Signature Wounds Read online

  13

  At dusk as I skimmed files uploaded to the Joint Terrorism site, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—ISIS and AQAP—both claimed the bombing. I stopped to watch the TV news on that. The media was hard at work. On two of the major cable stations, expert panels were already analyzing the Middle Eastern groups’ joining forces, though it wasn’t even necessarily true that ISIS and AQAP were collaborating. When speaking to infidels, you’re allowed to lie.

  An older file with a year-old tip we’d investigated from here about radicalized Islamic recruiting in Las Vegas looked relevant again. Jane Stone worked that but hadn’t gotten anywhere with it. She’d also chased Denny Mondari’s bomb-maker rumor. Mondari had been my confidential informant before she took over. I called and left a message for him. I also tried his apartment manager, who stonewalled me, saying Mondari was on vacation.

  “When is he coming back?”

  “No idea,” the manager said.

  “He communicates with you. You need to tell him to call me. Here’s my number. If I don’t hear from him, I’ll come see you in the morning.”

  I wouldn’t, but I might as well warm up the conversation. I made another call before leaving the office, this one an inquiry to the Royal Australian Air Force about a drone pilot named Philip Ramer. An officer politely took down the message that I’d like to talk to Ramer. He asked why, but I didn’t say.

  Near midnight I left the office and drove home for a shower, clean clothes, and maybe four hours’ sleep. Home was a beige stucco house at the edge of the desert, with a two-car garage, a brown concrete-tile roof, oak plank floors, and a lap pool installed two years ago to help strengthen the muscles of my lower back. When my wife, Carrie, died in a car accident a decade ago, domestic life ended. Other than the lap pool, I’d done nothing with the house since. The first two years after her death, I had avoided coming home altogether. When I did, I avoided our bedroom. In those days of billowing sorrow, I’d slept outside on the lawn furniture or on the couch in the front room.

  Even today, I live mostly in the kitchen or on the terrace in back. That’s where I like the light and air most. Sitting outside in the night, looking up at the stars and the black lines of desert mountains calms me. I understood what Beatty meant when he said he lived in the trailer park because from the back of his trailer he had open sky. I take comfort in knowing it will all still be here long after me.

  A sensor light at the porch kicked on as I limped to the front door. The limp arrives when I get tired. The lap pool helps keep it at bay. In the kitchen I pulled a bottle of rum off a cabinet shelf and tapped a baguette, bought on a whim a few days ago, against the countertop. The bread was brick hard, but I sawed through and made a sandwich before pouring a short glass of rum. I showered with the water as hot as I could take and directed it at the lower left side of my back. The shower is part of my drill.

  When I returned to the kitchen, the rear patio lights were on. Their motion sensors were hair trigger. Most likely it was the coyote that had been around lately. I liked the craftiness of the coyote and how it was building on what it had learned, but it was after a neighboring cat and I was going to have to run it off soon.

  Not tonight, though, nothing tonight. The rum tasted right. Now get sleep. Get back to the office. Try not to let grief take away what you need to do. I opened the slider to let air in and rummaged once more for food. When muscles in my lower back spasmed, I debated getting in the pool for fifteen minutes. Often that helped.

  After returning from the hospital in Germany and when I was still learning to walk with a rhythm rather than jerking, halting steps, I’d started jogging on the track at the local high school. I ran in the cool early light or later in the dusk-to-dark hour. I ran when I was least likely to be seen, being too proud to do it any other way. Even with yoga and Pilates classes and orthopedic massage and all the rest, I pitched to the left with each stride.

  That first summer it didn’t take long for a couple of bored kids to figure out that the freak sometimes showed at sunset. The boys were maybe twelve and thirteen. One would get out in front of me and the other behind, and they’d circle the track half-tipped over. The mockery didn’t really bother me, and they didn’t run many laps. It’s not easy to run and giggle when you’re bent over. I was a smart-ass kid myself once, and their unsentimental judgment was better than the somber visits I got from agent friends who felt compelled to give me career advice.

