JESUS SHOWED THEM the way to the backyard, where he said the gardener had been working last time he had seen him. Jesus’s face was deeply lined, his hair no more than a few dark strands combed across his scalp, but his eyes were lively and bright even though he was deeply afraid.
Some gardening tools had been abandoned near a flower bed, but the person who had left them there was nowhere in sight. Horatio scanned in every direction, then made a decision. “Here’s what I need you to do, Mister Wolfe. Go back inside and quietly get everyone out the front door, and then a thousand feet away from the house. Not an inch less, all right?”
“Got it,” Ryan said. Without another word he took Jesus and hurried back into the house.
Horatio followed as far as the back door.
From there he was on his own.
He didn’t think the bomber would have been able to plant anything in the library, since Carmen Ibanez had clearly been there for some time sipping coffee and reading.
That only left the entire rest of the house, which had somewhere north of five thousand square feet of floor space and a layout only slightly less confusing than the schematics for a space shuttle.
From what Asher had said—and from his own limited experience of the Baby Boomer—the man would be most likely to plant his device near Carmen’s bedroom. She was the target, not her staff. He should have had Jesus show him where her bedroom was, but he didn’t want any extraneous bystanders in the house an instant longer than absolutely necessary.
The house had two stories, and he was sure the main bedroom would be upstairs, so that narrowed things down. Gun in hand, Horatio crossed from room to room, kitchen to formal dining room to living room to home theater, until he found a staircase that wound up. He climbed carefully, making sure to keep his SIG Sauer at eye level as he ascended in case the Boomer was waiting for him.
At the top, the stairs fed into a kind of star-shaped foyer, with hallways branching off in three different directions. Horatio listened but heard nothing except bird sounds and the distant rumble of a car on a roadway. The floor here was thickly carpeted, but the passage of many feet had crushed the pile enough so that there was no way of telling which hall had been traveled most recently.
He decided to try the one that led to the east. Since the landscaping had clearly been designed to limit sun from the western exposure, he doubted if the master suite would face the west. More likely, it would look east, toward the sunrise and the ocean.
He glanced into each room as he passed, turning doorknobs silently, opening them only far enough to determine if they appeared to be a master bedroom.
The third door was the one.
And when he opened that door, a flash of movement inside convinced him that he’d made the right choice.
“Police!” Horatio shouted. “Freeze!”
The person who had been in the room, squatting near the big four-poster bed, darted through another doorway. As he went, he whipped a handgun out and fired a wild shot that slammed into the wall near the doorjamb. Too close for comfort, considering he had taken no time to aim. Horatio squeezed off a shot in return, but the target was gone by the time his round plowed into the far wall.
All Horatio had seen was a dark blur, with no distinguishing characteristics at all. He thought it was an adult male, but that was really more of a sensory impression than any kind of certainty.
“I’m coming in,” Horatio said. “I’m armed, and there are more officers outside. You’re trapped, so it’s time for you to surrender before someone gets hurt.”
The man inside didn’t respond. Horatio walked far enough into the bedroom to see that the intruder had ducked into a dressing alcove as big as Horatio’s entire office back at the crime lab. Luxurious women’s clothing hung everywhere, along the walls and from floor racks, and a dressing table with an illuminated mirror sat against one wall.
But he couldn’t see the man who had run this way. He checked below the hanging clothes, looking for legs. His heart pounded, but the weapon was steady in his hand.
With another step closer, he could see that the alcove led into a bathroom, full of gleaming tile and gold fixtures. Firing a shot in there would risk ricochets, but he would do it if he had to. He just had to make sure he didn’t miss.
He had taken two steps into the dressing alcove when the bomb went off.
Horatio heard the click of the detonator, even realized what it was, but that realization was simultaneous with the blast. A ball of bright white light with a fiery core flashed in front of his face. A pressure wave hit him an instant before the heat and knocked him backward, stunning him. The sound slammed into him at the same time as the heat wave, but the worst of the heat scorched the air above him, and he was already rolling away, pressing his face against the plush carpet, turning it away from the burst of flame. Debris rained down on his back.
Although he knew in what order the various effects of the blast reached him, in the moment it came all at once, pressure and heat and noise, and it felt like someone had shoved a lit firecracker in his mouth, like it was all happening inside his head and outside at the same instant.
When the rain of plaster and fabric and debris had settled, Horatio rolled again. His muscles seemed to work, his bones weren’t broken. Blood trickled from ears (the ringing in them so loud he wasn’t sure if he could hear anything, until he snapped his fingers as a test; that he heard, but far away, as if he were underwater with his hand above the surface) and his nose.
Blinking away the slivers of light burned into his retinas, Horatio found his gun, a couple of feet away from where he had landed. The bomber had apparently fled the scene, or at least had not taken advantage of Horatio’s defenseless state. Maybe he thought his bomb had done the trick.
A small fire blazed in the closet, some of Carmen’s clothing having been ignited by the blast. Horatio kicked the clothes to the floor, yanked a duvet off the big bed, and threw it over the flames, stomping on it until he was sure they were out. Then he stepped over the mess and into the bathroom, his weapon at the ready in case the bomber had taken refuge in the tub.
A glass shower enclosure was cracked and the bomb had left scorch marks on the white tile floor, but otherwise the room was clear. Another door, wide open, led out into a hallway. Horatio passed through it. Outside, he heard a car engine abruptly catch, and he raced to a window just in time to see a dark green sedan speeding away on the street behind the property. Through the trees he couldn’t identify the driver or even the make of the car.
He was back in the bedroom, looking for a secondary device, when he heard someone on the stairs.
“Horatio!” Ryan sounded almost panicked.
“I’m fine, Ryan,” he said. “I’m in the bedroom.”
“Keep talking,” Ryan said. “This house is like a maze.”
“You’re almost here,” Horatio said. A moment later, Ryan appeared. When he saw Horatio, the relief was clear on his face.
“Are you okay? I heard—”
“We traded shots, and there was a small detonation,” Horatio said. “Not enough to kill me, maybe even just a blasting cap or a little flash-bang. Here”—he pointed a small Maglite at a black box on the floor beneath the head of Carmen Ibanez’s bed, about eight inches long, four wide, and three tall—“is the real bomb.”
“Is it live?”
“It is. That’s why I wanted everyone out of the house. Including you.”
“Can you disarm it?”
“I might be able to,” Horatio said. “Then again, opening the casing might set it off. Our man usually uses timers, but ‘usually’ isn’t the same as always, and we don’t know that he hasn’t set a backup detonator that’s triggered by vibration. We’ll let the bomb squad render it safe remotely.”
“Is there time?”
“The bomb that caught me was a quickie, and tiny,” Horatio said. “More sound and fury than actual destructive power. I suspect it was something he had handy, that he could detonate on the run, meant to be a distraction if he needed one. If he could have detonated the big one remotely, he would have, since he knew that once the little bomb went off, even if it killed me, someone else would find the real one before Mrs. Ibanez slept here again. So the real bomb is on a timer, and there’s no remote override. And it’s set to detonate late tonight, when there’s the best certainty that she would be asleep in bed.”
“You’re bleeding, though, H. You should get to a hospital, get checked out.”
“I’m fine,” Horatio said again. “Let’s get out of here and get the bomb squad rolling.”