The scene was not quite like any Watkins had seen before. Where the house had been was now a pile of lumber, some of it charred near the ends where small charges had been placed. The roof was collapsed over the pile of wood and siding, its gutters now about three feet above the ground and its peak less than six feet high. The lots on this street were not large, but the houses on either side of this one appeared to be intact.
Watkins looked over the area and realized there were fourteen techs working this scene—exactly half of the LAPD Bomb Squad. After a short time, Del Castillo waved to summon Watkins to the bomb truck parked on the street.
He was carrying a laptop now, and he opened it on the hood of the bomb truck. “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Take a look. I got the plans for this house from Building and Safety.”
They stared into the screen, shading their eyes from the afternoon sun. The first image was a diagram of the house from above, showing the locations of walls, doors, and windows. Watkins noticed a rectangle with a row of thin horizontal lines. “Is that a staircase?”
Del Castillo looked at it. “Yeah. Looks that way.”
“I didn’t see any staircase.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was a one-story house. Why would there be stairs?” Watkins looked closely and then clicked on the second view of the house’s plan, and saw a side-view rendition. The stairway was below ground level.
It took Watkins a second to identify this part of the diagram. There was an underground space, almost square. He spread his fingers on the touchpad to enlarge the image.
A dozen things came clear in an instant. He had not seen the stairs because they were underground, extending down to a small basement. A basement was unusual in Los Angeles, but some old houses had them. The basement was why the charges had all been relatively small, placed high in the skeleton of the house to take it apart and collapse the roof onto the floor. Virtually none of the energy had been focused downward. The bomber was protecting something down below. The bomber hadn’t been demolishing some businessman’s house; he’d been making it into a trap for the police.
Watkins shouted, practically screamed, “Stop!” He ran a couple of steps toward the wreckage that had been the house as he yelled. “Stop! Don’t move! Everybody freeze! Stay where you—”
Later, the video from the camera mounted on Captain Del Castillo’s truck that had been recording the search showed Sergeant Timothy Walker running toward the rubble, and picked up what he was shouting. Nobody was able to see later what, exactly, triggered the second device precisely at that moment.
Every bomb technician standing on the lot at 12601 Valkrantz Street could have listed five or six ways to wire that kind of booby trap, but the one who touched the wrong thing didn’t see it. This was the big charge, the one Watkins had been expecting but had not found. He’d failed because the large cache of explosives had been, not inside the house, but under it.
The main charge turned the air hard, the shock wave bursting up and out, converting the detached pieces of the house into weapons that cut down bomb technicians where they stood and hurling some of their bodies so they came down on lawns together with the boards, bricks, and hardware they’d been examining.
Watkins, Maynard, Del Castillo, Capiello, and ten others were dead. Many of the police officers who were parked at the ends of the block to keep away the curious, and the firemen who had parked ambulances and pumper trucks farther off, were knocked off their feet by the force of the blast, and a few had minor injuries. The bomb truck Del Castillo had brought was blown onto its side, but its camera kept recording the unchanging image of the blue Los Angeles sky.
4
Dick Stahl had been both a soldier and a cop, two professions that never left a man unchanged. He was forty-four now, but in a suit and open-collared shirt he was still straight backed and walked with a physical authority that made him seem taller than his six feet. He had the sort of tan men like him had—darkened forearms, face, neck, and hands—wherever his shirt didn’t cover. His tan was color acquired as wear, one of the things his work had done to him.
He got into his black BMW and looked back at the big house perched near the top of the hill overlooking the ocean. The woman who lived there was standing above him behind a floor-to-ceiling window watching him go. He gave her an unsmiling half wave and then drove.
Stahl’s mind was already working on Sally Glover’s problem. She and her husband had lived in that house for thirteen years. Every morning Glover had driven to his company offices in Calabasas, and she’d spent her days on the things the wives of successful men did—volunteer work for the homeless, the hungry, and the victims of a couple of favorite diseases—directing the spending of the couple’s small charitable foundation. Stahl was aware that the things people distrusted a rich wife for—keeping herself beautiful and capable of intelligent conversation, keeping the big house tastefully decorated and provisioned to entertain her husband’s colleagues and customers—were also just chores. The money didn’t change that.
The money had brought on their current problem. Her husband had begun to work on expanding his business into Mexico. He had wanted to build a facility for manufacturing and shipping medical imaging machines, and for the past few months he’d been spending weeks at a time in the small towns east of Mexicali, where he had been choosing a site and securing the land leases, permissions, licenses, and permits.
Two days ago Mrs. Glover had received a call from Mr. Glover’s cell phone. When she answered, a man with a thick Spanish accent told her that her husband would not be coming home until she had paid for his freedom. If she wanted him back, she should mail a hundred thousand dollars in cash to a mailbox rental business in Mexicali. She was skeptical until the man put Benjamin Glover on the line. He said he had been dragged from a taxicab, beaten, and taken somewhere. He was all right, if a bit hurt and shaken, but she should do as the man asked.
She had called the head of security at her husband’s company, who made some calls to friends of his in the narrow world of security and private investigation and found a name and a phone number. There was a man named Stahl who was known to have made some successful extractions from Mexico.
Stahl had come to see the prospective widow and told her to prepare the hundred thousand dollars. He gave her a blue cardboard box and assured her it would hold a hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She must give him the address of the post office box and send the money right away. He took several pictures of the box.
She said she could get a hundred thousand dollars from a personal bank account. Was that all it would take? No, he told her. This was just the kidnappers’ way of beginning the negotiations. It would persuade them her husband was worth keeping alive while they prepared to make their next demand. In time they would ask for much more, so she should begin selling stocks, bonds, or property. She had to be ready to respond right away, or they might feel the need to send her an ear or a finger to motivate her.
Stahl said, “I’ll leave today for Mexico. I’ll do this as quickly as I can.” Then he listed some items he would need immediately. One was her husband’s most recently expired passport. Another was a collection of photographs of her husband. The third was her current passport.
When she asked about his fee, he said, “I have a flat rate for kidnappings in foreign countries. It’s five hundred thousand dollars.”
“What if you find you can free him for the cost of a trip to Mexico?”
“I don’t give refunds. But if it costs ten times as much to get him back, I won’t ask you for more. And no matter what it takes, I won’t quit or give up. Here’s my card. You can send the check to my office when you have the money in your account. Of course, you can do this another way or contact somebody else.”