Melissa ducks down and reaches for the bike. Alex grabs her hand. “Don’t touch it. It could be evidence.”
Melissa gets down on all fours and crawls under the branches that cover half the bike. She stretches forward, brushing her hair back from her face. Then she turns around. “It is Damon’s! There’s a scrape on the front end of the frame.”
“Are you sure?” asks Bree.
Melissa nods. “Damon was riding one afternoon when he went by a parked car. Idiot driver opened his door without checking. Damon was okay, but the bike got scraped. He was really pissed off about it. He showed me the mark when he came home.”
Progress,Alex thinks.Now we just need to get the bike to a police lab.
“Thanks, Melissa,” he says. “This helps.”
Melissa sits back and brushes the dirt from her hands and knees. “Is there anything else I can do?”
Bree opens her laptop and holds the screen in front of Melissa’s face. “Yes. You can explainthis.”
CHAPTER 34
Sampson
WHEN I WALK INTO Anna Rizzo’s office at the ATF facility, she’s busy typing on her keyboard.
“Sit,” she says, nodding toward a chair without even looking up from her screen.
Unlike the lab, Rizzo’s office is cluttered with bookcases, filing cabinets, and bomb diagrams. There are also some photos. One is her in full army battle rattle standing with her bomb disposal crew next to an up-armored Humvee. The landscape behind her looks to be from the same part of the world where I spent many miserable months.
In another photo, I see a young boy and girl smiling at a birthday party.
I point to the kids. “Juan and Tina?”
Rizzo looks up from her screen and smiles. “Impressive, Detective. You remembered their names.”
“What can I say? I’m a good listener.”
Behind Rizzo is a frame holding a small piece of an American flag, torn and burned on one edge.
“What’s that about?” I ask.
“A reminder,” she says in a tone that doesn’t invite further conversation.
I move on. “So you have something?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking back on things.”
“Back on what things?”
“Back to guys like Timothy McVeigh.” She clicks on her screen and pulls up a photo from April 19, 1995, showing the wreckage at the front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. “A hundred and sixty-eight dead on that day.”
“Right. Men, women, and children.”
Rizzo clicks on a close-up of McVeigh’s face. Short hair. Round jaw. Cold eyes.
“I remembered that Oklahoma City wasn’t his first bomb,” she says. “Two years earlier, he was doing practice runs, making explosive devices on a farm in the middle of nowhere.”
“You think our guy practiced too?”
“I know he did.”
Rizzo clicks to a Google image of a small rural town.
