Justin let his fork clatter down to his plate. “How the hell do you know that?”
Bruno sat back in his chair, let an easy grin spread across his wide face. “Gimme some credit, Jay. I know a lot of stuff.”
“What, do you have the Feebies’ phones bugged up there?”
Bruno kept the grin on his face. “Hey, they bug us, don’t they? It’d only be fair if we did.”
Justin regained his composure enough to signal the waiter and ask for a double espresso.
“You eatin’ dessert?” Bruno asked.
“I’m trying to watch my weight.”
“Yeah, me too.” Bruno turned to the waiter. “So just bring me one piece of cheesecake instead of two, okay?”
9
Justin met Chuck Billings at eleven o’clock the next morning, two blocks from Harper’s Restaurant.
“I’m just here as a consultant,” Billings said. “I’m the only outside expert. Everyone else, at least everyone in my area of expertise, is from inside the Bureau.”
“Why you? I mean, other than your natural genius.”
“Signatures,” Billings told him, and when he saw Justin’s puzzled expression he said, “Not like handwriting. Bomb signatures. Things that tell us who’s responsible. Let’s say I’m kind of obsessed with that sort of thing.”
“How does one get obsessed with bomb signatures, exactly?”
“I’ll explain when we’re inside. I want to prepare you for what you’re gonna see,” Chuck said. “That’s why I thought it’d be better if we walk a little bit first.”
“It’s been cleaned up already, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s clean. Well. . it’s clean compared to what it was. You’re not gonna see any body parts or anything. But it’s still pretty disturbing.”
“Okay. I appreciate the preparation.”
“I want to prepare you for some other stuff, too.”
“Such as?”
Billings slowed down a bit. His walk turned into more of an amble. “I’ve never been involved with anything like this. I mean, I’ve worked with the Feds before, I know the kind of assholes they can be, but this is something different.”
“Different how?”
“I can’t explain it. I’m going against strict orders by bringing you into this restaurant, but one of the reasons I’m doing it is ’cause I hope you can explain it.”
“What is it I’m trying to explain, Chuck?”
“I don’t want to say anything more. Let me just show you around, give you my impressions of what happened, then you tell me what you think. Fair enough?”
“More than fair. Anything you want to give me is fair. Like I told you, I’m just trying to get some info so I can help a friend sleep a little easier.”
“Good,” Chuck said. “Maybe you’ll wind up helping two friends.”
Chuck Billings had been right. He flashed his badge, told the two FBI agents at the front that Justin was with him, then they stepped inside. And despite the extensive cleanup, Justin almost burst into tears when he walked into the building that had, just a few days ago, been Harper’s Restaurant. Justin had seen death and death didn’t frighten him. But the bombed-out restaurant did frighten him. It sent a deep chill throughout his entire body and filled him up with sadness. This was much worse than being surrounded by death. It was as if the room they were standing in was filled with ghosts.
“Yeah,” Billings said, looking at Justin’s expression. “A bomb site can be pretty overwhelming.”
Justin took a deep breath, swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to show me?”
“I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for,” Billings explained, “so I’m just going to show you what happened, or what I can pretty much deduce happened. Things we’ve picked up from surviving witnesses, from people who saw the bomber on his way to the restaurant, from bomb fragments, a few other pieces of physical evidence.” He was all business now, he didn’t even wait for Justin to respond. He launched into his recitation. And Justin thought it was just that: this was something Chuck Billings had been practicing.
“Okay,” Billings said. “We believe the guy walked here from several blocks away. Maybe as many as eight or ten.”
“Where was he before that?”
“Let me go through this, Jay. Hold your questions until after I’m done. But remember ’em. You’ll see why when I’m finished.” Justin nodded and Billings continued. “What we know for sure is that our guy walked in the door carrying a briefcase. That was the bomb. He talked to the hostess, went to a specific table”-Billings walked to a spot in the restaurant, stood there as if trying to visualize the room intact-“right about here. We narrowed it down to four possible tables. Our job is really to determine three things: the quality of the explosive, the type of explosive, and the location of the blast. So we got the location. This baby went off right here, give or take a couple of feet.”
Billings walked away from the spot, as if it were dangerous to stand on it for too long. “Okay, we know he talks to someone at the table, leaves the briefcase on the floor next to the guy he’s talking to. Takes a couple of steps away, like he’s walking out of the restaurant, his cell phone rings.”
“His cell phone rang?”
“Yeah. Hold on. You got a pen and paper? Write down your questions if you have to, but lemme go through the whole thing.”
“Go ahead. I don’t need a pen. I’ll remember.”
“His cell phone rings,” Billings repeated. “And then. . boom.” The head of the Providence PD bomb squad shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, as if he were trying to block the sound of the explosion. “You know anything about explosions?”
“Am I allowed to interrupt you with an answer?”
“Don’t be a wiseass.”
“No,” Justin said. “I don’t know anything about explosions except they’re loud and they kill people.”
“Look around you. You see this room?” When Justin nodded, Billings made a circle in the air with his left hand. “All right,” he said, indicating the invisible circle. “This is water. You smack your hand down right in the middle of it, you get a depression. Can you picture that?” Justin nodded again. “Think of the water as the atmosphere. The atmosphere in this room. When a bomb goes off, the blast scatters the atmosphere the way your hand scatters the water when you smack it. It pushes it away. That’s the initial effect of an explosion. It pushes everything away. Blows the windows into the street, sends tables flying, all that other shit. But nature abhors a vacuum, as we know from our sixth-grade science class, so there’s a negative pressure that replaces the atmosphere. Right? You hit the water, it swirls, moves away, but then it comes back, fills up the vacuum. That’s what happens with a bomb. This negative phase sucks things toward it. Lighter things like paper, clothing, debris are sucked back toward the explosion. It all happens instantly, it’s why things get so surreal. All this pushing and sucking. It’s why that table wasn’t touched, the one next to it was pulverized. But the closer you are to the point of the explosion, the better chance you have of being pulverized. We call it a kill ratio. Within ten feet of a pound of a high explosive, like a grenade, you’ll have a hundred percent kill ratio. With three pounds, it’s approximately twenty feet. This bomb was about three pounds. You want to know about the actual explosion? I mean, what happened in here?”
“Yeah. I think my friend might want to know that.”
“It was a hell of a bomb. Like I said, about three pounds. They used Semtex. It’s an ex-Soviet bloc explosive. They still make it. The Czechs still make it, too. Not so easy to smuggle in, but it can be done. It’s basically the equivalent of our C4. Al Qaeda uses it. So do the Colombian cartels. Used to be big with the IRA, but I guess they’ve cleaned up their act. Anyway. . the bomb went off right over there. Anything within twenty feet, forget it. The primary fragmentation on this was brutal.”