Run the Risk (4 page)

“Call nine-one-one, tell them ‘Officer down.' ”

“No phone,” the woman said.

I looked back at Dave, but his eyes had slipped away again. I stood up and started toward the car and the radio inside. Halfway there I heard the first sirens already on the way to the scene. I reached the car and picked up the radio anyway and called in an “Officer down” call, just so there was no doubt about the amount of help that would be on the way.

As I started back toward Dave, I noticed that glass from each of the bungalows had shattered and littered the drive. Blood began to drip into my right eye. I reached up and painfully touched the small piece of glass embedded in my scalp. I again checked Dave's pulse and found it unchanged. His eyes had rolled back in his head.

I pulled out my Glock and moved to the front of the bungalow, where the shattered door frame hung by a single nail. I raised my weapon and scanned the inside of the bungalow to make sure Sweeny had nothing else planned. Everything behind the source of the explosion was intact, as if nothing had happened. A mug, half-filled with coffee, sat on the small dinette table. Next to the mug several empty beer bottles still stood upright. The third of the room in the direction of the blast was a shambles. The
woodwork had been splintered, the plaster walls turned to dust and now lay on the floor.

As my mind began to clear from the fog of the concussion, I noticed the fragments and wires of the triggering mechanism in pieces on the scorched wood floor. I holstered my gun and rushed back to Dave as the first squads pulled up with sirens blaring. A fire truck was on their heels and a paramedic unit right behind them, and still the air was filled with sirens. Nothing brings help faster than an “Officer down” call. And no call is more dreaded.

I stood over Dave wishing I could do something and feeling helpless that the best I could do was nothing. An officer walked up to me and said something, but I didn't hear it. Several firemen knelt over Dave and began administering to him. Another took me by the arm and walked me over to the step of another bungalow, sat me down, and slipped on a pair of blue latex gloves that were unnaturally bright in the rain.

He held up a finger in front of my eyes and moved it back and forth. “Can you follow this?

I nodded. “I'm all right,” I said.

He reached up and pulled the piece of glass from my scalp and covered the wound with a compress. I looked at Dave, who was now completely surrounded by the yellow jackets of firemen and paramedics. More than a dozen officers were now on the scene securing the bungalow. I heard one of them call for the bomb squad. My head began to hurt for the first time, and there was a pounding in my ears almost as if I was finally hearing the explosion. I looked at the bungalow and tried to focus on the blown-out doorway. I sensed there was something I had to remember. What was it? My mind was stuck, unable to find a gear.

Another officer knelt next to me and began talking.

“What can you tell me about . . .”

The fireman was asking me questions.

“Are you hurt anywhere?”

More sirens arrived filling the air with sheets of sound.
I stared at the doorway, trying to remember, trying to escape the swirl of voices flooding my head. The fireman helped me to my feet and put a silvery space blanket over my shoulders.

“You may have a concussion and you'll need some stitches.”

He began walking me toward one of the ambulances. And then it struck me. I turned and looked at the shattered doorway. How did a man whose criminal history extended no further than forging signatures on checks manage to build a sophisticated explosive device? It didn't fit any more than the possibility that he was the man in the mask pulling the trigger at the florist's.

A group of firemen carried Dave past me toward a waiting ambulance, strapped to a backboard and wearing a neck brace. I watched them load him into the ambulance, then I looked back at the bungalow.

If Sweeny didn't have the ability to build the device, then who was the bomb for? Us . . . or was it for him? The only things that were clear were right in front of me: the officers stringing yellow evidence tape, Dave's brown shoe sitting on the stoop as if waiting to take its next step, the rich aroma of the carnitas, and the rain washing away the sickening smell of explosives.

“
IF TRAVER
had stepped in through the door instead of stopping on the threshold and calling ‘police' he would have been killed instantly,” the bomb squad officer said. “The device was designed for a very specific purpose with a very small kill zone. His leaving the door open and not stepping in dissipated the effect of the blast over a much wider area than intended.”

It was five
P
.
M
.—seven hours after the explosion. Dave was in intensive care with a hairline fracture of the skull as a result of being struck by the door as it was blown off the frame. He was heavily sedated but no longer unconscious. He wouldn't know whether the vision in his right eye
would be the same until the swelling went down. The attending physician suggested that for a man who had been blown across a driveway by a flying door, he was lucky. I suggested to the doctor that he stay away from Vegas if that was his understanding of odds.

I had four stitches in my head, ringing in my ears, dirt all over me, and blood-soaked cotton stuck up one of my nostrils. It was the nightmare my mother had always feared when I became a cop—not that I would be killed, but that I would become unattractive and therefore an unsuitable wife. If she had only understood that I was an unsuitable wife long before I ever had cotton stuck up my nose, our relationship would have been a lot easier.

I called Dave's wife from the emergency room and told her what had happened and that he would be all right. She asked for specific details as if trying to find a hole in the story because I was avoiding the really terrible news. I could hear her holding back tears.

“I thought when he left patrol he would be safe. . . . Detectives aren't supposed to get hurt.”

After that I left a message for Lacy that I was all right, in case she had heard something on the news.

