Demolition Angel

  CALLER: Dese pipes, see? I dunno. It made me scared.

  EMS: Could I have your name, sir?

  CALLER: Is by the trash dere, you know? The beeg can.

  EMS: I need your name, sir.

  CALLER: You better come see.

  The line clicked when the man hung up. That was the end of the tape. Starkey turned off the machine.

  Marzik frowned.

  “If it’s legit, why wouldn’t he leave his name?”

  Santos shrugged.

  “You know how people are. Could be he’s illegal. He’s probably just some neighborhood guy, around there all the time.”

  Starkey scrounged for something to write on. The best she could do was a copy of The Blue Line, the LAPD’s union newspaper. She drew a rough street map, showing the mall and the location of the phones.

  “He says he looked in the bag. Okay. That means he’s here at the mall. He says it scared him, seeing the pipes like that, so why not just use the phone right here outside the Cuban place or over here across the street? Why walk another block east?”

  Marzik crossed her arms again. Every time Marzik didn’t like something, she crossed her arms. Starkey could read her like the daily news.

  “Maybe he wasn’t sure it was a bomb, and then he wasn’t sure he wanted to call. People have to talk themselves into things. Christ, sometimes I gotta talk myself into taking a shit.”

  Santos frowned at Marzik’s mouth, then tapped the phone outside the laundry.

  “If I found something I thought was a bomb, I’d want to get as far away from it as possible. I wouldn’t want to stand next to it. Maybe he was scared it would explode.”

  Starkey considered that, and nodded. It made sense. She tossed The Blue Line into her wastebasket.

  “Well, whatever. We’ve got the time of the call. Maybe someone around there saw something, and we can straighten this out.”

  Santos nodded.

  “Okay. You want to do that while we get the apartment houses?”

  “One of you guys swing past, okay, Hook? I’ve gotta meet Chen over in Glendale.”

  Starkey gave them the addresses, then went in to see Kelso. She walked in without knocking.

  “Hooker said you wanted to see me.”

  Kelso jerked away from his computer and swiveled around to peer at her. He had stopped telling her not to barge in over a year ago.

  “Would you close the door, please, Carol, then come sit down.”

  Starkey closed the door, then marched back across his office and stood at his desk. She was right about that cow Marzik. She didn’t sit.

  Kelso squirmed behind his desk because he wasn’t sure how to come at what he wanted to say.

  “I just want to make sure you’re okay with this.”

  “With what, Barry?”

  “You seemed just a little, ah, strained last night. And, ah, I just want to be sure you’re okay with being the lead here.”

  “Are you replacing me?”

  He began to rock, his body language revealing that that was exactly what he was thinking.

  “Not at all, Carol. No. But this case strikes close to home with you, and we’ve had these, ah, episodes recently.”

  He let it hang as if he didn’t know how to carry it further.

  Starkey felt the shakes coming on, but fought them down. She was furious with Marzik and terrified that Kelso might reconsider ordering her to the bank.

  “Did Marzik say that I was drinking?”

  Kelso showed both palms.

  “Let’s leave Marzik out of this.”

  “You saw me at the crime scene, Barry. Did I act drunk or unprofessional to you?”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. You’ve been wound a little on the tight side, Carol. We both know that because we’ve talked about it. Last night you were confronted with a situation very similar to one that you yourself barely survived. Perhaps you were unnerved.”

  “You’re talking about replacing me.”

  “I left our conversation last night thinking that I smelled gin. Did I?”

  Starkey met his eyes.

  “No, sir. You smelled Binaca. I ate Cuban for lunch, and I was blowing garlic all day. That’s what you and Marzik smelled.”

  He showed his palms again.

  “Let’s leave Marzik out of this. Marzik didn’t say anything to me.”

  Starkey knew he was lying. If Kelso had smelled gin on her breath, he would’ve said something at the scene. He was running with Marzik’s complaint.

