The bomb maker was seeing things in gray this morning. He had slept badly, staying up too late, then finally falling asleep for an hour, then waking up again, always in the middle of a nightmare. After one of these awakenings he realized he’d been dreaming about the female bomb technician who had driven the truck in front of him so he couldn’t shoot and detonate the bomb vest.
In the dream she stared straight into his eyes, and that had given her complete knowledge of everything about him. He began to run along the streets and became breathless and tired. But every time he stopped, she was there ahead of him, pointing her finger and saying terrible things, which attracted angry people. He didn’t wake up but finally acknowledged that he had been awake, listening to the insistent sounds of daylight for some time—birds, a distant train whistle, cars—and swung his feet out of bed.
The bomb maker once had a wife, but now he was alone. He continued to hate her as though he still had her. He smoothed over the sheets and blanket on her side of the bed, and once again noticed that her side of the mattress was still firm, while his side had begun to develop a shallow valley. All he had to do was spin the mattress around, and his side would be the good side. But he never did it.
Her name was Carla. They had met when he worked at a soft drink bottling plant in Illinois. By then he had two years invested in an engineering degree, and she had been in an art therapy program for a year. They were both employed in the bottling plant for the summer because they had relatives who worked there, and it was the sort of place that hired relatives.
Near the end of that summer he got a good look at her after work when she didn’t have her long hair stuffed into a hairnet, and her body was not rectangularized by the white coats they wore on the bottling line. She looked at him with her eyes no longer behind protective goggles, smiled, and said hi. After a second of contemplating her voice he realized that she was both women, the one he had worked with and this one. She had straight golden hair, bright blue eyes that looked better unprotected, and a lithe female body. He asked her to go out with him to dinner and a movie, and she agreed and kept agreeing.
After another summer in the bottling plant and another year in school they graduated and got married. The church was the one Carla had gone to as a kid, where she had her first Communion, then seldom entered except on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.
Her parents were not enthusiastic supporters of the marriage. They owned a new-and-used car lot in a southern suburb of Chicago and noticed right away that he didn’t own anything, and his parents didn’t appear to either. His parents were more supportive because they had been eager for him to grow up and move out of their house. He had always been sullen and solitary, and they didn’t like him much. He got a job at a company in Cincinnati that made valves and control systems for pipelines. Moving away from their families was a relief to him, but Carla seemed to dislike the lowering of her standard of living.
After a year of searching in vain for art therapist positions, Carla took a job with a company that sold medical supplies. Her territory included not only Cincinnati but a wider slice of southern Ohio. On Mondays she would put a small suitcase full of clothes in the trunk of her car along with another small suitcase full of samples, order sheets, and inventory lists, then drive off, to return on Wednesday. She would be off again on Thursday and return on Friday.
In her second year, he began to notice that her work schedule became erratic. She sometimes came home from work very late in the evening or even the morning after she was due. She began to be too tired to have sex with him, even when she was home for a couple of days at a time.
He was an engineer, a man accustomed to measuring and evaluating things mathematically. He decided to investigate Carla the same way. He had kept accurate records for tax purposes, so he used them. He plotted graphs comparing her monthly paychecks, which were partially based on sales commissions, with her checks from the previous year. He made another graph comparing the hours she was away at work with the hours the previous year. The results indicated that his subjective impression had been correct. She was away more, but selling less.
One morning he picked up her cell phone while she was in the shower, but found it now had a password. The next day he began to follow her when she left for work. He learned nothing whatever from that practice, so he began to leave his own job early on days when she was working out of the company office and visiting Cincinnati pharmacies. He’d sit in a rental car and wait for her to pass by when she left work. He followed her to a restaurant, but only found she was meeting a group of colleagues that included both men and women having drinks.
Her company’s next quarterly sales conference was to be in Cleveland. His study of her movements inspired him to go to the hotel in downtown Cleveland where her conference was held. He went to the front desk with a suitcase, showed them his identification, and asked for a second key card to her room, which he called “our room.” Since the name and address on his license matched her reservation, he got the card.