  Running helped my mind as much as my body, and that first summer I worked my way up to sixteen laps, and somewhere along the way the two kids figured out it wasn’t funny anymore. I tore the same adhesions loose, day after day after day, hurt all the time, and took painkillers until they made me stupid. I stopped those, connected with the bomb techs in Washington, and started forward again.

  I took another swallow of rum as my phone vibrated with a text. It read, I’m out back. I walked out and saw her.

  “Jo, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you. I’m so sorry. I was thinking about you being alone after what’s happened. I came in the garage side. I hope that’s still okay.”

  “It’ll always be okay.”

  “I’m—”

  She paused and I put an arm around her shoulders. Our breakup didn’t need to happen, or maybe it wasn’t a breakup. Another doctor, a guy a couple of years off a divorce and close in age to her, was the catalyst. I never looked him up or learned anything more about him than what she told me. He was a brilliant surgeon, great athlete, piloted his own plane, owned a vineyard, and so forth. The surgeon was just living his life, and Jo and I had reached a place where she needed more commitment and wasn’t getting it from me.

  One Friday morning I had to go to Chicago on a case, so I canceled out on our weekend plans. Jo was on her rounds. I couldn’t reach her and left a message with a promise to call back. By three o’clock that afternoon, we were closing in on a suspect. That carried on into the night, and I never got a call off to Jo. I didn’t apologize until Monday. When she answered, she was angry and said, “No problem. I went with Dr. Gravure and had a great time. We’re going out again Friday night.”

  I left it there. She called and texted a number of times a few weeks later, but I didn’t return any of them. Too much pride—one of my many flaws—though I didn’t stop thinking about her. That was six months ago. Melissa said I was acting like a teenage boy and was a fool to let her go, but it was more complicated than Melissa knew. Jo was forty-three and fit. She was looking for someone to love and grow old with, and I wasn’t a good bet for that.

  In Germany when I was just getting over the worst, a doctor there, who prided himself on candor, told me I’d age out sooner than normal because of internal organ damage. He told me this like I’d won a contest. His guess was I had fifteen to twenty years more. He urged me to heal and get out and make the most of it. Jo could do better than me, although tonight I was very touched that she was here, and it was great to see her. It was more than great. It was emotional just to touch each other again. She wept as I told her I was first into the Alagara and found Melissa.

  “How can you even work?” she asked.

  “How can I not?”

  I moved the conversation to Julia, and Jo said, “I came to tell you. I checked on Julia before I left and talked to the surgeon. He said he’d spoken to you.”

  “Yeah, we talked early this morning and again this afternoon.”

  “There’s new swelling from the surgery, but it’s still looking hopeful tonight. Did he tell you that?”

  “Not quite like that, no.”

  “He’s being careful with you.”

  Jo sat down on the edge of a lounge chair.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be home, but thought I’d try.”

  “I’m home for a few hours, and I’m glad you’re here.”

  I sat down next to her. She reached a hand out. I took it.

  “You have a lot to figure out,” Jo said.
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  “I do.”

  Neither Jo nor I have kids, and I wasn’t really sure what it meant to see my niece through high school into college, or how to make it work if it turned out that Julia was paralyzed. Jo squeezed my hand.

  “I think she’ll be okay,” Jo said.

  “Do you really believe that or just hope for it?”

  I saw her hesitate and heard her choose her words.

  “Swelling after injury varies in all of us. Julia may be on the low end of the curve.”

  “I thought this was about bruising.”

  “It’s about both, and the early signs are good. Latik is the best we have. He heard about the bombings last night and drove straight to the hospital.” She squeezed my hand. “This is terrible timing, but I have to say this. I’ve been thinking a lot about us. When I heard about the bombings and your family, I decided I wouldn’t wait any longer. We made a mistake. We belong together. That’s not for tonight, but I want you to know that.”

  I had similar thoughts most days.

