I liked her right away, dead serious but with a strong dark sense of humor.
“How are you with sleep deprivation?” I asked.
“It sucks, but I can fake it.”
“How about on the phone?”
“I can talk to anybody.”
“Bring in some extra clothes and stick them in a gym locker. If we get onto something, we’re going to stay on it. We’re working local leads. How did they place the bombs? Who helped them? Where did they stay? What did they eat? Anything, everything. Everyone leaves a footprint.”
I smelled the strong black tea as she lifted the mug and took another swallow. My feeling about her was good, but chasing local leads while the drumbeat to bomb somewhere in the Middle East intensified would take concentration. I took the conversation back to the C-4.
“The CIA says 311 pounds of C-4 made it home to America. Maybe half of that was used in the Alagara bombings,” I said.
She nodded. She knew that already.
“Our primary focus is finding the bomb maker. Most of all, we’re looking for him.”
“You say him.”
“It’s far more likely.”
“Okay, if you say so, but I didn’t know we made assumptions.”
“We don’t, but we have to filter. It could be a woman, but if you go through the known database you’re going to see men.”
“Will I get out in the field with you, or am I going to be in front of a computer all the time? I don’t want to just fill out forms.”
“You don’t want to be anybody’s girl Friday.”
“I don’t know what that means. Is that like some old-school thing?”
“You want to do it all.”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get started.”
She logged into my list of bomb makers, and I drove to the leased airplane hangar where debris from the bombings had gone. I wasn’t a bomb geek, but I knew the techs and talked their language. I had a good head for science and therefore they figured I was, underneath, one of them.
The hangar was near the airport. Before I got there, a call came from the FBI yard where the Hullabaloo van Juan Menderes was driving had been towed.
“Grale?”
“Yeah.”
“Come take a look at this.”
“We’re working the bomb maker. What have you got?”
“A hidden compartment that’s too small to hold a big-ass cake. This van was modified.”
“Did you call for a drug dog?”
“Dog is on the way. Where are you?”
I changed lanes and made a hard right, though I was unsure now where I fit into the search for Menderes. We’d put out a fugitive warrant on him. Half of Las Vegas PD was searching for him.
“Heading toward you, maybe ten minutes out. But I won’t be there long.”
I arrived with the drug dog and her handler. It didn’t take long to determine that the compartment in the interior of the van had held cocaine. Nor was it hard to deduce that the Hullabaloo van delivered more than cake. Which brought to mind the cake in the van with the address tag still on it, despite the people at the delivery address having claimed they had received it.
We all got in the van and looked at the clever compartment with its sliding steel cover. You park the Hullabaloo van and carry the cake box up, and inside is cocaine instead of cake. You make the delivery, then dump the cake that was ordered. Or like Juan, maybe you give it to your girlfriend.
The night of the bombings, Menderes made all his deliveries and texted they were done. One answer to that was he didn’t know about the Bar Alagara bombing and continued work. Another scenario was he’d detonated the bar bomb and making three more deliveries was his cover. The first one was simpler and rang closer to the truth, I thought. He delivered the coke, abandoned the van, and ran because he was nobody’s fool. He heard about the bombing and knew we’d want to talk to him and look at his van. I thought through that as I drove to the airplane hangar.
There I surveyed the debris and remembered the parallel investigation the FBI had conducted with the National Transportation Safety Board after TWA Flight 800 went down. I was there for that one. I had interviewed witnesses who claimed they saw a streak of light move toward the airliner. That put me right at the heart of the accidental-missile-launch controversy. Several witnesses I walked the beach with were certain they saw a missile arc toward the plane, though we couldn’t find any evidence of that in the wreckage, and the conclusion was that there was a spark in a gas tank. Remembering that was a reminder to let small details accumulate and to believe that when you have enough, the truth will reveal itself.
I turned as a bomb tech walked up to me. Ted Darza. He fist-bumped me.
“What’s up, Grale?”
“I’m looking for Special Agent Stone’s Apple Mac laptop.”