“What about Gloria Hedlund? What was he doing when she blew up?”
“He was at the station, from the time of the press conference until seven, with other police officers present while he cleared his office. And then he was with Sergeant Hines all night until morning, when Captain Almanzo woke him.”
“She’s Stahl’s girlfriend, for Christ’s sake. And she had reason to hate Gloria too. You call that an alibi?”
“She’s a sergeant on the police force. And she’s also a victim of the bomber with severe injuries.”
“I don’t believe having Richard Stahl inside our government and giving his advice to our police would have done anything to prevent this.”
“We just lost a bomb technician supervisor with twenty-two years of experience. He wasn’t good enough to outsmart this bomber. Stahl has done it repeatedly. We have the best explosives expert in the West still willing to help us. We’d be foolish not to take his help.”
“I’ll do better than that,” said the mayor. “Call the FBI again and ask them for their very best man to be assigned here on temporary duty. We’ll pay his salary and expenses, and he can be in charge of all bomb-related activity. We’ll give him all the support he wants.” The mayor shrugged. “Problem solved.”
As the mayor moved ahead, Deputy Chief Ogden said to the chief: “Mind if I go back up for a minute?”
“No,” said the chief. “Calling Stahl?”
“Yes. I think I should tell him.”
“Right. But let him know we’re going to keep trying.”
39
Steve and Debbie Garrick drove into the parking lot beside the picnic area in Fern Dell at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday. They were in their Suburban, and when all the seats were installed and the kids were strapped in, they could carry both of them, six of the boys from the baseball team, their equipment, and the picnic supplies. Haley and Ron Steiner had the rest in their van, and they would be along in a few minutes.
They had been practicing all morning at a field in Griffith Park, and now they were all hungry. Debbie tugged at the big cooler of food she had made before dawn and pulled it toward the back door. Then she tapped it on top so the boys knew she wanted it out. As the two Morales boys and Henry Cooper lifted it, she watched her son, Dennis, try to help. He wasn’t as strong as those boys, but at least he had the alertness and hustle to get in on the work.
Debbie stifled the feelings that surfaced unexpectedly. She had been a star softball player in high school and college, and later she played in a women’s hardball league for three years. She had gotten used to keeping to herself the fact she was so much better at baseball than her husband, Steve, and now their son too. But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten.
The problem she faced had been being a woman. She had fallen in love with Steve at the age of twenty-four, and in a year Steve had passed the bar exam. He wanted to marry her, but she knew if she married him she would have to drop out of the league. She couldn’t be his wife and travel with a baseball team. Her team had played in a championship series in Venezuela the previous season, and there were signs that they were good enough to keep competing at a high level. But baseball was a game, and being Steve’s wife was a future. She tried various methods of putting him off. She told him she was perfectly happy to keep having sex with him regularly while she was home without getting married, and would even live with him for the entire off-season. She made an argument that this would probably be the future pattern for most male-female relationships. But he was a good lawyer. He lined up all his arguments and then marched them past her in review—children, house, financial security, shared risks and rewards, and the near certainty that if they remained single, one of them would meet someone else and move on.
She still had a better arm than Steve, and she was fairly sure she could still outrun him, maybe even by a larger margin than she could at twenty-six, because of her jogging and taking care of the kids every day. When she and Steve were coaching the baseball team she always took the secondary role. Steve would instruct and give pep talks and she would demonstrate. She pitched batting practice, popped fly balls into the outfield for the fielders to drop, and hit grounders for the infielders to bobble.
Her life had not been a disappointment. It was just that her hands still longed for the feel of the horsehide in the precise diameter of the regulation ball. She loved the smell of the glove leather, the grass, and the exact shade of reddish dust in the infield. None of those things had anything to do with Steve.
She was in her mid-thirties now and would have been at the end of her career, probably already a step slower toward first base. And women’s baseball had not grown into the sensation everyone used to assure each other it would be by now.
She moved close to the place where the cooler sat on the other table and reached to open it. Her glance passed over a shiny cylinder shape on the ground beyond the table, and she thought the boys must have knocked one of the stainless steel thermos bottles off the table or dropped it while unloading. As she walked around the table to pick it up, it looked less like one of hers. Then she saw wires and looked more closely.
“Okay, guys,” she called out. “I’d like you to step back to the car. Walk exactly the way you came, in a straight line, and then go to the side door and get in.”
She called out, “Steve, can you help me, please? We need to move the picnic to another spot.”
She could tell he heard something in her voice that nobody else’s ears would pick up and that something was off. And here he came.
The bomb truck arrived with a police cruiser in front and another about two hundred yards behind. Sergeant Ed Carmody got out of the passenger side of the truck and looked in each direction. He spotted a family of—no, too big to be just a family. There were three mothers and two fathers. All boys. Baseball.
He moved toward them smartly. He saw one mother in particular whose blond hair was in a ponytail that protruded through the back of her baseball cap. She had great legs and when she threw a ball to one of the boys at the far end of the lot she threw like a guy, with a little snap to the release at the end and a loud smack when it hit leather.
She saw him long before he got near, and trotted up to him. “Did you see it yet?” she said. “Is it a bomb?”
He read in her eyes a concern for the boys who were her responsibility. She looked along her shoulder at them like a pitcher holding runners on base.
He said, “I haven’t seen it yet. My men are taking a preliminary look before I go in and deal with it.” He hadn’t realized he was gong to deal with it until just then, but now he was.
“Do you go in with those big bomb suits?”
“That will depend on what we see. Sometimes there’s something to worry about, and sometimes there isn’t.” He looked into her eyes.
“How far should we pull back?”
He smiled. “Far enough so that if this weren’t LA, you’d be a couple of towns away, ma’am. I’d suggest you take the boys home now.”
“Really?”
“If you don’t, then later one of the mothers will take you to task for it, and I’ll bet you know just which one already.”
She smiled and cupped her right hand beside her mouth. “Steve!” she shouted. “Let’s round them up now. We’ve got to get out.”
Her husband made a couple of arm-swing herding gestures and the boys scrambled in the open door of the Suburban and the sliding door of the van. They began the business of buckling seat belts and settling in.
The woman said, “Good luck with that thing.”
“Thanks,” Carmody said. “Good luck with the team. What’s their record?”