“Hummer matches your face,” he said, holding on to the keys. “You look like the Terminator on one of his worst days.”
Frank held out his hand. “I don’t want to be in anything that looks like my face.”
Richardson lofted the keys, and in an easy motion, Frank snagged them out of midair.
“Thanks, John.” Frank put on his dark glasses, and smiled. “I’ll be back.”
Hummer might have been fun, Frank thought as he made his way across the Fourteenth Street bridge. He switched on the radio and there was Joe Madison. As he expected, Madison was waist deep in yesterday’s bombing, grilling a hapless guest from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Sorry, Joe.
The next preset put him in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Can’t Take Love for Granted.” Carpenter’s Marlboro-and-Jack-Daniel’s throatiness came out warm and sexy, and he felt his tension ease as Kate’s smile came to mind.
At Reagan National, Frank hurried past newsstands whose papers carried photos of his bomb-blasted car side by side with file shots of Leon Janowitz. He got to the US Airways gate just as the doors were opening.
Kate was among the first passengers off the shuttle. Catching sight of Frank, she stopped momentarily, obviously shaken, then rushed to him. She dropped her carry-on bag and hugged him, then, feeling him wince, stood back, eyes moist, and cupped his chin in her hand.
“You said a couple of scratches.”
“Looks worse than it is. I was lucky. Leon wasn’t.”
She held him at arm’s length, eyes going over his face.
“Frank,” she whispered, “it was…” As though suddenly realizing how near to the brink they had stood, and how deep the abyss, she shuddered. A single tear ran down her cheek. “… it was so damn close.”
She leaned forward and kissed him.
Five minutes later, they were driving north on the parkway.
“Favor?” Frank asked.
“Not here,” Kate said.
He reached into his shirt pocket for what he’d started thinking of as Janowitz’s envelope. He passed it to her.
She opened it. “Looks like a safe-deposit-box key.”
“It is. From Kevin Gentry’s office files. I want to see what’s inside. We need a court order or something?”
“Unh-hunh. You’ll want it yesterday?”
“That’d be nice.”
“How about today? Even that’ll be a push, getting a judge on a Saturday.”
Frank swung off the parkway onto the ramp to the Fourteenth Street bridge and back into the District. He headed toward Kate’s office.
“Have to do.”
“What do I get in exchange?”
Frank glanced over and grinned, and for the first time that day he felt pretty damn good.
It was an improvised device employing a sodium perchlorate explosive.” Renfro Calkins danced a laser pointer over the poster-size enlargement of what had been the front seat of Frank’s car.
At the head of the conference table, Seth Tompkins raised a hand.
“Improvised, Mr. Calkins… how?”
“Relatively simple, Your Honor,” Calkins told the mayor. Around the table with him were Chief Noah Day, Randolph Emerson, Frank, and Jose.
“You can do it in a bathroom or kitchen. Take HTH, a common swimming pool chlorinating compound, boil it along with table salt. Run the mixture through a couple of filtering processes and you come up with sodium perchlorate crystals. Grind the crystals, then mix with petroleum jelly… Vaseline… and you’ve got a very dandy plastique explosive.”
Calkins nodded toward Frank. “Your batch, Frank, was mixed with aluminum powder… obtainable at any paint store… that increased the explosive power, which also accounted for the bright flash you saw.”
“How big was it?” Tompkins asked.
“Not more than a pound of explosive,” Calkins answered, “perhaps even less.”
Tompkins’s eyes widened. “That small?”
“Enough if you know what you’re doing. The explosive was formed into a shaped charge, much like a cone,” Calkins explained. “The wide end was pointed toward the door and packed with lead pellets. Strictly an antipersonnel weapon. Officer Janowitz wasn’t killed, because the driver’s-side door shielded him from the pellets.”
“So much for the device,” Emerson said. “Any evidence of the origins?”
Calkins made eye contact with Frank, then with Emerson. “The design is one favored by bombmakers in the drug trade.”
Frank knew what was coming.
“Colombian?” Emerson asked.
Persistent if nothing else, Randolph, Frank wanted to say. Instead, he asked, “Forensics, R.C.?”
“The bombmaker was a local.”
“How’d you get that?” Emerson asked.
Calkins went to the easel, reached behind the photo enlargement of Frank’s car, and brought out another enlargement, of an irregular-shaped orange and black object. He settled the photo on the easel and flashed the laser pointer over a series of numbers apparently impressed into the surface.
“The bomb’s firing mechanism had its own power source,” he said. “A nine-volt Duracell battery. We found this fragment. Note here”-the bright red laser dot danced across the figures-“these are the manufacturer’s lot numbers. Duracell records the regional distributors to whom each lot is shipped.”
Emerson frowned. “Yes?”
“We traced this lot to a distributor in Columbus, Ohio. The distributor’s records show that it was broken into three separate shipments to retailers. One to a Home Depot in Montgomery, Alabama, and another to a Lowe’s in Lexington, Kentucky, and a third… here in the District. The Home Depot over in Northeast.”
The door to Tompkins’s left opened, and an assistant slipped in and handed him a folded note.
Tompkins picked his reading glasses up off the conference table. He took his time when reading the note, then glanced around the table.
“A summons,” he said, waving the paper. “The Honorable Frederick Rhinelander requests my presence in his office Monday morning.”
Calkins, sensing his time onstage was over, folded his easel and began putting away his charts. Frank caught Emerson nudging Chief Day’s elbow. Day sat without expression.
Emerson hesitated, then jumped in. “You know what he’s going to want, Your Honor.”
Tompkins raised an eyebrow. “Besides my head?” After enjoying Emerson’s discomfort, he continued. “I suspect, Captain Emerson, he’s going to put the squeeze on me to get this case solved.”
Emerson nodded energetically. “I think you’re right, Your Honor.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Tompkins said dryly. His sarcasm sailed over Emerson’s head.
“Who do you want to go with you?” Emerson asked with the same suck-up enthusiasm.
“Who do you suggest, Captain?”
“Well,” Emerson said, all businesslike, “myself… ah… Chief Day, of course. Perhaps Susan Liberman, our congressional relations specialist…”
“Quite an entourage, Captain,” Tompkins said as he got up. “I don’t think so.” He got an amused look and pointed down the table to Frank and Jose. “I think these two gentlemen will be sufficient.”
Jose looked down the block. Both sides of the street had been restricted to parking for official vehicles.
“We got wheels?”
“Yeah… blue Crown Vic over there.” Frank pointed. “Richardson wanted to give us a confiscated Hummer.”
“And you didn’t take it? Shit, Frank, our chance to get a luxury assault vehicle and you turn it down?” Jose
