CHAPTER 9 Sampson
Sampson
THE WOMAN OUTSIDE SCREAMS again, louder. I run out of the Panera and into a street filled with broken vehicles, shattered glass, and injured people. That’s when I see her.
She isn’t screaming.
She’s shouting.
It’s a highly agitated woman, about five foot five, wearing jeans and a dark blue windbreaker with the letters ATF on the back, and her shouts are directed at two DC firefighters who are hosing down the burned wreckage of an Audi.
“You idiots, the goddamn fire is out! You expect the thing to spontaneously combust? All you’re doing now is wrecking my evidence! For fuck’s sake, shut the water off!”
A DC fire chief with a white bunker coat and helmet walks over. “Hey! Hey! What’s going on? What’s the problem?”
“The problem is these jerks are soaking my crime scene!” the woman says.
The chief looks at the firefighters and makes a quick cut sign across his neck. The firefighters switch off the hoses and the torrent of water shrinks down to a dribble.
Ned Mahoney steps up beside me and points in the woman’s direction. “That’s the other member of our team. Anna Rizzo. She’s an explosives enforcement officer with the ATF.”
I’m impressed already. Rizzo obviously knows how to get somebody’s attention. Mahoney waves her over. She’s an attractive woman—olive skin, brown eyes, black hair bobbed in a short, no-nonsense style.
Mahoney does the honors. “Officer Anna Rizzo, meet Detective John Sampson, DC Metro Police.”
We exchange a quick handshake. Then something clicks in my brain. “Hold on, I remember you! Rizzo. You’re the one who found the guy responsible for that series of bombings out in Iowa. The grain towers.”
“That’s right,” says Rizzo, hands on her hips, looking around at the burned and blackened carnage. “A shitty case. But it wasn’t just me, it was my whole team—and the locals who hated seeing their harvests ruined.”
“But you were the key. I read the report.”
An indifferent shrug from Rizzo. “I got lucky. I was sifting through shards of metal and ceramic and I noticed something on a piece of metal, looked greasy. Turned out to be the bastard’s thumbprint. From there, pretty open-and-shut.”
“Don’t downplay it, Anna,” says Mahoney. “I heard you were at that examination table twenty hours straight before you found that piece of metal. That’s not luck. That’s work.”
“Yeah, well,” says Rizzo, “that was then, this is now.” She looks up at me. “So, Detective Sampson, what’s going on at your end?”
Right to the point.
“Our Special Operations Division has officers out gathering footage from security cameras, dashcams, traffic observation posts, and anything else that might have recorded traffic coming into the area. Detectives are interviewing witnesses and survivors to see if anyone saw anything unusual or out of place before it happened.”
Mahoney leans in. “Homeland Security didn’t get any warnings or threats. Neither did our local field office.” He glances at his watch. “One hour since the blast and nobody’s claimed responsibility.”
“I’ll leave that part up to you guys,” says Rizzo.
“Right now, this entire crime scene is mine, especially everything two hundred feet from the crater.” She looks at the ground.
The hoses are off, but water from a broken pipe is still flooding the street, eddying around our shoes. “Damn it! Hold on.”
Rizzo takes out her phone and taps a number.
She turns and walks a few paces away through the rising water.
“Hey, is this Paul Baker at the Water and Sewer Authority? Hi, Paul. Anna Rizzo, ATF. Look, I called you folks ten minutes ago to shut off the main on Thirteenth Street Northwest. What’s taking so long?
” I see her listening, looking impatient, and when she speaks again, her tone is cold.
“Tell you what, Paul, either this water stops flowing in two minutes or I’m coming down there and arresting your ass for interfering with a federal investigation. Are you hearing me now? Good.”
The call is over. I don’t think poor Paul Baker got too many words in.
As Rizzo puts her phone away, I step over and tap her shoulder. “I’ll do it if you want.”
“Do what?”
“You keep on working the scene, and I’ll go down and knock some people around at Water and Sewer. Starting with Paul Baker.”
She gives me a small smile. “Detective Sampson, we’re going to work well together, I can just tell.”
“Call me John.”
“Just get the job done,” says Mahoney.
“Oh, we will,” says Rizzo. She turns and stares at the crater at the center of the explosion.
“FBI profilers say there are two types of bombers, disorganized asocial offenders and organized nonsocial offenders. The disorganized ones make pipe bombs and blow up random people and places because they can, because it gives them a sense of power.”
She turns to look back at the rest of the wreckage.
“The organized ones are highly intelligent and highly motivated, and they construct very technically proficient devices. They’re determined to strike for revenge, for terror, for something that doesn’t make sense to most people but makes perfect sense to them. ”
Her voice gets softer. “In those grain-tower cases, the bomber got sloppy. This is different. It looks sophisticated, well planned. What I’m seeing here shows smarts, experience, and some warped sense of dedication.”
I nod. “I agree. And dedicated guys don’t tend to get sloppy.”
Rizzo looks out over the carnage. “Exactly,” she says. “They’re fucking fastidious.”