  “I’m here for you,” she said. “I’ll call you if I learn anything. About us, I’m going to leave it there for you to think about when you’re ready.”

  She kissed me, then walked out the back gate. I heard her car start and pull away as I sat thinking about her. Then alone in the night by the pool, I let go and wept for everything: for Melissa, whom I’d never hear laugh again; for my closest friend, Jim Kern; and for Nate, so full of life and forward-looking. Melissa used to tell me in a regular way and only half-jokingly, that I was so, so lucky she and Jim and their family were in Vegas. I had a standard retort, but I knew her point was true. I was always a workaholic cop, and after Carrie died, that only got worse. Melissa’s family was my family, my link to seeing children grow up and a lot of other things. I was so lucky. I knew that and never forgot it. I’d have to change and be more than I have been to truly help Julia cope and move on.

  I sat there by the pool and talked to Melissa and promised her what I would do. I don’t even remember what time it was when I got up and walked inside. I slept an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and headed back in.

  14

  In December 1988 a bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103. That was nine years before I joined the FBI, but I still kept a file titled Lockerbie. In it were scanned copies of satellite imagery, helicopter surveys, and an accounting of the path leading to the Swiss-made part, a Mebo MST-13 timer used to make the bomb. Early in the morning on the sixth of July, I scanned the file as a kind of touchstone. At 7:00 a.m., I sat down with Lacey Shah, the young agent Venuti had assigned to work with me.

  I drank black coffee, my habit, and Shah drank tea while she thumbnailed her background. This was her first year with the Bureau, first six months, really. Started in January and arrived here yesterday. Headquarters was beefing up staff in the area for the duration of this investigation. Venuti had said he didn’t know if she was aware yet that I’d lost family. He left it to me to sort that out, and from the easy way she was talking, I knew she didn’t. I liked the calm, confident way she expressed herself and I didn’t want to interrupt that with my sadness. It could wait.

  “You rate yourself highly computer literate?” I asked.

  “I am and I believe the computer is the greatest investigative tool ever.”

  Venuti loved to say the same thing, but were we solving more cases now that everyone camped out in front of a screen? That conversation could also wait. We moved on. Lacey had never written a FISA request nor done a Title III, but was confident she could, along with anything else we needed.

  “I need coaching, but I’m resourceful.”

  “That’s a good trait around here.”

  “When I was six years old, my mom would go to work and leave me to take care of my baby brother and sister.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Three-and-a-half and five.”

  “Which one was easiest?”

  “My brother. He was the five-year-old, so he understood that if he gave me trouble I’d beat the shit out of him.”

  “You left this out of your FBI interview.”

  “I don’t tell many people.”

  I liked her right away, dead serious but with a strong dark sense of humor.

  “How are you with sleep deprivation?” I asked.

  “It sucks, but I can fake it.”

  “How about on the phone?”

  “I can talk to anybody.”

  “Bring in some extra clothes and stick them in a gym locker. If we get onto something, we’re going to stay on it. We’re working local leads. How did they place the bombs? Who helped them? Where did they stay? What did they eat? Anything, everything. Everyone leaves a footprint.”

  I smelled the strong black tea as she lifted the mug and took another swallow. My feeling about her was good, but chasing local leads while the drumbeat to bomb somewhere in the Middle East intensified would take concentration. I took the conversation back to the C-4.

  “The CIA says 311 pounds of C-4 made it home to America. Maybe half of that was used in the Alagara bombings,” I said.

  She nodded. She knew that already.

  “Our primary focus is finding the bomb maker. Most of all, we’re looking for him.”

  “You say him.”

  “It’s far more likely.”

  “Okay, if you say so, but I didn’t know we made assumptions.”

  “We don’t, but we have to filter. It could be a woman, but if you go through the known database you’re going to see men.”

  “Will I get out in the field with you, or am I going to be in front of a computer all the time? I don’t want to just fill out forms.”

  “You don’t want to be anybody’s girl Friday.”

