THE DAY WAS FINE, the sun a huge golden ball in a blue sky that warmed the earth to perfect picnic temperature, and Horatio and Marisol took advantage of the opportunity to get out of town. They ate on a blanket spread out on a grassy, gentle slope that angled down toward a swiftly flowing river. On the river’s far side, sunlight spiked down through the branches of a dense orange grove, the trees arranged in careful rows.
Their food was Cuban, spicy and rich, and they ate their fill of it before turning their attentions to each other. Marisol tucked plates and utensils and serving containers back into the big picnic basket she had brought, because an unexpected breeze was blowing up out of the east, off the unseen ocean. When everything was put away and the breeze tugged at the edges of the blanket and at their clothing, they undressed and made love where they had so recently eaten, their bodies fitting together perfectly, puzzle pieces that were always meant to be joined as one.
Afterward they lingered, enjoying the sun on their flesh, until Marisol announced that she had to be going. Horatio tried to protest, but she insisted, dressing quickly. She was starting to put on a hat Horatio didn’t remember having seen before, straw with a wide brim and a patterned sash around the crown, when the wind snatched it from her hands and sailed it out over the water.
Horatio was tugging on his own clothes, although they seemed to fight him, his feet catching in his pants, shirt buttons refusing to cooperate, when Marisol waded into the river after the hat. She said something to him that he couldn’t hear, her words snatched away by the increasingly furious wind, and he started toward her, wrestling with the last of his buttons. He was almost to the riverbank when the water suddenly became a whirlpool, raging around her, drawing her down, down…
The ringing of his bedside phone was a relief. Horatio sat upright in his bed, sweat running off him in sheets, and grabbed the receiver. “Horatio Caine,” he said. The digital clock by his bed read 4:11.
“Horatio, it’s Frank.” Frank Tripp. Horatio would have known that accent anywhere. “There’s been an explosion. A doctor’s house in the Grove.”
Horatio was instantly alert, his bad dream fading under the weight of someone else’s real-life tragedy. “Victims?”
“At least a couple, but it’s still hot and we haven’t really been able to get inside yet for any extended searches. Doctor Greggs lives there with his wife and seven-year-old daughter.”
Horatio remembered the FBI agent who Frank had introduced him to. “Frank, does this look like the work of that bomber Special Agent Asher is after? The Baby Boomer?”
“I don’t see how. This doctor has never performed an abortion in his life, and he doesn’t work at a clinic that performs them. He’s a neurologist, with neurosurgical credentials at Dade Memorial. Or he was—I’m pretty sure he’s one of the crispy corpses inside.”
“A brain surgeon? Frank, preserve the scene. I’m on my way.”
Doctor Marc Greggs and his family lived on Devon Road, just a couple of blocks inland from the mission-style, coral-rock Plymouth Congregational Church. Coconut Grove had been the first European settlement in south Florida, and the residents liked to try to preserve elements of that past. The church dated to 1917, which for Miami was ancient. Coconut Grove had tried to remain independent of Miami, but the growing metropolis had annexed it in 1925. Ever since, dwellers in the Grove had subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—resented the big city and worked to maintain the ambiance of their small, historic neighborhood.
The Greggs place had been no different. It had been built of wood and stone and surrounded by a jungle’s worth of native plants.
That was before a massive explosion, and the resulting fire, turned it into charred, twisted wreckage.
Horatio had called his team from the road, hesitant to wake them after a busy day but knowing he would need all hands on deck to process the scene. When he reached Devon Road, it was easy to see where the Greggs house was, marked by bomb squad vans, fire trucks, radio cars, ambulances, press, and other vehicles jamming the street. He parked two blocks from the house, almost in front of the old church, and hustled to the scene. Calleigh and Eric had arrived before him.
Calleigh saw him coming and met him as he approached. “Horatio, it’s pretty bad here.”
“I can see that, Calleigh. Who’s in charge?” No CSIs were allowed onto a bombing scene until it had been cleared by the bomb squad. The officer who ran the scene for that squad was called the bomb-scene manager, a position Horatio had held many times during his years on the squad. Only when the scene manager had determined to his satisfaction that no more explosives were hidden inside would anyone else be let in.
