Demolition Angel (35 page)

Marzik was the first one bored with the wait, and expressed her annoyance.

“What in hell is taking so long? We don’t need Parker Center to rubber-stamp this thing. Let’s just go pick up the sonofabitch.”

Santos frowned at her.

“He wants Morgan to sign off, is all. It’s politics.”

“Kelso’s such a chickenshit.”

“Maybe Morgan isn’t there. Maybe he can’t reach Lieutenant Leyton.”

“Oh, screw that.”

Starkey had decided to head for the stairwell with a cigarette when Reege Phillips called. The tone of his voice was careful and measured, which immediately put her on edge. She didn’t want Hooker and Marzik to hear.

Starkey said, “I don’t know that I can talk right now, Reege. Will this keep?”

“I don’t think so, Carol. You got a problem on your hands.”

“Ah, can I call you right back?”

“You want to change phones?”

“That’s right. I’ve got your number.”

“Okay. I’m right here.”

Starkey hung up, told Santos and Marzik she was going for a smoke, and brought her purse. When she was in the stairwell, she called Phillips on her cell phone. Just pressing the numbers left her feeling sick.

“What do you mean, that I have a problem?”

“Jack Pell isn’t an ATF agent. He used to be, but not anymore.”

“That can’t be right. Pell had bomb analysis reports from Rockville. He had a spook at Cal Tech doing work for us.”

“Just listen. Pell was an ATF field agent working for the Violent Crime Task Force, attached to the Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department. Twenty months ago, he was in a warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, trying to get the goods on some Chinese AKs coming up from Cuba. You read those reports he gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Think Newark.”

“Mr. Red’s first bomb.”

“Pell was in that warehouse when it went off. The concussion caused something in his eyes called commotio retinae.
You catch it in time, you can fix it with the laser. Pell’s didn’t show up until later, and then it was too late.”

“What does that mean, too late?”

“He’s going blind. Way the man explained it is that the retinas are pulling away from his optic nerves, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. So the Bureau retired him. Now you’re telling me he’s acting like he’s still on the job. You got a rogue agent on your hands, Carol. He’s hunting down the bastard who took his eyes. You call the FO and get them in on this before Pell hurts somebody.”

Starkey leaned against the wall, feeling numb.

“Carol? You there?”

“I’ll take care of it, Reege. Thank you.”

“You want me to get the office on this?”

“No. No, I’ll do it. Listen, I’ve gotta go, Reege. We have something here.”

“You watch out for that guy, Carol. He’s looking to kill that sonofabitch. No tellin’ what he might do. He might even kill you.”

After she ended the call, Starkey finished her cigarette, then went back into the squad room. She must have looked odd.

Marzik said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

Finally, Kelso’s door opened and Kelso stepped out. Starkey could see that something was wrong with him, but Marzik was already halfway to the stairs, muttering.

“It’s about goddamned time.”

“Beth, wait.”

Kelso stared at them. He didn’t speak; he didn’t move for the longest time.

Santos said, “What is it, Lieutenant?”

Kelso cleared his throat. His jaw worked as if he were trying to make spit.

“Detectives, the San Gabriel police were notified that an explosion occurred at Buck’s home. He was pronounced dead at the scene.”

By the time they reached Daggett’s home, the San Gabriel Fire Department had the fire out. The garage and the back side of the house were still venting steam, but the Sheriff’s bomb investigators were already walking the scene. Starkey wanted to walk with them, but the commander of the Sheriff’s Bomb Squad refused to clear her onto the site until the body had been removed. Only Kelso was allowed in the rear. Dick Leyton had arrived a few minutes before them.

Starkey, Marzik, and Santos stood in a tight knot in the front yard, Santos talking to burn off the nervous energy.

“Do you think he killed himself? That’s what happens when you get close, you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“You hear that a lot with officers. They realize they’re about to take the fall, bang, they kill themselves.”

Starkey, feeling bad enough, walked away.

“I wonder if he killed his wife, too.”

Marzik put a hand on his shoulder.

“Jorge? Shut the fuck up.”

