Page 107 of South of Nowhere

“Will do, Captain.”

He disconnected before the man added more qualifiers or changed his mind.

“Thank you,” he said to Dorion.

Tolifson now hesitated, realizing he’d just gotten what he’d asked for. The chance to spend time in a place that would be horrific beyond his imagination.

Molecule of skin and bone…

He found himself staring at the levee.

Then he heard a voice behind him. “Mayor.”

It was Colter Shaw speaking.

He turned.

“Dorion told me you got the okay to start investigating the Redding bombing on your own.”

“That’s right.”

“For what it’s worth, I’ve done demolition investigations as part of my job. I know you probably want to run the scene yourself, but if you don’t mind, any chance I could do it? I know what to look for, and it’ll cut the time down considerably.”

A frown. “Well, now, Mr. Shaw, Colter, you’re right I’d rather do it myself. But if you think it’d be better for the case, I’ll stand down.” He shrugged. “We all have to make sacrifices for what’s best.”

46.

The truth is a thing of percentages too.

Because truth’s building blocks—facts—don’t always stand up the way we’d like.

People grew sick from wind and vapor and spirits—a one hundred percent fact—until germs were spotted by a rudimentary microscope.

A human being couldn’t fly. Fact. Until two brothers demonstrated otherwise on a beach in North Carolina.

Then there are the more subtle underpinnings of the truth.

What would the shattered metal and glass and plastic—and human tissue and bone and blood—in a copper mine workshop say about what happened there?

Would what Colter Shaw was about to find support an answer that rated a truth factor of one hundred percent?

Or zero?

Or somewhere in between? (It took a while to link those crawly little microscopic things to the flu.)

The rain had largely stopped but the surface of the highway to the Redding mine was still slick and when Shaw arrived he skidded long, stopping just shy of the gate. The sandbag barrier was downhere, allowing the ambulance and two official cars—Debi Starr’s and TC McGuire’s—inside.

Shaw took in the grim mine—made grimmer yet by the awareness of what had just happened in the workshop shed not fifty feet away, the door blown out and burn marks in a corona around the frame.

Shaw walked to two people who were having a conversation near the entrance: Debi Starr and the man Shaw had met earlier, the operations manager, Hugh Davies, looking pale and distraught and actually wringing his hands.

Without a greeting, he turned to Shaw with hollow eyes tinted with red skin from crying. “I saw it.” He whispered, “I’ll see it forever. He…I mean you can’t even say ‘he’ or ‘him’ anymore. It’s a thing. That’s what the explosion did.”

Starr was holding a notebook and she’d already gotten some information, he could see. She was saying to the man in a kind, motherly voice, “There are some people you can talk to. They’re like counselors. Trauma. They can help. They really can.” She wrote some names and numbers—from memory, Shaw noted—and tore off the slip and handed it to him. He stared at this too.

Shaw supposed that being the town traffic detail, she had had occasion to see tragedy on the highways and would want to set up a fatality’s family with those who could help during those impossibly difficult times. For his own business he’d done the same on rare occasions. Teddy and Velma Bruin maintained a list of such professionals.

Two more vehicles arrived.

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