Chapter 19
MY OFFICE OVERLOOKS downtown LA, and the late-afternoon sun was high and hot, glancing off the glassy skyscrapers across the street, blazing over the fast-moving traffic below.
Dr. Sci was talking to me on the interoffice network, the picture on my screen so high-def, I could see the individual stitches on the seams of his bowling shirt. He was telling me that there was a new chemical explosive at loose in the world.
“I’m calling it barium trichlormanganate for now,” he said. “I can’t find any reference to its properties.”
“What’s special about it?” I asked.
“It requires extreme heat and contact with gasoline to make it ignite,” he told me. “Works fine on a burning car.”
“Yes, it does.”
Sci explained how the explosive had been packaged and ignited, went on to say that this new compound was novel but not versatile. He said that there were numerous easily obtained explosives that would work as well or better, including a Molotov cocktail tossed through the car window.
“So this doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said.
“In my humble opinion, this is the kind of thing that a teenager or a gang of teenagers would do, not terrorists or, say, organized-crime types.”
“Cops told me that mine is the sixth car in two months to go boom in the night,” I said.
“That fits with my theory,” Sci said.
I said good-bye to Sci just as I heard a commotion outside my office. My assistant, Valerie Kenney, came through my door in a huff.
Val is five eleven, a striking twenty-five-year-old African American woman who went to BU on scholarship, then got her master’s in criminology, also on scholarship, at the University of Miami. Same time she was going for her master’s, she was working nights as a clerk in the back rooms of the Miami PD and helping her mother with an out-of-control younger brother.
Last year, she learned that I was looking for an assistant and she applied for the job; she accepted the offer with the understanding that she’d get a promotion to investigator in the future if and when I thought she was ready.
In the short time Val had been working for me, I found her to be smart, disciplined, willing to do any kind of work needed and without being asked. She was also very funny. Val didn’t rile easily. But she was riled now.
“It’s your brother,” she said. “He showed up downstairs and says he’s coming up here right now. He has no appointment that I know of and no apologies either. You want to see him, Jack? Or you want me to call security?”
My identical twin, Tommy, was named for my miserable father, Tom Morgan. Tommy is older than me by three minutes, arrogant, a bully, and very likely a killer. I’ve never been able to prove that last, but I have good reason to believe it.
“Call security,” I said. “No, I’ll do it.” I went for my phone but never reached it.
Tommy brushed past Val, managing to touch her inappropriately on his way through the door.
“Oh nooo,” he said with a bright, mocking tone. “Bad Tommy’s here.”
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“How’d you like twenty million bucks?” he said. “Got time for me now?”