high school kid? Sort of. I seem to remember him from a talk I gave at the school about arson last fall. Eager and full of questions. Good questions.”
How interesting, Darcy thought but kept the thought to herself. “I left him at the cordon holding coffee for you and your guys, and anyone else working on this. Maybe you’re used to it, but it feels chilly to me out here.”
Charity smiled. “Coffee’s always welcome. Thanks.”
“What brought the crowd? Did you find something?”
Charity laughed. “Not what, but who. They heard ATF was here. Enjoy your celebrity, if you can. I experienced a bit of it after I married Wayne. Good people, but curious as hell.”
She called to her two helpers, telling them Jack had coffee for them. That cleared the zone briefly for Darcy, who set her equipment down, pulled on her gloves, made sure her loupe was in her pocket along with some evidence bags and started to walk through the grid laid out by the firefighters.
She squatted often, examining the contents of a bag more closely and checking the ground beneath it. Once, she lifted her head and sniffed the air. It still contained the faintest tang of fuel oil after nearly two days. It must have soaked the ground.
She added that tidbit to her increasing list of tidbits. She needed to find out what kind of fuel it was, because she needed to know its burn characteristics but also because she needed to know why she could still smell it. Fuel oil evaporated quickly if it didn’t burn. It was the benzenes and xylenes that made up the gasoline that created most of the familiar smell. Those evaporated relatively quickly, so a lot must have leaked out of that bomb without burning at any point.
That brought her head up. Still squatting, she thought about it. That much fuel oil? In a closed container, why add the fertilizer? You could just make a great Molotov cocktail.
She looked toward the building. But it wouldn’t have caused that kind of damage. She closed her eyes again, sniffing and thinking about it. Apparently the bomber hadn’t perfected his method. He’d left far too much gasoline residue behind. Way too much.
Had this been a practice bomb? The notion chilled her deeply. One accident might well become a string of bombs if this had been a trial run.
Good God!
“Can I join you?”
Darcy turned her head a little in response to Charity’s voice. “Yeah. Don’t disturb anything.” She almost winced as she heard herself. Charity certainly didn’t need that warning.
Soon Charity was squatting beside her, saying, “I figured once we move everything we can see out of here we’ll need to look again.”
“Yeah, with a rake. It’s hard to be sure we haven’t stomped something into the dirt.” Then she pointed toward where she’d found the wire. “We have all that to cover, too.”
“You’re sure the wire came from the explosion?”
“Unless someone was soldering out there, yeah.”
Charity sighed. “I’ve seen some bad fires, Darcy, but nothing like this. You’ll have to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t seem to have a problem with that, huh?” Darcy’s voice was dry.
Charity chuckled quietly. “That’s okay. There can never be too many reminders. By the way, Alex said you needed a place to spread all this out. He’s talking the principal into turning the gymnasium over to you. I don’t get why that would be a problem. We haven’t even been able to determine if the rest of the building is structurally sound yet. We have an engineer coming from Gillette on Thursday. Meantime, no school. And thanks again for the coffee.” She raised her foam cup as if in toast, then sipped.
“Darcy?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been squatting here an awfully long time. Is something bothering you or do you need help getting up now?”
It was such a relief to just laugh. Darcy let it out, along with a lot of tension. “I was thinking. You’re the arson person. Do you still smell fuel oil?”
“Yeah, I do. Some didn’t burn off. The ground must be soaked. It’s driving my guys crazy because I won’t let them smoke anywhere around here.”
Darcy turned her head. “Your guys smoke?”
Charity shrugged with a half smile. “The chief, my husband, hates it, but it’s as if these guys just can’t get enough smoke. They’re not allowed to do it in public, but it’s no secret, really.”
“Criminy,” Darcy remarked.
“Yeah. You’d think they never saw the results of careless smoking. Anyway, fuel oil. I gather it’s bothering you, too.”
“If the bomb was precisely made, the residue of the fuel oil, the volatile chemicals in it, should be pretty much gone by now. The fact that I can smell it here in the open air after all this time...” She shook her head a little.
“You’re thinking this guy didn’t know what he was doing?”
“I’m thinking he knows what he’s doing but hasn’t quite got it right.”
Charity drew a sharp breath. “I don’t like what that might mean.”
“Me neither. Say, you know Alex, right?”
“Fairly well, I guess. He’s a friend of Wayne’s.”
“Well, he worked for BSU, but from what he said I gather he left some demons behind. Do you think I’d disturb him if I asked him for an evaluation?”
At that moment, Darcy’s knees decided to raise an objection. She straightened and Charity was right beside her. The two of them stood sipping their coffees while Darcy shook her legs a bit and waited for Charity’s answer.
“I honestly don’t know what his instinctive reaction would be,” Charity answered finally, drawing the words out as if she were still pondering. “I know this school matters a lot to him, and his students even more. He’s the kind of teacher we’d all have liked, you know? He takes a personal interest and, from what I hear, is amazingly even-tempered even when provoked by some teen. You know how teens are. Or you can remember.”
“Smart mouths.”
“Yeah. And they push each other into stupidity sometimes. But he’s never criticized one of them in a way that anybody complains about. Gifted with dealing with testosterone, I guess. But for the rest?” She looked at Darcy. “I’ve never talked with him much about his FBI days. Wayne’s given me the sense that Alex would prefer to forget them. But given that his school has been struck by a bomb...and more specifically his shop facilities...” She trailed off. “I dunno, Darcy. He’s a grown man. He knows how to say no. My guess is that he’d like to do something constructive about this mess, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“I’m not asking for a guarantee. I just want to avoid hitting a raw nerve, but I’m not trying to put you on the spot or deprive him of the right to speak for himself.”
She