Starkey’s first thought had also been suicide, but that was something they might never know unless Daggett left a note. If he didn’t, the rubble would be sifted, the frag collected, the device reconstructed as with any other bomb. They would try to place the moment of detonation and determine if it had
been accidental, or by design. Starkey knew it would all be a matter of guesswork.

Waiting there on the street, Starkey’s thoughts drifted back to Pell. She considered paging him, but didn’t know what she would say if he returned her call. She put it out of her head. She was getting good at that, putting things out of her head.

After a while, Kelso came up the drive past Buck’s 4-Runner, and waved them to join him.

“How many bodies?”

“Just Buck. It looks like Natalie wasn’t home. We don’t yet know if she left before it happened or after, but her car is missing.”

Starkey felt some of her tension ease, though not much. She had been worried that Buck and Natalie had gone together.

Kelso looked at Starkey.

“The thinking now is that it was a suicide. I want you to be ready for that, Carol. We can’t be sure yet, but that’s what it looks like.”

Marzik said, “Why?”

“He wrote something on the wall above his workbench. The spray paint is still tacky. We can’t be sure it’s a suicide note, but it could be.”

Starkey took a deep breath.

“Does it mention me?”

“No. All it says is, ‘the truth hurts.’ That’s all it says.”

The San Gabriel coroner investigators wheeled a gurney bearing a blue plastic body bag to their van. The bag was misshapen and wet.

Kelso started back down the drive.

“Come on. We can go back now. I want to warn you all that it’s a mess. His body was badly dislocated. Also, I want you to remember that this is not our crime scene. The Sheriff’s investigators are talking to Dick Leyton now, and they will want to talk to us. Stay close.”

Santos looked sad.

“So Carol was right.”

Marzik frowned at him.

“Of course she was right, you idiot.”

“I was hoping that … even with everything we know, I guess I was hoping she was wrong.”

Marzik stopped, and waved them on.

“Screw it. I don’t want to see all that blood. I’m going to stay out here.”

They walked back along the drive past the firemen and the San Gabriel Bomb Squad. Under other circumstances, at another crime scene, Starkey would have talked to these people, but she ignored them. Dick Leyton was in the backyard with a couple of San Gabriel suits that Starkey took to be Sheriff’s investigators. Kelso and Santos joined them, leaving Starkey alone. She was glad for that. She didn’t want to look at these things, and think the things that she was thinking, and have to talk to anyone. She wished she hadn’t heard all that crap about suicide because now she was feeling guilty about it.

The drive and the buildings were wet. The firemen were cranking in their hoses, moving in teams around Buck’s 4-Runner and away from the garage. Starkey stepped off the drive to make way for them and felt the water squish up around her shoes. The aluminum garage door had been pulled out of its frame by the fire department. Starkey could see that it had been down at the time of the detonation by the way the aluminum panels were bowed outward. The firemen would have wanted to raise it to get water on the flames, but couldn’t; they had probably set grappling hooks to pull it away. Inside the garage, the Sheriff’s bomb investigators were sifting and photographing the debris exactly as Starkey and her people had done in Silver Lake. The air in the garage was damp, and heavy with the scent of burned wood.

The spray-painted words were above his bench.

THE TRUTH HURTS

They were red.

“You one of the L.A. people?”

Starkey showed her badge.

“Yeah. CCS. You mind if I look?”

“Just tell us before you touch anything, okay?”

Starkey nodded.

A half-moon shape like a jagged crown of splinters was blown out of Buck’s workbench. Wooden shrapnel sprouted from the inner garage walls like porcupine quills. Much of the bench was charred from the fire, but not the area shattered by the blast. Something had hit the far wall and left a red smear. Starkey concentrated on the painted words. THE TRUTH HURTS. It could mean anything or nothing. What truth? The truth that was about to come out? The truth that his wife loved another man? That Pell had lied to Starkey, and used her?

Starkey said, “How do you call the scene?”

“Too early for that.”

“I know it’s too early, but I haven’t seen the body. You have, so you probably have an idea.”

The investigator didn’t stop what he was doing to offer his opinion. Like any investigator, he wanted to finish his work and get the hell out.

