They stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, and then he said, “You had a leather bag jammed into the space under the sideboard between you and the bomb. That may have helped too. You remember it? It seemed to be an overnight bag.”
“A travel bag. Yes,” she said. She sounded like a liar, even to herself. This suddenly seemed to be going in a bad direction.
“It contained some of your clothes. Can you tell me why? You were at work all that day, and you were scheduled to do a full shift the next day.”
“I was going downstairs to do laundry later. It made a good laundry bag.” She kept her eyes on him as she added, “The net ones you can see through make me uncomfortable. I don’t like people looking at my underwear and everything. It’s just a bit too much sharing.”
Almanzo looked at her sympathetically. “You understand that when the crime scene people arrived, there was good reason to believe you were another homicide victim, not a survivor. Your apartment was a crime scene, and they had to go over everything carefully.”
“Of course.”
“Is there anyone other than the bomber who might have entered your apartment that day? Another male?”
“Not that I know of. I haven’t given any friends a key, and the landlord has to notify me before he comes in.”
“Did you have your boyfriend over, or anything like that?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You understand that nobody on the force wants to embarrass you. But the specialists went over everything. There was male DNA on some of the clothing in your bag. What your cell phone bill showed was that at ten on the night after the bomb was removed from the gas station in Studio City, you called three one zero, five five eight—”
“Yes I did,” she interrupted. “Do you know whose number that is?”
“I told you, every lead gets checked.”
“I was calling the commander of my unit, who is also the supervisor of my three-person team. I had never met him before that day, but we had both been through a horrific, scary experience, and I wanted to talk to him about it.”
Almanzo looked at her for a second. “Good enough for me,” he said. “That is as far as I go. I respect you for immediately telling me the truth. But I’ve got to say one more thing. A secret is something only one person knows. In a homicide investigation everything gets collected, and a lot of eyes get to see it. Even on the smallest matter, do not get caught saying anything that contradicts the evidence.”
“I won’t. Thank you for letting me know about this.”
“I’m leaving my card on the table here. I’ll also give one to the nurse at the counter out there. If anything I need to know comes to your attention, give me a call, night or day.” In a moment he was out the door.
She wasn’t sure what to feel about her relationship with Dick Stahl. When she woke up from her coma she wondered if she’d dreamed what had happened. This morning she felt confused about it, but unable to think about anything else for long periods. She knew she had been very interested in Dick Stahl before she was hurt, but now the whole thought of the relationship seemed distant, as though her injuries had made her into someone else.
She had begun to think about him again after they’d talked. But then Captain Almanzo had drifted in and taken the oxygen out of the air. She felt alone and in trouble. She felt an urge to call Dick, and maybe that meant she still had real feelings for him, but she didn’t have a phone except the hospital phone. If she used it, Dick’s number would be listed on her hospital bill. She began to think about ways to get a new secret cell phone.
Diane knew she had to get her mind under control, and not make things worse for her or Stahl. But it seemed to her the world wasn’t paying attention to the right things. The whole police force was looking for a mass murderer who was not even close to being identified or located. But they were not too busy to go after two police officers who might be getting too close.
When the nurse came back and gave her the tiny plastic cup of the nauseating purple liquid to put her to sleep, she was glad to drink it.
22
Stahl had just arrived at the office after a late lunch hour and sat down at his desk when a call on his radio distracted him. Team Four was on its way to a school in Brentwood, where someone had found a suspicious package in the cafeteria. Stahl stood and walked from his office and through Andy’s on his way out.
“I’m going out with Team Four to that call at the school.”
“Got it,” said Andy.
As Stahl hurried toward the elevator to the parking lot he was already thinking about the fastest way to Brentwood in mid-afternoon. He had chosen to go to the scene because a school was the sort of place this bomb maker might pick for his next attack. Stahl was aware that a school was also the most likely place for a false alarm. Kids made crank calls and staged misguided hoaxes, and only a very tiny number planted homemade devices. This was most likely a kid’s backpack with his sneakers and the remains of his lunch inside. But if it wasn’t, he wanted to see it.
Stahl got into his unmarked police car and drove. During the weeks since Diane was injured he had been going to the scenes of bomb calls more and more often. He’d carried a tool kit and a bomb suit in the trunk of his car in case he wanted to go downrange and examine the device that prompted the call.
Diane’s injuries had made him try to do everything and be everywhere. Part of the reason was that without her, he felt anxious and restless. Another part of the reason was that in the back of his mind he believed that not even an expert bomb technician was going to be as good as he was.
He had spent years at Eglin teaching military Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialists how to spot and defeat the most sophisticated devices, and since then he’d gone back for the refresher courses required to stay certified. He had kept up with whatever was newest and most formidable. Other people were almost certainly doing that too, but they couldn’t match the breadth of his experience.
This bomber seemed to him to require his personal attention. Everything he did was odd—eccentric and unfamiliar, but at the same time teasing and sadistic.
Diane’s bomb had been like that. The bomber had wanted to do more than just hurt her. He wanted to fool her, make her stand still where the bomb would be most powerful, and give her a moment or two to realize she had caused her own death. What Diane’s attack seemed to have done was change the bomber’s rhythm. Maybe he had been so pleased with his work at her apartment that he hadn’t been feeling the need to hurt anybody else right away. He had gone quiet for over a month.
All that time Stahl kept waiting and wondering what the next attempt would be. Stahl had gone on around twenty bomb calls and found nothing that seemed to be the murderer’s work. There was no device that would have presented a problem for any of Stahl’s twenty-seven technicians. The devices that weren’t fake were so crude that they would not have detonated if they’d been left in place forever.
Sometimes Stahl concocted stories to account for the bomber’s inactivity. The man had to be living somewhere far from other people, where his neighbors didn’t see or hear any of his testing or smell the chemicals, many of which had to be heated and cooled and reheated—and mixed with extreme care causing no friction, no buildup of static electricity, and no percussion. The bomber had been on a trend since his first crime, making and using more and more unusual and undependable mixtures in his bombs. Maybe on the day after rigging Diane’s apartment he had been making his next bomb and suffered an accident. Maybe he had neglected to ground himself often enough and shuffled his feet. That could build up a static charge in his body. Maybe this time he had sent stray voltage along the metal housing of his device, set off the bomb in his hands, and blown himself to atoms. Stahl hoped so.