3rd Degree (2 page)

I grabbed Jacobi. “Warren, I want everyone moved back away from here, now. Move everybody back, now!”

FROM THE BACK of a basement closet, Claire Washburn pulled out an old, familiar case she hadn't seen in years. “Oh, my God...”

She had woken up early that morning, and after a cup of coffee on the deck, hearing the jays back for the first time that season, she threw on a denim shirt and jeans and set out on the dreaded task of cleaning out the basement closet.

First to go were the stacks of old board games they hadn't played in years. Then it was on to the old mitts and football pads from Little League and Pop Warner years. A quilt folded up that was now just a dust convention.

Then she came upon the old aluminum case buried under a musty blanket. My God.

Her old cello. Claire smiled at the memory. Good Lord, it had been ten years since she'd held it in her hands.

She yanked it from the bottom of the closet. Just seeing it brought back a swell of memories: hours and hours of learning the scales, practicing. “A house without music,” her mother used to say, “is a house without life.” Her husband Edmund's fortieth birthday, when she had struggled through the first movement of Haydn's Concerto in D - the last time she had played.

Claire unsnapped the clips and stared at the wood grain on the cello. It was still beautiful, a scholarship gift from the music department at Hampton. Before she realized she would never be a Yo-Yo Ma and headed to med school, it had been her most cherished possession.

A melody popped into her head. That same, difficult passage that had always eluded her. The first movement of Haydn's Concerto in D. Claire looked around, as if embar-rassed. What the hell, Edmund was still sleeping. No one would hear.

Claire lifted her cello out of the felt mold. She took out the bow, held it in her hands. Wow...

A long minute of tuning, the old strings stretching back into their accustomed notes. A single pass, just running the bow along the strings, brought back a zillion sensations. Goose bumps. She played the first bars of the concerto. Sounded a little off, but the feel came back to her. “Ha, the old girl's still got it,” she said with a laugh. She closed her eyes and played a little more.

Then she noticed Edmund, still in his pajamas, watching her, standing at the bottom of the stairs. “I know I'm out of bed” - he scratched his head - “I remember putting on my glasses, even brushing my teeth. But it can't be, 'cause I must be dreaming.”

Edmund hummed the opening bars that Claire had just played. “So, you think you can finish off the next passage? That's the tricky part.”

“Is that a dare, Maestro Washburn?”

Edmund smiled mischievously.

It was then that the phone rang. Edmund picked up a cord

-

less on the handset. “Saved by the bell,” he groaned. “It's the office. On Sunday, Claire. Can't they ever give you a break?”

Claire took the phone. It was Freddie Rodriguez, a staffer at the ME's office. Claire listened, then she set down the phone.

“My God, Edmund...there's been an explosion down-town! Lindsay's been hurt.”

I DON'T KNOW what took hold of me. Maybe it was the thought of the three dead people in the house, or all the cops and firemen charging around the accident scene. I stared at that knapsack, and my brain was shouting out that it was wrong - dead wrong. “Everyone get back!” I yelled again.

I started toward the knapsack. I didn't know what I was going to do yet, but the area had to be cleared.

“No way, LT.” Jacobi reached for my arm. “You don't get to do this, Lindsay.”

I pulled away from him. “Get everyone out of here, Warren.”

“I may not outrank you, LT,” Jacobi said, more impas-sioned this time, “but I've got fourteen more years on the force. I'm telling you, don't go near that bag.”

The fire captain rushed up, shouting into his handheld, “Possible explosive device. Move everybody back. Get Magi-takos from the Bomb Squad up here.”

Less than a minute later, Niko Magitakos, head of the city's bomb squad, and two professionals covered in heavy protective gear pushed past me, heading toward the red bag. Niko wheeled out a boxlike instrument, an X-ray scanner. A square armored truck, like a huge refrigerator, backed up ominously toward the spot.

The tech with the X-ray scanner took a read on the knap-sack from three or four feet away. I was sure the bag was hot - or at least a leave-behind. I was praying, Don't let this blow.

“Get the truck in here.” Niko turned with a frown. “It looks hot.”

