Far From True by Linwood Barclay Page A

out this stuff. Remember Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City? He was a fan of fertilizer. You get someone reasonably smart, pretty handy—they can put one of these together, do a lot of damage. Whoever did this did have some engineering smarts. He knew where to plant the devices to make the screen fall the way it did. Assuming he did, in fact, want it to fall on the audience.”
    She did some more pointing as they continued their slow trek over the remains of the screen. “The screen had four main supports, and my guess is there were four bombs, each attached to one of those supports, on the parking lot side, so the screen would drop in that direction.”
    “Would the bomber have had to be here? Close by? Maybe in one of the cars?”
    She shook her head. “No. I’m guessing what we’ll find is there was a common timer for all four, so they went simultaneously for maximum impact.”
    “So he could be anywhere. He could have been a thousand miles away when the bombs went off.”
    “Yup.”
    “And they could have been planted anytime.”
    “Double yup.”
    Duckworth felt a wave of hopelessness wash over him. Interviewing all the people present at the time of the explosion wasn’t likely to produce anything helpful.
    “No advance warnings, no threats, no one claiming responsibility?” Michelle Watkins asked.
    “No,” he said.
    “Well, we’re going to start pulling together bomb fragments. Once we get a handle on what it was made of, how it might have been put together, we’ll cross-check that with other bombings, look for similarities. That may end up pointing us in the right direction.”
    “Appreciate it,” Duckworth said. He was panting.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t usually spend my day climbing over a mess like this.”
    “You might want to think about taking up jogging or something,” she said. “Get yourself in shape.”
    “Thanks for that,” Duckworth said.
    “Maybe cut back on the Big Macs.”
    “I said thanks.”
    Michelle continued. “It’s clear to me our bomber was hoping to hurt some people, having this thing come down at twenty-three twenty-three, when it was known there would be people here for the drive-in’s last night. You ask me, it was lucky only four people got killed. If more people’d parked in that first row, there’d—”
    “Sorry. What was that?”
    “What was what?”
    “When it came down?”
    Michelle grinned. “Once you’ve been on military time, you’re on it forever. More precise, at least to me, than saying a.m. or p.m. I’m always thinking of a twenty-four-hour clock. The screen came down at eleven twenty-three p.m. Twenty-three minutes past twenty-three hundred hours.”
    Duckworth had stopped.
    “You out of breath again?” Michelle asked.
    “No, I’m okay.”
    “What is it? You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
    “Something just stopped being a bunch of coincidences,” he said.

SIXTEEN
    Cal
    I stepped into the red-walled room.
    “You’re saying you’ve never been in here?” I asked Lucy.
    Her eyes were wide. “Cal, I swear, I’ve never known anything about this.”
    “Did you grow up in this house?”
    “Not really. Dad got this place just as I was finishing high school. Once I went to college I never moved back. I’ve been over here hundreds of times, of course, but I’ve sure as hell never been given a tour of this. What
is
this?”
    Given the sexually graphic photos on the wall, and the bed, and the satin pillows, it seemed pretty obvious to me.
    “It’s not exactly a woodworking shop,” I said.
    “This is . . . unimaginable,” she said.
    The room wasn’t added onto the house. It was within the perimeter of the foundation. Maybe, at one time, this really had been a woodworking shop, or a wine cellar, or an exercise room. All Chalmers would have had to do was cover over the access with that sliding bookcase to keep anyone from knowing the room was here.
    Then the question was why.
    There was