Page 110 of South of Nowhere

Starr was aware of the direction of his gaze. “Aw, seen this before. Nab Wilkins—born Arthur, so don’t know where the nick came from. He took the bend at Lumberton Road doing eighty. It’s a forty zone. You know those numbers are on those signs for areason? Seatbelt wouldn’t’ve saved his life, but at least he wouldn’t’ve gotten smeared all over both sides of the highways. Cut clean in two. Never did figure out how that happened. So this?” A gesture toward what remained of Redding’s desk. Then a shrug. “I mean the headisa bit unpleasant. And people forget that along with blood there’sa bunch of shit inside people. Particularly true here. But other than that. All in a day’s work for Traffic Girl. You look like you’ve done this before too.”

“A few times. You know, I put the percentage low for another device, but low is not zero. You sure you want to be here? You have family, right?”

“Everybody’sgot family, Colter. And if we can find out what the hell’s going on in this town, then maybe they’ll be all the safer for it. What do you think happened?”

“That thing of his he was working on.”

Starr examined it. “Looks like a robot.”

“All its components go to the left, not everywhere. So the bomb wasn’t in there.”

“No.”

The desk was in pieces, the chair blown against a wall and embedded in the Sheetrock. Most shelves—and the equipment they held—were on the floor.

Not a single piece of glassware had survived.

Shaw studied the pieces of desk scattered around the front part of the room. He shone his light on what had been a drawer. “It was in there.”

Starr looked at it and nodded.

He closely examined what remained. “See the bits of circuit board? That could be from the detonator. Cell phone. Two circuits with different numbers. So you can arm it from a distance. Just in case there’s a similar frequency that trips the main circuit.”

“Professional,” she said, and glanced around. “There’s the hard drive.” The security camera disk—pale blue—wasn’t big. She walked carefully to it, looking at the floor as if land mines studded the concrete.

Starr slipped the drive into a Ziplock bag. “Prosecutors like special evidence bags. We don’t have any. These’ll have to do, and if a defense lawyer’s a stinker about it, on the stand, I’ll ask him todescribe in detail the difference between official twenty-nine ninety-nine CSI bags and these, and watch him come up short.”

Shaw said, “My theory is get your perp’s ID first and worry about his trial later.”

She considered this with a glint in her eye. “You mean something might happen to ’em, and they don’t make it to the courthouse alive?”

“No, I do not mean that.”

“Hm.” She continued to look at him for a moment. “Now, sir,I’vegot a badge and you don’t, but I know for sure that you’ve done this more than I have. So what else are we looking for?”

“One of two things happened here. A murder for its own sake. Or a theft, and the bomb was meant to cover that up. If it’s the first one, then all we can find is a footprint, or tool marks.”

“And the second?”

“Look for someplace ransacked.”

She laughed, looking around. “Hell, Colter, this is the definition of ransacked.”

“There’ll still be something you just sense is out of place—where he was searching for the hidden treasure.”

He shone his brilliant light around the walls of the room, which was about thirty by forty feet. “You go left, I’ll go right. And let’s move as fast as we can. If there’s something here that gives us a clue about the risk to the levee, we need it ASAP. But remember—”

“Step, touch, sit.”

The two began the search. The made their way through the circuit slowly, placing their feet onto the floor only after they shone their respective lights at the concrete and, reassured there were no trip wires, continued on, looking to the right and left and up and—especially—down. Pausing frequently. They repeated the process again and again.

Slow…

They returned, after their full circle, to the remains of the desk without finding anything either of them considered helpful.

Shaw then was looking at a small gray metal file cabinet on itsside next to site of the bomb. It was badly damaged but more or less intact.

Starr said, “It’s been moved.”

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