“Judging from the way he came apart, I’d say he was right on top of it, there at his bench. His lower extremities are fine except for the wood frag they caught. Most of the damage was in his chest and abdomen. He was damn near eviscerated, which suggests he had the device against his stomach when it went off. If it was a suicide, well, I guess he figured tucking it into his stomach was the way to go. If it was accidental, he was probably setting the leg wires into the detonator and he caught a spark. That would be my guess.”

Starkey tried to picture Buck Daggett stupid enough to wire a charge with the batteries connected, but couldn’t. Of
course, she also couldn’t picture Buck building bombs to murder someone.

Starkey walked back out onto the drive to consider the scene. She tried to get a sense of the pressure release. The garage door had been bowed, the side door blown out, and Buck Daggett seriously injured, but the structural damage was minor. She guessed the energy released was about as much as two hand grenades. Big enough, but not on the order of what killed Charlie Riggio or what Tennant was using to blow apart cars.

Kelso called out to her.

“Starkey, come over here.”

“Just a minute.”

The side door had been blown off its hinges and cracked by the pressure change, which meant the door had been closed. She could understand that Buck would want the garage door closed so that his neighbors couldn’t see what he was doing, but it didn’t make sense that he would close the side door. She knew that he was working either with Modex or RDX, and either one threw some pretty nasty fumes.

Starkey went back inside to the investigator.

“Your Bomb Squad recover any undetonated explosive?”

“Nope. What was here is what went up. They ran a dog through, too, before they let in the coroner’s people. You just missed him. Those dogs are something to see.”

“What about his hands?”

“You mean the injuries?”

“Yeah.”

“They were intact. We noted some lacerations and tissue loss, but they were still on. I know what you’re thinking, that the hands should’ve gone, but if he was hunched over it, it kinda depends what he was doing when the charge let go.”

Starkey couldn’t see it. If Buck had committed suicide, she thought that he would have been gripping the bomb, holding it tight against his body to make sure he died quickly. His
hands would have been gone. If he was seating a detonator in the charge and the explosive had set off accidentally, his hands would still be gone.

“Starkey.”

Starkey had an uneasy feeling as she joined Kelso and the others in the yard. She kept thinking about the red paint, and that Mr. Red claimed to know who had imitated him. How could Mr. Red know that? From Tennant?

The two suits were Sheriff’s homicide detectives named Connelly and Gerald. Connelly was a large, serious man; Gerald had the empty eyes of a man who had been on the job too long. Starkey didn’t like being around him.

After the introductions, Kelso told Starkey that Connelly and Gerald wanted to interview her. They exchanged cards, Connelly saying that they would be in contact sometime within the next few days.

Gerald said, “Maybe there’s something you can help us with right now.”

“If I can.”

“Did you see Sergeant Daggett earlier today?”

“Not today. I saw him yesterday.”

“You see any bruises or contusions on his face or head?”

Starkey glanced at Kelso, who was staring at her.

“I didn’t see anything like that. I can’t say about today, but there was nothing like that yesterday.”

Gerald touched the left side of his forehead.

“Daggett has a lump here that shows edema and bruising. We’re wondering when he got it.”

“I don’t know.”

She wasn’t liking this. First Tennant blows up, now Daggett blows himself up. Mr. Red claims he knows the copycat, and how could he know except through Tennant?

Starkey looked back at the garage.

“It wasn’t a very big charge.”

Gerald made a grin like a nasty shark.

“You didn’t see the body. It blew that poor fucker to shit.”

Starkey forgot about Gerald and spoke to Kelso.

“I got a description from the bomb investigator in there, Barry. Daggett shows the injuries because of his proximity, but I don’t think it was much of a blast. I can’t know for sure how much RDX Tennant had, but it was more than this.”

Kelso squinted at her.

“Are you saying that some explosive is missing?”

“I don’t know.”

Starkey walked back to the street to smoke. Everything had come to an end that wasn’t really an ending. She kept thinking about the contusion on Buck’s head, and about his hands. His hands should be gone. She found herself wondering what Tennant had used to blow himself up, and how he had gotten it. It took enormous energy to blow a man’s arms off. She didn’t like the little questions that had no answers. They were like reconstructing a bomb, only to find that there are wires that lead nowhere. You couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist. Wires always led somewhere. When you were dealing with bombs, wires always led to someplace bad. She thought about Pell.