Cast the First Stone by David Warren (booksvooks txt) 📕

Dream or not, I have twelve hours before another bomb hits my city. And I plan on being there to stop it.

Chapter 10

"Stone really thinks there’s going to be another bombing?” Silas stood at one of the long tables in the makeshift lab room, sorting bomb debris through a screen. A spotlight shone down on the fragments, the rest of the room under low light to accentuate the features. In one screen, he’d collected the shards of what looked like aluminum from the coffee thermos that held the bomb. In the second, he’d gathered the warped steel edges of a water pipe, the container that housed the low-level explosive materials, which were currently under the gas chromatograph to trace the chemical composition.

“Mmmhmm,” Eve said, picking up a fragment of the pipe. Jagged edges, coated with dark residue. She took a swab of it. “He says it’s a gut feeling.”

Silas looked up at her, raised an eyebrow.

“I know,” Eve said. “But he’s…well, not what I expected. He’s…earnest. And not the dark and mysterious renegade my father—and everyone else—makes him out to be. Part of me wants to believe him.”

“I don’t want to know what that part is,” Silas said, and gave her a gimlet look. “Just watch yourself. I’ve heard stories.”

She dropped the swab into a container and labeled it for processing. “What kind of stories?”

“Just that Rembrandt Stone is not above breaking a few rules to get answers.”

If I give them answers, then maybe they can stop hoping and start figuring out how to live with the wreckage of their lives.

Rem’s words, spoken as he stared into the dark amber of his beer, clung to her. A desperation, perhaps, in his tone that kneaded her own scar tissue. “Maybe sometimes you need to break a few—”

“No, Eve.” Silas looked up. “That’s the difference between criminal investigation and what we do. They’re all about hunches and interrogations and piecing what-ifs together. We look at the facts, the evidence and find the truth. It’s science, not instincts.”

Silas held her gaze, and she couldn’t escape the sense that it had irked him, her going out for lunch with Rembrandt. And Burke.

“Well, if I were to guess, given the blast wave pattern and the rate of deflagration, I think we’re going to find a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in this residue.”

“And maybe antimony.” He held up what looked like a burned Dcell battery. “I think we have the igniter.” He set the battery into the basket.

“It’s not a unique chemical signature, given the pattern of the recent Oklahoma and Centennial Olympic Park bombings.”

“He’s a copycat at best because he used a digital alarm clock timer as the detonator.” He picked up a burned mass of plastic, the wires charred.

“Which gave the bomber a twenty-four-hour window, once he set the time and attached the leads,” she said, making a mental note to tell Rembrandt.

“What bombers fail to understand is that bombs do not destroy themselves in the blast. Up to ninety-five percent of the casing survives the explosion,” Silas picked up a six-inch piece of mangled pipe. “What we have here is a simple pipe bomb, packed with ANFO, with a clock timer, a model rocket igniter, and activated by a battery.”

Which killed seven people, including a toddler. The pretzel from the pub had turned to sludge in her stomach. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into a nearby hazardous waste canister. “We won’t know for sure if your guess is correct until we get the results of the chromatograph test.”

Silas followed her out of the lab room into the main area where the techs were still cataloging the debris. Dim light hovered over the expanse, the cavernous room raising gooseflesh. The body of evidence felt a little like looking for the right sprig of hay in a field of mowed grass. Still, the more evidence they collected, the more information they could develop in the lab. Standing at the crime scene, amidst broken and blown-out windows, shattered furniture, the rubble of coffee machines, and even personal effects, she’d had to make some split decisions. Think like a bomber. How would I build a bomb?

The device would have to be undetected—hidden, perhaps under a table, in a bag, or even…and that led her to the coffee thermoses and a conversation with the arson examiner, who concurred with her theory. No, her guess.

Okay, fine, she’d call it a hunch. Still, Silas was right. Rules and order kept her from making crazy assumptions and veering away from the truth.

But just being around Rembrandt had made her already break some fundamentals. Like taking three hours to develop film of a crowd, in hopes of finding an unknown face at a future crime scene…yeah, he sounded crazy, and she’d drunk the Kool-Aid.

Eve walked from table to table, where the evidence technicians had not only bagged and labeled everything. Shoes, a backpack, and even the charred remnants of a coffee bean burlap sack, sketching out each item’s found location on a grid of the scene.

She read the label on the burlap. Green Earth coffee, out of Brazil. On the table next to it lay a coffee cup, bagged, slightly crushed.

“Where was this found?” Item number forty-four—she found its number on the map. Silas came up to look over her shoulder.

“It looks like it was picked up on the sidewalk across the street. Maybe from a patron who’d just ordered their coffee and was headed to the bus stop?”

“It was on the side street, away from the shop. The bus stop is further up the street, on the opposite side.”

“And there’s nothing else there but the backside of the grocery store,” Silas said.

“So, he was standing outside, watching?” Eve heard Rembrandt’s words pinging inside her. “He thinks the bomber is trying to make a point. The early time suggests he wasn’t as interested in massive casualties as he was in making a point.”

“Which means he wanted to make sure it