Chuck Billings had been right. He flashed his badge, told the two FBI agents at the front that Justin was with him, then they stepped inside. And despite the extensive cleanup, Justin almost burst into tears when he walked into the building that had, just a few days ago, been Harper’s Restaurant. Justin had seen death and death didn’t frighten him. But the bombed-out restaurant did frighten him. It sent a deep chill throughout his entire body and filled him up with sadness. This was much worse than being surrounded by death. It was as if the room they were standing in was filled with ghosts.
“Yeah,” Billings said, looking at Justin’s expression. “A bomb site can be pretty overwhelming.”
Justin took a deep breath, swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to show me?”
“I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for,” Billings explained, “so I’m just going to show you what happened, or what I can pretty much deduce happened. Things we’ve picked up from surviving witnesses, from people who saw the bomber on his way to the restaurant, from bomb fragments, a few other pieces of physical evidence.” He was all business now, he didn’t even wait for Justin to respond. He launched into his recitation. And Justin thought it was just that: this was something Chuck Billings had been practicing.
“Okay,” Billings said. “We believe the guy walked here from several blocks away. Maybe as many as eight or ten.”
“Where was he before that?”
“Let me go through this, Jay. Hold your questions until after I’m done. But remember ’em. You’ll see why when I’m finished.” Justin nodded and Billings continued. “What we know for sure is that our guy walked in the door carrying a briefcase. That was the bomb. He talked to the hostess, went to a specific table”-Billings walked to a spot in the restaurant, stood there as if trying to visualize the room intact-“right about here. We narrowed it down to four possible tables. Our job is really to determine three things: the quality of the explosive, the type of explosive, and the location of the blast. So we got the location. This baby went off right here, give or take a couple of feet.”
Billings walked away from the spot, as if it were dangerous to stand on it for too long. “Okay, we know he talks to someone at the table, leaves the briefcase on the floor next to the guy he’s talking to. Takes a couple of steps away, like he’s walking out of the restaurant, his cell phone rings.”
“His cell phone rang?”
“Yeah. Hold on. You got a pen and paper? Write down your questions if you have to, but lemme go through the whole thing.”
“Go ahead. I don’t need a pen. I’ll remember.”
“His cell phone rings,” Billings repeated. “And then. . boom.” The head of the Providence PD bomb squad shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, as if he were trying to block the sound of the explosion. “You know anything about explosions?”
“Am I allowed to interrupt you with an answer?”
“Don’t be a wiseass.”
“No,” Justin said. “I don’t know anything about explosions except they’re loud and they kill people.”
“Look around you. You see this room?” When Justin nodded, Billings made a circle in the air with his left hand. “All right,” he said, indicating the invisible circle. “This is water. You smack your hand down right in the middle of it, you get a depression. Can you picture that?” Justin nodded again. “Think of the water as the atmosphere. The atmosphere in this room. When a bomb goes off, the blast scatters the atmosphere the way your hand scatters the water when you smack it. It pushes it away. That’s the initial effect of an explosion. It pushes everything away. Blows the windows into the street, sends tables flying, all that other shit. But nature abhors a vacuum, as we know from our sixth-grade science class, so there’s a negative pressure that
“Yeah. I think my friend might want to know that.”
“It was a hell of a bomb. Like I said, about three pounds. They used Semtex. It’s an ex-Soviet bloc explosive. They still make it. The Czechs still make it, too. Not so easy to smuggle in, but it can be done. It’s basically the equivalent of our C4. Al Qaeda uses it. So do the Colombian cartels. Used to be big with the IRA, but I guess they’ve cleaned up their act. Anyway. . the bomb went off right over there. Anything within twenty feet, forget it. The primary fragmentation on this was brutal.”
“Sorry, you have to explain that.”
“Primary fragmentation? That’s pieces of the bomb that are intended to hurt. You read about it all the time when stuff goes off in the Middle East. If it’s a pipe bomb, they’ll stuff the pipe with rocks or glass or nails. The explosion drives those things outward, scatters them. They’re like mini-missiles. They’ll rip through just about anything-walls, flesh, bone.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah. Know what our genius used here?” Billings didn’t wait for an answer. He walked over to the nearest wall and pointed to a small object embedded in it. When Justin squinted, not sure what he was looking at, Billings pulled the fragment out of the plaster and held it in the palm of his hand.”
“A jack?” Justin asked. “A kid’s toy?”
“Pretty fuckin’ deadly kid’s toy when it’s packed into three pounds of explosives. It’s the perfect thing. Doesn’t matter which direction it’s facing, there’s a little spike on every surface. They’re small enough, you can squeeze a shitload of them into the container, and the more there are, the more damage can be done. These things were flying at people at about two thousand feet per second.”
“Jesus, Chuck. Who the hell would think of that? Jacks. .”
“Really pretty brilliant. In a sick kind of way. And if this isn’t a one-time thing, he’s gonna use ’em again, I guarantee you. It’s what I started to tell you before. Bombers can’t resist their little signatures on their work. Everybody’s got a different one. When you know what they are, it’s pretty much as defining as fingerprints. And this is one of the most distinctive signatures I’ve ever seen.”
“You ever seen it before?”
“Never even heard of anyone using jacks.”
“Would you?”
“Jay, I told you I was obsessed with this kind of thing, right? You know what the hell I do with my free time?”
“Do I want to know?”
“I’m on the weirdest fucking Internet bomb sites, shit you can’t even imagine. I’m on crackpot blogs about explosives. Some psycho blows up a cat somewhere in Kansas, I’m looking into it, checking out the signature. It’s why they called me in here.”
“All right. So you’ve got a signature: jacks. And they did a lot of damage. What’s next?”
“Well, that’s just the primary fragmentation. You’ve still got a secondary. Like all the window glass that was in this place. The glassware, silverware, all that stuff. That stuff was slicing the shit out of everything and everybody. The secondary fragmentation was devastating. What you have to remember is that it’s not like in a movie. A bomb isn’t static. There’s a huge amount of bleeding. The lights are out, it’s smoky, the noise is literally deafening, it’s almost impossible to hear anything. Here, it was particularly bad because it was a restaurant. So it didn’t just start a fire, there were live electrical lines that went down, there were gas and water leaks. When the fire hit the gas, that was worse than the initial explosion. It must have been a fucking nightmare. The only thing I can tell you that might help your friend. . according to the seating charts, which we got off the computer, her husband was about eight feet from the blast. He wouldn’t have felt a thing. Some comfort, huh?”
“I don’t know what to say to all this, Chuck.”
“You want to indulge me a minute, Jay? Lemme guess the questions you’ve been storing up.”
“Go for it.”
