. Big talk on the net, but short of action in the real world. This, John knew, is what separated the predators from the prey.

John sat in the diner, sipping iced tea until six women rose from a corner booth and left. The alpha female, a busted-out Clairol blonde with cratered skin and an ass as wide as a mobile home, had put the bill on her charge card. Now, as they herded out, John ambled past their table. He made sure that no one was looking, then palmed the credit card receipt and tucked it into his pocket.

As it was only a little after two in the afternoon, John had time to kill, and was curious to learn what the ATF had made of his little love letter in the Broward County Library. John had been moving steadily since then, working Claudius to locate a new source of RDX, but was now anxious to read the alerts that had been written about him in the ATF and FBI bulletins. He knew that his little stunt at the library would not place him on the Ten Most Wanted List, but he expected that field offices around the country would be buzzing with alerts. Reading them gave him a serious boner.

John laughed at the absurdity.

Sometimes he was so goddamned bizarre that he amazed himself.

John paid for his meal without leaving a tip (the crappy shrimp), saddled up the big 396, and rumbled down the road back to the Blue Bayou Motel, where he had acquired a room for twenty-two dollars. Once in his room, John plugged the new iBook into the phone line and dialed up AOL. Typically, he would sign on to Claudius to read what the geeps posted about him, and sometimes he would even pretend to be someone else, dropping hints about Mr. Red and enjoying his mythic status. John ate that stuff up: John Michael Fowles, Urban Legend, Rock God. But not tonight. Using the Visa card slip and the Clairol blonde’s name, he joined AOL, signed on to the Internet, then typed in the URL address for a web site he maintained under the name Kip Russell. The web site, housed in a server in Rochester, Minnesota, was identified by a number only and had never been listed on any search engine. It could not be found on Yahoo!, AltaVista, HotBot, Internet Explorer, or anything else. John’s web site was a storage facility for software.

John Michael Fowles traveled light. He moved often, abandoned those possessions and identities by which he could be tracked, and often carried no more than a bag of cash. He was without bank accounts, credit cards (except those he stole or bought for temporary use), and real property. Wherever he relocated, he acquired the things he needed, paid cash, then abandoned them when he moved. One of the things he often needed but never carried was software. His software was indispensable.

Before John built bombs, he wrote software. He hacked computer systems, networked with other hackers, and was as deeply into that world and its ways as he was into explosives. He wasn’t as good at it as he was with explosives, but he was good enough. The software that waited for him in Rochester was how he was able to run background checks on doofballs like Peter Willy, and how he knew what the feds knew about Mr. Red. With the software that rested in Rochester, he could open doors into credit card companies and banks, telephone systems and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, including the FBI’s Bomb Data Center, the ATF’s National Repository, and some branches of the Defense Department, which he often scanned for reports of munitions thefts.

When John had accessed his web site, he downloaded an assault program named OSCAR and a clone program named PEEWEE. The downloading took about ten minutes, after which John hand-dialed the phone number for a branch of Bank of America in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and used OSCAR to hack into their system. PEEWEE piggybacked on OSCAR, and, once in the B of A system, cloned itself into a free entity that existed only within the B of A branch in Kalamazoo. PEEWEE, from Kalamazoo, then dialed into the ATF’s National Repository. As expected, PEEWEE was stopped at a gate that demanded a coded password. PEEWEE then imported OSCAR to assault the gate. Start to finish, the process took two minutes and twelve seconds, whereupon John Michael Fowles, also known as Mr. Red, had access to everything within the ATF’s database of information on bombs and bombers.

John smiled to himself as he always did, and said, “Piece a’ fuckin’ cake.”

The most recent entry was from Los Angeles, which surprised John. It should have been from Miami, but it wasn’t.

John Michael Fowles had not been to Los Angeles in almost two years.

John stared at the entry for several seconds, curious, then opened the file. He skimmed the summary remarks, learning that an LAPD bomb technician named Charles Riggio had died in a Silver Lake parking lot. John scanned the summary, the last lines of which hit him with all the impact of a nuclear device.

… analysis finds residue of the trinary explosive Modex Hybrid … Initial evidence suggests that the perpetrator is the anonymous bomber known as “Mr. Red.”

John walked across the room, leaned against the wall and stared at nothing. He was breathing harder now, his back clammy. He stalked back to the iBook.

John’s eye zoomed into the components of the bomb until they filled his screen.

MODEX HYBRID

He wondered for a crazy, insane moment if he had built the bomb and somehow forgotten it, laughed aloud at that, then threw the iBook across the room as hard as he could, gouging a three-inch rent in the wall and shattering the plastic case.

John shouted, “You MOTHERFUCKER!”

John Michael Fowles grabbed his bag of cash and ran out of the motel. Peter Willy would have a long night at the titty bar, waiting for someone who would not show. John barrel-assed the big red SS 396 along the edge of the lake, pushing the gas-guzzling engine hard and making the fat, low-class tires squeal. He stopped on the side of the causeway long enough to throw the iBook into the water, then drove like a motherfucker all the way back to the airport. He put the car in long-term parking, wiped down the interior and doors to remove his fingerprints, then paid cash for a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

No one knew better than John Michael Fowles what it took to make Modex Hybrid or how to find those things within the bomb community.

John Michael Fowles had resources, and he had clues.

Somebody had stolen his work, which meant someone was trying to horn in on his glory.

John Michael Fowles was not going to tolerate that.

He was going out there to get the sonofabitch.