Brian Freeman - Marathon

“Good find on the pressure cooker,” Stride told her.

“Thanks. I want to show you something else, too.”

Maggie led the way to the other side of the street. The two of them picked their way among the FBI evidence team toward the Duluth Outdoor Company shop. The store was a ruin inside and out, its windows gone, the cobblestones in front of the store torn up, its brick walls seared. Nothing had escaped the devastation.

“The bomb went off here,” Maggie said. “Ground zero.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but check this out.” She took him inside. The floor of the shop was scattered with remnants of the store’s merchandise. Burnt and torn clothes. Shredded satchels. Stride saw colorful shards of plastic water bottles that had been imbedded like knives in the rear wall by the sheer force of the bomb.

“What am I supposed to see?” Stride asked.

“It’s what you don’t see. Glass.”

He looked down and realized what Maggie was showing him. Amid the debris, there was very little glass on the floor of the shop. Outside, glass fragments littered the entire street — but not here. He realized immediately what Maggie was suggesting.

“You think the bomb was inside the store,” he said. “The windows shattered outward.”

“Right. Leave a backpack with a bomb inside a store that sells hundreds of backpacks. Who’s going to notice? Somebody brought it inside and left it behind. Either they used a timer or a radio trigger to set it off.”

“What about the people who were inside the store?” Stride asked.

“Two dead, one critical, a couple others with serious injuries. They won’t be talking to us for a while.”

“Does the FBI know about this?”

“Yeah, they have it figured out, too. I heard them talking. I wasn’t sure when we’d get the news.”

Stride wandered back outside the store. The street was filled with police and FBI, not the people who should have been there on marathon day. Runners. Tourists. Locals and visitors who would have crowded Canal Park in the aftermath of the race. That night, there was supposed to be an awards ceremony and live entertainment, but it had all been cancelled.

Cancelled because of a madman with a bomb. Or madwoman — terrorism was becoming an equal-opportunity profession.

Stride didn’t know who the bomber was, but he could see a shadowy image of that person in his mind’s eye, walking into the Duluth Outdoor Company shop with a heavy backpack casually slung over one shoulder. And then leaving without it. How far away was the bomber when the explosion went off? Fifty yards? One hundred? Far enough to be safe but close enough to witness the trauma caused by the attack.

“The FBI is gathering up cameras and video footage from Canal Park,” Stride told Maggie. “Somewhere in all those photos, we’ll find the person who did this. They can’t hide for long. Whoever it is has a face.”

Michael Malville loved the long summer evenings in the Northland. Daylight lingered into the late hours like an old friend. The scent of flowers blew in the air, and hawks circled overhead. This should have been a perfect Saturday night, but a strange emptiness ruled in the aftermath of the bombing. Even in the town of Cloquet, which was twenty miles outside Duluth, people stayed inside. The grassy land across from Michael’s front porch typically bustled with children playing baseball until it was nearly dark, but not tonight.

He lived in a historic district, with roots going back to the town’s lumber milling days a century earlier. The homes were expensive; his neighbors were wealthy. A few years ago, he and Alison had built a mansion in a rural area much closer to Duluth, but they’d sold it after Alison’s violent encounter with the serial killer there. Alison had never wanted to go back to that place. In a small town like Cloquet, they now had neighbors who looked out for one another.

Their home was two and a half stories, built on a slope above a cul-de-sac, with white clapboard siding and columns lining the porch. The lawns were lush. Evergreens ringed the neighborhood. Sometimes it felt as if they’d gone back to a simpler time. Alison loved it here, and so did Michael, but he was restless.

He’d spent most of his life building a successful technology business, but he’d sold it two years ago, along with their Duluth house. For a year, he and Alison had focused on putting their marriage back together and putting the Spitting Devil nightmare behind them. She still had the occasional panic attack, but she was better, and they were sleeping together again, which had taken months of therapy to achieve. Evan, caught up with his cartoon monsters and TV zombies, seemed unaffected by his close encounter with a real-life monster.

They had plenty of money. The sale of his company had given him enough assets to retire comfortably, but Michael wasn’t the kind of man who could play golf every day. Alison had thrown herself into projects at Evan’s school and into the Cloquet arts community, but Michael was adrift. He’d made a few angel investments, but making money on top of money didn’t appeal to him. He felt as if he had no purpose in life, and every man needed a purpose. Without it, he didn’t know why he was here.

He stared at the lengthening shadows in the cul de sac. Lights had come on in the other houses around them. On the porch, citronella candles burned to keep away the mosquitoes. He sipped a gin and tonic. He’d hoped, by loosening his mind with alcohol, that the image of the man on the street would come back, clear and sharp, but it didn’t work that way. Every time Michael dug into his memory, the recollection came out muddier than before. The man’s face changed. His clothes changed. He wasn’t sure of any of the details now.

The man had collided with him; he’d looked back; they’d shared a glance. Face. Eyes. Hair. Expression. Skin tone. Clothes. Michael had seen it all, but the moment had tiptoed in and out of his brain without leaving clear footprints. Every day contained more than eighty-six thousand seconds, and if you didn’t know that one of them was going to be important, you didn’t really pay attention.

“Are you okay?”

Alison stood in the doorway. His wife cupped a glass of Riesling.

“I’m still thinking about it,” he said. Then he added, “It makes me mad.”

She came and sat in an Adirondack chair beside him. Once upon a time, she’d had long, natural red hair, but now she colored it blond and kept it in a bob. Her long legs were bare below her shorts, and she wore a tan blouse with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. She was slim, and she preferred to go without makeup. To him, her natural face was even more attractive, with its laugh lines and freckles.

They were both forty-one years old. He didn’t know where the time had gone. Just yesterday, he’d been thirty.

“I really don’t understand how any human being could do this,” Alison murmured. “It makes no sense to me. Some person had to plan this. Someone had to make it happen, knowing what it would do.”

“I know. It’s insane.”

“I don’t want Evan playing alone outside until they catch whoever did this,” Alison said.

“We’re safe here in Cloquet,” Michael told her, but he didn’t want to argue with her. After what they’d gone through two years earlier, it didn’t take much for Alison to feel threatened. “But yeah, okay, we’ll stay home with him.”

He grabbed his phone from his belt. He used his thumb to swipe through the Twitter time line. Everyone was talking about the bombing. He wasn’t used to Duluth being the center of the universe, but the world now had its eyes trained on Canal Park. He watched a video clip from the FBI press conference. Next to the agent in charge, he recognized the Duluth police lieutenant, Jonathan Stride, who’d called Michael a murderer two years before.