In the next minutes, reinforced steel curtains were pulled out of the truck and set up in a protective barrier. A tech wheeled in a claw and crept closer to the bag. If it was a bomb, it could go off any second.

I found myself in no-man's-land, not wanting to move. A bead of sweat trickled down my cheek.

The man with the claw lifted the backpack to transport it to the truck.

Nothing happened.

“I don't get any reading,” the tech holding the electro-sensor said. “We're gonna go for a hand entry.”

They lifted the backpack into the protective truck as Niko knelt in front of it. With practiced hands, he opened the zip-pered back.

“There's no charge,” Niko said. “It's a fucking battery radio.”

There was a collective sigh. I pulled out of the crowd and ran to the bag. There was an ID tag on the strap, one of those plastic labels. I lifted the strap and read.

BOOM! FUCKERS.

I was right. It was a goddamn leave-behind. Inside the backpack, next to the standard clock radio, was a photo in a frame. A computer photo, printed on paper, from a digital camera. The face of a good-looking man, maybe forty.

One of the charred bodies inside, I was pretty sure.

MORTON LIGHTOWER, read the inscription, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.

“LET THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE BE HEARD.”

A name was printed at the bottom. AUGUST SPIES.

Jesus, this was an execution!

My stomach turned.

WE GOT THE TOWN HOUSE ID'd pretty quickly. It did belong to the guy in the picture, Morton Lightower, and his family. The name rang a bell with Jacobi. “Isn't that the guy who owned that X/L Systems?”

“No idea.” I shook my head.

“You know. The Internet honcho. Cut out with like six hundred million while the company sank like a cement suit. Stock used to sell for sixty bucks, now it's something like sixty cents.”

Suddenly I remembered seeing it on the news. “The Creed of Greed guy.” He was trying to buy ball teams, gobbling up lavish homes, installing a $50,000 security gate on his place in Aspen, at the same time he was dumping his own stock and laying off half his staff.

“I've heard of investor backlash,” Jacobi said, shaking his head, “but this is a little much.”

Behind me, I heard a woman yelling to let her through the crowd. Inspector Paul Chin ushered her forward, through the web of news vans and camera crews. She stood in front of the bombed-out home.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped, a hand clasped over her mouth.

Chin led her my way. “Lightower's sister,” he said.

She had her hair pulled back tightly, a cashmere sweater over jeans, and a pair of Manolo Blahnik flats I had once mooned over for about ten minutes in the window of Neiman's.

“Please,” I said, leading the unsteady woman over to an open black-and-white. “I'm Lieutenant Boxer, Homicide.”

“Dianne Aronoff,” she muttered vacantly. “I heard it on the news. Mort? Charlotte? The kids...Did anyone make it out?”

“We pulled out a boy, about eleven.”

“Eric,” she said. “He's okay?”

“He's at the Burn Unit at Cal Pacific. I think he's going to be all right.”

“Thank God!” she exclaimed. Then she covered her face again. “How can this be happening?”

I knelt down in front of Dianne Aronoff and took her hand. I squeezed it gently. “Ms. Aronoff, I have to ask you some questions. This was no accident. Do you have any idea who could've targeted your brother?”

“No accident,” she repeated. “Mortie was saying, `The media treats me like bin Laden. No one understands. What I do is supposed to be about making money.' ”

Jacobi switched gears. “Ms. Aronoff, it looks like the explo-sion originated from the second floor. You have any idea who might've had access to the home?”

“There was a housekeeper,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “Viola.”

Jacobi exhaled. “Unfortunately, that's probably the third body we found. Buried under the rubble.”

“Oh...” Dianne Aronoff choked a sob.

I pressed her hand. “Look, Ms. Aronoff, I saw the explo-sion. That bomb was planted from inside. Someone was either let in or had access. I need you to think.”

“There was an au pair,” she muttered. “I think she some-times spent the night.”

“Lucky for her.” Jacobi rolled his eyes. “If she'd been in there with your nephew...”

“Not for Eric.” Dianne Aronoff shook her head. “For Caitlin.”

Jacobi and I looked at each other. “Who?”

“Caitlin, Lieutenant. My niece.”

When she saw our blank faces, she froze.

