“But you were the key. I read the report.”
An indifferent shrug from Rizzo. “I got lucky. I was sifting through shards of metal and ceramic and I noticed something on a piece of metal, looked greasy. Turned out to be the bastard’s thumbprint. From there, pretty open-and-shut.”
“Don’t downplay it, Anna,” says Mahoney. “I heard you were at that examination table twenty hours straight before you found that piece of metal. That’s not luck. That’s work.”
“Yeah, well,” says Rizzo, “that was then, this is now.” She looks up at me. “So, Detective Sampson, what’s going on at your end?”
Right to the point.
“Our Special Operations Division has officers out gathering footage from security cameras, dashcams, traffic observation posts, and anything else that might have recorded traffic coming into the area. Detectives are interviewing witnesses and survivors to see if anyone saw anything unusual or out of place before it happened.”
Mahoney leans in. “Homeland Security didn’t get any warnings or threats. Neither did our local field office.” He glances at his watch. “One hour since the blast and nobody’s claimed responsibility.”
“I’ll leave that part up to you guys,” says Rizzo. “Right now, this entire crime scene is mine, especially everything two hundred feet from the crater.” She looks at the ground. The hoses are off, but water from a broken pipe is still flooding the street, eddying around our shoes. “Damn it! Hold on.”
Rizzo takes out her phone and taps a number. She turns and walks a few paces away through the rising water. “Hey, is this Paul Baker at the Water and Sewer Authority? Hi, Paul. Anna Rizzo, ATF. Look, I called you folks ten minutes ago to shut off the main on Thirteenth Street Northwest. What’s taking so long?” I see her listening, looking impatient, and when she speaks again, her tone is cold. “Tell you what, Paul, either this water stops flowing in two minutes or I’m coming down there and arresting your ass for interfering with a federal investigation. Are you hearing me now? Good.”
The call is over. I don’t think poor Paul Baker got too many words in.
As Rizzo puts her phone away, I step over and tap her shoulder. “I’ll do it if you want.”
“Do what?”
“You keep on working the scene, and I’ll go down and knocksome people around at Water and Sewer. Starting with Paul Baker.”
She gives me a small smile. “Detective Sampson, we’re going to work well together, I can just tell.”
“Call me John.”
“Just get the job done,” says Mahoney.
“Oh, we will,” says Rizzo. She turns and stares at the crater at the center of the explosion. “FBI profilers say there are two types of bombers, disorganized asocial offenders and organized nonsocial offenders. The disorganized ones make pipe bombs and blow up random people and places because they can, because it gives them a sense of power.”
She turns to look back at the rest of the wreckage. “The organized ones are highly intelligent and highly motivated, and they construct very technically proficient devices. They’re determined to strike for revenge, for terror, for something that doesn’t make sense to most people but makes perfect sense to them.”
Her voice gets softer. “In those grain-tower cases, the bomber got sloppy. This is different. It looks sophisticated, well planned. What I’m seeing here shows smarts, experience, and some warped sense of dedication.”
I nod. “I agree. And dedicated guys don’t tend to get sloppy.”
Rizzo looks out over the carnage. “Exactly,” she says. “They’re fucking fastidious.”
CHAPTER 10
Cross
ALEX CROSS STANDS IN front of his son Damon’s apartment building on Maxwell Road. It’s a one-story extended-ranch brick building that’s less than a mile from the center of campus. The lawn is green but thin with a few tall pine trees on one side providing shade.
Alex can make out a steady hum of traffic from U.S. 501, the highway barely visible through the trees. He walks to Damon’s front door. Bree is right behind him. She reaches into her purse and digs out the spare key Damon gave them.
She also pulls out two pairs of blue medical gloves and two sets of paper booties.
“Bree …”
Her voice is tight: “You know we have to go in like this. If it’s a crime scene, we can’t contaminate it.”
She’s right, and Alex knows it. He just does not like theimplications.For God’s sake, how many times have I entered homes or rooms like this and ended up finding the bloody remains of a homicide victim?
He takes a pair of the gloves, snaps them on, then slips the booties over his shoes. Bree leans on him as she slides her own booties on. They’ve both had lots of practice.
