He’d also stained and waxed the concrete floor where his customers were, and it was easy to see where that line of stained and waxed floor ended at the bar. I looked at the line of the color difference of the concrete and pictured a table out in front of it, one about ten feet long, sitting directly before the bar but not blocking people from getting drinks. The table was for the children and would have a red, white, and blue paper tablecloth. It was a thing Melissa always did at the Fourth of July party. She liked the kids front and center. They made her happy. She didn’t care if they screamed and made a lot of noise.
So the kids there and excited as the cake arrived and adults nearby watching as Jim and the Hullabaloo driver, Juan Menderes, carried the cake over to the table. “Happy Birthday” was sung, not for the country, but for two of the kids, one born on the Fourth, one today. Menderes sends a text while still on the lot and passes by me in the intersection, going in the opposite direction, about a mile away.
Omar Smith has owned the Alagara for two years. He holds the keys. He determines who gets in and when. There are regular cleanings. There’s upkeep and in recent weeks, repairs in the bar and bathrooms. A scrutinizing of the subcontractors here yesterday was well under way. The tile setter who spoke only Spanish didn’t see anybody. A plumber did. The plumber was here when the wine refrigerator swap-out was made. He’d talked to the man changing the refrigerator and said the guy wasn’t happy about working the holiday. Described him as a normal dude.
The plumber had answered most questions straightforwardly but had danced around others. I’d watched that interview video this morning. Thought about how the plumber had gotten squirrelly, then my thoughts flickered through my impression of Omar Smith the night before. Smith claimed that he didn’t return in time to meet with the tile setter and plumber and sign off on their work because of a business trip to Houston. Did that mean anything? Did it matter?
Smith was a media artist. Opening his records and house to us last night was like live TV. In a Hullabaloo ad that played often on a Vegas AM radio station, Omar Smith, with an exaggerated accent, struggled to pronounce his name. The gag went on for maybe twelve seconds, right to the edge of being too long, and then cut to a smooth, crystal-clear voice saying, “This is the Turk and this is Vegas. Parties should never be hard in Vegas.”
Then came the Hullabaloo pitch for his party-rental business. Hullabaloo vans were sherbet tricolors. In Vegas you saw them enough to conclude the business was successful, but already investigative reporters were turning up griping vendors and unpaid bills and the shadow of lurking bankruptcy. That was news this morning, and we had agents questioning those same vendors. We also had agents in conversation with Turkish police in Istanbul, where Smith was from.
I heard footsteps, turned, and was surprised to see Venuti. Maybe because of how emotional I felt in the restaurant, seeing him unsettled me. Dan looked tall and gaunt, his face hawklike and gray, shoulder bones sliding under a thin, dark blue suit coat. But everyone looked beat this morning.
“Didn’t hear you come in.”
“I need your help clearing out Jane’s condo before the family gets there. I picked up food for lunch. You probably haven’t eaten since it happened, have you?”
I hadn’t.
“You’ve got to eat. How long are you going to be in here?”
“Not much longer.”
“I’ll be in my car making calls. We need two agents present if we remove anything. We also just got test results back on the explosive used here. We can talk about that. You were right. It was C-4.”
We left my car parked near the LVPD patrol that was watching the lot, and I ate the turkey tortilla Venuti handed me as he drove. I was grateful for it. I hadn’t thought much about food, and, despite everything, it felt good to eat. I was hungry.
“The C-4 in the Alagara bomb and in the pickup bomb came from a batch made for the army in 2009,” Venuti said.
“That’s coming from the manufacturer?”
“Yes.”
“That was fast.”
“They’re more ready nowadays.” Venuti added softly, “They have to be. All of that batch shipped to Afghanistan.”
“And some of it disappeared and didn’t turn up.”
Venuti nodded.
“You got it. It made it to Kandahar Airfield where 311 pounds disappeared. The CIA is saying they tracked the C-4 through the Haqqani network to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At some point ISIS got involved too.”
“A joint operation? Is that believable?”
“They say it is.”
“Then what?”
“Then by boat from Africa to South America, where operatives working for the Sinaloa cartel moved it north. We’ll get more on that today, but not hard details. The CIA made that clear this morning. Either they don’t want to share all of it yet, or they don’t have the full path it tracked north on. But you could say they administered delivering it to a Phoenix warehouse. It then disappeared from that warehouse. Apparently we were helping watch over it when it vanished.”
“Why were we there?”
“We got briefed once it was obvious that it was coming here. It got here and we took over and had surveillance teams rotating at the storage facility in Phoenix.”
I nodded. That made sense.
“So we were waiting to see who would pick it up and where they were taking it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not clear.”