The Bomb Maker Read online

  The homicide detectives looked shocked. There was a brief silence while they stared at Stahl. Almanzo said, “Do you have a plan?”

  “I’m hoping we’ll get reinforcements from the FBI and ATF, but they’re not going to be any better than the technicians we already have. Their presence is welcome, and they’ll give me a chance to keep my teams from getting exhausted and making mistakes. But some of the reinforcements won’t have served here before, and learning to be a good LA cop takes longer than training to be a competent bomb tech. Our only possible strategy is to try to keep this guy from killing us as long as we can.”

  Almanzo said, “We’ve been told that often bomb experts can recognize a bomb maker’s work. Any chance some bomb squad in some other city has seen this guy before?”

  “It’s made national news and no agency has called. I spent part of last night looking through the ATF’s summary descriptions of explosive-related crimes, but there’s nothing listed that’s remotely like this guy’s work. I went back about ten years.”

  There was a buzz and Stahl looked at the screen of his phone. “That’s my alarm.”

  Almanzo looked at his watch. “I guess that’s all we can cover for now.” He reached to the back of his chair for his coat. “Anybody else who’s going to the funeral, it’s time. The rest of you, keep at it.”

  Stahl drove to Forest Lawn alone and joined the mourners already assembled. There were a large number of civilians who continued to arrive for a long time—fourteen dead men had many friends and relatives—and the police presence was overwhelming. There were contingents from various parts of the state, and even from a few other states that touched California on the north and east. Parked on a single winding piece of pavement were a dozen news vans with satellite dishes on booms, and camera people recording with telephoto lenses.

  Stahl had been present at too many funerals of men in uniform—men who had served with him in the army, police officers who had died chasing getaway cars in LA traffic, victims of shootings. They had become almost interchangeable to him, casualties of battles that seemed to be parts of one struggle. During the previous evening he looked at the photographs taken at the scene in the hope that his practiced eye would see something new, but they were the same as what he’d seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. High explosive shock waves tore people apart and heat burned them. He recognized a couple of the victims as old friends, but there was little to be learned from this horror that he hadn’t already known.

  Stahl listened to the words of the chaplain, the several priests, and the ministers who were there to represent their versions of God. He listened to the mayor and the police chief. His cell phone was in his shirt pocket. He was aware it might vibrate with an incoming call related to a new bomb threat at any time and felt relief with each passing minute when it didn’t.

  He had scanned the ranks of uniformed police officers in the cemetery when he arrived, but he didn’t spot Diane Hines. She was probably somewhere in the rows behind him. The fourteen technicians who had not been at the Encino house would all be sitting together.

  When the ceremonial talk ended, a police honor guard fired the customary rifle salute, and a lone bagpiper played a sad, wailing tune from a few yards higher on the hillside that looked out over the flat valley below. Stahl waited for the final prayer to end and turned to look behind him. He saw her about fifty feet away with Elliot and Team Three and Team Four. She looked very solemn and beautiful. Her eyes never glanced in his direction as she pivoted and walked along the row of chairs with the others.

  At that moment his phone began to vibrate in his breast pocket. He saw the number was his office, and he moved off quickly to be able to talk.

  As he hurried toward the road where his car was parked he called Andy. “This is Stahl.”

  “Second team is out on a suspicious package call, but Sergeant McCrary, the supervisor, just called to talk to you. He said he’s got something.”

  “Can you connect me?”

  “Yes. Hold on.”

  When he heard the connection go through he said, “This is Stahl. What have you got, Sarge?”

  McCrary said, “A pipe bomb. It was left outside the front door of the women’s health building at Kaplan and Steers in Van Nuys this morning. It looked like a routine delivery, but when a security guard went to pick it up, the box was just an empty cover slipped over the bomb. When he ran inside to get something to keep people from touching it, the phone was already ringing at the front desk. It was a guy warning him he had five minutes to clear the building.”

  “Did he?”

