Stephen White - Warning Signs

I spotted Sam over in the produce department. He already had a cart in front of him. It took me three tries to find a cart without a wobbling or stuck wheel. Part of my general karma in life is that I don't have good luck with shopping carts. The wheels all worked on the one I ended up with, but it had something brown and sticky plastered all over the plastic flap that covered the leg holes of the little child seat.

I didn't want to know.

I walked over to join Sam. He was sniffing cantaloupes and tapping the ends of them as though the aromas and echoes told him something important. I said, "Isn't worth buying them before the Texas crop comes in at the beginning of May, Sam." I pointed at the big pile in front of him. "Those are the early season melons from Southern California."

He didn't look up. "Actually, isn't worth buying any of 'em before the Rocky Fords show up at the end of the summer. Now, those Rocky Fords," he said, pausing for emphasis, "… now those are melons."

A few feet away from us, a tall young woman, her brown hair piled haphazardly on her head, was busy selecting strawberries. As soon as Sam finished speaking, she turned toward him and smiled, her shoulders retreating and her posture straightening just the slightest bit.

Sam Purdy didn't appreciate the irony. I didn't think he'd even noticed the woman's flirtation. He certainly didn't appreciate the fact that in Boulder-after his comment about the melons-she was three times as likely to have hit him over the head with a pineapple as she was to smile at him.

"I didn't want to say anything this morning, but you really look like shit," I told him.

"Avs lost tonight. Sloppy play behind the goal. They gave up two power play goals. Two. There's no excuse for that, none, not in the playoffs. I ever tell you that I hate turnovers?"

"Pastry? You hate those kinds of turnovers?"

He shook his head at me and stepped away from the cantaloupes. "What about kiwis? I like the way they taste but I've never figured out how to get the damn fuzzy stuff off without throwing away half the fruit. How do you do that?"

"You've lost weight, Sam."

"You gonna buy anything or you just gonna yap?"

"I think I'm just gonna yap," I said.

"I don't know why I agreed to do the grocery shopping again. I hate it. Sherry said it would be a growth experience for me. All I'm growing is another hemorrhoid. I keep thinking maybe I shouldn't be a cop in Boulder at all. I should be a cop in some real town where men don't meet their friends on Friday night to do the grocery shopping."

I laughed. "King Soopers is where the girls are, Sam."

"The single ones, yeah. In Boulder, the married ones all send their husbands. This is probably the place where half of the extramarital affairs start in Boulder. I swear we live in a city of wusses. You ever notice that?" He fingered his list, moving his reading glasses down from the top of his head so he could have a prayer of reading the scrap of paper. "Sherry said I should ask you about garlic. She said you'd know how to pick out garlic. I can't believe I have a friend who can't bait a hook but knows how to pick a bunch of garlic."

I couldn't bait a hook. Not a prayer. "A head of garlic, Sam. But that's not important."

"You got that right."

I led him over toward the onions and garlic.

He fumbled with a plastic bag, but his fat fingers couldn't quite get it open. He said, "In case you're wondering, I don't really want to know about garlic. Don't even think about lecturing me about garlic. Just pick one."

"You've lost weight," I said for the second time. "Are you worried about Lucy? Or is something else going on?"

He tried to separate the folds of the bag with his teeth. "You heard the details about the device we recovered at the Peterson home?" he mumbled.

I'd been waiting patiently for him to get around to it. I said, "I heard what's on the news, that's all."

"It was a pipe bomb, rigged to a radio controller. Just needed a signal and it would have gone off."

"Jesus."

"Nothing fancy about it, apparently. X-ray didn't show any booby traps. Guy who made it wasn't trying to hurt anybody who found it."

"How did they disarm it? Did they take it out of the house and put it in that little round trailer you always see on the news?"

He shook his head in disdain at my ignorance. "The little trailer is called a total containment vehicle, and no, they didn't use it. In situations like that they use a robot with a disruptor on it. Blows the thing apart with water. It's like a little water cannon. That way nobody actually has to get close to the device."

"That's it? Couldn't doing that make the bomb go off?"

"There's a risk of sympathetic detonation but it's more theoretical than real. I've never seen it happen."

"How do you know all this?"

Sam ignored me, instead asking, "You done with your questions? Because my supervisors in the department are curious how I knew that there was a bomb in the house."

"First, tell me how you know so much about the bomb squad."

"I took an FBI course. Now, how did you know it was there?"

"What did you tell your supervisors?"

"I told them I got an anonymous tip."

"They believed you?"

He shrugged. "What are they gonna do?"

"How does this all bode for Lucy?"

We'd moved from the produce department to the back of the store. "Is there a right way to do this?" Sam asked. "Should I go all the way across the back and then do each aisle? Or should I just go up and down each aisle and see a little bit of the dairy case each time? How do housewives do this? It seems to me I should do the freezer part last. That makes sense."

"You're free to improvise."

He made a noise. "Don't know if anyone told you but Lucy's prints are on that ceramic thing. The one that was used to bash Royal in the face? We found it in pieces all over the floor in the living room."

"Lauren told me a few hours ago. When I was in the house this morning with Dorsey and Shadow I saw a collection of fancy ceramics downstairs in Royal's office. There was one space empty on the shelves. I was thinking that that's where it came from."

"We reached the same conclusion. Somebody grabbed it downstairs, carried it upstairs to whack Royal."

"Anybody else's fingerprints on the ceramic?"

"Roy's and Susan's."

"The fact that her fingerprints are on it isn't good news for Lucy. But… I thought the murder weapon was the brass lamp."

"The coup de grace was from the lamp, yes. Current theory is that the initial blow was from the ceramic thing."

"And Lucy's prints aren't on the lamp?"

"No. Just some partials from Susan and the woman who comes in to help her with the cleaning. That's it. The theory to explain that little discrepancy is that Lucy wiped it where she touched it. She couldn't wipe the ceramic because it was busted all over the floor."

"And now your colleagues are working under the assumption that Lucy planted the bomb we found?"

"Current theory is yes. They searched her place and her car again this afternoon, looking for evidence from the bomb or residue from the explosive. That's something they didn't cover with the initial search warrant. The thinking goes that she planted the bomb, and Peterson discovered her doing it, confronted her. She picked up the ceramic whatever, climbed the stairs, and bashed him in the head with it."

"Why didn't she just use her gun? Shoot him or hit him with it?"

Sam gave me a disgusted look. "Don't go there. She didn't do it. The reason she didn't choose her weapons carefully is because she didn't choose her weapons at all. It's simple."

I knew about the second search warrant at Lucy's place, of course. Lauren and I had discussed some of the day's events at dinner a few hours before. "They find anything at today's search?"