“Jorge Ortiz.”
“He’s a good man.” With a practiced eye, Horatio scanned the perimeter Ortiz had set. Ortiz would have determined where the probable seat of detonation was, measured how far debris was thrown from there, then set the perimeter line to enclose a space half again as large.
In the brilliant glow of floodlights set up on stanchions and powered by noisy generators, Horatio could get a sense of the damage. The front wall of the house was almost completely demolished, including what appeared, from the glass strewn everywhere, to be many large windows. It looked like the wall had been peeled away, as if someone had been making a doll’s house with one wall missing so a child could reach inside. The second floor of the two-story house sagged precariously where a supporting pillar had been blown out from beneath it, and most of the upstairs furnishings, at least from the rooms Horatio could see, had tumbled down onto the ground floor. Timbers and stones had been hurled into the street, and the front yard, with its thick growth, looked like a madman’s storage area for used building materials.
“This was quite a blast, wasn’t it?” he asked, mostly of himself.
“It looks that way.” Calleigh had pulled herself together well for the middle of the night, dressing in typical business attire—a blue suit with a striped, V-neck blouse and high-heeled shoes, but she still looked sleepy. She had probably stayed up late catching up with Nina, not expecting a call-out at four-thirty. “Not that I have anywhere near your experience with such things.”
He ignored the comment. “How’s Nina?”
“She seems good. A little anxious, maybe, but you know.”
“That’s to be expected.” They kept walking, and in a moment reached the tape line, where a uniformed officer handed Horatio a clipboard with the sign-in sheet. He signed it and passed beneath the tape, joining Eric and Frank on the other side. The smells of burned wood and plastic and wire and flesh were everywhere, inescapable.
“Sorry to roust you,” Frank said when he saw Horatio.
“Is there any news on Doctor Greggs and his family, Frank?”
“Not yet. Bomb squad guys say there are bodies inside, but no one’s been able to ID ’em.”
“How much longer?”
“Fire was controlled in a hurry, so that’s not a concern. Last time I talked to Jorge he seemed to think they were almost done. Can’t be too much longer now.”
“All right,” Horatio said. He looked down the street and saw a lone figure approaching the perimeter with a crime scene kit in his hand. “And here comes Mister Wolfe. The gang’s all here.”
By the time Ryan reached the others, Jorge Ortiz had emerged from the wreckage of the house, walking awkwardly in his heavy protective suit. He took off his helmet, wiped sweat from his brow, and showed Horatio a grim smile. He wore a thick handlebar mustache, and his eyes were gray and clear. “Horatio,” he said. “Place is clear.”
“Thank you, Jorge. Anything we should know?”
“Just be careful. Fire didn’t spread far, but it’s hot. Stairs are about gone, and it’s pretty dicey in there.”
“Okay. What about the Greggs family?”
“No one came out of that house after the explosion,” Ortiz said. “I saw some DBs, but I don’t know who’s who.”
“That, Jorge,” Horatio said, “is something that we’ll find out.”
Horatio went in first.
Even though Jorge Ortiz had given the all-clear, he didn’t trust bomb scenes or bombers. His time on the bomb squad had taught him more than he had ever hoped to know about what explosions and fire could do to the human body—not to mention what he had learned about the powerful, twisted forces that drove those who set the bombs. One thing bombers liked to do was to set explosive devices in series, so that the people investigating the first blast would be threatened by another one. Charlie Berringer, a former bomb squad compatriot who had turned bomber and who killed Horatio’s squad mentor Al Humphreys, had used that technique.
Horatio didn’t have any special sixth sense that would let him smell a device that the squad had missed, and the equipment he could use was the same the squad had no doubt already employed. All he had was an unformed hope that if someone was watching the scene (and arsonists and bombers were among the most likely people to do so—they notoriously loved standing among the onlookers at their own crime scenes), he would detonate the second one while Horatio was alone in the house, sparing those who worked for him. He thought of his team as his family, and losing members, as he had lost Tim Speedle, was a loss that was too painful to even think about.
