Rizzo stares at something in the distance. “John, in my go bag, there’s a measuring tape. Grab it for me, will you?”
I unzip the bag and fumble around inside until I find it. It’s a three-hundred-foot reel on a big plastic spool, the kind builders and surveyors use. I hand it to Rizzo.
“Hold this end,” she says.
I grab the reel and stand in the small depression. Rizzo starts walking, unspooling the tape as she goes, farther and farther across the pit, then up a slope lined with small trees and bushes.
She stops and calls back to me. “What’s the distance?”
I look down at the tape. “One hundred seventy-four feet!” I yell.
“Why did she stop?” the chief asks me.
“She’s measuring the blast zone. You can see where the explosion took out branches and scarred tree trunks. See where she’s standing? That’s where the damage stopped.”
Rizzo walks back over to us as I roll up the tape.
“The first DC blast zone was one hundred and seventy feet,” she says. “The blast zone at the Vietnam memorial was one hundred seventy-seven feet.”
I hand her the tape measure and she drops it into her bag. She looks across the pit.
“He knew exactly the blast range he wanted,” says Rizzo. “The son of a bitch started right here. This was his practice field.”
CHAPTER 38
Cross
ALEX AND BREE ARE leaning on the rear fender of their Camry when they hear a car coming up the park road.
“She’s back,” says Bree, her voice rising.
Sure enough, a few seconds later, Melissa’s car pulls up beside them and stops. Melissa hops out and lifts the back hatch. The cargo area is filled with cases of bottled water and plastic shopping bags.
Melissa hands Alex his credit card. “Hope I got enough stuff,” she says. She reaches into the bags and pulls out carton after carton of Clif Bars. Then she picks up a white cardboard box. “I went by Staples like you said, then I stopped by campus on my way here and put a few dozen of these up.”
Alex’s breath catches in his throat when he sees the flyer. He’s seen hundreds of them in his career, but he never expected to see one with his own son’s face on it.
Bree picks up one of the flyers and checks the boldfaced phone number at the bottom to make sure it’s correct.
Alex runs his hand over Damon’s picture. “I hope Bluestone is ready for the calls.”
“Don’t worry. They are,” says Bree. “Former police dispatchers will be answering the phones. They’ll know which calls are bullshit, which ones to follow up on. If there are any good leads, they’ll pass them along to us—and the Chapel Hill PD.”
“Bluestone?” asks Melissa. “Who are they?”
“The company I work for these days,” says Bree. “Trust me, they’re people who know how to get things done.”
“Were you able to recruit some volunteers?” Alex asks Melissa.
“I texted everybody I know. I think we’ll have a pretty good turnout. At least I hope so.”
Alex reaches into the back seat of the Camry and pulls out a topographical map. Using the edge of one of the flyers as a ruler, he starts drawing boxes on the area of the map showing the nature reserve.
Melissa leans over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Making search grids,” says Alex. “We can’t have people just wandering aimlessly through the woods. There needs to be a plan, a process.”
“You’ve done this before?”
