At six o’clock, Sinclair and Braddock walked up the same concrete stairs they had ascended three hours earlier. Sinclair grimaced with each step and limped slightly from where the doctors at ACH ER had dug a piece of concrete out of his right hamstring and closed the wound with five sutures and surgical superglue. The rest of his body felt like it had just gone ten rounds with a heavyweight champ. His thick raincoat protected most of his body after he went airborne and landed on the asphalt, where he slid, tumbled, and rolled for another twenty feet. Still, he ended up with road rash on his left hip where the surface of the parking deck tore through his wool pants, as well as oozing abrasions on his left arm and chin.
A canvas canopy the size of a small circus tent covered the far end of the parking lot where the device had exploded. Maloney waved at Sinclair as soon as he stepped under a smaller canopy that had been set up as a break area for the scores of officers and agents from a variety of local, state, and federal agencies. “I thought I told you at the hospital to go home when they released you,” Maloney said.
“I figured it was a suggestion,” Sinclair replied.
Maloney shook his head and sighed. “I take it the MRI found your brain wasn’t too badly rattled.”
Sinclair turned his head to the left, since the ringing in his right ear drowned out all but the loudest sounds. “No more than normal.”
“What about you, Cathy?” Maloney asked Braddock.
“I was a lot farther away, so the blast didn’t even knock me down.” She was almost yelling even though Maloney was only a few feet away. “Other than a slight headache from the noise, I’m good, but the bomber got away.”
“You stayed with your partner,” Maloney said. “That’s the right decision.”
Sinclair poured himself a cup of coffee and pulled a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end, and pulled out his Zippo. Immediately, a man in an FBI windbreaker rushed from the other side of the tent, yelling, “You can’t smoke here! This is a crime scene.”
Maloney turned toward the man and held up his hand like a stop sign. “This is Matt Sinclair, the man who was nearly blown up. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the crime scene and all the evidence is under the other tent.”
Sinclair lit his cigar.
The man in the FBI windbreaker introduced himself as the San Francisco Field Office assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism. ASAIC Lee said, “You’re a very lucky man, Sergeant. They tell me if you were much closer, you wouldn’t be standing here right now.”
“No luck involved, sir,” another man with a weightlifter’s build said. He was wearing an ATF windbreaker, for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. “I just read the sergeant’s statement from the hospital. He recognized the backpack as an IED, saw the bomber preparing to trigger it with a cell phone, and hauled ass out of the blast radius. Only a fucking warrior knows to do that.”
Sinclair puffed on the cigar to get it started, drew a mouthful of smoke into his lungs, and exhaled. From the way the ATF agent talked, he had to be prior military, but Sinclair didn’t have the energy to swap military service and unit assignments with him. “Are you guys doing the scene?” he asked.
“Us and the FBI’s evidence response team,” the ATF agent said.
“What was the device?” Sinclair asked.
The ATF agent looked to Lee, who nodded his approval. “A simple pressure cooker bomb filled with black powder and set off remotely with a cell phone triggering device that was attached to a blasting cap in the lid. The bomber didn’t fill it with shrapnel—you know, nails or ball bearings—like the Boston Marathon bomber and most other bombers do. Still, the concussion would kill anyone within twenty feet, lots more in an enclosed area. Some fragments of the pressure cooker became airborne projectiles, too. If one of those would’ve hit you or your partner, even from across the parking lot, you’d be in for a big hurt.”
“Does that mean the bomber was an amateur?” Braddock asked.
“Not necessarily,” the AFT agent replied. “He probably figured you would pick up the backpack, at which time he’d detonate it. No need for fragmentation projectiles at that distance. Amateur, professional, who knows. Anyone with an Internet connection can learn how to make a pressure cooker bomb.”
“Anything on the cell phone yet?” Sinclair asked.
“The lab will have to examine it, but it looks like a cheap flip phone, probably a prepay.”
Lee added, “We traced the number that the subject called you from. It’s a TracFone, part of a batch that was distributed to Bay Area convenience stores. It’ll take a while to trace it to a particular store. Eight minutes after the second call to you, precisely at the time of the explosion, the phone made an outgoing call to a number that’s part of that same batch of TracFones.”
