“What have we got?” she asked the lieutenant in charge, a man named Jim Smith. She flipped her ID and Black did the same.
Smith inspected them both carefully before replying. “Security guard blown to pieces. Local man. A good man.” He shook his head, and West was reminded of the slightly slower pace of life on the island, she could imagine the lieutenant with a toothpick in his mouth, one that he kept there the whole day.
“Mind if we take a look?”
A hesitation. Then a nod, and he led the way, through snow that was messed up from a hundred footprints from the parking lot of the compound, towards the buildings.
“They tell me there’s been a string of these?” the Lieutenant asked.
“This’ll be the seventh,” Black replied. “If it’s our guy.”
“And who is your guy?”
“We don’t know. We assume he’s some wacko environmentalist nutjob, but he’s careful, so we don’t actually know.”
“So why do you think it’s him?”
“It’s a chemical plant. It’s an attack with no warning and no obvious motive. The bomb was in a backpack, and you said there were large pieces of silver metal found around the blast?”
“Yeah, and some embedded in the guard.”
“Stainless steel?”
“Right. You have any idea what they are?”
“We have a pretty good idea.”
The lieutenant stopped suddenly.
“And you wanna share that information, Special Agent?”
“They’re pieces of pressure cooker,” West interrupted, knowing how her partner would answer this. The lieutenant turned to her.
“What?”
“A steel pressure cooker. This guy likes to pack his bomb materials inside them. It initially contains the explosion, which means when it finally goes, there’s more energy expended and more damage.”
The lieutenant frowned.
“You remember the Oklahoma bombing? Same deal. Probably where he got the idea from.”
Lieutenant Smith considered Black’s interruption, still without moving.
“He mean to kill with it?”
West hesitated. “He hasn’t so far. He’s gone after low value buildings with minimal security, and always after hours, when there’s no workforce on the sites. He doesn’t even seem to want to cause too much damage, judging by where he’s put the bombs.”
“Doesn’t make any difference though,” Black said. “If he meant to kill or didn’t. He set a bomb and blew a guy to pieces. That’s still murder.”
Smith looked to Black, and then back to West. The action gave her an air of authority and both men waited for what she said next.
“There’s footprints everywhere, do we have a record of what was here before you guys turned up?”
“There were two guards on duty last night. Keith Waterhouse – he’s the guy who died – and a younger guy named Miguel Lopez. Lopez says that Waterhouse reported he was following a single track of footprints. He said they were small. But it kept snowing after that which covered them over. Plus then Lopez freaked out and ran around like a madman. We’ve got photos of the ground, but it was a mess.”
“He said they were small?” West looked at Black, and her eyebrows raised.
“But nothing we can get a cast from?”
“Everything’s covered in snow.”
“How about CCTV? Anything captured?”
“We’ve got boys looking over it now, but the compound manager – that’s a woman named Claire Watson – she says the signs make a big thing of it, but they don’t really have much. Nothing here to protect.”
They arrived at the dead security guard’s truck, the door still waiting open as if he might leap back in and continue his rounds. The police had made their own path through the snow, leaving the original tracks still visible, but their outlines were now softened by the covering of white, which had smoothed out any sharp edges. They could have been made by anyone – or anything. The prints connected the fence, where in the daylight a large hole was easily visible, and the largest building in the compound.
“Tracks that way lead through the fence and to a depression where a vehicle was parked. Then tyre tracks go back to the main road. Everything covered by snow though. We can’t get anything useful.”
“And the other way?”
“Where the bomb went off. It’s kinda grim.”
He turned, and led them that way, following the line of police footprints towards a large low building. The entrance porch was obviously damaged, parts of it hung down limply, and several windows were shattered. The snow around here looked odd, flattened and cleared in part, and trampled down in others. There were at least six people working, wearing the blue and white protective gear of forensic experts.
“You wanna get any closer, you’ll have to suit up.”
West watched for a while, taking in the scene, and trying to reconstruct in her mind how it must have happened. It wasn’t too different from the other bombing sites she’d visited, and the thought of what would follow, a fruitless search through the debris – recovering parts of the bomb, but finding they’d been built to a recipe freely available on the internet, and carefully, with no trace of identifying material anywhere – depressed her.
“No, it’s alright. But I’d like to speak to the manager you mentioned. Claire something?”
“Watson. Sure. She’s over by the control room.” He pointed towards another building, which had its lights on. “Go right on in, I’ll be over in a minute.”
Black and West walked across and opened the door, to find a woman in her forties just putting down her cell phone.
“Claire Watson? I’m Special Agent Jessica West, this is Special Agent Jason Black.”
The woman nodded. She looked exhausted. “The police said you were coming. Said there’s been other attacks like this one.”
“That’s only a possibility at this stage,” West cautioned. “May we ask you a few questions?”
Watson nodded a second time, eyeing a low sofa in the reception area.
“You look tired. Let’s take a seat. Early start for all of us.”
Before she sat, Watson found a beaker of coffee, and emptied it into three cardboard cups. It tasted bitter, but the steam rising up and
