Patrick took a couple of gulps of cold air. Paranoid. He was too damned paranoid. He went back into the hotel. Rebecca had to be inside somewhere.
CHAPTER 35
Maggie ignored the ache in her back. Something pinched where she had slammed against the front of the car. At first she had tried to unzip her jacket to get at her Smith amp; Wesson. It slowed her down too much. The kid wasn't armed. She'd do without it. Besides, she was the only one who could catch him now. They'd all listened to her. Stood down.
Behind her she could hear footsteps crunching but they were too far back. Her radio crackled from her shoulder, 'Subject headed south, southeast.'
The kid had slipped a couple of times, little traction in his sneakers. Each time she closed the distance between them, two paces, three. Only a car length between them now, but he was wiry, flexible, spinning around bumpers and twisting to avoid rearview mirrors. He was scared. Didn't matter that he wasn't one of the bombers. He didn't understand what had caused all the attention. Maggie wondered if he even understood much English.
As soon as she had gotten a good look at him she knew immediately he wasn't a part of the group of young men she had spent the afternoon watching. He was too young. And he was black. Tall, skinny?almost anorexic thin. But it was that look in his eyes that gave him away, that terrified panic of someone who's been accused and hunted before. She'd seen that look. It wasn't fear from guilt. It was fear of persecution. She was guessing about his lack of English.
There were drifts between the cars and one of them had swallowed Maggie's boot, sucking it right off her foot. Cheap slip-ons. She didn't let it slow her down. Her daily exercise regimen included a three, sometimes four- mile run.
From the radio, more static then, 'Don't let him leave the lot.'
She heard the clicks of metal behind her. Closer.
Damn it! Was that the sound of rifles getting set? Is that what she was hearing? Someone bracing a weapon against the metal of a vehicle? Taking aim?
'Hold your fire,' she yelled into her shoulder, only it came out in gasps, hardly coherent.
'Suspect fleeing. Considered dangerous.'
'Hold all fire,' she tried again. He's scared, not dangerous. Could they shoot him with her trailing this close?
She heard more movement coming fast behind her. Heavy boots crunching snow, the slap of leather, the clack of metal, shouts garbled by the wind.
The boy slipped again, wiping out and thumping his knee against a bumper. Another two paces lost. Then he glanced over his shoulder. Big mistake. Slowed you down every time. He thought he'd regain momentum by taking a sharp left, and running parallel back in her direction, only with a lane of cars between them. Maggie spun around.
He was right there. Right alongside her. She could see slices of him between the parked vehicles. The cars were all that separated them. She pushed herself. A little faster. Her lungs were already burning from the cold air she'd sucked in. But the wind was at their backs now. Just a little more. She needed to get a step or two in front of him. She'd still lose him if she had to twist between the vehicles. She decided on a shortcut.
Maggie glanced ahead at the long uninterrupted row of vehicles. She chose wisely. Then she jumped on the hood of a compact and let the slide of snow-caked rubber soles on metal propel her right on top of the boy. It knocked him completely off his feet. His elbow jabbed into Maggie's side, catching her right under her vest. It knocked the air out of her. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, but still held on.
He was shoving and kicking until she grabbed his arm. One twist and his body went rigid. She pulled his arm back behind him and almost automatically he went down, face down. Her knee was in his back, his legs sprawled.
'You may not feel like it now,' she told the boy in machine-gun bursts of breath. Each intake of cold air stabbed her lungs. 'But you'll thank me for this later.'
Better a knee in the back than a bullet.
When she finally looked up she was surrounded by men in helmets and scoped rifles. One of them held the red backpack that had gotten discarded somewhere along the chase. Another held the boot she had lost.
Charlie Wurth squeezed through the group, a head shorter than the rest of them, looking small and out of place. But he had a huge smile on his face as he offered a gloved hand to help Maggie up.
'Son of a bitch, O'Dell. You are something else.'
CHAPTER 36
'It's bigger than we thought,' David Ceimo was telling Nick and Jerry Yarden. 'Not just three kids getting together and thinking it'd be cool to blow up a shopping mall.'
Nick pulled the paper shoe covers on but kept his face mask dangling at his neck. Jerry had geared up completely, reminding Nick of an orange bug. The elastic band that held up the mask made his ears stick out further. And he'd mussed his hair, leaving tuffs sticking straight up. Nick resisted the urge to nudge him, and do a swipe at his own hair like he'd do with his nephew, Timmy, to tell him his hair was all tousled. Instead Nick pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves and followed behind Ceimo and Yarden, staring at Jerry's tufts of orange hair rather than looking down at the trails of blood. Bodies were covered where they lay but he swore he saw what looked like a leg?gnarled fabric and flesh with a loafer?underneath what may have once been a food court table, now twisted metal.
Ceimo was leading them to the first and closest crater. No one paid any attention to them. They continued their slow, painstaking tasks. The buzz and hum and swish of equipment took the place of conversation. Walking amongst the techs in their Tyvek overalls, masks and goggles reminded Nick of walking through a scene of
a different planet covered in soot and ash with a distinctive smell of burnt dinner. That's how he tried to think about it. Especially the burnt dinner part. Anything to keep his mind from focusing on it really being burnt flesh and singed hair.
A tech noticed their approach. She shoved her goggles up on top of her short blond hair then picked up the tray of debris she was sifting through.
'Jamie's lead on the crater dig. She's our bomb expert,' Ceimo told them.
Nick thought she looked like a college kid. On closer inspection he could see small crinkle lines at the corners of her eyes that revealed she was older.
'Go ahead and tell them what you told me,' Ceimo told Jamie.
She pointed with a gloved finger to a pile of debris in the center of her tray.
'When you think of an explosion most people automatically think everything is incinerated. But fire is only one portion of an explosion. The other, of course, is blowing things apart. We end up with fragments. Some actually are decipherable.' She poked around the debris and now Nick could see what looked like fibers, obviously scorched but some of the ends were still red.
'The backpack,' Yarden said.
'Yes, and this metal piece was part of the detonating mechanism.'
'Doesn't look like much of anything,' Nick couldn't help saying.
'There're several other smaller fragments here.' She gently pushed them out of the ash. 'I'll piece them together back at the lab, but I recognize it already. You guys remember the Pan Am flight that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland?'
Everyone nodded. It was a long time ago. Nick figured twenty years at least, but anyone in law enforcement recognized the case. A huge passenger jet blowing up in the air.
