16th Seduction (Women's Murder Club 16)

He read the title out loud: “‘How to Make a Bomb.’ Subtitle says, ‘For Twenty-Five Dollars in Twenty-Five Minutes,’ and here, lower right corner, ‘by Connor A. Grant.’”

Conklin walked his phone over to Jacobi, who slapped his hands on his desk and said, “Thank you, Rich, and thank you, God.”

He picked up his desk phone, punched out some numbers.

“Len,” he said to DA Leonard Parisi. “We got something useful on the science teacher. Conklin is forwarding a photo to you now.”

CHAPTER 17

AFTER CONKLIN AND I said good night in the parking lot, I pulled the car out onto Bryant and made my way to Harrison, then took Tenth toward the hospital.

Traffic was thick and maddeningly stop-and-go, but I resisted the urge to hit the siren. The normally ten-minute drive took twenty, during which time my mind was flooded with images of Connor Grant, the way he’d looked Thursday night in front of Pier 15. He’d been awestruck, and yet his expression when Brady and I interviewed him this morning had been mocking.

Now we had a little more circumstantial evidence against him: his laboratory and his unfunny manuscript on how to build a bomb at home in your spare time for pocket change. It wasn’t proof, but it was enough to charge him. At least I thought so.

Even if Joe couldn’t hear me or answer me, I wanted to tell him all about it, just like I used to do.

I turned into the hospital parking area and found an empty spot outside the ER. I took that to be a good sign. I threaded my way through the lobby, to the correct elevator bank, and reached the ICU without a hitch.

/> I introduced myself to the nurse at the desk and asked how Joe was doing.

“We’re weaning him off the medication to bring him out of the coma,” she said. “It’s not a sudden waking up, more like slow-w-w-ly coming back into consciousness. I think he’ll know you’re here even if he seems to be out of it.”

She walked me to the glass-sided stall where Joe lay swaddled in bandages.

“I’ll be back in a few,” she told me.

There was no chair, so I stood right next to the bed and looked down at my battered husband. His head was wrapped, and tubes ran from somewhere inside his skull, looping under a flap of skin in his neck, and from there emptied into his abdomen. His face was bruised purple. His right forearm was in a cast and his right leg was in traction. He was breathing regularly. He was alive.

In my mind I replayed images of the explosion and the immediate aftermath, the shocking remains of the museum, the body bags lined up on the sidewalk, and the families of the dead and injured both outside the tape and inside the ER waiting room. I was so grateful for Joe’s life.

I covered his hand with mine.

“Joe, it’s me. Lindsay. You are doing really well. Dr. Dalrymple is going to put you in a private room tomorrow. With a window. And a chair.”

Joe’s eyes fluttered open.

Oh, my God. He was awake. “Joe!”

I squeezed his hand and his fingers moved. Tears ran out of my eyes and dropped onto the sheets.

“What happened?” he asked me.

I hurried to say, “You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”

I cleared my throat and, striving for a calm tone, I told him about the explosion, that something had fallen on his head, that he’d had surgery.

“Your doctor, Joe, she’s great. And you remember that guy who said he set the bomb? We might have evidence against him.”

Joe closed his eyes, and a moment later he opened them and said, “Sophie? Sophie Fields?”

“Joe, it’s Lindsay.”

I flushed. Who was Sophie Fields? A childhood sweetheart whose name had gotten knocked into the present? Maybe she was a partner in one of the clandestine services Joe had worked for. Or was she a current girlfriend? We were living separately, so a girlfriend wasn’t actually any of my business, right?

Joe had never explained about the mysterious spy, a femme fatale, who’d been part of his life and possibly the true root of our split-up. Those raw feelings of betrayal rushed in as I sat with my husband, holding his hand. I didn’t like the feelings. Joe didn’t owe me an explanation. But why had “Sophie Fields” been the first name out of his mouth?

“What happened?” he asked me again.