Page 109 of South of Nowhere

Davies was hesitating. In an unsteady voice he said, “The disk is in the workshop. A separate hard drive plugged into the desktop. Tothe left as you walk in. The videos are stored for forty-eight hours. Then they’re overwritten.”

Shaw said, “I’ll get it when I search the room.”

Tolifson was looking away. Then he said, “I appreciate this, Mr. Shaw, but I’m thinking. You wonder if maybe the bomber left another IED in there? You know, to stop investigators?”

“I give it fifteen percent.”

“How do you figure that low?”

“It’s just logical. Assuming it was murder, which I think it’s safe to do now, then it wasn’t a timed device. The killer couldn’t know exactly when Redding would be inside. The trigger was rigged to something that Redding touched, stepped on or sat down in.”

“Okay, but how are you going to avoid setting another one off?”

“There’s an easy rule for that.”

“What?”

“Be careful what you touch, step on or sit down in.”

47.

He had learned to go to a different place.

When faced with a situation impossible to witness yet witnessing was unavoidable, Colter Shaw flipped some kind of switch in his psyche.

After all, if a reward was offered for a person who could not be found, then one possible explanation was that they were dead, either of natural causes, accident or criminal intent. Or their own hand, of course.

And in his mission to discover them, he occasionally found the person he sought was no longer of the living—and, accordingly, altered in terrible ways. Perhaps by time and the elements. Perhaps by weapons. Perhaps by scavenging animals or insects.

Shaw was not a spiritual man, but he’d heard of people claiming that in near-death incidents, they had floated above their body, and looked down in a state of utter calm.

Shaw did not believe in that, but he stole the metaphor.

And that’s what he did when he confronted horror.

He floated above it.

He did this not to avoid being sick or stave off nightmares. No, he did this to ply his trade. Simple as that. To survive you needed toobserve and assess dispassionately. And whether that involved noting footsteps in a beautiful garden that smelled of violets, or observing the angle of hacksaw blades on a victim’s ankles, he had to be as distanced as a surgeon.

He now, wearing blue gloves, found himself in that mental place as he surveyed what had once been a man—one he’d spoken to just a few hours before. Examining the organs, the shattered and burned black and red skin, the bones…

The stains of blood.

Indicators of the how and the where of the explosion.

Normally Shaw would document his findings in another one of his notebooks dedicated to the job, but that would take too long and he wanted to get the hell out as soon as he could. He had his phone to record the details of the incident. He lifted it now.

“How ’bout if I handle that,” someone said behind him.

He turned to see Debi Starr approaching, a digital camera in hand. “Just easier and better if we don’t have to play bucket brigade with the evidence. Photos’re in the chain of custody too. Oh, and here.”

She handed him booties.

“I’m the footprint queen, remember? The tales they tell…”

Shaw slipped them on.

He glanced at her as she took in the gore, noting her face was as neutral as his. He wondered whereshefloated.

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