We took a last look around the house, Conklin snapping pictures to take back to Brady and Jacobi, and we left by the back door. Clapper was standing outside waiting for us.
He pointed at the wood-frame garage at the end of the driveway adjacent to the house and at the three-person bomb squad standing outside the roll-up doors.
Clapper said, “Well, my friends, wait’ll you see this.”
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS ALMOST five when Rich Conklin said to Lindsay, “I’ll call you after the meeting,” and dropped her at her car in the All-Day lot across from the Hall. He parked the squad car in front of the building, then headed inside and took the elevator to the fifth floor.
Brady was already waiting in Jacobi’s corner office.
“We might have found something, Lieu,” Conklin said.
He had just taken a seat next to Brady on the tufted leather sofa when Chief Jacobi came in, straightening his gray hair with both hands, wincing from an old gunshot injury to his hip as he angled his body and dropped into the chair behind his big cherrywood desk.
Jacobi’s new assistant, Toni Reynolds, breezed in with her coat buttoned and told Jacobi that Boxer called to say she couldn’t make the meeting.
“You’ve got approximately two hundred e-mails, Chief, and too many calls to count. Mostly journalists and TV people. You’re gonna be famous. Here are the calls and e-mails I marked urgent.”
She handed Jacobi a sheet of paper and asked if he needed anything else. “Speak now. Otherwise, I’m going home to my hubby.”
When Toni had gone, Jacobi told Conklin and Brady about his day.
“FBI section chief Gerson Oliver came here first thing. He’s got one objective. If Grant threatened to kill folks, it’s domestic terrorism and the case goes to the FBI.
“If Grant blew up the big glass building all by himself—as he told Boxer—the case is ours.”
Brady and Conklin nodded. Jacobi continued.
“Oliver shared his info and it’s next to nothing. All the FBI could dig up on Grant is job history and some smalltown newspaper and internet stories, mainly about science programs he ran in high schools in three states since the time he graduated from the University of Miami in ’93.”
“That’s all they’ve got?” Conklin said.
“Wait. There’s more. After our talk Oliver and another agent asked Grant for a chat. He agreed, rather happily. They interviewed him for about four hours. They did all the talking, with Grant saying ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ and ‘I got nothing else to say.’
“So the Feds wanted to take Grant to the bomb site, and I thought, Okay. We’ve got nothing to lose except maybe this giant headache gets handed off to the FBI. I tagged along, hoping the science teacher would show us something, say something.”
“Fifty cents says he didn’t say a thing,” said Brady.
Jacobi rocked in his chair. “You’re close. He stood in one place and looked around, saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is just amaaaazing.’ He said several versions of that. Like it was an outing and he was happy for the day off.”
Jacobi shook his head in disgust. “Divers are going into the bay tomorrow. The bomb is still missing.”
Conklin said, “Chief, Grant has a chemistry lab in his garage.”
Jacobi stopped rocking. “No shit. Really?”
Conklin summarized in a few words what had taken hours to analyze from Grant’s Bayview property, and then he homed in on the lab in the garage.
Said Conklin, “It’s like what you might see in a high school classroom. One side of the garage has got a sink and shelves of chemicals and all the fixings: beakers, Bunsen burners and microscopes, some stainless steel equipment, I don’t know what to call it.
“CSI cataloged everything and took samples.”
Brady said to Conklin, “You were about to say something to me when the chief came in?”
“Right. I found this inside his lab.”
Conklin took out his phone and pulled up a photo of a notebook lying on a stainless steel table. He said, “This could be a book manuscript.”