Demolition Angel Read Free Page B

X-ray that had been blown out into the street. She considered the Dumpster again, and guessed that the Real Time had been kicked more than forty yards. Riggio himself lay almost thirty yards from the Dumpster.
    “Did Daggett or the medics pull him over here?”
    Anytime there was an explosion, bomb techs were trained to expect a secondary device. She figured that Daggett would have pulled Riggio away from the Dumpster for that reason.
    “You’d have to ask Daggett. I think this is where he fell.”
    “Jesus. We gotta be, what, thirty yards from the detonation point?”
    “Buck said it was a helluva blast.”
    She guesstimated the distance again, then toed the body armor to examine the blast pattern. The suit looked as if twenty shotguns had been fired into it point-blank. She’d seen similar suit damage when “dirty” bombs had gone off with a lot of fire and shrapnel, but this bomb had pushed the shrap through twelve layers of armor and had thrown a man thirty yards. The energy released must have been enormous.
    Chen took a plastic bag from his evidence kit, pulling the plastic tight to show her a piece of blackened metal about the size of a postage stamp.
    “This is kind of interesting, too. It’s a piece of the pipe frag I found stuck in his suit.”
    Starkey looked close. A squiggly line had been etched into the metal.
    “What is that, an
S
?”
    Chen shrugged.
    “Or some kind of symbol. Remember that bomb they found in San Diego last year, the one with dicks drawn all over it?”
    Starkey ignored him. Chen liked to talk. If he got going about a bomb with dicks on it, she would never get her work done.
    “John, do me a favor and swab some of the samples tonight, okay?”
    Chen went sulky.
    “It’s going to be really late when I finish here, Carol. I’ve got to work the Dumpster, and then there’s going to be whatever you guys find in the sweep. It’s going to take me two or three hours just to log everything.”
    They would search for pieces of the device everywhere within a hundred-yard radius, combing nearby rooftops, thefaces of the apartment buildings and houses across the street, cars, the Dumpster, and the wall behind the Dumpster. They would search for anything and everything that might help them reconstruct the bomb or give them a clue to its origins.
    “Don’t whine, John. It’s not cool.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    “How long does it take to cook through the gas chrom?”
    The sulk became sullen and put upon.
    “Six hours.”
    Residue from the explosive would be present on any fragments of the bomb they found, as well as in the blast crater and on Riggio’s suit. Chen would identify the substance by cooking it through a gas chromatograph, a process which took six hours. Starkey knew how long it would take when she asked, but asked anyway to make Chen feel guilty about it taking so long.
    “Couldn’t you swab a couple of samples first, just to start a chrom, then log everything after? An explosive with this kind of energy potential could really narrow down the field of guys I’m looking at, John. You could give me a head start here.”
    Chen hated to do anything that wasn’t methodical and by the book, but he couldn’t deny her point. He checked his watch, counting out the time.
    “Let me see what time we finish here, okay? I’ll try, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
    “I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”
    Buck Daggett’s Suburban sat forty-eight paces from Riggio’s body. Starkey counted as she walked.
    Kelso and Leyton saw her coming and moved away from the others to meet her. Kelso’s face was grim; Leyton’s tense and professional. Leyton had been off shift when he’d gotten the call and had rushed over in jeans and a polo shirt.
    Leyton smiled softly when their eyes met, and Starkey thought there was a sad quality to it. Leyton, the twelve-yearcommander of the Bomb Squad, had selected Carol Starkey for the squad, just as he’d selected Charlie Riggio and