At the morgue in the midafternoon, an assistant slid open the drawer holding Jim Kern. I unzipped the body bag and looked at my old close friend and brother-in-law with a five-inch gash in his scalp. Maybe the gash could be hidden, maybe not. I wasn’t up on their techniques, but white bone showed and Julia didn’t need to see it. When the bag was unzipped farther, I saw his left arm detached and lying in the bag, his right shattered and flayed. I slowly rezipped the bag and slid the drawer back in, and then had to take a few minutes before looking at Melissa.
Her face was nearly unmarred. For that, I was thankful. I knew when I found her the night of the bombings that she’d bled out rapidly, but that night I hadn’t registered the full extent of her wounds. The ripping tear through her abdomen brought bile to my mouth, even as I told myself she couldn’t have felt much, if anything. She lost consciousness in the initial blast. She didn’t suffer, did she?
I looked at Nate last. He’d lived long enough to bruise on one side of his face. Maybe if Julia looked at him from only the other side, or if the bruising was masked, it would be okay. But if it was my choice, I’d tell Julia to remember them as they were, not as they are.
Outside I was glad for the bright hot sunlight and made one more stop and a drive-by before visiting Julia. The stop was to see the car from the freeway bombing. It was in the airplane hangar with the Alagara bomb debris. I stood with a couple of techs and looked at the twisted-and-burned shell, glass and doors gone, roof deformed. It smelled heavily of melted plastic. Early analysis said only a small amount of C-4 was used, but incendiaries were with it. In the intense heat, the car interior ignited. Neither man had a chance. It underscored the skill of the bomb maker and to me was another indication of a pro.
When I left the hangar, I drove past the Alagara to see the flowers. I didn’t linger and wouldn’t have told anyone, but it helped me to see that people were moved enough to leave flowers. I still didn’t know what the rose thing was about, but there were more and more of them. They spilled over the sidewalk into the bar lot and, though wilting in the summer heat, they were quite beautiful.
Driving to the hospital I scrolled cell numbers until I reached the name Peter Henley. For a long time Henley was in CIRG, the Bureau’s Critical Incident Response Group at FBI headquarters. Retired now, he lived in Vermont but still had limited clearance and was a resource for certain bomb investigations. Some combination of the morgue visit and fatigue had left me shaken, so I waited a few minutes before calling him.
Henley picked up on the second ring and said, “Good to hear your voice, let me get to a chair.”
An armchair squeaked: a big man getting older. When Henley was FBI he was overweight by Bureau standards, and they periodically got on him about it. Chemist that he was, he brewed great beer. He reworked a shed he had and figured out how to make an IPA with a distinct bite, but a good one. When I tried it I wanted more.
Beer put weight on Peter. Now that he was retired, he’d gained another thirty pounds. I was out east in April and had driven to his house in Vermont to see him. Physically, he was struggling. Diabetes was a problem.
I heard him clear his throat, then his deep voice with the familiar question, “What have you got, Paul?”
“A detonator of a type I haven’t seen before. We found bits of tubing on the Alagara lot and again today on the freeway.”
“Could be an igniter,” Henley said.
“With C-4, why go to the trouble?”
“I’d guess it’s what you already probably suspect. He’s changing his signature. I don’t see any advantage in terms of detonating the bomb.”
“I don’t either. It’s why I’m calling.”
“I would look for a known bomb maker.”
“I have been, and the CIA is telling us AQAP has much deeper pockets now. They’re getting Saudi oil money through several charities and can afford an expensive freelancer. At the same time, ISIS and AQAP have better bomb makers and more of them now, so who knows?”
“I think you’re right about a pro.”
The chair squeaked and I knew that was Peter leaning forward. After so many years working around him, I could easily visualize him. Henley cleared his throat again.
“You’re guessing he’s using a different igniter to throw you off from recognizing his signature because he’s aware he’s in our database, Interpol’s, or the Russians’.”
“I am guessing that, and whoever they have on the ground here is getting very good information. We’re struggling with that. The car was rented less than twenty-four hours before, and it’s a different type than Nasik, the engineer, usually rents. Yet the charge was shaped for the car. They found out what type of car, got the information to the bomb maker, and got the bomb planted, all inside twenty-four hours.”
“This bomb maker may be getting in your head, Paul.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“How much C-4 is left?”
“Roughly half.”
“It’s not a one-off-then-run-away operation.”
No need to respond to that. That was Peter thinking aloud. The freeway bombing was the third. Henley was headed to the same conclusion I was debating.