  Starkey was very careful in how she stood. She knew he would be reading her body language the same way she read his. He would look for any sign of defensiveness.

  Finally, he settled back, relieved that he’d said what he needed to say and had been the responsible commander.

  “All right, Carol, this is your case. I just want you to know I’m here for you.”

  “I need to get over to Glendale, Lieutenant. The quicker I can get hard news on the bomb, the faster we can bag this puke.”

  Kelso leaned back, dismissing her.

  “All right. If you need anything, you know I’m here. This is an important case, Carol. A human being died. More, an officer died, which makes it personal.”

  “It’s personal to me and the guys on the Bomb Squad, Lieutenant. Believe it.”

  “I imagine it would be. Just take it easy, Carol, and we’ll get through this all right.”

  Starkey went back into the squad room, looking for Marzik, but she and Santos had already left. She gathered her things, then wrestled her car out of the parking lot jockeying spots with a fat IAG detective named Marley. It took her almost fifteen minutes to get out of the building, and then she pulled to the curb, so angry at Marzik that her hands were shaking.

  The flask of gin was beneath her seat, but Starkey didn’t touch it. She thought about it, but she didn’t touch it.

  Starkey lit another cigarette, then drove like a bat out of hell, blowing smoke like a furnace.

  It was only eight-thirty when Starkey pulled into the Glendale PD parking lot. Chen had said he’d have the chromatograph by nine, but Starkey figured that he’d built a fuck-up and paperwork cushion into that estimate.

  She sat in her car smoking for five minutes before using her cell phone to call SID.

  “John, it’s Starkey. I’m out here in the lot. You have the results?”

  “You’re outside right now?”

  “Affirmative. I’m on my way in to see Leyton.”

  Instead of giving her attitude or excuses, Chen said, “Give me two minutes and I’ll be right down. You’re gonna love this.”

  The LAPD Bomb Squad is based in a low-slung modern building adjacent to the Glendale police substation and piggybacked with the Scientific Investigation Division. The building is built of red brick and snuggled behind a stand of rubber trees, most people would mistake it for a dental office, except that it is also snuggled behind a ten-foot fence topped with concertina wire. The parking lot is dotted with dark blue Bomb Squad Suburbans.

  Starkey let herself into the Bomb Squad reception area and asked for Lieutenant Leyton. He’d stayed out with the others at the crime scene, walking the sweep like everyone else. Dark rings had set in around his eyes, making him look older than she’d ever seen him, even after Sugar Boudreaux died.

  Starkey handed over the baggie.

  “I walked the scene again this morning and found these. You got someone on the reconstruction yet?”

  Leyton held up the baggie to look. All three bits would have to be logged into the evidence records, then tested to see if they were actually part of the device.

  “Russ Daigle. He came in early to start sorting what we recovered last night.”

  “Chen’s on his way down with the chrom. I was hoping to snatch whatever component manufacturers you have, so I can get rolling with this.”

  “Sure. Let’s see what he has.”

  She followed Leyton down a long hall past the ready room and the sergeants
’ offices to the squad room. It didn’t look like any other squad room in the department; it looked like a high school science lab, all small cramped desks and black Formica workbenches.

  Every surface in the squad room was covered with de-armed bombs or bomb facsimiles, from pipe bombs and dynamite bombs to canister bombs and large military ordnance. An air-to-air missile hung from the ceiling. Trade journals and reference books cluttered any surface not sporting a bomb. FBI Wanted posters were taped to the walls.

  Russ Daigle was perched on a stool at one of the workbenches, sorting pieces of metal. Daigle was one of the squad’s three sergeant-supervisors, and the man who had the most time on the squad. He was a short, athletic man with a thick gray mustache and blunt fingers. He was wearing latex gloves.

  He glanced up when he heard them, nodding toward a smudged computer at the end of his workbench. It was covered with Babylon 5 stickers.

  “We got the snaps up. You wanna see?”

  “You bet.”

  She moved behind him to see the monitor.

