to take a look?”
DiMaggio motioned toward the corpse. With a frown, Brown stepped toward the sheet covering the body and, after lifting it for a second, instinctively turned his head in revulsion. The corpse looked as if some giant had just torn off the guy’s head. Brown couldn’t get the image out of his mind.
“What the fuck…”
“Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Who is he?”
“Eric Pickman, age thirty-eight.” DiMaggio checked his notebook. “Owner and director of Plate Build Construction. That’s the office, over there.”
DiMaggio motioned toward the two-story building along the side of the road.
“That’s what it looks like, I guess, when your job blows you away.” Brown tried to joke, not having regained his composure.
“Only it wasn’t work that blew him away, but a bomb or grenade. Did he stick it in his mouth, or what? Can you imagine? The guys from the lab have already collected fragments, and promise to give us the information as soon as possible.” DiMaggio nodded at the overturned pickup which had been moved over to the shoulder, where the patrolmen and CSI guys were checking things out. “That guy was just passing by. And then, kaboom! Bummer.”
“Uh-huh, in the wrong place at the wrong time. When did it happen?”
“The 911 call came in at 5:40 a.m. A patrol car was here in five minutes. The body was still warm.” After a pause, the usually swaggering macho DiMaggio could no longer contain himself. “Troy, Pickman’s head just exploded! And the explosion was so big that we have two corpses instead of one. This is… Damn, how could this happen?”
It was a rhetorical question, really. Moreover, Brown was now interested in something else.
“At 5:40? What the hell was the boss of the company doing around the office at 5:40 on a Monday morning?”
The Plate Build Construction office was a two-story building made of glass and concrete —Pickman had clearly been trying to impress potential customers. Several detectives from Brown’s department had interviewed staff who were just coming to work. Brown went into a room with one of them, Sergeant Chambers.
“There was no security at the office at night, only an alarm,” said the security guard apologetically, “and also a surveillance camera.” There was a picture on the monitor. At Brown’s request, the guard fast-forwarded the recording to the relevant time.
A black van was driving toward the building, but stopped suddenly, 20 yards away. The numbers in the corner of the screen recorded the time: 5:27. The man in the suit, Eric Pickman, got out of the van. Like a zombie, stumbling as if in shock and clearly not seeing anything in front of him, Pickman made for the office door. The van disappeared around the corner of the building.
“What’s that thing around his neck?” exclaimed Brown, looking at the monitor. When Pickman arrived at the office, the camera showed not only his face, contorted in horror, but the strange contraption around his neck. A metal collar a couple of inches thick, with a tiny, square mini-camera fastened to the front.
“I’ve never seen the boss wearing anything like that,” the guard confessed.
“It’s a bomb.” Chambers was impressed. “Pickman came to the office with a bomb around his neck!”
Meanwhile Pickman disappeared from the monitor’s field of view and entered the building. Brown gestured at the monitor, asking the guard: “And the van? Is that your boss’s car?”
“No, sir. He drives a BMW. I’ve never seen this van here, sir; it’s not from the company.”
“They turned the corner. What’s over there?”
“The dumpster, that’s all,” Chambers replied. “The guys from the lab are trying to find traces of the tread.”
“We should send them this clip. Maybe they’ll be able to make out the van’s license plate.”
For seven minutes the camera didn’t pick up anything else, but then headlights flashed and the van came around the corner again, pulling onto the freeway at high speed. And less than a minute later, Pickman came charging out the door, slamming it open so hard that the image on the monitor shook. Stumbling, waving his arms, and tugging at the collar, Pickman raced after the van. Brown and Chambers stared at the screen, waiting for what was about to happen. And after half a minute came the answer: Something blazed up brightly for just a moment, somewhere over on the side, and the image shook again.
“The blast save,” Chambers muttered. The security guard involuntarily closed his eyes and whispered, “Oh, my God…”
“They put that damn thing on him to make him do something for them in the office.” Brown hesitantly began to put together an argument. “But why the hell did they leave? Why did he run out empty-handed?”
“And why didn’t he call the police, if he was alone in the office?” Chambers added.
A patrolman looked into the room. Seeing Brown, he announced, “Lieutenant, they’ve found something on the second floor.”
One of the shelves in the safe was full of papers, the second completely empty. A pale woman in a suit, upset and confused, looked at Brown and Chambers.
“There was cash in there, nearly $500,000. It was just there on Saturday. And now…”
“$500 K, not bad,” whistled Chambers. “Did Pickman have the combination?”
“Of course, he was the owner of the company.”
Brown went over to the window, taking a glove out of his pocket just in case, which helped him to open the sash. He looked outside. The front office. An asphalt walkway around the building, with the dumpster at the corner. Under the windows, one of the crime scene guys was studying the pavement. Brown nervously wondered what Pickman had been through in the last minutes of his life. Emptying out the safe in a panic, throwing the money into a bag or package. Opening the window, throwing the money out. The people in the black van seizing it and racing off. Realizing that they had left him with the collar on, Pickman in a panic rushes downstairs as if he might have been able to catch up with the van… Guided by instinct. Brown imagined that the only thought in Pickman’s head as he careened toward the road, was “TO LIVE!” But the guys in the van had other plans. BAM! And Pickman’s head burst, like a watermelon falling from a skyscraper.
“Pickman did everything to get them to take that collar off,” Brown said grimly, closing the window. “But they had other plans.”
They’d been working at the crime scene for almost half a day. With a tow truck, they pulled away the dirty pickup truck of the poor bastard who had just happened to be driving by. A CSI crew gathered up all the fragments of the collar and what was left of Pickman’s head, which were scattered about the road within a forty-yard radius. Then the road was opened to traffic. The detectives interviewed all the company’s employees. Pickman was single and lived alone in a house outside of town. A police cruiser immediately headed there. The patrolmen and DiMaggio found the owner’s BMW in front of the house.
