Watkins lay still for a few seconds while the debris fell around him, then listened. There was a strange, terrible silence that made him wonder if he’d lost his hearing.
“I’m alive,” he said into the microphone, and was relieved to hear himself speak.
“We heard somebody breathing,” said Maynard’s voice in his earpiece. “Are you hurt?”
“I think I’m okay,” said Watkins. It wasn’t a perfunctory answer. Some bomb victims had fatal internal injuries and bleeding they didn’t detect at first. “Let’s get the area roped off before we get overrun.”
He recognized Graham’s voice. “We’re on it.”
The voices and the incidental noises in Watkins’s earpiece went away. Watkins pushed himself up to his knees, examined his bomb suit for holes or tears, but found it intact. He stood and the layer of debris on his suit fell in a puff of dust at his feet.
The thing to worry about now was unexploded ordnance. He began to walk across the backyard looking for surprises among the pieces of the house. It was unlikely this bomber would have made any bad electrical connections and left a charge unexploded. He was too highly skilled for that. But his work was also devious and premeditated, so it was important to Watkins to be sure he had not left anything intentionally.
As Watkins surveyed the scene he saw the thoroughness of the bomber’s work. There were a great many small pieces blown from the house—roof shingles, mostly from the corners of the building, windows and frames, glass, a few sections of clapboard. But the main part of the structure had collapsed into a pile.
Some of the studs and roof timbers he could see had been drilled and wired for charges, so the house would fall in on itself. He found the front door out on the lawn near the street with forty round holes punched through it. He looked at the angles of impact and realized there must have been a bomb or two with ball bearings taped to them placed above the gypsum board of the ceiling to kill him if he tried to run out that way.
He watched his team’s black bomb truck stop in the street. It was emblazoned with bright gold paint that said BOMB SQUAD in the hope it would keep at least some bystanders at a distance. Hitched to the back of the truck was a containment vessel on wheels, a steel ball about five feet in diameter with a hatch that could be sealed and a valve for the release of gases. Graham and Maynard got out and began to string yellow tape to keep people away until the scene was found safe and the pieces were examined for evidence.
The team’s truck had been only five hundred feet away, so it reached the bombed house immediately, but now other vehicles began to arrive. The patrol cars that had blocked off the street on both ends before he entered the house now admitted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and then another bomb truck towing a containment vessel.
Captain Victor Del Castillo, the commander of the Bomb Squad, jumped down from the truck and trotted up to Watkins. He was lean and tall, a long-distance running enthusiast, and spent months each year trying to recruit his squad members for the annual police endurance races. He said, “Tim, are you all right?”
“A little stressed,” said Watkins.
“Stressed? That’s it? Then I won’t waste my sympathy on you. Did you see anything inside we ought to be looking for?”
“The kitchen was at the back. An intervalometer was on the counter.”
“A what?”
“An intervalometer, like photographers use. It was a black box about the size of a cell phone, with the name Canon on it in white letters. I think it was the kind that has a motion sensor that sets off the camera if you want to take pictures of lightning or moving animals or something. I leaned into the kitchen and saw a small red light go on. Then I heard a click. Once the power was on, it ran through a sequence of clicks, each one setting off a charge.”
“I’ll have the guys start looking for pieces of it. If there’s anything left, it could have a serial number or something. The main thing right now is to be sure we don’t still have live explosives.”
Del Castillo had come with a three-man team of bomb techs, and he assigned them to search the scene for explosives, pieces of detonators, or other bomb components. He repeated Watkins’s description of the intervalometer and added it to the list. In another ten minutes two more trucks arrived bringing three-man teams, who were added to the sweep. They had to make sure the danger was over before a crime scene crew could come in and collect evidence.
Their search was difficult and painstaking. Any scrap of metal might be part of one of the bombs. It was essential to clear the area of anything that might explode, and this had to be the priority.
The scene was not quite like any Watkins had seen before. Where the house had been was now a pile of lumber, some of it charred near the ends where small charges had been placed. The roof was collapsed over the pile of wood and siding, its gutters now about three feet above the ground and its peak less than six feet high. The lots on this street were not large, but the houses on either side of this one appeared to be intact.
Watkins looked over the area and realized there were fourteen techs working this scene—exactly half of the LAPD Bomb Squad. After a short time, Del Castillo waved to summon Watkins to the bomb truck parked on the street.
He was carrying a laptop now, and he opened it on the hood of the bomb truck. “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Take a look. I got the plans for this house from Building and Safety.”
They stared into the screen, shading their eyes from the afternoon sun. The first image was a diagram of the house from above, showing the locations of walls, doors, and windows. Watkins noticed a rectangle with a row of thin horizontal lines. “Is that a staircase?”
Del Castillo looked at it. “Yeah. Looks that way.”
“I didn’t see any staircase.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was a one-story house. Why would there be stairs?” Watkins looked closely and then clicked on the second view of the house’s plan, and saw a side-view rendition. The stairway was below ground level.
It took Watkins a second to identify this part of the diagram. There was an underground space, almost square. He spread his fingers on the touchpad to enlarge the image.
A dozen things came clear in an instant. He had not seen the stairs because they were underground, extending down to a small basement. A basement was unusual in Los Angeles, but some old houses had them. The basement was why the charges had all been relatively small, placed high in the skeleton of the house to take it apart and collapse the roof onto the floor. Virtually none of the energy had been focused downward. The bomber was protecting something down below. The bomber hadn’t been demolishing some businessman’s house; he’d been making it into a trap for the police.
Watkins shouted, practically screamed, “Stop!” He ran a couple of steps toward the wreckage that had been the house as he yelled. “Stop! Don’t move! Everybody freeze! Stay where you—”
Later, the video from the camera mounted on Captain Del Castillo’s truck that had been recording the search showed Sergeant Timothy Walker running toward the rubble, and picked up what he was shouting. Nobody was able to see later what, exactly, triggered the second device precisely at that moment.
Every bomb technician standing on the lot at 12601 Valkrantz Street could have listed five or six ways to wire that kind of booby trap, but the one who touched the wrong thing didn’t see it. This was the big charge, the one Watkins had been expecting but had not found. He’d failed because the large cache of explosives had been, not inside the house, but under it.
The main charge turned the air hard, the shock wave bursting up and out, converting the detached pieces of the house into weapons that cut down bomb technicians where they stood and hurling some of their bodies so they came down on lawns together with the boards, bricks, and hardware they’d been examining.
Watkins, Maynard, Del Castillo, Capiello, and ten others were dead. Many of the police officers who were parked at the ends of the block to keep away the curious, and the firemen who had parked ambulances and pumper trucks farther off, were knocked off their feet by the force of the blast, and a few had minor injuries. The bomb truck Del Castillo had brought was blown onto its side, but its camera kept recording the unchanging image of the blue Los Angeles sky.