  “End and side view. We got others, but these are the best. It’s a classic goddamned pipe bomb. Betcha some turd built it in his garage.”

  The digital snapshots that Riggio had taken were displayed on the screen. They showed the two pipes as impenetrable black shadows neatly taped together with a spool of wire fixed to the cleft between them. All four pipe ends were capped. Starkey studied the images, comparing them to the bits of jagged black metal that were spread on white butcher’s paper. One of the end caps was still intact, but the others were broken. Daigle had divided them by size and conformation, exactly the way you would the pieces in any other puzzle. He already had the major parts of all four caps separated and had made good progress with the tubes, but it was clear that forty or fifty percent of the pieces were still missing.

  “What do we have, Sarge? Looks like typical galvanized iron pipe, two-inch diameter?”

  He picked up a piece of end cap that showed a letter V cast into the iron.

  “Yeah. See the V? Vanguard pipe company. Buy it anywhere in the country.”

  Starkey made note of it in her pad. She would compile a list of components and characteristics, and feed them through the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System to the FBI’s Bomb Data Center and the ATF’s National Repository in Washington. The BDC and NR would search for signature matches with every bomb report in their systems.

  Daigle ran his finger up under the edge of the cap, flaking off something brittle and white.

  “See that? Plumber’s joint tape. We got us a neat boy, here. Very precise. Even taped the joints. What does that tell you?”

  Starkey knew that the old sergeant had already drawn a conclusion and was testing her. He’d done the same thing a hundred times when she was on the squad.

  “You’re plumbing your sink, you maybe want to tape the joints, but you sure as hell don’t need to tape a bomb.”

  Daigle grinned, proud that she’d seen it.

  “That’s right. No reason to tape it, so maybe he does it out of habit, you know? Could be he’s a plumber, or a building contractor of some kind.”

  Another note for the feds.

  “Both pipes are the same size, as near as I can measure from the snaps. He either cut or had’m cut to length, and he was particular. You see the tape shadow here, how careful he wrapped the tape? We got us a particular boy here, and he’s good with his hands. Very precise.”

  Already Starkey was getting a picture of the builder. He might be a skilled tradesman or a machinist or a hobbyist who took pride in precision, like a model builder or woodworker.

  “Did Chen show you the 5?”

  “What 5?”

  Daigle placed a piece of the tube frag under the glass. It was the S Chen had pulled from Riggio’s armor.

  “It looks like an S.”

  Leyton said, “We’re not sure what it is, an S, or a 5, or some kind of symbol.”

  Daigle peered close at the glass.

  “Whatever it is, he cut it in with a high-speed engraving tool.”

  Chen came in while they were discussing the snaps. Like the others, he looked as if he hadn’t slept much, but he was excited when he handed Starkey the chrom results.

  “I can tell you right now I’m cooking another sample to confirm, but the explosive was something called Modex Hybrid. He didn’t buy this at the local hardware store.”

  They looked at him.

  “The military uses it in artillery warheads and air-to-air missiles. We’re talking about a burn rate of twenty-eight thousand feet per second.”

  Daigle grunted. The burn rate was a measure of how fast the explosive consumed itself and released energy. The more powerful the explosive, the faster the burn rate.

  “TNT goes, what, twenty thousand feet per second?”

  Starkey said, “Twenty, twenty-one, something like that.”

  Leyton nodded.

  “If we’re talking about a military explosive, that’s good for us. It should narrow the field, Carol. We see who’s missing some, then find out who had access.”

  Chen cleared his throat.

  “Well, it won’t be that simple. The chrom showed a lot of impurities in the chemical signature, so I phoned the manufacturer back in Pennsylvania. Modex comes in three forms: military grade, which is made under government contract, commercial grade, which is made for foreign export only—EPA won’t let anyone use it here—and homegrown.”

  Daigle scowled.

  “What’s that mean, homegrown?”

