He could always arrange a methane leak and explosion in her house. If she still had a car, he could tamper with her brakes or cause a gasoline fire. That might be fun. If she had a boyfriend these days, he could get the man blamed for her murder. There were so many ways to do any of these things.
But he was just teasing himself. He wasn’t going to do any of it. If her parents were alive—and he had no reason to believe they weren’t—they would instantly turn police attention on him. And even if they were dead, the fact that she had been part of a nasty divorce would make the police at least find out where he was living. Contemplating her death had raised his mood, but he would just have to let it go—for now.
He had probably thought of Carla because the person who had ruined his day yesterday had been a woman. But that was yesterday. Today would be different for him and for the woman cop.
He went through his morning rituals. He ate a breakfast of egg whites cooked in olive oil, drank some herbal tea, lifted weights, ran four miles around the perimeter of his property, then walked for a while to get over the shakes that overexertion caused.
At home he took a hot bath and soaked until his muscles relaxed, then dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and went into his workshop to get started. While he was at work, his hours ran as smoothly as a line reeling off a spool. He was alert and completely focused on what his hands were doing.
At some point that morning he realized he’d been pushing himself in the wrong direction. He had begun to use volatile and unpredictable explosives and exotic means of delivering and detonating them. He had been trying to present the Bomb Squad with devices they had never seen before and were likely to misinterpret. Once he destroyed the first fourteen men, he had hoped to take the others out by demoralizing and intimidating them. They would approach a device without being able to think through the ways it might operate, what touching it might set off, what leaving it alone might give it time to do, or what was protecting it from their interference. But working with more unstable explosives and more sensitive switches was risky for the bomb maker too.
And his new tactics hadn’t worked. According to the television news, the Bomb Squad was back up to strength with reinforcements from federal agencies. The bomb maker needed something big, another significant bombing, and it had to be flawless, a masterpiece of small deceptions that forced the technicians into making guesses until one of them guessed wrong.
He put away most of the ingredients he had been preparing to mix today. He was not going to rely on the volatility and unpredictability of the explosive to make the bomb deadly. He had lost his way for a few days, but now he would behave as though he were at war. He would use the best components, the most powerful charges, and the most reliable explosives.
He would go back to using Semtex. He went to the locked cabinet where he kept the raw ingredients. Semtex was a mixture of two explosives: PETN and RDX. He would have to start by making supplies of these two compounds.
He brought out ammonium nitrate, acetic anhydride, paraformaldehyde, distilled water, and boron fluoride. He was going to have to do lots of stirring and heating and cooling for the next part of the process, which had to be done within very narrow temperature ranges. When he finished making the PETN and RDX he would have to let them dry completely. The process would take a few days. At the end, he would have to combine the two. He would carefully grind the two substances into fine powder so he could combine them. After a few hours he reached the point where his intermediate explosives were drying and then quit for the day. He spent time ordering a number of chemicals to replace the ingredients he’d used. He ordered them from six different companies under six different corporate names.
He would spend the days while he waited for the process to be completed on his next project. He had watched the police press conference on television, but had not heard any names. There were just “three brave bomb experts.” But he could see that the one driving the truck was a woman. She had sergeant’s stripes, but she looked young for a sergeant. Her bomb truck had said TEAM ONE. He would find her.
He questioned the search engines in various ways, asking for images of the LAPD Bomb Squad; news organization reports of any public events attended by members of the squad; any interviews with bomb experts; any reports of public relations visits to schools or job fairs, hospitals or charities. And then, after several days of searching, he found the right image—a picture of a female police sergeant and the bomb-sniffing dog Aristotle at a visit to John Nance Garner Middle School, near the alley where a student had seen a homemade bomb. The text said she had gone there to give the students a lesson on what to do if they saw anything that looked like a bomb.
The picture was absolutely her. She was talking to kids in front of a glass case displaying inert fireworks, pipe bombs, hand grenades, and other things that went boom and they shouldn’t touch. There was no name given for her. Maybe the service that police unions hired to scrub the Internet of police officers’ names had removed hers, or maybe she hadn’t let it appear in print to begin with. But the paragraph hadn’t omitted the name of the school, the publication, or the woman who had written the article and taken the picture. The writer was also listed on the school paper’s website as an editor.
He drove all the way into Pacoima to make the call at a pay phone. After a few tries he reached the woman who had written the article. He identified himself as a teacher at Grant High School who wanted to arrange a similar visit. She remembered very clearly the name of the woman police officer. “It was Diane Hines,” she said. “Sergeant Diane Hines. She was so pretty and sweet the kids couldn’t take their eyes off her.”
Diane Hines had no website, no Facebook page, no Twitter account, no other obvious place where he could learn about her. He knew she had done more than enough to have her name on the Internet over the past few days, but there was no mention of her. She didn’t want to be found. But there was no question now that he could find her.
18
When Diane Hines left work the next evening she drove to her apartment. She had been sleeping in Dick Stahl’s condominium for six days now and was delighted to be there, but what she was doing wasn’t exactly living with him. Their relationship was still like a date that never ended, just got interrupted every day during their shift, and then resumed at night. Most of her clothes and her other belongings were still at her apartment in Sherman Oaks, and her mail, usually just bills, was still delivered there.
She stepped into the foyer of her building, a creamy white-and-yellow place that looked like a lemon meringue pie, climbed the three steps to a small landing, unlocked the room where the mailboxes were, and entered. The mail system was a good one, because the only access to the room was by using an apartment key. It would be very difficult for a mail thief to follow a tenant into the lobby and then into the mail room too.