  “Hell yes. He got everybody to go outside like it was a fire drill.”

  “Why did the bomber call?” asked Stahl.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The pipe bomb was right outside the front door, right? The guard lifted the cardboard box and saw there was a pipe bomb under it. The bomber knew one of two things was going to happen: either the guard would blow himself up or he’d know what it was.”

  “Yes,” said McCrary.

  “So why call?”

  “Maybe the guy wanted to scare people, but didn’t want to kill them, or lost his nerve, or just changed his mind. I don’t know. But it’s a routine-looking pipe bomb, put in an unsurprising place. You know how many women’s clinics have had bombs in the past ten years. I’d like to render it safe and then take it out of here in the containment vessel for detonation.”

  “Don’t do anything yet,” said Stahl. “Let it sit until I get there. And above all, don’t let anybody back into the building. If this is a bomb that’s not related to the others, we’ll do just as you say. But right now the call doesn’t feel right. It feels like our bomber used the pipe bomb to get them to evacuate the building so he could go inside and plant something worse. And it seems he might have picked a women’s health center to make it seem routine to us.”

  “Yes, sir,” said McCrary. Stahl could hear in his voice the patient resignation of a man who was used to obeying superiors because they were superiors, not because they were right.

  “You said Kaplan and Steers, right?” Stahl said.

  “Right.”

  Stahl hung up, trotted the rest of the way to his car, and drove to the women’s health center. The center was a four-story brick building with two rectangular wings and a central lobby with glass doors on the edge of a huge parking lot. Stahl could see the bomb truck, the only vehicle within a hundred feet of the front of the building. There was yellow police tape strung around the building’s entrance, and a second tape beyond the bomb truck to establish a perimeter. Stahl approached the nearest cop and showed his badge so he could pass.

  He ducked under the tape, walked straight to McCrary, and shook his hand. “Good,” said Stahl. “You’ve got a good perimeter set up and everybody out of the way. I assume you made a Code Five Edward call to clear the airspace?”

  McCrary nodded.

  “Then let’s take a closer look.”

  McCrary and Stahl walked to the front of the building, where they both paused a few feet from the device. Finally they approached the device cautiously. When they were near it, Stahl could see that the device looked like most pipe bombs. It was a two-inch metal pipe about a foot long with screw-on caps at both ends. Two holes had been drilled on one end and a pair of wires that looked like the leads to an initiator ran out to a lithium-ion battery. The trigger switch was not visible, but a switch could be any size, and there was a layer of tape around the pipe that Stahl could see was thick and lumpy and looked as though it held ball bearings. The tape could also hide the switch.

  “It’s too big to detonate here. We’ve got to take it away,” said Stahl. “We still use the Mark V-A1, right?”

  “Andros?” said McCrary. “Yeah. We don’t have one with us right now, but I’ll call for one.”

  “Okay,” said Stahl. “While we wait we can get the containment vessel ready to take the bomb and start having the officers move the bystanders back an
other two hundred feet. That device has a couple of layers of shrapnel taped around it.”

  While McCrary was on the radio to headquarters and to the police officers guarding the perimeter, they walked to the bomb truck. As they approached the truck, McCrary said, “Gentlemen, you’ve met Captain Stahl.”

  Stahl shook hands with the two. “Curtis, Bolland, nice to see you.”

  “The captain has given us the go-ahead to get the pipe bomb moved out of here, and I’ve called for an Andros,” McCrary said. “Let’s get the containment vessel moved up close so the robot can get the bomb into it by carrying it a few yards. No bumpy areas, no inclines if we can help it.”

  Curtis and Bolland got into the truck and towed the five-thousand-pound containment vessel close to the device lying on the concrete in front of the entrance. They secured it so it wouldn’t roll, then opened the vessel’s hatch. They pulled the truck back to where the others stood in the parking lot, and then began checking with the police officers in the area by radio to be sure all civilians had been moved back to a distance of five hundred feet.

