A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

and a robe, came stomping down the same flight of stairs, with the aid of a cane.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded, eyeing the man in plain clothes and the man in uniform.  “Coming to my house at this hour of the morning, and telling my housekeeper you’re going to break my son’s door down?”

“Actually, I’m the same detective who interviewed you about your private plane on Friday afternoon, Mr. Pierson,” Flynn reminded him.  “And this officer and I have with us a warrant that gives us permission to search your son’s home.”

“A search warrant?” the man bellowed.  “Who let you get a search warrant?”

“The Jackson County Prosecutor and the Presiding Judge,” the detective replied.

“You saying Kent McAllister approved this?”

“I’m afraid the chief of police wasn’t available when we decided to get the warrant.”

“You have one hell of a nerve,” Pierson declared, brandishing his cane, “and I’ll have your badges over this.”

“You’re free to do whatever you think you need to do, sir, but we have work to do, and very little time to waste,” Flynn said mildly, even as he took a small step back and, behind him, Cady quietly slid his hand over his holstered service weapon.  “We gave you the courtesy of coming up here, and asking politely before we acted.  So, the only question is -- do you want to give us the key to your son’s home, or do you want us to enter by force?”

The old man stared malevolently at the detective for a full minute before he realized that Flynn was not going to back down.  “Harriet, go get the key to the boy’s place,” he snapped at the housekeeper over his shoulder.  “My son is at work, and I’ll expect you to leave his home in exactly the same condition as you find it.”

Thank you, sir,” Flynn said.  “I assure you we’ll be as quick and as careful as possible.”

The hour-long search didn’t turn up anything suspicious, no unregistered weapons, no radical literature, no bomb-making materials, and they were about to give it up when Paul Cady called out from the master bedroom.  He had happened upon a small safe, hidden away at the back of the closet, and he had pulled it out and unceremoniously broken it open.  Inside, he found a thick file and a laptop computer.

“Hey, Roy, you’re not going to believe this,” he told the detective.  Inside the file were dozens of old clippings, from various newspapers around the state, going back almost two decades, detailing incident after incident of racially motivated violence, from physical abuse to property damage -- all unresolved.

“Guess he just couldn’t help himself,” Flynn observed, peering over Cady’s shoulder and shaking his head in disgust.  “I bet he has a real bad habit -- pulls this out any time he needs a high, and gets himself off reliving his past accomplishments.”

“There’s got to be more than a dozen cases in here,” Cady declared.

“Well, they might prove he’s a racist,” Flynn said, “but unfortunately, it’s not going to prove he had anything to do with the bombing.”

“No, but this might,” Ben Dawson said.  He had followed Flynn into the bedroom and turned on the computer, only to find it was password protected.  “Who lives alone and still protects a computer that’s kept in a closet unless it’s got something to hide?” he wondered aloud.

“Can you get into it?” Flynn asked.

Dawson shook his head.  “Not my specialty, I’m afraid,” he said.  “But get hold of someone who can, and I’d be willing to bet you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“Okay, it goes with us,” Flynn told him.  “Now let’s pack it up, and get out of here -- before we overstay our welcome.”

At that moment, his cell phone rang.

“I think you might want to get over here,” Coello said.

. . .

Grady Holt’s mother was at home when the police rang the doorbell of a classic bungalow at the edge of Old Town.

“You can’t just come barging in here like this,” she cried.  “I’ve got rights.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I’m afraid we can,” Coello told her, showing her the warrant.

“Well, my son isn’t here.  Can you wait while I call him?”

“You’re certainly free to call him,” Coello said, “but we aren’t going to wait.”

Splitting up, it took them about an hour to declare the house clean, and then another five minutes to find the locked room at the back of the separate garage.  When Holt’s mother claimed she didn’t know where the key was, they broke the lock, after which it took less than ten seconds to find what they were looking for -- a counter, running the length of the back wall, that was littered with pieces of pipe, two inches in diameter, Teflon tape, zip-lock freezer bags, wooden matches, firecrackers, tiny nails, small ball bearings, and a significant amount of gunpowder.

“Wow,” Cooper breathed.  “There’s a lot of stuff here.  Too much, as a matter of fact.  You think maybe they’re not done yet, that they’ve got some other targets in mind?”

“What I think is that we need to photograph every square inch of this place before we start processing,” Coello told him.  “And then we need to call in reinforcements.”

. . .

Joe was still at the office when the news he had been waiting for came in.

“We got everything we needed from the Holt place -- bombs in the making, fingerprints, DNA, the works,” Flynn told him.

“That’s just great,” Joe said.

“I’m sure we’ll get a match to Holt, and I think the chances are pretty good we’ll get a match to Pierson, as well,” the detective continued.  “And something else you can tell Lily.  Of all the planes at the airfield, there was only one we had a warrant to search -- and it just happened to be one that was painted metallic gold with a double black stripe.”

“That’s real good work, Roy,” Joe said.  “I’ll tell her.”

“We got hold of Pierson’s computer, too,” Flynn concluded.  “And as soon as we find someone