thought.’
‘What would one of these do to a cable car?’
‘Oh, I think you’d be looking for pieces and parts four blocks away.’ He paused. ‘You want to find the bomb maker like right now, pronto.’
TWENTY
Raveneau moved his car so the bomb sniffing dogs and the X-ray robot could enter through a loading bay. Still, you couldn’t fool the street. The neighbors quickly noticed the vehicles and a couple of people walked up to ask what was going on.
But nothing more was discovered and the X-ray was negative on anything else hidden in the plywood. Hurt Locker Garcia operated the X-ray robot. He determined the casings weren’t booby-trapped and removed them slowly. After that, the only metal the robot picked up were the screws sandwiching the plywood together. Garcia nodded at Raveneau’s guess the end pieces threaded on after the explosive was inside.
Other than Garcia no one touched them and Garcia wore gloves. A CSI team was on its way here and the hope was they’d pull something off them that would help.
Raveneau asked Garcia, ‘They looked heavy when you picked them up.’
‘They are. They’re some sort of alloy.’
Raveneau took photos and then stepped back as the CSI crew arrived and tried to figure out how to approach this. Meanwhile, Raveneau, Ortega, and the canine crew helped load the X-ray robot back into the van. When the bomb squad left Ortega called a meeting in Khan’s office. He wanted to caucus on how to proceed. One idea was to restack the plywood, reband the unit, and set up surveillance cameras before turning the building over to Khan. Raveneau favored that idea but disagreed with Ortega over bringing in the FBI.
‘You’ve got to bring them,’ Raveneau argued. ‘There’s really no choice.’
‘Raveneau, you know as well as I do what’s going to happen. They’ll trample our murder investigation. By noon they’ll have a press release out saying they’re working a significant terrorism investigation in San Francisco. The murders here will become a sidebar. They’ll tuck Khan away somewhere. We can wait a few days.’
‘I know who to call.’
‘Who?’
‘Mark Coe.’
‘I don’t even know him.’
‘You’ll meet him today. You’ll be able to work with him.’
Hagen jumped in. ‘Couldn’t disagree more,’ he said, and they continued on like this, but knew the call was going to get made. Ortega would have cut this debate off awhile ago if it wasn’t. Half an hour later, Ortega asked for Coe’s cell number.
Thirty-five minutes later Coe and two other agents were in the building looking at bomb casings. More calls got made and a bomb expert an hour and a half down the coast at Fort Ord got in his car. Another boarded a plane in LA. With Coe there Raveneau stepped back. He listened to Ortega sketch out his video surveillance idea.
‘We’re going to pull the crime tape anyway. We can put the bomb casings back in their nests, reband the plywood, give him the building back and watch what he does. His attorney keeps telling us his client will lose his business and they’ll sue if we don’t let him back in here soon.’
Raveneau knew Coe couldn’t decide on his own. He’d have to call his ASAC at a minimum. That call got made now and late in the afternoon Raveneau left the building to buy a banding tool and steel tape at a lumberyard. A clerk showed him how to use it. When he got back to Sixteenth Street he called Celeste to let her know he was going to be late.
‘Let me guess,’ she said as she picked up, ‘you aren’t going to make it tonight.’
‘I’ll be late. We found something very disturbing.’
‘That sounds scary.’
‘It is.’
Coe got a wiretap warrant and the FBI tested and retested their video system trying to get at a bug in it as Raveneau stacked plywood with Ortega. Every three or four sheets they stopped to make sure everything was lining up correctly. Lining up the creases the former banding tape made on the edge of the last sheet was hard. It needed to align perfectly and Raveneau struggled with the banding tool. But finally he figured it out and when he finished the stack looked pretty much like it had. One by one, they backed out of the building and as Raveneau stood with Ortega down the block and outside his car, Coe called from back in the Fed field office.
‘Everything is working, you’re good to go.’
Ortega turned to Raveneau and said, ‘Here goes.’ He called Khan’s lawyer. ‘This is Inspector Ortega. Mr Khan can have his building back. If he needs someone we can give you the names of several firms who do crime scene cleanup.’
‘Does that mean he is no longer a suspect?’
‘We’ve never called him as a suspect.’
Raveneau smiled as Ortega said that.
‘You’ve treated him as one. You prevented him from reopening his business and cost him a great deal of money. Who is going to compensate him for that?’
‘You tell me. I have no idea. Good night.’
TWENTY-ONE
Eight months ago near the end of spring last year, Celeste told him, ‘I’m forty-eight. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.’
She had two hundred seventy-one thousand dollars saved over seventeen years for the sole purpose of opening a restaurant. But the tipping point was when her mother died about a year ago and Celeste inherited $185,000, and with that felt sure she had enough money. Her mother’s death also made life much more finite for Celeste. That started the summer of eating and looking at other restaurants and places for lease.
They had fun with it right up to the point where she signed a lease and the clock started. The second thoughts arrived then and the fear she was in over her head in a competitive city woke her at night. She planned to serve food at the bar but had last cooked professionally twenty-five years ago when she imagined a career as a chef before becoming a bartender and later a wine broker.
During the heatwave last September when city temperatures broke one hundred degrees for the fourth day in a row, she had an anxiety attack that almost derailed the project.
She wept and shook as she told him, ‘I’m wasting everything I inherited and all the money my mom saved on a vain idea. I’ll get panned in the first reviews and will never be able to compete.’
But by then she was committed to the lease and had already spent fifteen thousand on architectural drawings. She broke out in hives. She fought panic with manic focus on restaurant design and construction and by testing drink recipes at home. But the low point was yet to come. It arrived a month later as she got the first construction bids from two general contractors, both of whom had come highly recommended.
The bids were nearly double what her architect had estimated. She found a third contractor and got another bid, then two more before realizing that she needed to scale back her plans radically. She kept the idea that you could still eat at the bar or a bar table. Not a restaurant style meal, and very casual eating, with the idea there would be six to eight small plates and always pizzettas. You’d get paper napkins not cloth but food would be part of the draw. She focused on the mixology, on bartending, on a culture that would treat customers like friends.
She didn’t have to but she also focused on sustainable. She found recycled materials. She bought used bar equipment and chairs and tables. She refinished the tables with Raveneau’s help. She found a used pizza oven and the architect came up with a way to capture waste heat from the bar dishwasher, running plastic Pex lines embedded in the concrete bar top so if you rested your elbows on the bar top concrete they would stay warm.