Later, during the string of afternoon meetings of the conference, he went into Carla’s room and installed three small digital cameras. Two were electric clocks with the cameras built in, which he put on the two nightstands. The third was a white circular box with a glowing red light that looked like a second smoke detector. He installed this on the ceiling above the bed. Then he went home to wait until the day the conference ended. Early that morning he went to the hotel and waited until he saw Carla walk across the lobby for breakfast accompanied by a man. Then he slipped into her room and retrieved the cameras.
When he saw what the cameras had recorded he sent copies to the e-mail addresses of her parents, four of her female friends, her employers, and another to himself. He sent the videos through a mail service in Moldova that existed to receive e-mails and send them on to their final recipients anonymously. He changed all the locks in the house. He collected all of Carla’s belongings, drove them to her parents’ house near Chicago, and left them in their driveway. Then he filed for divorce.
For the next week his phone received two or three dozen messages a day from Carla. At first she was all hurt and self-righteous innocence. Then apparently someone made her aware of the recordings he’d made in the hotel room. The next calls carried a freight of rage and professions of hatred, tirades that went on long enough to exhaust his interest. There were threats of arrest, which, after a few days, went away because some expert she or her attorneys had hired couldn’t trace the e-mails to him. Next there were detailed recitations of the things about him that had forced her to seek male companionship elsewhere. Finally there were threats that there were “real men” who had heard of his behavior and planned to beat or kill him.
He recorded all the phone messages, turned them over to his attorney, and in a day they stopped. He kept working and saving, living conservatively and quietly. But all the time he was preparing for a change.
In the divorce proceedings he refused to amend his filing to apply for simple dissolution of marriage, which was an option in Ohio. Instead he insisted on a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Since there were no children, both had been employed, and no other complications existed, the pair had to agree to a settlement in proportion to how much money the plaintiff and the respondent had brought into the marriage. He ended up with seventy-five percent.
For some reason Carla felt an irrational urge to end up with the house, either because her lawyer could get it appraised for less than it was worth, or because holding her ground made her feel she had won. He readily agreed, received payment for his share, and moved out. He quit his job in the water valve business and drove a U-Haul truck to California. He was confident that even if she kept her job after the recordings he’d circulated, she would not be able to afford the mortgage and in time would lose the house. That had been about five years ago.
This morning he thought it might be nice to kill her. They’d had no contact since the divorce, so while he would certainly be a suspect, he wouldn’t be the sort the police longed for—a husband who was a beneficiary of her insurance, a married boyfriend, a neighbor nobody liked.
He had to think carefully before he took on the project. Carla hated him when he left. And he was sure that over the past five years she would have had some hard times that she blamed on him, which kept the coals glowing.
But he was sure he could kill her without creating a new connection to her. Her family had originally been from Alabama and, like many Southern women, she was addicted to sweet tea. She used to keep a pitcher of it in the refrigerator. It was sweet enough to hide ethylene glycol. And there would be less difficulty if he left the opened jug of antifreeze in her garage. If the jug was gone, this was murder. If the jug was there, this might be suicide.
He could always arrange a methane leak and explosion in her house. If she still had a car, he could tamper with her brakes or cause a gasoline fire. That might be fun. If she had a boyfriend these days, he could get the man blamed for her murder. There were so many ways to do any of these things.
But he was just teasing himself. He wasn’t going to do any of it. If her parents were alive—and he had no reason to believe they weren’t—they would instantly turn police attention on him. And even if they were dead, the fact that she had been part of a nasty divorce would make the police at least find out where he was living. Contemplating her death had raised his mood, but he would just have to let it go—for now.
He had probably thought of Carla because the person who had ruined his day yesterday had been a woman. But that was yesterday. Today would be different for him and for the woman cop.
He went through his morning rituals. He ate a breakfast of egg whites cooked in olive oil, drank some herbal tea, lifted weights, ran four miles around the perimeter of his property, then walked for a while to get over the shakes that overexertion caused.
