3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)
“That’s a little sexist, even from you,” I said with a smile.
Clapper laughed. His Crime Scene team had spent the better part of the past day and a half picking through the bomb site. Charlie looked exhausted.
“FYEF, darlin’,” he said, motioning with his head for me to follow. “For your eyes first. They’re a whole lot cuter than Tracchio’s.”
“Knew I earned this gold shield for something.”
Charlie took me to his office down the hall. Niko was in there, from the Bomb Squad, leaning back in Charlie’s old hardwood recliner and picking something out of a Chinese food container.
“Okay, we’ve pieced together an idea of the explosive device.” Charlie threw out a chair for me. On a poster board, someone had drawn a floor plan of the Lightowers’ town house. “Traces of C-4 were all over the place. Half a pound’s enough to blow a jet from the sky, so from the size of the blast, I figure this was about five times that. Whoever did it put it inside something like this”—he took out a black Nike sport bag—“and placed it in one of the rooms.”
“How do we know that?” I asked.
“Easy.” Clapper grinned. He pulled out a fragment of black nylon with a Nike swoosh on it. “We found this plastered against the wall.”
“Any luck you could scrape a few prints off the bag?” I asked hopefully.
“Sorry, honey,” Clapper snickered, “this is the bag.”
“It was triggered by a fairly sophisticated device,” Niko explained. “Remote detonation. Blasting cap was hooked up to a cell phone.”
“There’s a market for C-4, Lindsay. We could look into any construction-site thefts, missing military inventory,” said Charlie Clapper.
“How are you with babies, Charlie?”
“If they’re eighteen or over,” the CSU man said, grinning. “Why? You finally getting the itch?”
If Clapper were a foot taller, fifty pounds lighter, and hadn’t been married for thirty years, I just might take him up on his little flirtations one day. “Sorry, this one’s a little younger.”
“You mean the Lightower baby?” Charlie scrunched his face.
I nodded. “I want her dusted, Charlie. The kid, blanket, bassinet, anything you can find.”
“Been thirty years since I changed a diaper.” Clapper let out a breath, looking a little squeamish. “Hey, I almost forgot….” He pulled out a coded evidence bag from underneath a pile of papers on the desk. “There was a room down the hall from the nursery. Someone spent the night there. Someone who isn’t accounted for now.”
The au pair, I was thinking.
“Don’t get excited,” Charlie said, shrugging. “Everything was cinders. But we picked up this by the bed.”
He tossed me the plastic bag. Inside was a small, twisted canister about three inches long.
I held it up. Didn’t have the slightest idea what it was.
“Everything must’ve melted.” Clapper shrugged. He fumbled behind him through his jacket draped over the chair. He came out with something that looked similar.
“Proventil, Lindsay.” He took the cap off his own device and fit it neatly onto the one from the evidence bag. He pressed the mouthpiece twice. Two puffs shot out into the air.
“Whoever slept in that bed had asthma.”
Chapter 23
JILL
BERNHARDT SAT in her darkened office long after everyone else had left.
A law brief was open in front of her, and she suddenly realized she’d been staring at the same page for ten minutes now. On nights when Steve wasn’t traveling or working late, she had taken to staying at the office. Doing anything she could to avoid him. Even when she wasn’t preparing for trial.
Jill Meyer Bernhardt. Superlawyer. Everybody’s alpha dog.