Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

Together, for an hour, they sifted through the debris. Rune kept running to Healy every few minutes with bits of metal and wire and screws in her hand and he'd explain they were chair hardware or wires from the wall or the plumbing.

"But they're all burnt. I thought--"

"Everything's burnt."

"That's true," she said and went back to sifting.

Healy's own pile of Significant Junk, which is how Rune thought of it, was growing, nestling in a stack of plastic bags under the exit sign.

"Zip is what I've got. Zip."

"No note this time," Rune pointed out.

He said, "The MO's the same as the first."

"Modus operandi," Rune said.

"The bomb was C-3. Timed detonator. You know, these last two bombs don't help your theory about someone covering up Shelly's murder. Nobody's going to keep bombing just to cover up a crime."

"Sure they are. If they're smart."

They'd both begun to cough; the fumes were thick. Healy motioned her to follow him outside.

As they stepped into the air, breathing deeply, Rune looked up at the crowd.

She saw a flash of color.

Red. It looked like a red jacket.

"Look! It's him!"

She couldn't see his face but it seemed that he saw her; the man turned and disappeared east down Forty-seventh.

"I'm going after him!"

"Rune!" Healy called but she ducked under the yellow tape and ran through the mass of spectators pressing forward to get a look at the disaster.

By the time she broke through them, though, he was two blocks away. Still, she could see that hat. She started across Broadway but the light was against her and she couldn't get through the traffic--there were small gaps between cars but the drivers were accelerating fast and she couldn't squeeze through. No one let her by. It was as frustrating as a toothache.

The man in the red windbreaker stopped, looked back, resting against a building. He seemed winded. Then he crossed the street and vanished into a crowd of pedestrians. Rune noticed that he was walking stiffly--and Rune remembered Warren Hathaway's observation that the man who planted the bomb seemed to be older.

She returned to Healy, panting. "It was him."

"The guy in the jacket?"

She nodded. Healy seemed somewhat skeptical and she thought about telling him that Hathaway had confirmed that he'd been in the Velvet Venus. But that would involve a confession about rifling Healy's attache case and she wasn't prepared for what the fallout from that might be.

He was debating. He walked to a uniformed cop and whispered something to him. The cop trotted off toward his cruiser, hit the lights and drove off.

Healy returned to Rune. He said, "Go on home."

"Sam."

"Home."

Tight-lipped, she looked at him, making him see--trying to make him see--that, goddamn it, this really wasn't a game to her. Not at all.

He must have seen some of this; he breathed out a sigh and looked around for an invisible audience like the kind Danny Traub carried around with him. Healy said, "All right, come on." He turned and walked quickly back inside the theater, Rune trotting to keep up with him.