Judas Horse Read Free

postblast crime scene?”
    “No, we all went out for sushi.”
    I cannot believe it. A force that powerful in the middle of nowhere? Animals or no animals, you’d need fifty pounds of explosives to blast a human body into the pieces that remained of Steve. And why isn’t everybody talking about it?
    Galloway puts the cigar away and swings the chair upright. “We pulled the bomb techs from the Portland division. Nobody knows about it down here.”
    There had to have been fifteen or twenty people involved. You had photographers, guys with shifting screens and shovels, teams marching the quadrants shoulder-to-shoulder, someone with a global-positioning system mapping the site to within a tenth of a millimeter of an inch. You had, in other words, a lot of jokers all dolled up in Tyvek suits—big rubber body condoms—walking around a national forest.
    And nobody knows?
    “In the crater we found pieces of the box that held the components. The lab has identified the explosive…. There were traces in the clothes.”
    “Clothes?”
    Galloway makes a sign with thumb and forefinger: this big.
    I am without words. My sight falls, unseeing, on Galloway’s collection of New York City police department souvenirs. Only he could get away with the alleged scalp of a drug dealer, and the Empire State Building wearing a brassiere.
    “The debris field was extensive, but we did okay. Parts of a battery, parts of a cell phone detonator. Alligator clips, a leg wire, toggle switch. Steve must have walked right into it.”
    I may appear rational, but the world is falling away from under my feet, like being lifted straight up in a helicopter.
    “I know he was a friend of yours,” says Galloway.
    I murmur something about Steve having been a great guy.
    “Steve Crawford should have had this chair. He would have, one day.” He kicks the chair away and unlocks a credenza.
    “So what do we think?” I begin in a professional manner. “He was hiking alone in the woods when he encountered a booby trap, some psychopathic piece of shit—”
    “We think it’s domestic terrorism.”
    Galloway drops four heavy documents on the desk. The impact rattles the bones in my neck. They are three inches thick, government-printed, with red covers—the result of a years-long investigation of a well-known radical group called FAN.
    Galloway closes the door. The silence throbs in my ears.
    “Steve was working undercover,” Galloway says.
    Like everyone else, I believed Steve was on vacation. That’s the way it is with undercover work.
    “This is classified. How Steve died”—he waves a hand, erasing everything he has just told me—“we still don’t know. And we’ll never know.”
    “Understood.”
    “He was working a FAN cell. The explosive that killed him is a water-based gel called Tovex—the same type of explosive used in the O’Conner Pharmaceuticals bombings two years ago.”
    FAN is an invisible group of anarchists that operates behind the façade of Free Animals Now—bland enough to attract the liberals and provide a front for the hard-core element. Interchangeable in tactics with ecoterrorists like ALF and ELF, the level of violence in their attacks is on the rise. They used to glue locks and liberate research animals; now it’s firebombing. There are dozens of unsolved cases in the Northwest attributed to FAN—which some investigators argue does not exist at all, but is a cover for a mixed bag of disenfranchised extremists.
    “FAN is on the short list for Steve Crawford’s murder,” Galloway says. “We’re going back in. It took some arm twisting, but headquarters finally approved. You fit the profile to take Steve’s place.”
    “Why?”
    “Right age. Right background.”
    “Because I’m mixed race?”
    Galloway seems surprised that I would bring that up.
    “
I
know you’re half Latina, but the way you present is ethnically ambiguous. You could be white, or something more exotic.”
    “And that’s supposedly