  The Team Three bomb truck arrived with the robot. Two of the bomb technicians jumped out and dragged out the ramp at the back while the other, Alice Terranova, brought out a small control device and began using it to direct the robot down the ramp to the surface of the parking lot.

  Stahl said, “Thank you, Terranova. Nice to see you, Moss.” He was making a point of addressing everyone directly for the moment. It wasn’t too much to expect for him to remember the names of the living fourteen people on the Bomb Squad, officers who would be risking their lives with him each day. He waved at the man driving the bomb truck. “Hey, Townsend.”

  Stahl said, “This is Sergeant McCrary’s operation. I’m just here to hang around and see if I can learn anything about this bomber. Team Two has done a great job of setting up a perimeter, getting everybody back far enough, and so on. The first mistake was mine. Because of me, this bomber has managed to get seven of us here at one time. That’s half the Bomb Squad at current strength. So I’m going to ask Team Three to turn around and return to your station. Team Two will take it from here. Thanks for the robot.”

  “Yes, sir.” Terranova handed the control console to Curtis, and she and the others climbed back into their truck and drove off.

  Stahl nodded at McCrary, then stepped back to stand by the truck while Curtis maneuvered the robot across the asphalt parking lot toward the entrance to the building.

  The work went quickly. The robot’s top speed was three and a half miles an hour, about the normal walking speed of a man. As the robot approached the pipe bomb, Curtis slowed it considerably and transferred all of his attention to the screen of the control box so he was seeing the bomb and the pavement from the point of view of Andros’s video camera.

  Stahl stood by the truck and called his assistant, Andy, at the station. “Andy, this is Dick Stahl. Get in touch with the building manager of the women’s health center at Kaplan and Steers and find out what you can about the security cameras outside the building and inside. Find out how we get the footage. What I need to know immediately is whether, after the people were evacuated from the building, the bomber went inside. Thanks.”

  He hung up and called Bart Almanzo at Homicide Special. He told Almanzo what was happening and said, “I think this is our guy again, but don’t send anybody here until we’ve checked the whole building. If I’m right, this isn’t going to be safe for a while. But we know this bomber was here in person. If there’s any surveillance footage that will help identify him or his car or any witness, it might make the difference. Our people have already requested whatever this building has to help us clear the place. But any building in the neighborhood might have caught something.”

  “Thanks,” said Almanzo. “We’ll get people collecting it. Good luck.”

  Stahl hung up and watched the robot. The robot was equipped with a two-thousand-foot cable, but they were using the remote control for the moment. Either this would work or it wouldn’t, but it would be quick.

  The robot was directly over the bomb now, and Stahl and the technicians studied the video image closely, scrutinizing the bomb for anything that might be a trap’s trigger: a wire or filament, a sensor of some sort, a pressure device or spring that would hold the switch at the OFF position until it was lifted, a remote control receiver.

  “Anybody see anything?” said Curtis.

  “No,” said Bolland.

  “Nope,” said McCrary.

  Stahl said, “Agreed.”

  The robot reached down, closed its grasping claw over the pipe, and lifted.

  There was a bright flash as the bomb tore itself apart and fired hundreds of projectiles in all directions, blowing the glass front into the building and sending a shock wave toward Stahl. A half second later the sharp bang slapped his ears and collided with his body, a flat, hard force that felt to him like something solid pounding his chest and stomach.

  At the same time, he saw the robot thrown outward from the building into the parking lot. It flew about fifty feet—not lifted but swatted—spinning and hitting on its side. Then it slid across the pavement to a stop. Some part of his mind noted that the arm was missing.

  Immediately Stahl’s eyes sought the sight of Curtis, McCrary, and Bolland. When he spotted them, Curtis was lying prone on the pavement of the parking lot and the others were kneeling over him. Stahl gasped and took a running step toward them, then saw they had not been hit. They got Curtis up, then stood. McCrary brushed invisible dust off his uniform pants from his knees to his waist and then the front of his shirt while Curtis picked up the control unit. After a few seconds he turned it off. Bolland began walking toward the front of the building to see if there was any part of the bomb left to be collected for evidence.