The floor creaked under his weight. Inside—despite the fact that the wall had been opened up like a sardine can lid—the bitter odor was worse, stronger, intensified by the water the fire department had used to quench the fire. He could taste wet burned wood, as if he’d taken a big bite of ash. Using water to put out the fire would make the collection of evidence even more difficult. He was walking through a thick soup of ash and debris, in which vital clues could be floating away from their points of origin at every second.
The power of the blast was even more evident in here than it had been outside. A copper pipe that had obviously run straight down from the second floor through an interior wall had been bent at an almost ninety-degree angle, and the end that had been sheared off had penetrated a dense wooden beam. Everything in the house that hadn’t been thrown clear or splintered had been bent away from the seat of detonation by the explosion’s shock wave: aluminum window frames, a light fixture suspended from the ceiling, even a brick fireplace.
Outside the house, Ryan had started taking pictures. Horatio took a deep breath, figured the place was as safe as it was likely to be, and waved his team inside.
“We do a full walk-through first,” he said when they joined him. “We’re looking for any obvious evidence. Fragments of the bomb casing, parts of the timer—I think we have to assume at this point that it was a timed device, or remotely detonated, and not set off from inside the house. Ryan, keep that camera handy.”
Ryan hadn’t stopped taking pictures; capturing every foot of the scene would be critical later. “You bet, H.”
“Watch your step, everyone,” Horatio added.
“It’s hard to see through the muck, and we don’t want to break anything.”
They lined up and walked slowly, not raising their feet up out of the layer of soup on the floor. Their shoes would never survive. They had to cover every inch of the ground floor, which was where the device had gone off—apparently against the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. The living room faced toward the street, which was why the blast had mostly affected the front of the house. Every few steps, one of them would call a halt and would bag some bit of plastic or metal—in one case a spring, in another a piece of a circuit board—that might have been part of the bomb.
Or part of a home computer or a microwave oven. They couldn’t know until they got it all back to the lab and studied it more closely.
They found the first body beside what remained of the wooden interior staircase. It was badly charred, its skin blackened, features vague, as if melted off, beneath the char, but it appeared to be an adult. Its hair was gone. Horatio guessed male but he couldn’t be certain. The body was drawn into a tight fetal position, legs and arms flexed, fists up under the chin. “Classic pugilistic position,” Calleigh said.
“That’s right, Calleigh,” Horatio agreed. “Indicating extreme heat. Fire dehydrated the muscles, causing them to contract and leaving the victim looking like he or she is curled up in pain.”
“Or ready for a boxing match,” Eric added.
Horatio looked at the staircase. Bodies could have fallen from upstairs through the hole blown in the bedroom floor over the living room, but not this one. This person had tried to get to the stairs, possibly to escape. Or maybe this person had heard something downstairs and was going to investigate when the blast went off, knocking him down the stairs, and he landed where the fire could sweep over him. “Definitely ready for a fight,” Horatio said.
“Severe alligatoring of the wood, too,” Ryan pointed out. He indicated the scaled, alligator-skin-like appearance of the burned staircase wood, where it had taken on a checkered aspect from the heat. “Do you think an accelerant was used in addition to the blast?”
“We’ll have to find that out, won’t we?” Horatio said. He kept moving, and the others joined him.
“This wasn’t a homemade explosive, was it?” Ryan asked when they had completed the initial sweep.
“That depends on what kind of home you come from, I suppose,” Horatio said. “But it wasn’t a Molotov cocktail or gunpowder or a fertilizer and gasoline bomb, no. Not something that could be brewed up in your average kitchen. We’ll have to do some tests, but it looks like high explosives to me.”
He set the other members of the team to work scooping debris out of the muck and into small piles, to determine if any bits of evidence had been missed the first time through. He went to the seat of the blast, which was where any traces of the explosive were most likely to be found. Although the jagged bits of casing had already been picked up, he thought the explosive device had probably been put on the floor, hidden behind a piece of furniture, a chair or table. Something big enough to disguise its presence but not so big that it would interfere with the blast. Splintered wood backed up his theory, but there wasn’t enough of it left to determine what the wood might have once been part of.
