hands. “These shoes are another of my brilliant ideas,” he said with a twisted smile. “It turns out our friend, the meth-head, wears exactly the same size shoe as I do. How fortunate, don’t you think? I’ll make sure his footprints, made from your blood, are found throughout your wonderful home.”
Frank rolled over onto his stomach, groaning from the searing pain radiating from numerous parts of his body. Unexpectedly he felt a drop of liquid spill on to his cheek. He slowly touched a finger to the spot, then looked at the finger. It was something red.
“It’s the meth-head’s blood, actually,” the man said proudly. “While he was unconscious during one of his benders I extracted a small amount, which I will now splatter here....and here....and here.” Frank could see him flicking a teaspoon, spraying the blood around from a small vial. It was grotesquely, horrifically reminiscent of a priest blessing the room against evil.
The man completed his gruesome task and turned back to Frank. “I think the time has come for you to meet your maker, Mr. Whalen. No more playing around.”
Frank dazedly watched as the man walked quickly toward him, pull his leg back and direct what Frank knew would be a fatal blow toward his head.
Chapter 15
Lieutenant Austen Beckett of the Massachusetts State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation Section surveyed the three day-old scene of the massive explosion and fire on the campus of Harvard University. He knew something was wrong. In spite of what the FBI was saying, the emerging causal factors just didn’t add up and he didn’t like it.
Ignoring a light drizzle, he stood at the edge of the parking lot of what used to be the Center for Astrophysics complex. He visually surveyed the shattered and charred remains of what had once been the bucolic home for astronomy on campus. Hundreds of small, differently colored cones dotted the devastation, signifying where various pieces of crucial evidence had fallen. Large plumes of steam drifted out of the still-smoldering, gigantic trash heap that had once been a proud building. The hundred year-old copper observation domes were now virtually unrecognizable piles of partially melted slag.
Something caught his attention at his feet. It was a red cone. He bent down, picked it up and saw underneath what appeared to be part of a human molar. He straightened up, took a deep breath and whispered to himself, “Good Lord, what happened here?”
He took a few moments trying to better understand the apparent chain of events that led to the landscape of utter destruction in front of him. They’d been very fortunate in one respect. A high-definition surveillance camera at a local convenience store had caught the delivery van as it slowly drove toward the campus—the name, address and phone number of the business clearly visible on its side. Without the video they’d have sifted through the dime-sized pieces of human anatomy and vehicle for months trying as best they could to literally and figuratively put the pieces together. The truth was it could have taken them more than a year to solve the mystery.
Somehow, an apparently drunk Guatemalan emigrant accidentally drives what amounts to a 2,000 pound bomb on wheels into a seemingly random building reducing it to smoking rubble in seconds. He is out that night as the result of an apparently phony order for explosive gases at an industrial lab on campus. From what is an apparent—there was that damn word again!—standing start, the 21 year-old van is going at least a nearly impossible 60 to 65 MPH when it hits the building. The owner of the delivery business says he recently had all of the engine hoses and belts replaced, yet there is a leak in a gas line that leads to the first small explosion moments after the impact. At least two to three of the very robustly engineered and constructed gas canisters fail in the crash, multiplying a relatively simple engine fire by a thousand times,
Frank rolled over onto his stomach, groaning from the searing pain radiating from numerous parts of his body. Unexpectedly he felt a drop of liquid spill on to his cheek. He slowly touched a finger to the spot, then looked at the finger. It was something red.
“It’s the meth-head’s blood, actually,” the man said proudly. “While he was unconscious during one of his benders I extracted a small amount, which I will now splatter here....and here....and here.” Frank could see him flicking a teaspoon, spraying the blood around from a small vial. It was grotesquely, horrifically reminiscent of a priest blessing the room against evil.
The man completed his gruesome task and turned back to Frank. “I think the time has come for you to meet your maker, Mr. Whalen. No more playing around.”
Frank dazedly watched as the man walked quickly toward him, pull his leg back and direct what Frank knew would be a fatal blow toward his head.
Chapter 15
Lieutenant Austen Beckett of the Massachusetts State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation Section surveyed the three day-old scene of the massive explosion and fire on the campus of Harvard University. He knew something was wrong. In spite of what the FBI was saying, the emerging causal factors just didn’t add up and he didn’t like it.
Ignoring a light drizzle, he stood at the edge of the parking lot of what used to be the Center for Astrophysics complex. He visually surveyed the shattered and charred remains of what had once been the bucolic home for astronomy on campus. Hundreds of small, differently colored cones dotted the devastation, signifying where various pieces of crucial evidence had fallen. Large plumes of steam drifted out of the still-smoldering, gigantic trash heap that had once been a proud building. The hundred year-old copper observation domes were now virtually unrecognizable piles of partially melted slag.
Something caught his attention at his feet. It was a red cone. He bent down, picked it up and saw underneath what appeared to be part of a human molar. He straightened up, took a deep breath and whispered to himself, “Good Lord, what happened here?”
He took a few moments trying to better understand the apparent chain of events that led to the landscape of utter destruction in front of him. They’d been very fortunate in one respect. A high-definition surveillance camera at a local convenience store had caught the delivery van as it slowly drove toward the campus—the name, address and phone number of the business clearly visible on its side. Without the video they’d have sifted through the dime-sized pieces of human anatomy and vehicle for months trying as best they could to literally and figuratively put the pieces together. The truth was it could have taken them more than a year to solve the mystery.
Somehow, an apparently drunk Guatemalan emigrant accidentally drives what amounts to a 2,000 pound bomb on wheels into a seemingly random building reducing it to smoking rubble in seconds. He is out that night as the result of an apparently phony order for explosive gases at an industrial lab on campus. From what is an apparent—there was that damn word again!—standing start, the 21 year-old van is going at least a nearly impossible 60 to 65 MPH when it hits the building. The owner of the delivery business says he recently had all of the engine hoses and belts replaced, yet there is a leak in a gas line that leads to the first small explosion moments after the impact. At least two to three of the very robustly engineered and constructed gas canisters fail in the crash, multiplying a relatively simple engine fire by a thousand times,
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