I wanted to curl up in an afghan and lie down, but instead I was back standing in the middle of the bungalow wearing plastic booties over my shoes and talking with Detective Dylan Harrison of the bomb squad. He was thirty-seven years old and I suspect a genius who liked things that went bang in the night, day, or anytime in between. Like most of the men on the bomb squad he had found a home there because he never quite fit in anywhere else in the department. He was good-looking, though he didn't seem to know it. In fact at times it appeared a burden to him, almost like he was embarrassed by it. He moved through a room like a deer that is being stalked, each step carefully considered to arouse the least suspicion or attention. He had blond hair, green eyes, and an unimposing but strong body that he inhabited as if it were a stranger's that he was temporarily in custody of. In these times of
dysfunctional body image, he reminded me of many women I've known.

Though there was nothing on his department record, I imagine he was once severely wounded or traumatized either physically or emotionally, maybe both. He masked the pain with his good looks. And everything else he hid by working with explosives.

I walked over to the door where Traver had stood at the moment of the blast and looked back in. Both the walls and the floor of the bungalow were covered with tiny circles made with markers where fragments of the device had come to rest after the explosion. I looked over at Harrison, realizing that I had already forgotten what he had just said.

“The point you are making is . . . ?” I asked.

“The device was designed to kill a person walking all the way in without hesitation and closing the door behind them.”

He studied me as if waiting to see if I could complete the puzzle he had just laid out for me. He was giving me a test, something I wasn't used to in junior officers, but he wasn't just any officer.

“Like a person coming home,” I said.

He nodded.

“It was designed to kill the person who lives here,” Harrison said.

“He could have been expecting someone. Like us.”

I didn't believe it myself but I was curious to watch his thought process.

“Why go to all the trouble of a sophisticated device unless you are certain of the results?”

“Maybe killing wasn't the point; maybe he was making another point. Bombers have been known to do that,” I said.

“Yes, but in public places, in cars, mailboxes, department stores, bus stops, shopping malls, abortion clinics.”

“Like the Unabomber.”

He nodded. “This was supposed to be an assassination.”

“I prefer the term ‘murder.' ”

“Yeah,” he said, as if the word made him uncomfortable.

I thought about it for a moment. “So it's doubtful Sweeny made the bomb, unless he had a very dramatic flair for suicide.”

“People don't kill themselves with booby traps.”

What Harrison didn't know about the ways people were capable of exiting the planet was a lot, but I still didn't disagree with him.

“If Sweeny was the intended victim, why not just kill him with a gun?” I asked.

“Blood,” he said simply.

“You lost me.”

“It's too intimate. Bombers don't like to be close to people. The use of an explosive creates a kind of fiction for them that the pulling of a gun's trigger can't produce.”

“Fiction?” I said.

“An explosion is an act of creation. The use of a gun is an act of finality.”

“You're talking about control.”

“Exactly. Someone who uses a gun is just a killer. Someone who uses a bomb is after more than death.”

I glanced at the 9mm in Harrison's waist holster and wondered if he was in some part talking about himself. Would he be capable of using it if push came to shove? Could he point a weapon at a suspect and pull the trigger even if it meant saving his own life? I couldn't answer that.

“What can you tell me about him from the bomb?”

He knelt down and looked over the flash point on the floor where the device had been placed. I wondered if a part of him admired what he was looking at. You can't be an explosives expert if some part of you doesn't love it.

“He's very skilled, very dangerous, and he enjoys his work. He's also very careful; everything he used could have been bought at any hardware or hobby store, there's nothing to trace. Chemical analyses of the residue will probably tell us that he made it himself or it was a readily available explosive.”

“He?” I said. “So you think it's a man?”

The question surprised Harrison. He even smiled.
“Women don't blow people up. It's a guy thing. A woman would have used a gun.”

His eyes darted uneasily about for a moment like he was searching for a way out of the room. I was right about Harrison. He had been wounded, probably right in the heart by Mary Jane Doe, whose eyes still locked on him in his sleep. But he was right. A woman would have pulled the trigger, not lit a fuse. For some reason I took a small amount of solace in that, though I'm not sure why.

When Forensics had finished going through the debris from the explosion, we combed through every piece of Sweeny's life that was left behind in the bungalow. But beyond discovering that he wore boxers and bought cheap clothes, there was little to tell much of a story. There were no family pictures, no letters, address books, bank statements, checks, nothing that even remotely appeared personal. No favorite pen by the phone, nothing stuck to the door of the refrigerator. Nothing on top of the small cheap dresser next to the bed. Even the food in the fridge was all prepackaged dinners that appeared designed to obscure any sense of the individual. The sum total of my knowledge about him was that he had a thirty-four-inch waist and liked bland food, which sounded a lot like most of the men I had dated in my life.

But what I did know about Sweeny and maybe all that really mattered was that he knew something about the shooting of the florist Daniel Finley, and because of that knowledge someone had tried to kill him. And if the young genius Detective Harrison was right, the man who planted the bomb was probably not the same person who so intimately put a bullet in the back of Daniel Finley's head, which meant I might be looking for two killers instead of one.

“I'm going to need a partner on this investigation to replace Traver. You want it?”

“I'm not Homicide.”

“And I'm not an explosives expert.”

I could see him working it out in his head like he was
tracing the intricate wires of an explosive device: the red one here, the blue one there, don't ground this one, and for God's sake, don't touch the two leads together or that's the end of the party.

“I don't . . . I don't really like being around bodies,” he said.

“No . . . just small unidentifiable pieces of them.”

His face pained for a moment as if replaying a bad memory. “It's just—”