Chapter 14 Somebody Here Knows Fuses
WES got to the alley behind Ren Alvarez’s building forty minutes after the call and found nothing to do, which is the single most unsettling condition my job has.
There should have been something to do. The call had come in as a suspicious odor, a neighbor smelling what she described, with real accuracy, as “gasoline and matches and something like nail polish,” and a report of a package left against the foundation where the gas meter runs.
By the numbers that is my whole worst afternoon in one sentence.
I drove over expecting to stage the block, wait for the county tech, maybe wave the robot down from the city if it read wrong.
Instead I came around the corner and there was Detective Pike standing over a cardboard box with her hands in her coat pockets, looking at it the way you look at a joke you don’t get.
The box had been opened. Not torn into. Opened, the flaps folded back square, and everything that had made it dangerous was sitting apart from everything else it needed to be dangerous, laid out on the concrete in a line, tidy as a place setting.
Whatever had been meant to bring the parts together had been taken out of the middle of them and set by itself, off to the side, where it couldn’t reach anything.
It was, and I want to be careful here because I’ve thought about it a lot since, the most professional work I have ever come across on one of these, and it had been done by somebody who then walked away and did not call it in and did not want a single soul to know they’d been there.
“Tell me you did this,” I said to Pike.
“I found it like this.” She nodded at the neighbor’s window, where a curtain twitched. “Mrs. Sokol called it in. Says she came out to put her recycling in the bin and it was already open. Already, and I quote, ‘took care of.’”
“Took care of by who?”
“By nobody. That’s the part I like.” Pike is a good detective and she says things like that flat, no music on them, which is one of the reasons we get along and one of the reasons we drive each other up the wall.
“Nobody set it off. Nobody claimed it. It just got professionally handled by a ghost and then the ghost went home.”
I crouched. I did not touch anything, because it was hers now, evidence, and because I didn’t need to.
I could read it fine from where I was. Somebody had understood exactly what this thing wanted to do and had, without drama, without a single wasted motion, denied it the one thing it needed.
It’s the difference between kicking a door down and knowing which screw the whole hinge hangs on. One’s panic. The other is a trade.
Here is what I had, then, standing in that alley with the river smell coming up cold off the water two streets over.
I had an arsonist. That part I’d had for a week, since Larch and Delaney, since the low pour on the floor that told its careful little lie.
Somebody who could make a fire whisper accidental.
Somebody escalating, because you don’t go from a fire that reads like a grease pan to a box against a gas meter unless you’re climbing.
That was fear number one, and it was the normal kind of fear, the kind I’m paid to have.
And now I had a second person. Somebody who was not the arsonist, because the arsonist wants the thing to go and this person wanted the exact opposite, wanted it made safe and quiet and gone before anybody official arrived to make a scene of it.
Two experts, then. One building the danger and one taking it apart, and they were not working together, because if they were working together the second one would never have let the first one’s work get this far before undoing it.
This was a cleanup that happened after the fact and in a hurry and by a hand that plainly, professionally, knew fuses.
I have had two-suspect scenes before. What I had not had before, and what I stood in that alley turning over until Pike told me I was making her cold, was a second expert who wanted to stay invisible so badly they’d defuse a bomb and then tiptoe out the back rather than take the credit any human being on earth would take.
You don’t hide being that good unless being that good costs you something.
“Okay,” Pike said, once we were back at our cars. “Say it. You’ve got the face.”
“Somebody made that safe.”
“I noticed.”
“Somebody who’s done it before. A lot. That wasn’t a lucky guess, Lorna, that was training.
That was a person who’s been on the wrong end of these for a living and learned the manners.
” I heard myself and stopped, because the next sentence was going to sound insane, and I am careful about sounding insane.
“And they didn’t want us to know they exist.”
“So we’ve got a bomb tech in Halford, Ohio,” Pike said, “who’s shy.”
“I’m telling you what the scene says.”
“The scene,” she said, “is a cardboard box in Dutchtown. There’s no bomb techs here. There’s a VFW, a Dollar General, and a river. Who’s your candidate? Give me one name.”
That was the part I hadn’t wanted to get to, because I’d already gotten to it, three days ago, and set it down, and picked it back up, and set it down again, and it kept being there.