Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

People won’t stop doing what they do, either. It’s inside us. Someone out there housed a predator inside, and it was leaking out. He wasn’t a pro. But this time, his work wasn’t going to look like an accident, as it had at the mobile home. The signature of explosive would be distinctive, if that was indeed what was in the package. Our assassin was running out of ideas, or was just plain getting anxious and sloppy.

Who was he-an amateur? A wannabe-an ambitious young one? But who gives the ambitious amateur the targets? Motivation is all, Max. Who wants to kill you or Luz Carmen, or both?

From a distance, I heard the sound of sirens, then the distinctive deep honk! honk! of a rescue or fire vehicle coming from the direction of the park entrance to the north. I knew there wasn’t much use for the display, but when the bomb squad gets a call out, the bells and whistles come with it.

A sheriff’s car was the first one into the parking lot, followed by the bomb squad’s utility truck, and sure enough, a fire engine-and lastly, a paramedic unit. People who question what they see as an overreaction would also be the first ones to bitch and second-guess if there wasn’t enough backup to handle their own emergency.

Dan and Luz Carmen joined me on the porch. The deputy from the cop car went straight to Dan, given that he was the guy in the ranger uniform. Dan explained the situation again, a bit better now that he’d had time to edit himself. When he used the phrase Mr. Freeman’s car, he nodded at me. Now I drew the spotlight and the scrutiny.

Since we were looking at the Gran Fury from a distance as we spoke, the officer in charge of bomb unit figured it out pretty quickly and began unloading equipment. After spelling out for the deputy that I’d been told someone suspicious was seen near the car in early darkness, I explained that I’d carefully checked out the periphery of the car without touching it and had indeed looked underneath and observed the package, but no obvious triggering device.

The deputy wasn’t stupid. When he caught me using the words periphery and observed, he interjected.

“Are you in law enforcement, Mr. Freeman?”

“Was.”

He looked into my eyes, waiting.

“I was a cop in Philadelphia. I’m a PI now, working for an attorney in West Palm Beach.”

“I see,” he said, not bothering to elaborate on what exactly he was now thinking. “And you, ma’am?”

Luz Carmen looked at him with the blank expression that both legal and illegal aliens have honed to perfection in South Florida.

“She is a client,” I said. “You might want to get in touch with a Sergeant Lynch concerning a trailer fire two days ago. I think this could all tie in together.”

The deputy nodded. “One thing at a time, Mr. Freeman,” he said, and then turned to the bomb squad sergeant who had joined our group. “Can you explain again, in as much detail as possible, what you’ve already observed around and under the car to Sergeant Peters here? I’ll make some calls.”

I did my best for the sergeant and two of his men, and then watched as the entire gang got together, working out their plan of approach. The fire engine was repositioned, its hoses placed at the ready. The paramedics turned their ambulance around, either to have the back doors ready for any emergency admission, or to haul ass if something went boom. Then everyone on the four-man bomb and arson unit pulled on the ubiquitous surgical gloves and began to circle around the Gran Fury. They started some fifteen yards out, and in time I could see them tightening the grid.

It was a probe-and-poke routine, not unlike what I had done myself two hours ago. At one point, a member raised his hand. He was about ten yards from the car, waist-high in grasses. When he called out something, the sergeant joined him. They were behind the Gran Fury, in the direction Dan had told them the prowler had fled. They bent and disappeared under my sightline.

When he finally stood, the sergeant called out an order I couldn’t hear, and the entire team moved in on the car, this time less tactically, more aggressively. Within thirty minutes, Sergeant Peters came back to the porch, the loosened package of explosive in one gloved hand. In the other, he carefully held what looked like a dismantled garage door opener; his thumb tip at one corner, his index finger at the other.

He did not look me in the face when he said: “I’m not sure it would have worked, but there’s no reason why not. But it seems our bomber didn’t have the time to plant the detonator and use this as a remote switch.” He held up the garage door opener. “All you need is a current to pass between two contacts.”

Then he looked up. “You were still damn lucky, Mr. Freeman.”

I agreed without saying so.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Sergeant,” I said, “what kind of expertise does it take to hook up something like this?”

“Tough part is getting the explosives. They’re still near impossible to get even on the black market. But the firing device can be anything: cell phones, pagers, toy car remotes. Hell, I was in Iraq for eight months with my National Guard unit; children over there know how to rig these things.”

Again I thought of the propane tank at the end of the mobile home: a thimble of C-4; a toy car remote, for Christ’s sake.

“If you have your keys, sir, my guys will take a look inside,” he said. “You all should probably still stay here though, just in case.”

I handed over the keys, and while his squad did their thing, the sergeant went to his van and returned with a cardboard box. He was still holding the garage door opener carefully between his fingers.

Again, he addressed Dan as the person in charge. “May we use your office, Ranger? I need an electrical plug.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dan said, and opened the door. He followed, intrigued as much as I was. We all went inside.

The sergeant put the box on Dan’s desk and traced the lamp cord down to a wall socket. He took a simple coffee cup warmer out of the box, set it on the edge of the desk, and plugged it in.

I knew what was coming, but watched anyway.

“One of the problems with collecting evidence is that a lot of departments say they don’t have equipment and lab time,” the sergeant said, taking a grocery store roll of aluminum foil out of the box and a small tube of what I soon figured out was superglue.

The sergeant set the coffee cup warmer in one corner of the now-empty box. Then he took a piece of aluminum foil and formed it into a kind of ashtray, setting it on top of the coffee warmer where the cup would usually go. After opening the tube of superglue, he put a glob about the size of a nickel on the aluminum foil.

Dan was narrowing his eyebrows and looking over at me when the sergeant asked for a cup of hot coffee.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I just started a fresh pot this morning?”

The sergeant took a full cup from Dan and set it inside the box.

“It adds some humidity to the air,” he said. Dan just stared.

The sergeant then placed the garage door opener inside the box, carefully leaning it into a corner on its edges so that every flat surface was exposed. He then ripped off another piece of aluminum foil. We watched while he rubbed his finger on the side of his nose and pressed it to the small piece of foil, and then leaned it against a wall inside the box.

“A control standard,” I said.

The sergeant looked up. “You really were a cop, Mr. Freeman.”

I just shrugged.

He closed the top flaps of the box and said, “Be about ten minutes. If we get some good prints, we’ll send them off to the lab. I’ve just seen too many guys put these things in a plastic evidence bag and mess them up in transport.”