  “The company rep thought a kitchen chemist might’ve cooked up this batch. It’s not that hard to do if you’ve got the components and the right pressure equipment. The guy says it’s about as hard as cooking up a batch of crystal meth.”

  Starkey glanced over the chromatograph printout, but it didn’t tell her what she wanted to know.

  “Okay. If you can make the stuff by hand, I need the component list and the recipe.”

  “The rep’s going to put it together and fax it. I asked him for manufacturers, too. As soon as I get’m, they’re yours.”

  Starkey folded the page and put it with her notes. A unique explosive was a plus for the investigation, but she didn’t like what it implied.

  “If this stuff is a military explosive, or needs some kind of high-end lab work, it changes my picture of the builder. We can’t be talking about a guy who just wanted to see if he could do it. This is a serious bomb.”

  Leyton frowned and leaned against the bench.

  “Not necessarily. If the Modex turns out to be stolen, that’s true—a backyard nutcase wouldn’t know how to get his hands on something like that. But if he made it himself, he could’ve pulled the formula off the Internet. Maybe he figured that using a more powerful explosive like this was part of the challenge.”

  Daigle crossed his arms, not liking it.

  “Starkey’s right about this being a serious bomb. So tell me this: Why does he build a device like this and just leave it by a Dumpster? There’s gotta be more to it.”

  “We talked to every one of the shop owners, Sarge. Nobody says they were threatened. The bomb didn’t damage the building.”

  Daigle scowled deeper.

  “One of those fuckers is lying. You don’t build a bomb this powerful just to play with yourself. You watch what I’m saying. One of those fuckers screwed somebody over and this thing is payback.”

  Starkey shrugged, thinking maybe Daigle was right as she studied the snaps.

  “Sarge, I’m looking at this thing, but I don’t see a detonator. No batteries. No power source. How did it go off?”

  Daigle slid off the stool to stretch his back and tapped the picture on the screen.

  “I got a theory. One pipe holds the explosive, the other the detonator. Look here.”

  He picked up two of the larger pieces of pipe, holding them for her and Leyton to see.

  “See the white residue here on the inside of the curve?”


  “Yeah. From when the explosive burned off.”

  “That’s right. Now look at this other piece. Nothing in here. Clean. Makes me think maybe he had the detonator in this pipe, along with a battery or whatever.”

  “You think it was hooked to a timer?”

  Daigle looked dubious.

  “And the timer just happened to let go when Riggio was standing over it? I don’t buy that for a second. We haven’t found anything yet, but I’m thinking Riggio set off some kind of balance switch.”

  “Buck said Charlie never touched the package.”

  “Well, that’s what Buck saw, but Charlie must’ve done something. Bombs don’t just go off for no reason.”

  Everyone suddenly grew silent, and Daigle flushed. Starkey realized it was because of her, then she flushed, too.

  “Jesus, Carol. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Sarge. There was a reason. It’s called an earthquake.”

  Starkey remembered the twisted disk she’d found, took it from the baggie, and showed it to the others.

  “I found this at the crime scene this morning. I don’t know if it came from the bomb, but there’s a good chance. It could be part of the initiator.”

  Daigle put it under a magnifying glass for a closer look, chewing his lower lip, squinting and puzzled.

  “Something electrical. Looks like we got a circuit board in here.”

  Chen crowded in and peered at it. He pulled on a pair of Daigle’s gloves, then selected a narrow screwdriver and pried open the disk like a clamshell.

  “Sonofabitch. I know what this is.”

  A single word was printed inside the disk, a word they all knew, that was so out of place it seemed absurd: MATTEL.

  Chen put down the disk and stepped away. The others gathered closer for a better look, but Starkey was watching Chen. He looked stricken.

  “What is it, John?”

  “It’s a radio receiver like they put in those remote-control cars for kids.”

  Now all of them stared at him because what John Chen was saying changed everything they’d been thinking about this bomb and the anonymity of its explosion.

  “Charlie Riggio didn’t set off this device, and it didn’t just happen to explode. It was radio-controlled.”