when the car bounced? Was he hurt?
Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.
“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.
He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright. Kim thought he looked unharmed. But percussion injuries could manifest hours or days later, hard to detect and potentially devastating. They patted themselves down, checked for broken bones, or blood. Found none.
Kim and Gaspar moved away from the vehicle. Roscoe stared forward, pale, rigid, horrified. Kim understood. The dead, the injured, were Roscoe’s friends and colleagues. She could have been among them. All three of them could have been standing at the Chevy when it exploded, had Roscoe not stopped back there on the county road.
And then the shaking started. Kim felt it, but was powerless to stop it.
Gaspar wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his body.
“What is it? Are you hurt?” he yelled, patting her down, looking for anything, everything.
Kim shook her head and mouthed without sound, “No, I’m fine.”
Then she thought:
But she had to stop.
She had to help those people. She knew combat first aid. They all did. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt. She had to go help.
She pushed Gaspar away and walked three steps on spaghetti legs toward the carnage. Gaspar grabbed her arm, pulled her around to face him.
“They’ve got enough help,” he said. “There’s more coming. Better that we stay out of the way.”
Kim heard him as if he was at the end of a very long tunnel. She looked ahead at the scene. Medical personnel, first responders, firefighters, sirens, helicopters. She shook Gaspar’s hand away, put one foot in front of the other, determination as wobbly as her steps, but she kept on going. Her next thought was foolish nonsense. She said, “No way to keep the media away now, Roscoe. No way in hell.”
She smiled. How silly was that? She giggled. She covered her mouth with her hand, pressed hard until only stifled silence remained.
Hysteria was the last thing anyone needed.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Kim felt Gaspar’s hand on her shoulder again after she’d walked only twenty feet. She glanced at him, noticed his limping, and slowed her pace. Maybe he was hurt after all? Roscoe had stayed behind. She’d moved the Town Car and parked it across the county road, bubble light flashing. Kim saw her talking on the cell, probably calling Brent for roadblocks. Preventing more chaos was a good plan.
Gaspar put weight in his grip on her shoulder. She turned her head toward him. He leaned closer, squeezed her shoulder tighter, stopped their forward momentum. He tapped his watch and spoke slowly to make her understand words she was unable to hear.
“We can’t stay too long,” he said. “We need to get out before our presence is recorded or questioned. Keep your head down. Talk to no one.”
She nodded agreement. He squeezed her shoulder once more before they moved deeper into scenes resembling a war zone. Roscoe jogged over and met them at the outer perimeter of most serious damage.
The November air was now blackened with sooty pollution. Kim tasted the stench; smoke burned her eyes. Explosion debris blocked all normal paths. Hot spots glowed in weed patches, threatening to reignite. Noise levels continued to rise around her as vehicles and personnel overwhelmed.
“Holy Christ,” Gaspar said, crossing himself in the traditional Catholic way when they saw the Leach brother’s charred corpse pass by on a stretcher. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a linen handkerchief and handed it to Kim. “Here. Cover your nose and mouth. You don’t want to breathe this stuff any more than you have to. It’s toxic.”
He bent his left arm at the elbow and covered his own face with his sleeved forearm. Roscoe did the same.
“Let’s split up,” Kim said, through the fine linen filter. Was she whispering or shouting? She raised her voice anyway, just in case. “Meet back here or call me. OK?”
He nodded through the crook of his elbow and peeled off to the southwest. Roscoe melted into the crowd of responders.
Kim moved north, making slow progress toward the smoldering Chevy. Along her route she helped where she could until the last of the victims were hustled into rescue vehicles. Then finally she reached the center of combustion. For a good long time, she stood away from the knot of investigators and simply stared at the debris.
Kim had recognized the blast for what it was: a VIED. A Vehicle Improvised Explosive Device. The idiot’s weapon. She had learned in specialized FBI training that car bombs were easy to build and always effective and indiscriminately murderous. A nearly perfect disaster machine. No prior experience required.
Except everything she’d observed had confirmed that the Chevy bomber was an expert. He had demonstrated abilities idiots do not possess.
Kim pulled out her smart phone, running video and clicking stills as she surveyed the scene. A circle of burned grass surrounded the Chevy’s blackened chassis. The vehicle and all forensic evidence it might have contained were obliterated. Perhaps charred fragments of the dead man would eventually be located here and there, but probably not.
Before the blast, when Roscoe was parking the Town Car, Kim had seen the trunk lid open while crime scene techs calmly processed the trunk’s interior. Meaning there had been no explosives in the trunk. The Chevy hadn’t been packed with low-grade explosives, as idiots’ car bombs often are. Something more powerful in smaller quantities had been used.
Judging from the explosion’s properties and the significant amount of damage, Kim figured the bomb was most likely PETN. An odorless, powerful military grade plastic explosive, PETN had become the first choice of serious terrorists. It was stable and it produced maximum damage employing a minimum amount of product. Quite effective.
The difficulty should have been obtaining access to PETN. In theory, unauthorized personnel couldn’t acquire it. But laws are for the law-abiding and where there’s a will, there’s a way. Supplies were not as well controlled as Homeland Security would have the populace believe. Kim’s team back in the Detroit field office collected PETN from radicals too often.
The Chevy’s placement had been exact. Not only did the vehicle explode, the blast took out two flanking GHP cruisers. Tow trucks parked in front of the Chevy provided the secondary explosions. Five vehicles destroyed with one bomb. Either the Chevy bomber knew precise details of local procedures or he’d been blessed with dumb luck.
Kim didn’t believe in luck.
She decided the bomb had been carefully designed to damage or destroy interstate travel north and south for miles. Which meant the bomb’s designer was not only knowledgeable about local traffic patterns, but also ruthless. He was willing to kill cops, roadside crews, and innocent travelers as well. Kim shuddered, noticed, and forced herself to stop before the shudder escalated to violent shaking again.
Engrossed in her assessment and her self-control efforts, she didn’t immediately notice the phantom cell phone’s vibrations in her pocket.