In a relatively clean spot, he opened his crime scene kit and took out his spot-test kit, a stainless steel box about the size of a small cosmetics case. He opened it to reveal three bottles of reagent, a UV lamp and charger, and the necessary supplies and utensils: test tubes, plastic bags, and the like.
Picking what seemed a likely section of the scorched, cratered floor close to where the blast had destroyed what the bomb had been sitting on, Horatio turned on the UV light. He swiped a sheet of filter paper against the floor, then blew off the excess dust. There were circles marked on the filter paper. Setting the filter paper down on a paper towel, he took out the first bottle of reagent. With a dropper, he put a drop of the first reagent in one of the circles and waited. The fluid spread throughout the circle and a little over its borders, but the paper didn’t change color. That ruled out TNT as the explosive, which would have shown purple or black under the UV. A drop from the second bottle went into another circle. This one might not react as immediately, so he went ahead with the third bottle.
As a control, while those drops dried a little, he repeated the process on another sheet of filter paper, which had not been wiped on the floor.
When he finished that, he checked the first sheet again. The third circle remained blank, but the second one showed blue-black.
“Interesting,” he said aloud, but mostly to himself.
“What’d you get, H?” Eric asked from across the room.
“Reagent B reacts.”
“Which means RDX or HMX,” a new voice said.
“The Baby Boomer always uses C-4.”
Horatio looked up to see Special Agent Wendell Asher walking toward him, taking care not to contaminate the scene. “And C-4 contains RDX, so we have a possible match,” Horatio said. “We’ll get some samples back to the lab and use gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to find out for sure if it’s C-4.”
“Sounds good,” Asher said. “What else have you got so far?”
Horatio described what they had found, which admittedly wasn’t much. As he spoke, Asher nodded and interjected a few questions. When Horatio finished, Asher said, “Sure sounds like our guy. Using a timed device, using C-4, timing it to detonate in a home while the victims are asleep—those are all part of his signature.”
“Excuse me, Horatio,” Calleigh said. “We’re going to take a look upstairs.”
“Just be very careful, Calleigh. The staircase and floors are treacherous.”
“Will do.”
Horatio turned his attention back to the FBI agent. “I don’t know much about your suspect, Special Agent Asher. But I know evidence, and we’ll find whatever’s here. You’ll get our full report when it’s ready. For now, I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of my crime scene, all right?”
Asher raised his hands defensively and showed an awkward grin. “Absolutely, Lieutenant Caine. No problem at all. I’m around if you need me, but otherwise I’m the invisible man. Okay?”
“That, sir, will be perfect. Are you working on the hotels and motels and car rental agencies? It would be good if we can find this guy before he strikes again.”
“Working on it, Lieutenant. In fact, I’ve got some places to check out right now.”
Horatio watched as the agent backed away, then turned and walked out along the same path he had taken in. Horatio didn’t have much use for FBI agents in general, but at least this guy seemed to know what he was doing. He just didn’t like anyone on his scenes except his own people, when possible, to reduce the possibility of anyone compromising evidence.
“H!” Eric called from the staircase. Horatio was sealing the filter papers into bags to preserve them, but he looked up at the sound of Eric’s voice. “We’ve got two bodies upstairs. One of them’s a child. We’ve cleared all the rooms, so we’re looking at three vics total.”
“Thanks, Eric.” The victims were probably Marc Greggs, his wife, and their daughter, but their identities would have to be confirmed at the lab.
Horatio called over the EMTs and told them where the bodies could be found. “Take care with them,” he said. “And be sure they’re all thoroughly fluoroscoped. There might be bomb fragments inside them, and we’ll need those.”
As the EMTs went to work, a wave of sadness washed over Horatio, especially for the child. Whatever her parents may or may not have done to attract the attention of a murderer, certainly she had been uninvolved.
That was the trouble with bombers and arsonists, though. Of every breed of killer, they were the least concerned about collateral damage. They didn’t care who was murdered in their attempts to sow destruction and fear.
Horatio cared, though. He was more determined than ever to get this guy, and to get him soon.