Demolition Angel (9 page)

Less than twelve hours ago she had emptied her flask and promised herself that she would ease up on the drinking, but to hell with that. She ate two Tagamet and cursed her rotten luck that the ATF was involved.

Pell sat in a small white room not much bigger than a coffin to read the reports. He had been provided with the initial findings from the Bomb Squad, SID, and the autopsy of the deceased officer.

After reading them, he felt that LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division and Bomb Squad had done an excellent job
of forensics and analysis, though he was disappointed that only a single letter—the
S
—had been recovered. Pell was certain there would be more, but had a high degree of confidence that the criminalist over there, Chen, would not have overlooked anything. Pell wasn’t so certain about the Medical Examiner’s office. An important step had not been noted in the autopsy protocol.

He brought the reports into the hall and found Santos waiting.

“Do you know if the medical examiner took a full X-ray of Riggio’s body?”

“I don’t know. If it’s not in the protocol, they probably didn’t do it.”

“It’s not, but it should be.”

Pell paged open the autopsy protocol and found the attending medical examiner’s name. Lee Richards.

“Is Starkey still here?”

“She’s gone.”

“I’d better see Lieutenant Kelso.”

Twenty minutes later, after Kelso had made two phone calls to locate Richards, Santos drove Pell around behind the rear of the County-USC Medical Center to the Medical Examiner’s building.

When Santos started to get out with him, Pell said, “Take five and grab a smoke.”

“Don’t smoke.”

“You’re not coming in there with me.”

Pell could tell that Santos was bothered by that, but Pell didn’t care.

“You think I wanna watch an M.E. dig around in a friend of mine? I’ll grab a cup of coffee and wait in the lobby.”

Pell couldn’t object to that, so they crunched across the gravel toward the door.

Inside, Santos identified them to the security guard, then
went for his coffee. Richards appeared a few minutes later, Pell following him into a cold tile X-ray room where they waited while two technicians wheeled in Riggio’s body. The body was zipped into an opaque plastic bag. Pell and Richards stood silently as the technicians took the body from the bag and positioned it on the X-ray table. The great Y incision down the chest and abdomen that Richards had made during the autopsy was stitched closed, as were the wounds where the frags had done their worst damage.

Richards eyed the body as if he was assessing his work and liking it.

“The entry wounds were fairly obvious, as you can see. We took area X-rays wherever the entries appeared to be of a significant nature, and that’s where we removed the fragments.”

Pell said, “That’s the problem. If you only look where you see an entry wound, you’ll miss something. I’ve seen cases where shrapnel bounced off a pelvis and followed the femur down to a knee.”

Richards looked dubious.

“I guess it’s possible.”

“I know it’s possible. Where are his hands?”

Richards frowned.

“Hm?”

“Were his hands recovered?”

“Oh, yes. I examined them. I know I examined them.”

Richards peered at the bony stubs of the wrists, then squinted at the technicians.

“Where are the goddamned hands?”

The technicians fished around in the bag and came out with the hands. Scorched from the heat flash and macerated by the pressure wave. Richards looked relieved.

“See? We’ve got the hands. It’s all here.”

Like he was proud of himself that all the body parts were accounted for.

Richards said, “What we’ll do is look over the body with the scope first. We see anything, we’ll mark it, okay? That’ll be faster than screwing around with the X-ray.”

“Fine.”

“I don’t like the X-ray. Even with all the shielding, I worry about the cancer.”

“Fine.”

Pell was given a pair of yellow goggles to wear. He felt nothing as he watched them wheel Riggio’s body behind a chromatic fluoroscope. The fluoroscope looked like an opaque flat-screen television, but when Richards turned it on, it was suddenly transparent. As the body disappeared behind the screen, its flesh was no longer flesh but transparent lime Jell-O, the bones impenetrable green shadows. Richards adjusted the screen.

“Pretty cool, huh? This won’t scramble your ’nads the way an X-ray will. No cancer.”

At Richards’ direction, the techs pushed the body slowly past the screen, revealing three sharply defined shadows below the knee, two in the left leg, one in the right, all smaller than a BB.

Richards said, “Sonofabitch, here you go. Right here.”

Pell had expected to find even more, but the armored suit had done its work well. Only those fragments with a significant mass had carried enough inertia to punch through the Kevlar.

Richards peered at him.

“You want these?”

“I want it all, Doc.”

Richards marked the spots on the body with a felt-tipped pen.

By the time they finished scanning the body, they had found eighteen metal fragments, only two of which had any real size: one, an inch-long piece of twisted metal that had
lodged in Riggio’s hip joint; the other, a half-inch rectangular fragment that Richards had overlooked when he’d removed a cluster of fragments from the soft tissue of Riggio’s right shoulder.

As Richards removed them, the taller technician rinsed them of clotted blood and placed them in a glass tray. Pell inspected each bit of metal, but he found no etches or markings.

Finally, Richards turned off the light screen, and lifted his goggles.

“That’s it.”

Pell didn’t say anything until the last of the fragments had been rinsed. It was the largest piece, and he wanted there to be something so badly that his heart was hammering, but when he examined it, he saw that there was nothing.

“Does any of this help, you think?”

Pell didn’t answer.

“Agent?”

“I appreciate your staying, Doc. Thanks.”

Richards peeled off his gloves to glance at his watch. It was a Mickey Mouse watch.

“We’ll send these over to SID in the morning. We have to deliver them under seal to maintain the chain of evidence.”

“I know. That’ll be fine, thanks.”

It wasn’t fine and Pell didn’t like it. A cold rage of frustration threatened to spill out of him.