“Which would be the phone used as the detonator,” Braddock said.
Sinclair drifted to the far end of the tent and looked through the rain to the large canopy on the other side of the parking lot. Thirty or forty people, most dressed in white coveralls and yellow booties, scurried about with cameras and evidence bags. The Ford sedan was a twisted carcass of metal and broken glass. Twenty feet of the parking structure’s concrete railing was missing, obviously blown apart by the blast. Sinclair felt a hand on his shoulder and turned.
“Glad you’re okay, partner.” Phil Roberts was dressed in an OPD baseball cap and a blue windbreaker with yellow OPD letters on the front and back.
Sinclair pulled a cigar from his pocket and handed it to Roberts. Roberts cut the end with a pocketknife and lit it with Sinclair’s Zippo.
“The FBI labeled this an act of terrorism and think it’s connected to the anarchists’ video of your murder,” Roberts said. “That’s freeing up all kind of resources. They’ll be able to track the movement of the cell phone the bomber used through its GPS, which might provide some leads to his identity. They’ll trace any cell phones nearby his and look for connections. That might give us associates. Your killer has to be among them.”
“Do the Feds have anything that directly links this to the anarchists?” Sinclair asked.
“Earlier today, the cell phone’s GPS put it at one of the cafes frequented by Occupy Oakland types. At the same time, three other cell phones they’ve linked to known occupiers were there.”
“Do these guys have names?”
“Matt, an investigation like this expands tenfold every eight hours as more and more data are linked. This is what the FBI excels at. They’ll work up files on everyone. When the time’s right, agents will interview them. Analysts, who combine it with phone, e-mail, and financial records, enter the details from every interview and surveillance into a computer program. That will show the relationships between hundreds of people and thousands of pieces of information, more than we can possibly keep in our heads. Most of the time it’s best for us to just stay out of their way and not muddy the waters.”
Sinclair didn’t deny the FBI’s ability to amass enormous resources to collect and compile massive amounts of information in complex investigations. But he had worked with the Feds on drug cases before, where numerous people continued to die in the drug wars and tons of dope continued to flow onto the streets while he waited for them to act. “When are they going to reveal what they learned?” Sinclair asked.
“They’re talking about holding a briefing tomorrow, after which they’ll divvy up responsibilities for the investigation.”
“What about my murders?”
Roberts tapped the ash off his cigar. “Should be one and the same.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“We’ll have to see where the evidence points. They collected three cigarette butts outside the coffee shop. The manager said most people obey the law about no smoking within twenty-five feet of the doorway, so one of them might belong to our guy. This is a priority, so they could have DNA results within days. Can you remember anything else about the bomber?”
When Sinclair first saw him on the bench outside Peet’s, he didn’t give him a second glance. A fedora hid his face, and it was impossible to accurately gauge the size of someone sitting. Sinclair told the agents at the hospital he thought the man was in his twenties or thirties, probably between five-eight and six-two, thin to medium build, with dark-brown hair that hung over his ears. Besides a fedora-style brown hat, he wore a navy-blue parka similar to what you’d see in an REI or North Face store, dark jeans, and dark hiking boots. He was too far away for Sinclair to pick up any other details about him in the split second he saw him later across the parking deck, and Braddock only caught a glimpse of him before he disappeared into the stairwell a second before the explosion.
“What about the car that was blown up?” Sinclair asked.
“Belongs to an employee at Petco. She parks there every morning and walks down those steps and into the back door of the store. She’s clean.”
“When will I get a copy of the client list from the escort service?”
Roberts puffed on his cigar and blew a smoke ring that hung above him for a few seconds before dissipating. “You’re not giving up on that, are you?”
“What would it hurt to feed all those names into the big FBI computer in the sky with everything else your Fed friends are collecting and see what it spits out?”
“I’ll talk to them,” Roberts said. “We’ll probably be here the rest of the night. Why don’t you get some rest? Nothing for you to do unless you want to crawl around on your hands and knees looking for bomb fragments.”