  “I don’t know what that means. Is that like some old-school thing?”

  “You want to do it all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get started.”

  She logged into my list of bomb makers, and I drove to the leased airplane hangar where debris from the bombings had gone. I wasn’t a bomb geek, but I knew the techs and talked their language. I had a good head for science and therefore they figured I was, underneath, one of them.

  The hangar was near the airport. Before I got there, a call came from the FBI yard where the Hullabaloo van Juan Menderes was driving had been towed.

  “Grale?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come take a look at this.”

  “We’re working the bomb maker. What have you got?”

  “A hidden compartment that’s too small to hold a big-ass cake. This van was modified.”

  “Did you call for a drug dog?”

  “Dog is on the way. Where are you?”

  I changed lanes and made a hard right, though I was unsure now where I fit into the search for Menderes. We’d put out a fugitive warrant on him. Half of Las Vegas PD was searching for him.

  “Heading toward you, maybe ten minutes out. But I won’t be there long.”

  I arrived with the drug dog and her handler. It didn’t take long to determine that the compartment in the interior of the van had held cocaine. Nor was it hard to deduce that the Hullabaloo van delivered more than cake. Which brought to mind the cake in the van with the address tag still on it, despite the people at the delivery address having claimed they had received it.

  We all got in the van and looked at the clever compartment with its sliding steel cover. You park the Hullabaloo van and carry the cake box up, and inside is cocaine instead of cake. You make the delivery, then dump the cake that was ordered. Or like Juan, maybe you give it to your girlfriend.

  The night of the bombings, Menderes made all his deliveries and texted they were done. One answer to that was he didn’t know about the Bar Alagara bombing and continued work. Another scenario was he’d detonated the bar bomb and making three more deliveries was his cover. The first one was simpler and rang closer to the truth, I thought. He delivered the coke, abandoned the van, and ran b
ecause he was nobody’s fool. He heard about the bombing and knew we’d want to talk to him and look at his van. I thought through that as I drove to the airplane hangar.

  There I surveyed the debris and remembered the parallel investigation the FBI had conducted with the National Transportation Safety Board after TWA Flight 800 went down. I was there for that one. I had interviewed witnesses who claimed they saw a streak of light move toward the airliner. That put me right at the heart of the accidental-missile-launch controversy. Several witnesses I walked the beach with were certain they saw a missile arc toward the plane, though we couldn’t find any evidence of that in the wreckage, and the conclusion was that there was a spark in a gas tank. Remembering that was a reminder to let small details accumulate and to believe that when you have enough, the truth will reveal itself.

  I turned as a bomb tech walked up to me. Ted Darza. He fist-bumped me.

  “What’s up, Grale?”

  “I’m looking for Special Agent Stone’s Apple Mac laptop.”

  “There’s a half a Mac here, but it’s pretty trashed.”

  It took Darza several minutes to sort out labels on plastic bags holding debris. Then he pulled out a Mac without a screen and with its keyboard half-scraped away. It was dented but not burned. He showed me a map of where the damaged laptop was found. I turned the laptop in my hands and said, “I need a copy of everything on it—today, if possible.”

  He shook his head.

  “Is that too fast?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, because I work for the Bureau not you. But the other problem is everything is going through headquarters first.”

  “First?”

  “Yep.”

  “Not this. This is about something Jane Stone and I worked on that Washington doesn’t know anything about. They wouldn’t know what they were looking at. It’s important here and lost there, and it could matter. So I’ve got to see it first.”

  “They said no exceptions.”

  “They always say that.”

  Headquarters wanted to control the investigation, no surprise there. A rumor making the rounds this morning was that a cell phone found inside the Alagara had a video of a candlelit cake and small children at a table in front of the bar. According to the rumor, the video had a time stamp, and headquarters knew the exact moment of detonation. That fed a suspicion Washington was seeing evidence ahead of us, and Darza had just confirmed it. I looked down the line of tables with plastic bags of bomb debris lined up and numbered.