“Nobody has charged me with anything.”
“Just to clarify, you’re not aware of any charges, filed or contemplated, by the police department against you for sexual harassment or fraternization with a member of your command?”
Stahl could feel rage building in his chest and moving upward. “I can’t know what anybody in or out of the department is contemplating. You’re the first one to mention it to me.”
She was frustrated, not wanting him to slither away. “Maybe I should be more direct. Have you had sexual relations with any member of the police force?”
“Maybe you should be less direct,” Stahl said. “I was asked to answer any questions I could about the hospital bombing. Apparently you and the last reporter have no questions relevant to the case, so right now I’m going back to work. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.”
He took long steps out the door and away from the pressroom, and headed toward the Homicide Special offices. He was still feeling heat around his neck, but a sensation like cold in his chest and stomach—anger and dread. As he walked along the open floor to the office section of the building, he controlled and isolated the feelings. He had learned to separate himself from distracting emotions many years ago and gotten very good at it over the years, but times like this still caught him by surprise.
He could see that the detectives in Homicide Special were busy. He knew they were probably shunting excess cases back to the divisions where they’d happened, so they could devote more time to the bomber.
Some of them were working on flipping through loose-leaf murder books, slipping new pages into the binders and clicking the jaws closed. Others were making phone calls or conducting people into conference rooms. But he knew most of the detectives would be performing tasks today that focused on the bomb deaths. The device in the hospital would have added two more binders, and they would reside on the desk of whoever became the lead detective on the case.
By now someone had probably entered the essentials of the hospital bomb into the ATF’s Bomb Arson Tracking System, hoping to find other incidents that were similar to this one. Entering it also put the incident out there for experts in other agencies to notice and think about.
There might already be a few pieces of the bomb in the crime lab being examined for fingerprints and chemical traces. Stahl had his own expectation for the device. It would be a series of small batteries connected to a number eight blasting cap, a spring-loaded switch that would complete the circuit when the box was opened, and a charge of homemade Semtex. There would be something else. A bomb that would blow out a ten-foot stretch of hardened concrete and brick wall with rebar supports would make the sheet cake heavy. There could have been more Semtex connected to the initial charge. He remembered seeing a cart—not for moving a patient, but the kind institutions used to deliver food. Maybe the lower shelf had been full of explosives.
Stahl arrived at Almanzo’s office and knocked on the window. Almanzo was, as usual, working at his desk wearing suit pants and a perfectly pressed snow-white shirt with a .45 caliber pistol in a holster. When he saw Stahl he popped up and stepped to the door. “Come on in, Dick.” He closed the door and waved at one of the empty seats facing his desk. “I was hoping we could talk today.”
“Me too,” said Stahl. “Have we learned anything since the hospital bomb?”
“I want to be sure you got my message.”
“What message?”
“I guess you didn’t. The crime scene people going through Sergeant Hines’s belongings found some male DNA on her clothes. They’ve been able to identify it.”
Stahl stared at him for a moment. He felt as though he’d been punched. “Thank you. That explains something I was just wondering about.” He forced himself to hide his shock. “How about the hospital bomb?”
“We’re waiting to see if anything survived the blast—prints, blood, or something that was shielded from the heat and the power of it. I’m probably kidding myself, hoping something didn’t get burned off or blown away. But there could be a serial number or a marking that will tell us something.”
Stahl shrugged. “It’s always worth checking. I’ll send some technicians to the lab as soon as I know who’s coming in today. Everybody who wasn’t on duty last night was at the hospital.”
“Thanks, Dick. What do you think the bomber is doing right now? Will he take another month off?”
“Month off?”
“Yeah. After the explosion at Diane Hines’s apartment, he didn’t strike again until last night.”
“As of last night I don’t think he was taking time off,” Stahl said. “I think what he was doing was resupplying his arsenal. He had used a lot of explosives up to then. I think he was in his workshop or lab or bunker or whatever it is, making more high explosives. His favorites are plastics, usually a homemade version of Semtex. Making it is the hardest part of what he does, and the most dangerous. He has to make most of the ingredients, and then combine them right, or they won’t become Semtex. The ingredients are mostly explosives in their own right. Some are volatile and unstable, so he has to work in slow motion, also making sure they don’t get too hot or too cool, too wet or too dry. He has to heat some of them to make the chemical changes occur, which means he’s got to have a source of heat, one of the things that can set off an explosive. He has to grind some of them from cakes into powders without setting them off. At the same time he’s got to avoid sparks, short circuits, static electricity. He can’t drop things. But the batch he used last night at the hospital means he succeeded in making plenty. So now he’s coming after us again.”
26
Diane Hines woke and sat up. She felt disoriented for a few seconds, and then saw the shapes in the room—the table on her left that swiveled over the bed, the open door to the tiny bathroom, the monitors. She was in a hospital. It was another one, but still a hospital.
She was clearer now. She hadn’t gone over what happened yet, but she was sure the memories were still available to her. She remembered the nurse coming in to tell her that the Bomb Squad was in the waiting area to see her. She remembered trying to make herself presentable. When she had done what she could—a little makeup, brushing her stubble of hair—she wheeled herself to the door of her room and out into the hall. And then there was the terrible noise. All the bomb techs in the world knew that noise because it was the sound they heard when they destroyed a bomb in a controlled detonation. The noise had been in her dreams for years. After that explosion, she remembered Dick above her yelling at an intern to help him put her on a stretcher.
After a time, she had been wheeled through dark night air, and she remembered a ride in an ambulance, but without being able to see anything except the roof of the vehicle above her. When the ambulance stopped she was pulled out on the stretcher at the back of a building. The back of this hospital looked like the back of every hospital, a roofed-over spot for the ambulances to unload, a set of double doors that huffed open automatically, and then a long series of ceilings and fluorescent lights gliding by overhead.
She had seen more of the city’s hospitals from the back than most people ever did when she had been a young street cop, taking in injured suspects, victims, and bystanders after some act of violence or poor marksmanship.