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CHAPTER TEN

" S tone really thinks there’s going to be another bombing?” Silas stood at one of the long tables in the makeshift lab room, sorting bomb debris through a screen. A spotlight shone down on the fragments, the rest of the room under low light to accentuate the features. In one screen, he’d collected the shards of what looked like aluminum from the coffee thermos that held the bomb. In the second, he’d gathered the warped steel edges of a water pipe, the container that housed the low-level explosive materials, which were currently under the gas chromatograph to trace the chemical composition.

“Mmmhmm,” Eve said, picking up a fragment of the pipe. Jagged edges, coated with dark residue. She took a swab of it. “He says it’s a gut feeling.”

Silas looked up at her, raised an eyebrow.

“I know,” Eve said. “But he’s…well, not what I expected. He’s…earnest. And not the dark and mysterious renegade my father—and everyone else—makes him out to be. Part of me wants to believe him.”

“I don’t want to know what that part is,” Silas said, and gave her a gimlet look. “Just watch yourself. I’ve heard stories.”

She dropped the swab into a container and labeled it for processing. “What kind of stories?”

“Just that Rembrandt Stone is not above breaking a few rules to get answers.”

If I give them answers, then maybe they can stop hoping and start figuring out how to live with the wreckage of their lives.

Rem’s words, spoken as he stared into the dark amber of his beer, clung to her. A desperation, perhaps, in his tone that kneaded her own scar tissue. “Maybe sometimes you need to break a few?—”

“No, Eve.” Silas looked up. “That’s the difference between criminal investigation and what we do. They’re all about hunches and interrogations and piecing what-ifs together. We look at the facts, the evidence and find the truth. It’s science, not instincts.”

Silas held her gaze, and she couldn’t escape the sense that it had irked him, her going out for lunch with Rembrandt. And Burke.

“Well, if I were to guess, given the blast wave pattern and the rate of deflagration, I think we’re going to find a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in this residue.”

“And maybe antimony.” He held up what looked like a burned Dcell battery. “I think we have the igniter.” He set the battery into the basket.

“It’s not a unique chemical signature, given the pattern of the recent Oklahoma and Centennial Olympic Park bombings.”

“He’s a copycat at best because he used a digital alarm clock timer as the detonator.” He picked up a burned mass of plastic, the wires charred.

“Which gave the bomber a twenty-four-hour window, once he set the time and attached the leads,” she said, making a mental note to tell Rembrandt.

“What bombers fail to understand is that bombs do not destroy themselves in the blast. Up to ninety-five percent of the casing survives the explosion,” Silas picked up a six-inch piece of mangled pipe. “What we have here is a simple pipe bomb, packed with ANFO, with a clock timer, a model rocket igniter, and activated by a battery.”

Which killed seven people, including a toddler. The pretzel from the pub had turned to sludge in her stomach. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into a nearby hazardous waste canister. “We won’t know for sure if your guess is correct until we get the results of the chromatograph test.”

Silas followed her out of the lab room into the main area where the techs were still cataloging the debris. Dim light hovered over the expanse, the cavernous room raising gooseflesh. The body of evidence felt a little like looking for the right sprig of hay in a field of mowed grass. Still, the more evidence they collected, the more information they could develop in the lab. Standing at the crime scene, amidst broken and blown-out windows, shattered furniture, the rubble of coffee machines, and even personal effects, she’d had to make some split decisions. Think like a bomber. How would I build a bomb?

The device would have to be undetected—hidden, perhaps under a table, in a bag, or even…and that led her to the coffee thermoses and a conversation with the arson examiner, who concurred with her theory. No, her guess.

Okay, fine, she’d call it a hunch. Still, Silas was right. Rules and order kept her from making crazy assumptions and veering away from the truth.

But just being around Rembrandt had made her already break some fundamentals. Like taking three hours to develop film of a crowd, in hopes of finding an unknown face at a future crime scene…yeah, he sounded crazy, and she’d drunk the Kool-Aid.

Eve walked from table to table, where the evidence technicians had not only bagged and labeled everything. Shoes, a backpack, and even the charred remnants of a coffee bean burlap sack, sketching out each item’s found location on a grid of the scene.

She read the label on the burlap. Green Earth coffee, out of Brazil. On the table next to it lay a coffee cup, bagged, slightly crushed.

“Where was this found?” Item number forty-four—she found its number on the map. Silas came up to look over her shoulder.

“It looks like it was picked up on the sidewalk across the street. Maybe from a patron who’d just ordered their coffee and was headed to the bus stop?”

“It was on the side street, away from the shop. The bus stop is further up the street, on the opposite side.”

“And there’s nothing else there but the backside of the grocery store,” Silas said.

“So, he was standing outside, watching?” Eve heard Rembrandt’s words pinging inside her. “He thinks the bomber is trying to make a point. The early time suggests he wasn’t as interested in massive casualties as he was in making a point.”

“Which means he wanted to make sure it went off.”

“Let’s see if we can pull DNA off this. Could be nothing, but if whoever the cup belongs to was in the store, he or she might have seen something. We may have a survivor here who we missed.” She handed him the baggie. “Tomorrow. Go home, Silas. It’s been a long day and it’s late.”

“You first.” Silas glanced at his watch. “Pizza?”

She scrubbed her hands down her face. “I just want to climb into my bathtub and see if I can put myself back together.”

“You don’t have running water,” Silas said.

“Thanks for that.” She followed him to the door, grabbing her satchel from the rack. “Samson promised he’d turn the water on.”

