'In your dreams.'

    'Yeah, in my dreams. You know, I haven't had a good donut since they closed the Melo-Glaze. You know what they're making there now? Dog biscuits. Frigging boutique dog biscuits. If that's not a waste of good, industrial kitchen equipment, I don't know what is. I mean, we've all had dogs before, we know what they eat. And I can tell you one thing, it's not pistachio-encrusted, truffle-infused, carob-coated petit fours. Which actually aren't that bad.'

    'You ate dog food?'

    Gino shrugged and hitched his pants up. 'I didn't realize it was a goddamned dog bakery last time I went.'

    In the office, they found Johnny McLaren and his partner, Tinker Lewis, standing around the filing cabinet, looking at the little television on top.

    'What's with the TV?'

    McLaren snorted. 'It's stupid day at the airport again. Some jerk forgot a package next to a chair in baggage claim and they had to evacuate the terminal.'

    Magozzi glanced at the screen, saw a shaky long-lens shot of hundreds of passengers hightailing it away from the terminal while the Bloomington PD Bomb Squad moved in. He shook his head, thinking of the thousands of dollars that would be spent having somebody's lunch box hauled away in a total containment vessel and moved to a detonation site.

    McLaren said, 'I don't get it. There's great security at the airport. You can hardly get in the damn place.'

    Gino snorted. 'Are you kidding me? Every time Angela's parents fly in she's crossing her legs half the way there and by the time I pull up to the curb she's out of the car like a rocket, tearing inside to use the can. And let me tell you, that's woman's purse is huge. She could carry a tactical nuke in that thing, and nobody stops her. There is no security at passenger pickup.'

    McLaren was troubled. 'That can't be right.'

    'You ever been to the airport, McLaren?'

    McLaren flipped him the bird and continued staring at the television.

    'Well, when you're finished wasting taxpayer dollars watching the idiot box, get your ass over to our cube so we can talk about all that help you're supposedly giving us.'

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a couple more minutes.'

    They drifted to their desks, and Gino sat down and swiped a pile of crumbs from his blotter. 'This whole plan to try and connect the victims drove me to drink more Chianti last night.'

    'Worked for you last time.'

    'Not this time. I'm thinking I should switch over to Pinot Grigio, just for the summer. Might be a little more inspirational.'

    Magozzi tipped his head at the sound of feet hitting the hall floor hard. Someone was running somewhere; maybe to the same place the squads had been heading when he'd come in. Officers running in City Hall was like kids running in grade school; it wasn't unheard of, but it prickled the hairs on the back of your neck, just because you didn't hear it that often.

    'Aw, shit,' McLaren called from across the room. 'They've got another one.'

    'Another what?'

    McLaren blew a raspberry at the TV. 'Another call on a suspicious package… oh, terrific, this one's ours, boys, smack-dab in the middle of the Convention Center. Can anybody tell me how the media gets this stuff before we hear about it?'

Running footsteps in the hall, Magozzi thought, and stepped out of Homicide in time to see Joe Gebeke heading out, once again decked out in his gear. Deja vu. 'You going to the Convention Center, Joe?'

    'Oh yeah, and guess who's there today. The National Library Association and about ten million boxes of books we're going to have to check one by one. Two more days and I could have gotten a free pass into the boat show, but no, it had to be today.'

    Magozzi took a step or two down the hall with him, which wasn't easy. The man had a stride like a race horse. 'Say, have we ever had two of these suspicious package calls in one day before?'

    Joe stopped and looked at him for a long second before answering. 'Sure we have, Leo. No sweat.'

    'Okay.'

    But after Joe hit the front doors and the hall was empty, Magozzi could hear phones ringing all over the building.

Chapter Twenty-nine

    Barney Wollmeyer didn't feel that twist in his gut anymore when his squad was called to the airport. It had happened too many times, and it was starting to get boring. That was a bad sign. For this kind of duty you had to be calm, thorough, and methodical, but it didn't hurt to be a little scared shitless, either, and he was losing that. Time to turn over the lead to someone younger, someone less jaded, who still thought maybe there was a bomb in the Neiman Marcus bag, and not a birthday present for someone's grandkid.

    Bloomington PD's bomb squad had covered the airport from the beginning, and were arguably the best in the state. Best equipment, the best men - and absolutely the most experienced, since airports were primary targets, at least in the minds of those who ran Homeland Security. Barney never got that. Why was a bomb at the airport any more frightening than a bomb in the middle of a shopping center? Funny how people assigned different levels of fear to something as silly as location. Dead is dead, after all; didn't matter much where it happened, but get a suspicious package anywhere near an airplane and everybody's heart rate doubled.

    Everybody else on the squad hated the suit - the way you could hear your breath inside the hood, and the steady beat of your pulse in your ears. Barney loved it. At home he had six kids and a wife with a high-pitched voice that hit your ears like Chinese music. He loved them all more than life, but oh, God, the sound of his own breathing was soft and restful, and he only heard it in the suit.

    He looked over at his partner, toddling spread-legged across the last road between the parking lot and the doors to baggage claim. The kid wasn't used to walking distances in the heavy suit yet, in spite of all the practice. It was different when you were breathing hard because the adrenaline was pumping and it was about a hundred degrees outside on top of it.

    Aubrey would be one of the candidates Barney would tag to take his place as lead on the squad. He was old enough to have experience under his belt, young enough to have the strength and guts, and new enough to the duty to still be scared. Perfect. And Lord knew he needed it. What kind of sadistic parents named a kid 'Aubrey,' for crying out loud? You almost had to volunteer for bomb squad duty to live down a name like that.

    They'd shut off the power grid to baggage claim, and the lower level of the terminal was dim and gloomy with only the faint light creeping through the front windows. The carousels were still and quiet, luggage jammed onto the metal fins, going nowhere. He saw backpacks and garment bags, Louis Vuitton cases butted up against cheap black nylon marked with pink duct tape, and there he saw the commingling of a diverse society that flew together, shoulder to shoulder, went to the same places, and maybe came home to a safe place in the Midwest.

    Barney didn't like this part. Airports weren't supposed to be empty and quiet. He was used to seeing passengers crowded around the spinning circles, hearing the annoying announcements spit out almost nonstop over the public address system, dodging running kids and rolling suitcases that all seemed a lot more dangerous than some innocuous box sitting unattended. The best part of his job was making sure that all came back.

    The box was against an interior wall behind carousel number three. Heavy cardboard sealed with standard strapping tape, the same size as the boxes his wife used to store old tax files. Utterly unremarkable except for one thing: in a place where every single item had ID tags and addresses and routing labels slapped all over them, this box didn't have a mark on it.

    Barney took a little deeper breath than he had so far and set up the portable X-ray. It was real-time, but the viewer was small, and a little fuzzier than the big monsters upstairs at security check-in. He took a knee and

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