At home he took a hot bath and soaked until his muscles relaxed, then dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and went into his workshop to get started. While he was at work, his hours ran as smoothly as a line reeling off a spool. He was alert and completely focused on what his hands were doing.
At some point that morning he realized he’d been pushing himself in the wrong direction. He had begun to use volatile and unpredictable explosives and exotic means of delivering and detonating them. He had been trying to present the Bomb Squad with devices they had never seen before and were likely to misinterpret. Once he destroyed the first fourteen men, he had hoped to take the others out by demoralizing and intimidating them. They would approach a device without being able to think through the ways it might operate, what touching it might set off, what leaving it alone might give it time to do, or what was protecting it from their interference. But working with more unstable explosives and more sensitive switches was risky for the bomb maker too.
And his new tactics hadn’t worked. According to the television news, the Bomb Squad was back up to strength with reinforcements from federal agencies. The bomb maker needed something big, another significant bombing, and it had to be flawless, a masterpiece of small deceptions that forced the technicians into making guesses until one of them guessed wrong.
He put away most of the ingredients he had been preparing to mix today. He was not going to rely on the volatility and unpredictability of the explosive to make the bomb deadly. He had lost his way for a few days, but now he would behave as though he were at war. He would use the best components, the most powerful charges, and the most reliable explosives.
He would go back to using Semtex. He went to the locked cabinet where he kept the raw ingredients. Semtex was a mixture of two explosives: PETN and RDX. He would have to start by making supplies of these two compounds.
He brought out ammonium nitrate, acetic anhydride, paraformaldehyde, distilled water, and boron fluoride. He was going to have to do lots of stirring and heating and cooling for the next part of the process, which had to be done within very narrow temperature ranges. When he finished making the PETN and RDX he would have to let them dry completely. The process would take a few days. At the end, he would have to combine the two. He would carefully grind the two substances into fine powder so he could combine them. After a few hours he reached the point where his intermediate explosives were drying and then quit for the day. He spent time ordering a number of chemicals to replace the ingredients he’d used. He ordered them from six different companies under six different corporate names.
He would spend the days while he waited for the process to be completed on his next project. He had watched the police press conference on television, but had not heard any names. There were just “three brave bomb experts.” But he could see that the one driving the truck was a woman. She had sergeant’s stripes, but she looked young for a sergeant. Her bomb truck had said TEAM ONE. He would find her.
He questioned the search engines in various ways, asking for images of the LAPD Bomb Squad; news organization reports of any public events attended by members of the squad; any interviews with bomb experts; any reports of public relations visits to schools or job fairs, hospitals or charities. And then, after several days of searching, he found the right image—a picture of a female police sergeant and the bomb-sniffing dog Aristotle at a visit to John Nance Garner Middle School, near the alley where a student had seen a homemade bomb. The text said she had gone there to give the students a lesson on what to do if they saw anything that looked like a bomb.
The picture was absolutely her. She was talking to kids in front of a glass case displaying inert fireworks, pipe bombs, hand grenades, and other things that went boom and they shouldn’t touch. There was no name given for her. Maybe the service that police unions hired to scrub the Internet of police officers’ names had removed hers, or maybe she hadn’t let it appear in print to begin with. But the paragraph hadn’t omitted the name of the school, the publication, or the woman who had written the article and taken the picture. The writer was also listed on the school paper’s website as an editor.
He drove all the way into Pacoima to make the call at a pay phone. After a few tries he reached the woman who had written the article. He identified himself as a teacher at Grant High School who wanted to arrange a similar visit. She remembered very clearly the name of the woman police officer. “It was Diane Hines,” she said. “Sergeant Diane Hines. She was so pretty and sweet the kids couldn’t take their eyes off her.”
Diane Hines had no website, no Facebook page, no Twitter account, no other obvious place where he could learn about her. He knew she had done more than enough to have her name on the Internet over the past few days, but there was no mention of her. She didn’t want to be found. But there was no question now that he could find her.