Private Vegas (Private 9)

“Yes. He’s told me.”

“Anyway, I thought he was dreaming, but then I saw light on the wall. And I smelled smoke. Something was burning.”

“Did you hear an explosion?”

“Not then. Jack told me to get dressed and he ran out to where he’d parked the car. I ran after him. It took me a moment to realize that the fireball was Jack’s car.

“And then, there was a blast,” Justine said, “and that knocked Jack off his feet. He’s not hurt, Sci, but I worry about what this means. If it was personal, was blowing up the car the whole point? Or was it a warning? You know, at any given moment, a lot of people are pissed off at him.”

The machine at Sci’s right blinked to show that the analysis was complete, but it also flashed the words No match.

“This is odd,” Sci said, turning the screen so that Justine could see the display. “See, the gas tank was BLEVE’d. Blown out, so the explosive was in the tank. However, our spectrometer is calling the explosive ‘unknown.’”

“An unknown chemical? That has to be a first.”

“I’m going to have to research this compound, but I can tell you what it was packaged in. Latex.”

“Like a glove?”

“Or like a condom. Yep. The machine is telling me we’ve got some spermicidal lubricant here.”

“Let me get this right. Someone put explosives in a condom? Then put the condom in the gas tank?”

“Correct. A charge was set under the car to start the fire, and when the fire got hot enough, it melted the latex. That put this chemical in contact with the gas, and boom. That’s my theory, anyway. That’s why there was delay on the explosion. The latex was a delay device.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“This is the kind of thing a teenager would think up. A teenager with access to a car and a total disregard for life.”

Chapter 19

MY OFFICE OVERLOOKS downtown LA, and the late-afternoon sun was high and hot, glancing off the glassy skyscrapers across the street, blazing over the fast-moving traffic below.

Dr. Sci was talking to me on the interoffice network, the picture on my screen so high-def, I could see the individual stitches on the seams of his bowling shirt. He was telling me that there was a new chemical explosive at loose in the world.

“I’m calling it barium trichlormanganate for now,” he said. “I can’t find any reference to its properties.”

“What’s special about it?” I asked.

“It requires extreme heat and contact with gasoline to make it ignite,” he told me. “Works fine on a burning car.”

“Yes, it does.”

Sci explained how the explosive had been packaged and ignited, went on to say that this new compound was novel but not versatile. He said that there were numerous easily obtained explosives that would work as well or better, including a Molotov cocktail tossed through the car window.

“So this doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said.

“In my humble opinion, this is the kind of thing that a teenager or a gang of teenagers would do, not terrorists or, say,

organized-crime types.”

“Cops told me that mine is the sixth car in two months to go boom in the night,” I said.

“That fits with my theory,” Sci said.

I said good-bye to Sci just as I heard a commotion outside my office. My assistant, Valerie Kenney, came through my door in a huff.

Val is five eleven, a striking twenty-five-year-old African American woman who went to BU on scholarship, then got her master’s in criminology, also on scholarship, at the University of Miami. Same time she was going for her master’s, she was working nights as a clerk in the back rooms of the Miami PD and helping her mother with an out-of-control younger brother.