CHAPTER 34 Sampson
Sampson
WHEN I WALK INTO Anna Rizzo’s office at the ATF facility, she’s busy typing on her keyboard.
“Sit,” she says, nodding toward a chair without even looking up from her screen.
Unlike the lab, Rizzo’s office is cluttered with bookcases, filing cabinets, and bomb diagrams. There are also some photos.
One is her in full army battle rattle standing with her bomb disposal crew next to an up-armored Humvee.
The landscape behind her looks to be from the same part of the world where I spent many miserable months.
In another photo, I see a young boy and girl smiling at a birthday party.
I point to the kids. “Juan and Tina?”
Rizzo looks up from her screen and smiles. “Impressive, Detective. You remembered their names.”
“What can I say? I’m a good listener.”
Behind Rizzo is a frame holding a small piece of an American flag, torn and burned on one edge.
“What’s that about?” I ask.
“A reminder,” she says in a tone that doesn’t invite further conversation.
I move on. “So you have something?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking back on things.”
“Back on what things?”
“Back to guys like Timothy McVeigh.” She clicks on her screen and pulls up a photo from April 19, 1995, showing the wreckage at the front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. “A hundred and sixty-eight dead on that day.”
“Right. Men, women, and children.”
Rizzo clicks on a close-up of McVeigh’s face. Short hair. Round jaw. Cold eyes.
“I remembered that Oklahoma City wasn’t his first bomb,” she says. “Two years earlier, he was doing practice runs, making explosive devices on a farm in the middle of nowhere.”
“You think our guy practiced too?”
“I know he did.”
Rizzo clicks to a Google image of a small rural town.
“Kansas? Texas?” Could be anywhere, I think.
Rizzo shakes her head. “Palmer, Georgia, near the Alabama line. Population nine hundred fifty. About a year ago, a farmer thought he heard an explosion in a sandpit. When the cops came out, they found remnants of a van. And a very big hole. There wasn’t much of an investigation, but they did the best they could. ”
“What else did they find?”
“Remains of a fertilizer bomb in the wreckage of the van. And this …”
She clicks a link and a photo pops up on the screen. Spread out on a white evidence table are a bunch of charred bolts and nuts.
“Look familiar?” asks Rizzo.
“It sure does. Same kind of shrapnel we’ve seen here. Twice.”
“That’s right. Same contents. Same proportions.” Rizzo swivels her chair around to face me. “I think you know what this means for us.”
“Us? You and me?”
“Right.”
“Road trip?”
She nods. “There’s an air force transport leaving Andrews for Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning this afternoon. I called in a favor. We’re on it.”