Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“I wouldn’t disagree with you there,” Michelle said. “IED is just a fancy acronym for a bomb you build yourself. Doesn’t mean it’s a bomb made by some Middle Eastern terrorist group, but then again, it doesn’t mean it’s not. But there’s plenty of places online where you can find out how to make one. Plenty of yahoos over here can figure out this stuff. Remember Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City? He was a fan of fertilizer. You get someone reasonably smart, pretty handy — they can put one of these together, do a lot of damage. Whoever did this did have some engineering smarts. He knew where to plant the devices to make the screen fall the way it did. Assuming he did, in fact, want it to fall on the audience.”

She did some more pointing as they continued their slow trek over the remains of the screen. “The screen had four main supports, and my guess is there were four bombs, each attached to one of those supports, on the parking lot side, so the screen would drop in that direction.”

“Would the bomber have had to be here? Close by? Maybe in one of the cars?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m guessing what we’ll find is there was a common timer for all four, so they went simultaneously for maximum impact.”

“So he could be anywhere. He could have been a thousand miles away when the bombs went off.”

“Yup.”

“And they could have been planted anytime.”

“Double yup.”

Duckworth felt a wave of hopelessness wash over him. Interviewing all the people present at the time of the explosion wasn’t likely to produce anything helpful.

“No advance warnings, no threats, no one claiming responsibility?” Michelle Watkins asked.

“No,” he said.

“Well, we’re going to start pulling together bomb fragments. Once we get a handle on what it was made of, how it might have been put together, we’ll cross-check that with other bombings, look for similarities. That may end up pointing us in the right direction.”

“Appreciate it,” Duckworth said. He was panting.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t usually spend my day climbing over a mess like this.”

“You might want to think about taking up jogging or something,” she said. “Get yourself in shape.”

“Thanks for that,” Duckworth said.

“Maybe cut back on the Big Macs.”

“I said thanks.”

Michelle continued. “It’s clear to me our bomber was hoping to hurt some people, having this thing come down at twenty-three twenty-three, when it was known there would be people here for the drive-in’s last night. You ask me, it was lucky only four people got killed. If more people’d parked in that first row, there’d—”

“Sorry. What was that?”

“What was what?”

“When it came down?”

Michelle grinned. “Once you’ve been on military time, you’re on it forever. More precise, at least to me, than saying a.m. or p.m. I’m always thinking of a twenty-four-hour clock. The screen came down at eleven twenty-three p.m. Twenty-three minutes past twenty-three hundred hours.”

Duckworth had stopped.

“You out of breath again?” Michelle asked.

“No, I’m okay.”

“What is it? You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

“Something just stopped being a bunch of coincidences,” he said.

Istepped into the red-walled room.

“You’re saying you’ve never been in here?” I asked Lucy.

Her eyes were wide. “Cal, I swear, I’ve never known anything about this.”

“Did you grow up in this house?”

“Not really. Dad got this place just as I was finishing high school. Once I went to college I never moved back. I’ve been over here hundreds of times, of course, but I’ve sure as hell never been given a tour of this. What is this?”

Given the sexually graphic photos on the wall, and the bed, and the satin pillows, it seemed pretty obvious to me.

“It’s not exactly a woodworking shop,” I said.

“This is... unimaginable,” she said.

The room wasn’t added onto the house. It was within the perimeter of the foundation. Maybe, at one time, this really had been a woodworking shop, or a wine cellar, or an exercise room. All Chalmers would have had to do was cover over the access with that sliding bookcase to keep anyone from knowing the room was here.

Then the question was why.

There was no shame in the fact that couples living together shared bedrooms, with actual beds in them, where they had sex. No one would go to that kind of trouble to hide that fact. I was betting Adam and Miriam Chalmers had spent most of their nights in that bedroom upstairs. In that huge bed. Where they often had sex.

But this room, this was for something more than garden-variety sex. This was for when sex was an event. This was a room dedicated solely to sex. No sleeping went on in here. This was not a room where you put your aunt when she came to visit.

I took in the erotic photographs framed on the walls. “Would that be Miriam’s work?” I asked.

Lucy nodded. “I think so. I’ve seen her stuff online. When she wasn’t doing run-of-the-mill portraits and weddings, she fancied herself a female Mapplethorpe.”

I stepped carefully over the discarded empty DVD cases, then knelt down on one knee in front of the small cabinet that was tucked up against the wall below the flat-screen TV. One of the doors was half-open, and I was guessing this was where the cases had come from. I pulled it open all the way. Lucy had come into the room and was standing behind me, looking down over my shoulder.

There were two shelves. On the top, to one side, was a DVD player. Next to it were an assortment of creams and lotions and condoms and an open jewel case. The bottom shelf was littered with what would be categorized as sex toys. Vibrators, rubber phalluses, various and assorted straps, handcuffs. Even a box filled with batteries, although not the kind you put in the smoke detectors.

I heard an intake of breath behind me. I turned my head to look at Lucy. “You okay?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I mean, it’s a lot to take in. I don’t think I’m a prude. People have sex, sometimes with all the extras, and I’ve got nothing against that. Even when it’s your own father.” She paused. “But this... I don’t know what to think about this.”

I glanced back at the bed, spotted some items on the table next to it. Remotes, for the TV and the DVD player.

“Lucy, can you grab me those?”

“What?”

“Those remotes.”

She walked around the bed, appeared hesitant to grab them at first, but of the items I’d found in this room, the remotes were the ones I’d be the most comfortable touching. She handed them to me. I figured out which one was for the DVD player, powered it up, then hit the eject button. The tray slid out.

Empty.

Either Adam Chalmers was in the habit of taking the disc out of the machine when he was finished watching it, or whoever ransacked this place was thorough.

Even though my right knee was planted in shag carpeting, it was getting sore, so I switched to the other and, in the process, shifted in such a way that I caught a glimpse of something under the bed.

A black case. Plastic, it looked like.

I reached under, grabbed it by the handle, and slid it out.

“What’s that?” Lucy asked.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I flipped up the tabs on the front of the case and raised the lid. It was filled with soft gray foam, with cutouts to hold a camera and a couple of lenses that were packed neatly inside.

I pried out the camera. It was a nice, expensive model designed to take still photos or video.