Demolition Angel by Robert Crais Read Free Book Online Page B

to the curb, so angry at Marzik that her hands were shaking.
    The flask of gin was beneath her seat, but Starkey didn’t touch it. She thought about it, but she didn’t touch it.
    Starkey lit another cigarette, then drove like a bat out of hell, blowing smoke like a furnace.
    It was only eight-thirty when Starkey pulled into the Glendale PD parking lot. Chen had said he’d have the chromatograph by nine, but Starkey figured that he’d built a fuck-up and paperwork cushion into that estimate.
    She sat in her car smoking for five minutes before using her cell phone to call SID.
    “John, it’s Starkey. I’m out here in the lot. You have the results?”
    “You’re outside right now?”
    “Affirmative. I’m on my way in to see Leyton.”
    Instead of giving her attitude or excuses, Chen said, “Give me two minutes and I’ll be right down. You’re gonna love this.”
    The LAPD Bomb Squad is based in a low-slung modern building adjacent to the Glendale police substation and piggybacked with the Scientific Investigation Division. The buildingis built of red brick and snuggled behind a stand of rubber trees, most people would mistake it for a dental office, except that it is also snuggled behind a ten-foot fence topped with concertina wire. The parking lot is dotted with dark blue Bomb Squad Suburbans.
    Starkey let herself into the Bomb Squad reception area and asked for Lieutenant Leyton. He’d stayed out with the others at the crime scene, walking the sweep like everyone else. Dark rings had set in around his eyes, making him look older than she’d ever seen him, even after Sugar Boudreaux died.
    Starkey handed over the baggie.
    “I walked the scene again this morning and found these. You got someone on the reconstruction yet?”
    Leyton held up the baggie to look. All three bits would have to be logged into the evidence records, then tested to see if they were actually part of the device.
    “Russ Daigle. He came in early to start sorting what we recovered last night.”
    “Chen’s on his way down with the chrom. I was hoping to snatch whatever component manufacturers you have, so I can get rolling with this.”
    “Sure. Let’s see what he has.”
    She followed Leyton down a long hall past the ready room and the sergeants’ offices to the squad room. It didn’t look like any other squad room in the department; it looked like a high school science lab, all small cramped desks and black Formica workbenches.
    Every surface in the squad room was covered with de-armed bombs or bomb facsimiles, from pipe bombs and dynamite bombs to canister bombs and large military ordnance. An air-to-air missile hung from the ceiling. Trade journals and reference books cluttered any surface not sporting a bomb. FBI Wanted posters were taped to the walls.
    Russ Daigle was perched on a stool at one of the workbenches, sorting pieces of metal. Daigle was one of the squad’s three sergeant-supervisors, and the man who had the most time on the squad. He was a short, athletic man with a thick gray mustache and blunt fingers. He was wearing latex gloves.
    He glanced up when he heard them, nodding toward a smudged computer at the end of his workbench. It was covered with
Babylon 5
stickers.
    “We got the snaps up. You wanna see?”
    “You bet.”
    She moved behind him to see the monitor.
    “End and side view. We got others, but these are the best. It’s a classic goddamned pipe bomb. Betcha some turd built it in his garage.”
    The digital snapshots that Riggio had taken were displayed on the screen. They showed the two pipes as impenetrable black shadows neatly taped together with a spool of wire fixed to the cleft between them. All four pipe ends were capped. Starkey studied the images, comparing them to the bits of jagged black metal that were spread on white butcher’s paper. One of the end caps was still intact, but the others were broken. Daigle had divided them by size and conformation, exactly the way you would the pieces in