Silas pushed open the door, out into the night. Overhead, stars spilled across a dark and desolate sky, pinpricks of hope, the moon an eye upon the city. She followed the puddles of street lamps out to her Escort. Silas stood at her door and hung a hand on it as she opened it.

“You sure you don’t want pizza?”

He stood there, his blond hair swept back and tucked behind his ears, hazel eyes imperative.

“I gotta tell you something.” He shifted, blew out a breath and adjusted his shoulder strap on his backpack. “I don’t think you should be hanging out with Stone.”

“I’m picking that up. Calm down, it was just lunch?—”

“He didn’t reveal all his secrets in that memoir of his.”

She slowly rose from her seat. “I’m listening.”

Silas stepped back from her door, and she closed it, then leaned against it, arms folded.

“Listen, I’m not trying to get him into trouble. It’s just?—”

“Tell me.”

He ran his hand across his jaw. “Okay, so there was a case involving this missing four-year-old girl.”

“We talked about it today, over lunch. She was kidnapped from Minnehaha Park.”

“Yeah. Took them three days to find her—and when they did, she was dead.”

“Sad—”

“Horrifying, because she’d also been raped. And when the coroner found that out, rumor is that your friend Rembrandt sort of lost it.” He blew out a breath. “See, it was after they picked up the perp, and when the semen analysis came back, it was from…well, her father. And although there was nothing to tie the father to the kidnapping, he had contact with her either before or during the abduction. But the guy alibied out for the entire time, so…”

A chill had started in her core, begun to wring through her.

Silas seemed to be considering his next words, the way he stared out into the street, watching late night traffic cruise down the strip. The heat of the day had released from the sidewalks, now simmered in the air, mixing with the dirt and must of the city. A siren shot through the silence, whining in the distance.

“What happened?”

Silas met her eyes. “No one can prove it, but…well, the father was found beaten, nearly to death, outside a bar in St. Paul. One witness said they saw a Camaro parked on the street, but retracted it later.”

“A Camaro?”

“Black.” Silas’ eyes narrowed. “Stone drives a black Camaro.”

His words dropped through her like a stone. “You don’t think…”

“I absolutely do think. Everyone knows he’s a fighter—works out with his partner all the time at a local boxing ring.”

She just stared at him. “He wouldn’t…” she said softly.

He shrugged. “IA did some investigation, but rumor was Burke confirmed his alibi. Of course.”

She made a non-committal noise. Then, “I might be on his side, just a little.”

Silas raised an eyebrow. “No doubt it strikes a nerve in all of us to think about that little girl…and…” He shook his head. “But he nearly killed the guy, Eve.”

“Supposedly.”

“Really?”

“You don’t know. And he was cleared.”

Silas held up his hands. “All I’m saying is that the guy has a dark side. Don’t get too close, okay?”

Huh. But she nodded.

He let her climb in her car, and stood there watching as she backed out. Waved before heading to his own car.

She pulled out, driving through the darkened streets toward Lake Street, then past Lake Calhoun, glistening under the moonlight in Technicolor with the lights of the city.

When she pulled up to her house, Samson’s truck was parked out front. Moths played kamikaze with her lit porch light as she opened her door.

Inside, the kitchen light beckoned her and she found Samson sprawled under her sink, in his stocking feet and grout-splattered jeans. But along her kitchen counter, below the cupboards and along the back splash of her new stove, ice-blue tiles lined the walls, grouted with a foamy blue. And shoot, but Sams was right.

“Nice,” she said, dropping her satchel on her countertop. Samson climbed out, knocking his hat sideways.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she said.

“I have beer in the fridge.” He climbed to his feet.

“I just need a bath. Please, please?—”

“The water will be on in a jiffy. I need to finish connecting the new faucet.”

She noticed it now, a stainless goose neck. “The place looks good, Sams.”

He disappeared again under the sink. “Thanks. I know you had a rough day, so I wanted to finish it for you before you got home.”

Sweet. She opened the fridge, grabbed a couple beers and when he slid back out, handed him one. He opened it, then hers and tapped their beers together.

They drank in silence.

“Is it okay if I crash on your sofa?”

She grinned. “Yeah. Or in the second bedroom upstairs.”

“Great. Because I’m bushed.” He picked up his pipe wrench, dropped it into an open toolbox, then closed it. “I’m going to put this in my truck.”

She followed him to the door and walked out onto the porch as he went down the steps, then strode out to his Ford.

Sinking down onto the steps, she stared at the skyline in the distance, the purple lip of the IDS Tower, the shiny white of First Bank Place, and the glass curtain wall of the Piper Jaffray Building. A wall of clouds had moved in behind it, now starting to clutter the sky, and the scent of rain stirred in the hush of wind. Gooseflesh rose on her arms, despite the scrub of heat.

Samson returned and sat next to her. Took another drink, staring into the quiet neighborhood.

“I keep thinking about all those people today. They go in to buy coffee…and their lives are over, just like that.” Eve touched the bottle to her lips. “It could have been me. I go into that place off Lake almost every day.”

“Yeah. Think of their families, their spouses,” Samson said quietly.

She picked at the label on the bottle. “There was a kid—two years old.”

“Aw, man.”

“I know. And…well, I had lunch with Inspectors Stone and Burke today. Rembrandt thinks it’s just the beginning.”

Samson glanced at her. “Rembrandt?”

She didn’t pick up the bait, despite his smile. “What if he’s right?”

“Why does he think there’s gonna be more?”

“Instincts, he says.”

Samson made a non-committal sound. Then, “Just do your job, sis. And let Stone do his.”

She nodded. Took another sip of her beer, Rembrandt’s voice in her head. He’s not getting away with this…not on my watch.

Yeah, well not on hers, either.