one of the students were behind us. Strange as it may seem to you, I'm a popular girl.'
'Every one of the students
Cynthia Parrish smiled.
'Mr. Havel's dead,' said Danny.
Cynthia Parrish's smile faded. 'I know.'
'What do you know?'
'He had trouble remembering his table of elements,' she said. 'He's been distracted for a while.'
'How long?'
'A few months,' she said.
'You know why?'
'No,' she said. 'But something changed. Something happened. He had trouble keeping his mind on the class. Seven times he asked me to take over the class. That was fine with me and the other students. He tried to make it look as if he wanted to give me the chance to teach. But that wasn't it. He just wasn't up to doing it.'
'You want to be a teacher?' Danny asked.
'Not anymore,' she said.
6
DJ RIGGS STOOD UNDERNEATH the doorway overhang of Rhythm & Soul Music on 125th in Harlem. The streets were clear, except for the few fools trying to make a dash for who-the-hell-knew-where, most of them eventually being pelted to the nearest doorway by the rain.
DJ smiled. The rain from hell was a gift. They would expect him to make a dash for the subway station. DJ was too smart for that.
DJ was twenty-seven, a two-time loser, last time for dealing. Two undercovers had broken into his crib less than fifteen minutes ago. DJ had made it out the window and down to the street and looked back knowing that a third and final stretch upstate was only a hundred yards behind. The undercovers might have been faster than he was and in better shape, but DJ was highly motivated.
He ran until the rain and his failing breath told him running was no longer an option. Rhythm & Soul had been there, not yet opened. Might not even be open later on a day like this.
DJ didn't pray for the rain to continue. If there was a God out there, DJ was definitely not on his good side. He wasn't bad enough for help from the devil either, at least he didn't think so. Ride out the rain. Stay off the street, out of sight. They would give up.
DJ heard a cry and wasn't sure what it was at first. Then he connected the cry with what he saw shuffling along the curb. A toddler, dark skinned, in diapers, crying, arms stretching out for someone who wasn't there. DJ couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl.
He looked around, didn't see anyone. Where had this kid come from? Must have wandered off from his mother in the chaos of rain. The toddler was now about twenty feet in front of him.
Someone would come, DJ was sure. The kid was just getting wet, he wasn't hurt or anything. It was DJ who could be hurt if he tried to help. What good would he do? What could he do without getting caught?
Just wait. The baby toddled along. Then the horror hit DJ. He realized that the toddler had stepped off the curb and been knocked down by the rushing water in the gutter. The child was now being dragged along by the current toward an open drain whose mouth was definitely wide enough to welcome the child.
It was DJ's turn to cry out. He didn't even think, just ran from the doorway, watching the baby inch toward the drain, toward the sewer, toward the rats, the filth, no-doubt-about-it death.
DJ ran, almost crying, until he reached the child, right in front of the open gushing drain. He held tight to the baby's arms in spite of his slipping grip. He pulled the baby to him onto the sidewalk, felt its heart beating against his chest. When he opened his eyes he could see the two undercover cops splashing their way toward him in the middle of the street.
Leonard Giles, head of the tech lab, drove his wheelchair to the computer and keyed up the photographs Hawkes had taken of Custus. He had already run tests on the bits of wood and remnants of metal and plastic Stella had sent him.
'I think it was a bomb,' Stella had said when she called. 'More than one bomb.'
'Someone wanted to blow up a bar?' Giles said.
'Looks that way,' Stella said.
'Al Qaeda gone mad? Seeking unlikely targets to terrorize the nation?'
It wasn't funny and Stella didn't laugh. After a long silence Stella said, 'Hawkes may be trapped in a sinkhole with the bomber.'
'I'll take care of it,' Giles had said soberly.
Now he sat in front of the large computer screen. He typed in instructions and a geometric form appeared, a circle of Os and Cs with six H3Cs around them.
TATP, triacetone triperoxide, the explosive used in the London subway bombings, found in the shoe of Richard Reid, favored by Hamas, was highly unstable. The bomb maker, Giles knew, was almost as likely to blow himself up making it as he was to finish and deliver it. At least two bomb makers in Ireland had been victims of their own TATP bombs and more than forty bomb makers in Gaza and the West Bank had lost their lives to the unstable explosive.
TATP can be made of common household items such as drain cleaner, hydrogen peroxide and acetone.
Giles downloaded and saved the information, then inserted a CD. The information on the CD had been sent as an attachment from London and had been received less than half an hour ago. On the screen appeared a photograph of a man, his shirt off, his hair tousled, his left eye blackened. His chest was a jungle of hair parted by rivulets of scars, some white, some red, some ridged. The man's left hand was missing. Under the photograph of the man was information on the kind of explosive that had caused the scars. Next to the screen showing the CD were photographs Hawkes had taken of Custus. On the screen, the bare-chested Custus now appeared next to the redheaded man with one arm.
Giles moved slowly through the photographs on the CD that had been sent from London. He had no trouble finding a match for the scars, actually several matches. Giles concluded that the man in the pit with Hawkes was a survivor of at least four different kinds of bomb, including nitroglycerin and TATP.
'Definitely,' Lindsay said.
She and Danny were standing in the laboratory with the blood-soaked heads Lindsay had been testing. One head was currently in almost the same position in which they had found Alvin Havel.
Lindsay, dissatisfied with commercial artificial blood, had developed her own formula that she constantly changed as she searched for the perfect texture and color.
Danny examined the blood splatters, looked at the crime scene photographs she had handed him and said, 'Right.'
'Blow to the neck came when he was standing, head up,' she said. 'Blow to the eye came when his head was on the desk.'
'When he was dead,' said Danny.
'Dead at least ten minutes. Sid agrees. No blood splatter from the eye wound. He was already dead.'
'And your explanation?'
'One of those kids killed Havel, then waited around before stabbing him in the eye and leaving.'
'Why?' he asked.