  Stahl walked up to Curtis, smiled, and patted his back gently. “Don’t worry about the robot. That’s what it’s for. This guy’s objective was to take us all out and maybe incinerate a few civilians as a bonus. He got nobody.”

  Curtis managed a faint smile as Stahl passed him on the way to McCrary.

  Stahl said, “We still have to clear the building before we let anybody in.”

  “I know,” said McCrary. “This time that’s got to be my job. I’ll get suited up.”

  “Have you got a suit I can borrow?”

  “Sure, but I thought we were going to send only one tech downrange from now on.”

  “This time looks like an exception. I think this might be the same guy who did the house in Encino and the car at the gas station. What you see is something simple—today, an ordinary pipe bomb. But in the other two what we got was a second charge that was bigger. I want to see if there’s something else in the building.”

  McCrary shrugged. He went to the truck and took out a suit with his name stenciled on it and found another labeled with the number 2. He handed it to Stahl.

  While they put on the bomb suits, Stahl called Andy at the station. “It’s Stahl. What do we know?”

  “We’ve got some video from the building across the street from you. You were right. A man went into the clinic building during the evacuation. He was wearing some kind of uniform, maybe a janitor’s uniform—dark blue shirt and pants, no badge. About five ten or six feet tall, average weight and build, baseball cap. Nobody stopped him or even looked closely at him. He was going in as they were going out.”

  “Of course,” said Stahl. “Was he carrying anything?”

  “Yes. It looks like a gym bag. That size, anyway. Dark, probably black.”

  “Any luck getting the interior video from the clinic?”

  “Not yet. The security guy who has access to the system took charge of evacuating people, so now a unit is working with him and with the equipment manufacturer to set up a remote feed from the Van Nuys station.”

  “All right. Keep trying.”

  Stahl cut the connection and left his phone with Curtis. “If there’s a call, answer it. If it’s about
the indoor surveillance cameras, call me on the helmet radio frequency.”

  As Stahl and McCrary walked toward the building, Stahl told McCrary what he’d learned. When Stahl and McCrary reached the entrance they examined the damage. There were impact holes in the concrete like a pattern of little craters where ball bearings had hit. Stahl said, “Antipersonnel. I guess he was hoping for a few extra bodies. But he mainly wanted everybody out, so he could go in alone.”

  McCrary said, “What kind of trap do you think he put inside?”

  “Something new,” Stahl said. “Something we haven’t seen him do before. We’ll have to go through each room and clear it. He knows there won’t be more than one or two bomb techs inside the building at first. Maybe he wants to injure us so more cops have to go in before he drops the roof on our heads. We’ll have to take our time and look at everything.”

  When Stahl stepped in over the fallen glass, he appreciated the architectural design of the women’s health building. The concrete and steel stanchions in a row in front of the glass entrance had apparently been intended to keep a vehicle from crashing through. The freestanding wall behind the glass front of the building had provided more protection from the blast.

  The wall had been covered in a layer of plasterboard and painted like plaster, but behind that layer was structural concrete. The bomb’s ball bearings and pipe fragments had swept the glass inward. They chewed up the plasterboard, but did nothing to the wall behind it. The reception area inside looked untouched and intact.

  “One more thing just occurred to me,” said Stahl. “Nobody has said they’ve seen video of this guy leaving the building. We’ve been assuming he left as quickly as he could, because bomb makers do that. But he could still be in here. The building has four floors to hide in.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” McCrary said.

  The two men searched the lobby for any of the signs of a booby trap—fine trip wires, a gym bag like the one seen on the video, devices plugged into electrical outlets that didn’t seem to belong. Stahl knew their job was especially risky today because dozens of people had evacuated the building in a hurry, and might have left things like briefcases or equipment bags anywhere.