“There’s a half a Mac here, but it’s pretty trashed.”
It took Darza several minutes to sort out labels on plastic bags holding debris. Then he pulled out a Mac without a screen and with its keyboard half-scraped away. It was dented but not burned. He showed me a map of where the damaged laptop was found. I turned the laptop in my hands and said, “I need a copy of everything on it—today, if possible.”
He shook his head.
“Is that too fast?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, because I work for the Bureau not you. But the other problem is everything is going through headquarters first.”
“First?”
“Yep.”
“Not this. This is about something Jane Stone and I worked on that Washington doesn’t know anything about. They wouldn’t know what they were looking at. It’s important here and lost there, and it could matter. So I’ve got to see it first.”
“They said no exceptions.”
“They always say that.”
Headquarters wanted to control the investigation, no surprise there. A rumor making the rounds this morning was that a cell phone found inside the Alagara had a video of a candlelit cake and small children at a table in front of the bar. According to the rumor, the video had a time stamp, and headquarters knew the exact moment of detonation. That fed a suspicion Washington was seeing evidence ahead of us, and Darza had just confirmed it. I looked down the line of tables with plastic bags of bomb debris lined up and numbered.
“If that laptop is going to Washington, I have to get a look at what’s on it first. Can you at least do that for me? Text me. I’ll come here and read what’s on it.”
“It’s tight around here. They’re down on us and very clear about the protocol.”
“Are we being videotaped?”
“Yes.”
“You and me talking?”
“Yes.”
“What I’m looking for predates the bombings. It’s something Jane and I were working on in early June. She took the lead, and I don’t have her most up-to-date notes. I’ve got to follow up on it, and you’ve got to help me with her laptop.”
That wasn’t reaching him, so I took another tack. I pulled a twisted aluminum fragment from my pocket.
“How much of this have you found?”
“Plenty. Where did you get that one?”
“A surgeon removed it from my niece’s hamstring. I think it’s an aluminum fragment from a wine refrigerator that was behind the bar. Does that make sense to you?”
Darza shrugged, not even willing to answer that, though it was already accepted that the bomb had been in a wine refrigerator.
“I was the first person inside. These fragments were everywhere. Under the bar the concrete was scarified by the blast. Where are you storing these fragments?”
“They shipped to DC.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Okay, so we’ll see a report posted soon.”
“I don’t know about that. That’s above me.”
I handed Darza the aluminum fragment again, and I said, “I hear there’s a cell phone video. I’m looking for the driver who delivered the cake in that video. He might be in it because he helped carry the cake in. He’s missing.”
“The guy everyone is looking for?”
“Yeah, him, and I’m working him, so the cake delivery timing matters to me. Part of the rumor I heard this morning is there’s a stamp on the video that reads ‘8:03 p.m.’ If that’s true, hand me back the aluminum fragment I just gave you.”
Darza handed me the fragment, and I calculated as I slowly slid it into my pocket. My three-minute, forty-two-second conversation with Jim Kern had ended at 7:48. Lake Mead Boulevard is a long road, and I was on it for a while after talking to Jim. I’d hit a string of red lights, the last at the stoplight where I had looked across and seen the Hullabaloo van headed in the other direction, driven by Juan Menderes.
My call with Jim ended at 7:48. The blast was at 8:03, so there was a fifteen-minute gap between my hanging up with Jim and the bomb going off. How long did it take for Jim and Menderes to walk the cake to the table? Not too long, I guessed. Maybe a few minutes, and the cake was already paid for. All Menderes had to do was set it down and go. His text that delivery was made arrived at Hullabaloo’s office at 7:53. That left ten minutes for Menderes to cover the mile to where I saw him. That was too much time, and it troubled me.
There was another thing. When Menderes left the van, he left his phone under the passenger seat, most likely out of fear of being tracked with it. Its last activity showed a happy-face emoticon in a text to Hullabaloo and nothing more. So when I saw him on the phone in the intersection, he must have been on a different phone.
“Grale?” Darza said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to go back to work now, but we’ll get to the laptop today. Are you going to be around?”
“I’ll make sure I am.”
“I’ll call you.”
15