The bomb expert's head came up. "Red Snow? Were they involved with those bastards?"
"What's Red Snow?" Albee asked, who was in grammar school in the late Sixties.
"One of those violent underground groups that splintered off SDS around sixty-nine or seventy," he replied sourly. "Sometime in early 1970-"
"January ninth," Elaine Albee interposed from her printouts.
"January ninth," he nodded, "a group of radicals bombed a draft board in Chicago. What they hadn't bothered to check was that the draft board only took up part of the building. The other part opened onto a side street with just a flimsy wall between. Draft board on one side, day-care centre on the other. Four little kids were killed outright, along with one of the teachers and a couple from the draft board. It had snowed that morning and kids were blown out into the street, mangled and bloody in the fresh white snow.
"That's what I mean about amateurs," he said grimly. "They always use too damn much. Anyhow, that's supposed to be where they got the name. Red Snow. The papers had another version, though. Said the leader, Fred Hamilton, was a Ho Chi Minh sympathizer hooked on cocaine at the time."
"Yeah, I remember now," said one of the older detectives. "Weren't they the ones that blew themselves up in a fancy fishing lodge up around the Finger Lakes?"
"Yeah, that was Red Snow," McKinnon rumbled reminiscently. "Funny how you forget about things like that. It was a seven-day wonder with the papers. Beautiful young debutante."
His younger officers were looking blank again, so he refreshed their memories.
"One of the Red Snow members was the only daughter of a wealthy stockbroker who owned a twelve-room vacation cottage on Cayuga Lake.
"He knew she'd been a member of a radical SDS chapter at college that winter, but he thought she'd broken with them and joined some sort of back-to-nature outfit. At least that's what he told the FBI and the state troopers later. I guess granola and free love sounded so much better to him than riots and sit-ins that he let them use the place that summer while he and his third wife went off to Europe for a couple of months."
"She'd left SDS all right," said the bomb expert, picking up the story, "but Red Snow was no love-happy commune. They'd begun to stockpile weapons and explosives and they must have had several hundred pounds of the stuff because somebody got careless one August night and the place went up like Nagasaki. They say you could see the flames as far away as Syracuse, a hundred miles away.
"When the ashes cooled, seven bodies were found, but they were so badly burned that four of them were never positively identified. The house was built out over the lake and a couple of canoers swore they saw three people dive off an upper balcony with their clothes afire. The debutante's burned body was floating in the lake the next day, but they never found the other two."
"Red Snow had a meltdown," someone quipped.
McKinnon scowled. "And the Suttons were mixed up with them?"
"They were questioned," said Albee. "In January and again in August of that year."
"Probably because Sutton was active in SDS at McClellen State," said Sigrid, entering the discussion for the first time.
The others looked at her curiously. "You knew Sutton?" asked the captain.
"A friend of mine over at Vanderlyn first met them when John Sutton was head of McClellan's SDS. As I recall, Fred Hamilton was from McClellan, too. That's probably why the Suttons were questioned."
"So Sutton's wife might know how to make a bomb," said Peters.
Albee shook her small blonde head in vigorous denial. "No way. That was no act that lady put on last night. Besides, Sutton's not the one with the six-million estate."
"Keep an open mind," growled the captain. "He could have been carrying insurance. Check it. And check what the marriage was really like before you say 'no way' again. We're looking for somebody with bomb-making experience and for my money, and SDS background puts Mrs. Sutton on the charts. You've already said the tournament was her idea."
"My friend says he and Sutton were at the Maintenon on Wednesday," Sigrid said quietly. "They were actually in the same ballroom."
A babble of questions erupted just as a uniformed sergeant put his head in the door. "Captain? There's some guy here from the Navy to see you about the Maintenon bombing."
The captain heaved himself to his feet. "Take over. Lieutenant Harald," he said and went out to see what the Navy wanted.
8
FOR the next quarter hour, Sigrid passed along to her colleagues the background information Nauman had given her about Sutton's McClellan days, his current standing at Vanderlyn and his brief visit to the Maintenon Hotel on Wednesday. In return, she heard from them the mostly nonconclusive findings the various forensics teams had delivered earlier that morning.
The sling on her arm elicited questions, and she briefly described her confrontation with the assailant she'd shot the night before. It was the first time any of them had ever seen the austere lieutenant without her hair severely bound. The blue scarf did not restrain her hair as tightly as bobby pins and already a few stray tendrils had feathered around the strong lines of her face.
Some of the older men still had residual misgivings and resentments about a female lieutenant working homicides;but Tillie was universally liked and, as his partner, Sigrid was the automatic recipient of spontaneous condolence. Their warmth and sincerity made Sigrid momentarily tongue-tied, but for once-perhaps influenced by the sling and the blue scarf-they seemed to attribute her stammering acknowledgments to depth of feeling and not to the coldhearted detachment most tagged her with.
Tillie was one of their own, and since Sigrid was the most directly affected by his injury, it was taken for granted that she'd be running this case.
Whom she'd be partnered with until Tillie's recovery was another matter.
Depending upon whom you asked, Tillie was either a saint or a simpleton and not just because he worked with Lieutenant Harald without complaint, but because he also insisted that the lieutenant had a sense of humor and a human side somewhere under all that ice and efficiency. But Tillie could say what he liked: it had not gone unnoticed that Lieutenant Harald's frozen reserve seemed to make even Captain McKinnon uncomfortable at times.
Before anyone was forced to throw himself on the barbed wire, the captain returned with a young naval officer in a dark blue uniform, his black-billed white cap tucked under his arm.
He was not tall, an inch or so short of six feet in fact, but he was well-built; wide shoulders, slim hips, and an easy way of carrying himself that blended military discipline with athletic vitality. In his late twenties, the young officer had deep-set brown eyes, a lopsided smile, well-defined jaw and straw-colored hair a few shades darker than the bright gold stripes on his uniform.
An electric awareness immediately flickered through the other four women seated at the table.
"This is Lieutenant Alan Knight of Naval Intelligence," said McKinnon. "He'll be sitting in on our investigation of Commander Dixon."
An attractive young man, Sigrid noted clinically, and was amused to see a slight scowl appear on Jim Lowry's face as he became aware of Elaine Albee's cuter than usual friendliness when the captain introduced her to the newcomer.
In addition to Albee's flashing dimples, Sigrid noticed that Detective Urbanska was smoothing her curls and that the two women from the bomb squad sat just a shade more provocatively in their chairs.
Her inner amusement deepened as Lieutenant Knight shifted his hat to his left hand and a broad gold wedding band gleamed on that all-important third finger. A nearly inaudible female sigh swept the room and suddenly everyone settled back to normal. As hormonal tensions eased, they were replaced by the ordinary wariness that arises whenever a different authority meddles in what is perceived to be NYPD affairs. It was bad enough that the explosion had the FBI waiting in the wings. Who needed the Navy as well?