Page 47 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

47.

He had learned to go to a different place.

When faced with a situation impossible to witness yet witnessing was unavoidable, Colter Shaw flipped some kind of switch in his psyche.

After all, if a reward was offered for a person who could not be found, then one possible explanation was that they were dead, either of natural causes, accident or criminal intent. Or their own hand, of course.

And in his mission to discover them, he occasionally found the person he sought was no longer of the living—and, accordingly, altered in terrible ways. Perhaps by time and the elements. Perhaps by weapons. Perhaps by scavenging animals or insects.

Shaw was not a spiritual man, but he’d heard of people claiming that in near-death incidents, they had floated above their body, and looked down in a state of utter calm.

Shaw did not believe in that, but he stole the metaphor.

And that’s what he did when he confronted horror.

He floated above it.

He did this not to avoid being sick or stave off nightmares. No, he did this to ply his trade. Simple as that. To survive you needed to observe and assess dispassionately. And whether that involved noting footsteps in a beautiful garden that smelled of violets, or observing the angle of hacksaw blades on a victim’s ankles, he had to be as distanced as a surgeon.

He now, wearing blue gloves, found himself in that mental place as he surveyed what had once been a man—one he’d spoken to just a few hours before. Examining the organs, the shattered and burned black and red skin, the bones…

The stains of blood.

Indicators of the how and the where of the explosion.

Normally Shaw would document his findings in another one of his notebooks dedicated to the job, but that would take too long and he wanted to get the hell out as soon as he could. He had his phone to record the details of the incident. He lifted it now.

“How ’bout if I handle that,” someone said behind him.

He turned to see Debi Starr approaching, a digital camera in hand. “Just easier and better if we don’t have to play bucket brigade with the evidence. Photos’re in the chain of custody too. Oh, and here.”

She handed him booties.

“I’m the footprint queen, remember? The tales they tell…”

Shaw slipped them on.

He glanced at her as she took in the gore, noting her face was as neutral as his. He wondered where she floated.

Starr was aware of the direction of his gaze. “Aw, seen this before. Nab Wilkins—born Arthur, so don’t know where the nick came from. He took the bend at Lumberton Road doing eighty. It’s a forty zone. You know those numbers are on those signs for a reason ? Seatbelt wouldn’t’ve saved his life, but at least he wouldn’t’ve gotten smeared all over both sides of the highways. Cut clean in two. Never did figure out how that happened. So this?” A gesture toward what remained of Redding’s desk. Then a shrug. “I mean the head is a bit unpleasant. And people forget that along with blood there’s a bunch of shit inside people. Particularly true here. But other than that. All in a day’s work for Traffic Girl. You look like you’ve done this before too.”

“A few times. You know, I put the percentage low for another device, but low is not zero. You sure you want to be here? You have family, right?”

“ Everybody’s got family, Colter. And if we can find out what the hell’s going on in this town, then maybe they’ll be all the safer for it. What do you think happened?”

“That thing of his he was working on.”

Starr examined it. “Looks like a robot.”

“All its components go to the left, not everywhere. So the bomb wasn’t in there.”

“No.”

The desk was in pieces, the chair blown against a wall and embedded in the Sheetrock. Most shelves—and the equipment they held—were on the floor.

Not a single piece of glassware had survived.

Shaw studied the pieces of desk scattered around the front part of the room. He shone his light on what had been a drawer. “It was in there.”

Starr looked at it and nodded.

He closely examined what remained. “See the bits of circuit board? That could be from the detonator. Cell phone. Two circuits with different numbers. So you can arm it from a distance. Just in case there’s a similar frequency that trips the main circuit.”

“ Pro fessional,” she said, and glanced around. “There’s the hard drive.” The security camera disk—pale blue—wasn’t big. She walked carefully to it, looking at the floor as if land mines studded the concrete.

Starr slipped the drive into a Ziplock bag. “Prosecutors like special evidence bags. We don’t have any. These’ll have to do, and if a defense lawyer’s a stinker about it, on the stand, I’ll ask him to describe in detail the difference between official twenty-nine ninety-nine CSI bags and these, and watch him come up short.”

Shaw said, “My theory is get your perp’s ID first and worry about his trial later.”

She considered this with a glint in her eye. “You mean something might happen to ’em, and they don’t make it to the courthouse alive?”

“No, I do not mean that.”

“Hm.” She continued to look at him for a moment. “Now, sir, I’ve got a badge and you don’t, but I know for sure that you’ve done this more than I have. So what else are we looking for?”

“One of two things happened here. A murder for its own sake. Or a theft, and the bomb was meant to cover that up. If it’s the first one, then all we can find is a footprint, or tool marks.”

“And the second?”

“Look for someplace ransacked.”

She laughed, looking around. “Hell, Colter, this is the definition of ransacked.”

“There’ll still be something you just sense is out of place—where he was searching for the hidden treasure.”

He shone his brilliant light around the walls of the room, which was about thirty by forty feet. “You go left, I’ll go right. And let’s move as fast as we can. If there’s something here that gives us a clue about the risk to the levee, we need it ASAP. But remember—”

“Step, touch, sit.”

The two began the search. The made their way through the circuit slowly, placing their feet onto the floor only after they shone their respective lights at the concrete and, reassured there were no trip wires, continued on, looking to the right and left and up and—especially—down. Pausing frequently. They repeated the process again and again.

Slow…

They returned, after their full circle, to the remains of the desk without finding anything either of them considered helpful.

Shaw then was looking at a small gray metal file cabinet on its side next to site of the bomb. It was badly damaged but more or less intact.

Starr said, “It’s been moved.”

The base had left marks on the floor from where it had originally been. “It’s like the bomber moved it there next to the bomb. He wanted it destroyed, along with Mr. Redding.”

“And look. The lock.” Starr pointed.

“Jimmied with a screwdriver. Bomber broke in and did a sloppy job of it, because he didn’t think it would survive the explosion. That’s the ransack. Whatever he took—that’s our answer.”

The drawers were both partly open and Starr shown her light inside. “Papers. Don’t see any wires or timers.”

Shaw mused, “The perp found what he needed, moved the cabinet, set the bomb and then left.”

“What was so important he needed to put this all together to steal whatever was inside?”

“Or wanted to steal, but didn’t manage to find,” Shaw said.

“How’s that?”

“Look.” He shone his beam on the underside of the top drawer, where a sliver of paper was visible.

“Something taped up there.”

They regarded each other and Shaw knew she was thinking exactly what he was: weighing the odds that the paper was booby-trapped versus the value of what it contained.

From it they possibly could deduce the identity of who was behind the levee sabotage—presumably Bear’s employer—and save more lives.

A closer examination revealed it was a large white envelope, about 8 by 10 inches.

“See any wires?” he asked.

They both looked.

None. He reached down and tugged. It came away with nothing more than the sticky sound of peeling tape.

“Phew,” Starr said. Then she opened it, and tugged out the half dozen documents.

Shaw stepped close and together they read.

The documents made clear who was behind the sabotage.

And what the reason was.

And, most important, that it was only a matter of time until the rest of the Hinowah levee came tumbling down to earth, unleashing a deadly flood.