“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the briefing I was in only went so far. Our guys are saying we had it under surveillance the whole time. A batch match had already been made with an earlier sample, so we knew when the C-4 was made and where. Our agents went into the Phoenix warehouse at 3:30 a.m. this morning and didn’t find any C-4.”
I thought about that and said, “Okay, but we do know C-4 shipped to our army in Afghanistan and 311 pounds were stolen, sold, and made their way into the hands of AQAP and ISIS and then were brought all the way back across the world. Same batch.”
“Yes, so now it’s a very high probability that it was a terrorist attack involving Mideast actors and recruits here.”
“Are they speculating homegrown recruits here?”
He nodded, and I asked, “Why would they move this C-4 halfway around the world?”
“Lot of debate over that too. The going theory is the symbolism of getting it from an American military base and using it to attack America made it worth shipping. I don’t see that, but that’s what I heard this morning.” He added, “The army wants to control how it goes public.”
“I thought AQAP and ISIS were at each other’s throats.”
“They mostly are.”
I wiped my hands on the greasy napkin and crumpled the paper bag as we pulled into the garage beneath the condo complex. Venuti used a swipe card to get into the elevator room, holding it against the reader then showing it to me before slipping it into his wallet.
“Jane gave this to me. We sometimes met here. It’s on the way from my house, and it was a good place to talk.”
“Her condo was a good place?”
Venuti glanced at me.
“It was convenient.”
Venuti hit the fourth floor button and the elevator rose. He unlocked her door as if he’d done it a thousand times. In the main room I looked through the windows to the deck and at the desert beyond the city. The city of Las Vegas looked like an overnight guest in this view of the desert. Jane had made a good buy when the market was down in ’09. She got it very cheap, but it was like her to be unafraid when others were fearful. I knew she liked to sit on the deck with a glass of wine and unwind.
Venuti cleared his throat.
“I was here with Jane when the first bomb went off. Louise thought I was at work on a minor emergency and wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and then we would celebrate the Fourth of July. I was here having a drink with Jane first. That’s how I’ve treated the mother of my three children, the woman I’ve been with since I was twenty. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”
It took me a beat to register what he was communicating, but I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to hear a confession.
“When the bombing happened and the DOD called, I realized you couldn’t be the lead on-site. Jane didn’t feel qualified to run the crime scene after the bombing, but I talked her into it. She’d be alive otherwise.”
“You thought it would help her career.”
“That’s not why.”
The fuck it wasn’t.
“It’s because she was ready, and I knew I had to pull you,” he said.
“She was a good choice, but you didn’t need to pull me. It may as well get said now. You didn’t need to. There was no reason to.”
He ignored that and said, “I talked her into it, and it got her killed.”
“You didn’t get her killed.”
Jane once told me she liked unraveling the frauds, the money launderers, and cybercriminals. She loved sophisticated criminal types in twenty-thousand-dollar suits who were confident they were smarter than everyone else. She didn’t want a career dealing with the psychopaths, murderers, righteous zealots, and nihilistic bomb-building freaks.
She’d said, “The bombers and stone-cold killers are all yours, Grale. You can hold hands with them and stare into the abyss together. I’ll move off the DT squad in a couple of years. I don’t want anything to do with bombers. I want the guys who dream of cleaning out J.P. Morgan in under sixty seconds.”
“Jane and I talked about letting the bomb squad clear the vehicles first,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“If you’d been there, no one would have gone near those vehicles.”
“Jane knew to stay back. It was just bad luck she was crossing the lot. I’m sure she had a reason and it was a calculated gamble.”
“You wouldn’t have forgotten there could be somebody holding a cell phone and watching.”
“She didn’t forget either.”
“But for that bastard washed-out drone pilot, you would have been there. You would have kept everyone back.”
“You didn’t get her killed.” I came a breath from launching into him for pulling me from the Alagara, but decided not to. Couldn’t tell you why, maybe because it wasn’t going to get us anywhere. But neither did I want to hear him talk about himself. “How do you want to do this?” I asked.