“When you said Eric was the only one brought out, I just assumed...”

We continued to stare at each other. No one else had been found in the house.

“Oh, my God, Detectives, she is only six months old.”

THIS WASN'T OVER.

I ran up to Captain Noroski, the fire chief, who was bark-ing commands to his men searching through the house. “Lightower's sister says there was a six-month-old baby inside.”

“No one's inside, Lieutenant. My men are just finishing the upper floor. Unless you wanna go inside and look around again yourself.”

Suddenly the layout of the burning building came back to me. I could see it now. Down that same hallway where I'd found the boy. My heart jumped. “Not the upper floors, Captain, the first.” There could've been a nursery down there, too.

Noroski radioed someone still inside the site. He directed him down the front hall.

We stood in front of the smoking house, and a sickening feeling churned in my stomach. The idea of a baby still in there. Someone I could've saved. We waited while Captain Noroski's men picked through the rubble.

Finally, a fireman climbed out from the debris on the ground floor. “Nothing,” he called out. “We found the nurs-ery. Crib and a bassinet buried under a lot of rubble. But no baby.”

Dianne Aronoff uttered a cry of joy. Her niece wasn't in there. Then a look of panic set in, her face registering a com-pletely new horror. If Caitlin wasn't there, where was she?

CHARLES DANKO STOOD at the edge of the crowd, watch-ing. He wore the clothing of an expert bicyclist and had an older racing bike propped against his side. If nothing else, the biking helmet and goggles covered his face in case the police were filming the crowd, as they sometimes did.

This couldn't have gone much better, Danko was thinking as he observed the homicide scene. The Lightowers were dead, blown to pieces. He hoped they had suffered greatly as they burned, even the children. This had been a dream of his, or perhaps a nightmare, but now it was reality - and this par-ticular reality was going to terrify the good people of San Francisco. This fiery action had taken nerve on his part, but finally he'd done something. Look at the firemen, EMS, the local police. They were all here, in honor of his work, or rather, its humble beginnings.

One of them had caught his eye, a blond woman, obvi-ously a cop with some clout. She seemed to have some guts, too. He watched her and wondered if she would become his adversary, and would she be worthy?

He inquired about her from a patrolman at the barricades. “The woman who went into the house, that's Inspector Murphy, isn't it? I think I know her.”

The cop didn't even bother to make eye contact, typical police insolence. “No,” he said, “that's Lieutenant Boxer. She's Homicide. A real bitch on wheels, I hear.”

THE CRAMPED THIRD-FLOOR OFFICE that housed the Homicide detail was buzzing, unlike any Sunday morning I could remember.

I got a clean bill of health at the hospital, then arrived at the office to find that the whole team had showed up. We had a couple of leads to follow, even before the results of the examination of the blast scene came back. Bombings usually don't involve kidnappings. Find that baby, everything told me, and we'll find whoever did this horrible thing.

A TV was on. Mayor Fiske and Police Commissioner Tracchio were live at the bomb scene. “This is a horrible, vin-dictive tragedy,” the mayor was saying, having come straight off the first tee at Olympic. “Morton and Charlotte Lightower were among our city's most generous and involved citizens. They were also friends.”

“Don't forget contributors,” Cappy Thomas, Jacobi's part-ner, said.

“I want everyone to know that our police department is already vigorously pursuing concrete leads,” the mayor con-tinued. “I want to assure the people of this city that this is an isolated event.”

“X/L...” Warren Jacobi scratched his head. “Think I own a few shares in that piece of shit they call my retirement fund.”

“Me too,” said Cappy. “Which fund you in?”

“I think it's called Long-Term Growth, but whoever named it sure has a twisted sense of humor. Two years ago I had -”

“If you moguls have a moment,” I called. “It's Sunday and the markets are closed. We have three dead, a missing baby, and an entire town house burned to the ground in a possible bombing.”

“Definite bombing,” Steve Fiori, the department's press liaison, chimed in. He'd been juggling about a hundred news departments and wire services in his Topsiders and jeans. “Chief just got it confirmed from the Bomb Squad. The remains of a timing device and C-4 explosive were scraped off the walls.”