Pell was already thinking that he was too late, that Mr. Red might have come and gone and be on to another city or maybe had never been here at all, when the taller technician mentioned the hands.

“Doc, you gonna scope the hands, or should I bag this stuff and get out of here?”

Richards grunted like they might as well, then brought over the hands and placed them under the scope. Two bright green shadows were wedged among the metacarpal bones in the left hand.

“Shit. Looks like we missed a couple.”

Richards removed them with the forceps, passing them to the tech, who rinsed them and put them with the others.

Pell inspected them as he had done the others, turning over both pieces without hope when he felt an adrenaline jolt of rage surge through his body.

The larger piece had five tiny letters etched into its surface, part of a sixth, and what he saw there stunned him. It wasn’t what he expected. It wasn’t anything that he had expected. His heart was beating so hard that it seemed to echo off the walls.

Behind him, Richards said, “Find anything?”

“No. Just more of the same stuff, Doc.”

Pell palmed the shard with the letters and returned the remaining piece to the tray with the other recovered fragments. The lab technician did not notice that he had returned one piece and not two.

Richards must’ve read something in his eyes.

“Are you all right, Agent Pell? You need a drink of water or something?”

Pell put away those things he felt and carefully blanked his face.

“I’m fine, Doc. Thanks for your time.”

Special Agent Jack Pell walked back into the outer hall, where the security guard stared at him with goldfish eyes.

“You looking for Santos?”

“Yeah.”

“He took his coffee out to the car.”

Pell turned toward the door and was halfway down the hall when crimson starbursts appeared in the air before him, followed by a sharp wave of nausea. The air around the starbursts darkened and was suddenly alive with wormy shapes that writhed and twisted.

Pell said, “Shit, not now. Not now.”

Behind him, the guard said, “What?”

Pell remembered a bathroom. A men’s room off the hall. He blinked hard against the darkening stars and shoved his way through the door. A cold sweat sprouted over his back and chest.

The dizziness hit him as he reached the sink, and then his stomach clenched and he barfed into the sink. The room felt as cold as a meat locker.

Closing his eyes didn’t stop him from seeing the shapes. They floated in the air on a field of black, rising and twisting in slow motion as if filled with helium. He turned on the cold water and vomited again, spitting out the foul taste as he splashed water into his eyes. His stomach heaved a third time, and the nausea passed.

He heard voices in the hall and thought one of them might be Santos.

Pell clawed a towel from the rack, wet it with cold water, and staggered into the stall. When he straightened, his head spun.

He slumped onto the toilet and pressed the towel hard to his eyes, waiting.

He had done this before. He had done it many times and was scared because the time between bouts was shrinking. He knew what that meant, and it scared him more than anything in his life had ever scared him.

He sat on the floor, breathing through the wet towel until the floating monsters that haunted him vanished. When they were gone, he took out the piece of metal he had stolen and read the letters there, squinting to make his eyes work.

Pell hadn’t told Kelso and Starkey everything about Mr. Red. He hadn’t told them that Mr. Red didn’t just kill random bomb techs. He chose his targets, usually senior techs with headline cases under their belts. He didn’t kill just anyone; he killed only the very best.

When Pell learned of the
S
, he thought it would be from CHARLES.

It wasn’t.

Pell read the fragment again.

TARKEY

CRIME BOSS DIES IN FIERY BLAST

INNOCENTS DIE ALSO

By Lauren Beth

Exclusive to the

Miami Herald

John Michael Fowles was disappointed that the article was on page three, but decided not to show it. He was also pissed off that there was no mention of Mr. Red, nor of the fine work he had done in destroying the building. He folded the newspaper and handed it back to Angelo Rossi, the man who had put him in touch with Victor Karpov.

Rossi looked surprised when John returned the paper.

“There’s more on the next page.”

“It’s just an article, Mr. Rossi. I’d rather be readin’ the papers you got in that bag, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, sure.”

Rossi nervously handed over the bag with the money Karpov owed John. Karpov himself had refused to come meet John here at the library. He claimed illness, like a kid cutting class, but John knew the real reason: He was scared.

As before, John didn’t bother to count it, or even open the bag. He put the money into his backpack, and lowered the pack to the floor. When John had told Rossi to meet him here in the periodicals section of the West Palm Beach Public Library, he had had to explain what “periodicals” were.

John gave Rossi the cracker’s hayseed grin as he leaned back against the reading table.

“Take it easy, Mr. Rossi. We’re okay. You don’t have an overdue book, do ya?”

Rossi glanced over his shoulder as if the book police were hot on his trail, clearly nervous and out of place. John wondered if the fat bastard had even been in a library except when he’d been sent there on high school detention.

“This is foolish, Red, meeting in a library like this. What kinda mook talks about shit like this in a library?”

“A mook like me, I guess. I like the order you find in a library, Angelo. It’s the last place left where people behave with manners, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Why’d you do your hair like that?”

“So people will remember it.”

Rossi’s eyes narrowed. John pictured rusty gears turning in Rossi’s head, and had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing, though he knew Rossi to be a smart man.

“Don’t you worry about it, partner. Mr. Red has his reasons.”

“Oh, I get it. Mr. Red. The red hair.”

“There you go.”

Today, John’s hair was cut way short and dyed a vivid red the colorist had called Promise of Passion. Contact lenses gave him green eyes. His sideburns were long and pointed, and he’d fit cotton wads into his lower cheeks to make his jaw appear more square. He was also wearing lifts that made him three inches taller.

If Rossi knew the real reason John had made himself up this way, the man would shit a Buick.