“Is that it?” Claire said. “That little oblong shape there?”
I squinted and said, “Why don’t you tell us ordinary folks what you’ve got?”
Cortes had a wild, untethered laugh that totally suited her mad-scientist personality.
“That, my friends, is your smoking gun.”
Chapter 24
Dr. Damaris Cortes looked luminous and had a pleased ta-dah look on her face, as though she’d just discovered the eighth wonder of the world.
“Smoking gun?” I said. “How so?”
She was happy to explain—at length—which only told me how much work had gone into finding what was revealed to be a miniature gel cap. And, most important, it was intact.
Dr. Cortes’s explanation, translated into everyday English, came down to this.
A small soluble capsule had been filled with three ingredients: magnesium, which we’d already known about; RDX, which we had known nothing about; and oil to keep the two ingredients apart until stomach acid dissolved the capsule.
Cortes refreshed my understanding of RDX, a stable explosive in granular form that was developed for the military. RDX packs a huge bang more powerful than TNT, and to this moment, had only been detonated in conventional ways.
Now there was a new method.
Cortes theorized that when the capsule dissolved, stomach acid activated the magnesium, which created a flare. That flare ignited the RDX, causing a secondary explosion with enough power to blow through muscle tissue and seat belts and windshield glass.
Cortes went on, “The execution was brilliant. The capsule was evidently folded into top-grade hamburger meat, which could be preformed into patties, frozen, and cooked whenever.”
I asked, “And the person eating the encapsulated explosive wouldn’t notice it?”
“Not really,” said Cortes. “The gel cap is flexible and small. And now it’s embedded in this thick meat sandwich, maybe accompanied by cheese, bacon, and bread. The way most people tuck into hamburgers, they hardly chew, am I right?”
Cortes shrugged expansively.
I thought about recently wolfing down a Chuckburger at my desk and gave myself a belated scolding for taking a chance like that.
Cortes went on.
“Odds are your killer didn’t get it right the first time. I can imagine some trial runs before there was liftoff. But to conceive of this bomb at all, well, you’re dealing with some kind of genius. You see that, don’t you?”
Claire said, “What they used to call in the comic books an evil genius.”
Cortes said, “I ran a simple comparison between the beef in my sample and what’s available locally, and I’ve concluded that my sample of mush is consistent with the beef at Chuck’s Prime.”
We thanked Cortes, and Claire and I backtracked through the maze of offices out to the parking lot.
I said to Claire, “You know what I’m thinking?”
“Hold on.” She put her thumbs to her temples. “Let me tune in to your frequency.”
“I’m thinking maybe the Jeep victims’ belly bombs were the test run. If that’s so, if that was the first—”
Claire said, “So you’re thinking there could be another belly bomb?”
“I think so. We still don’t get the message.”
Chapter 25
Conklin was in the break room, washing out the coffee pot, when I found him.
I got a fresh can of coffee from the cupboard and popped the top. “I’ve got a belly bomb update,” I said.
“Hit me with it.”
I filled him in on the two-stage explosive that had been packaged in a gel cap and disguised inside ground beef consistent with Chuck’s Prime Beef blend.
“The FBI is locking down Chuck’s meat-processing plant. We should go to Emeryville,” I said.
“Let’s do it.”
Conklin put on his good tie. I refreshed my lipstick and then drove us across the Bay Bridge to Emeryville, which sits along the east side of the bay.
The morning sun filtered through the fog and put a flattering glow on the streets of Emeryville. Gentrification had bred lots of modern structures in this former industrial flatland—new shops and restaurants and, near the marina, film production companies and office parks with some historical buildings thrown into the mix.
Chuck’s corporate headquarters was on 65th Street in the Emery Tech Building, a streamlined, block-long, brick-and-glass building that had once been a valve-and-regulator plant.
I parked right out front and placed a card on the dash that identified our gray Crown Vic as a cop car. Then Conklin and I entered the building.
We sat in a reception area appointed with gears and parts from the old plant and waited to meet the chief executive officer, Michael Jansing, the son-in-law of Charles “Chuck” Andersen, the original Chuck.
After about twenty minutes of thumb twiddling, we were shown to a conference room where we met CEO Jansing, a sandy-haired man of fifty with narrow, closely spaced blue eyes.
Jansing in turn introduced us to six other people sitting around the sturdy redwood table: the marketing director, the heads of PR, HR, and Security, two lawyers, and the head of the product-development team, who was attending the meeting by teleconference.
It was a diverse group with one thing in common: they weren’t glad to see representatives of the SFPD. Their body language and facial expressions told me they were wary, angry, defensive, and suspicious. It was obvious that they thought we weren’t friends of the Chuck’s family and that we could have a bad, or even a fatal, effect on their reputation.
Accordingly, Jansing was putting on an extraordinary show of force for a preliminary meeting with two midlevel cops.
I can’t say that he was crazy to do so.
After we took seats at the table, Jansing said, “The FBI tore apart our Hayes Valley store and found nothing. Frankly, I was a little surprised to hear from you, Sergeant Boxer.”
“We’re working with the FBI,” I told the executives, “but we’re running our own investigation on what may have been a double homicide. We have new evidence that places high explosives inside hamburger meat that originated at Chuck’s.”
Jansing’s eyebrows shot up.
“You can prove that?”
It was a bit of a stretch, but I said, “Yes, we can. Mr. Jansing, two people ate Chuck’s hamburgers and died as a result. It doesn’t mean that someone who works for you planted those explosives, but it does mean that Chuck’s is square one.”
What followed was like a freestyle Ping Pong tournament, in which balls could go to any table and anyone could return them. There came a point when so many aggressive questions were being fired at us that Conklin stood up and said, “Hey. That’s enough. We’re willing to talk to everyone in this office and keep it out of the Justice Department. Or we’ll get subpoenas and interview each of you down at the Hall. Up to you.”
Donna Timko, the product-development manager connected to the meeting by way of the two-way video screen, was the only person who expressed concern or humanity.
Timko said, “Sergeant Boxer, I can’t tell you how distressed we all are at any implication that Chuck’s could be involved in any way.”
Her voice broke, but Timko pushed on.
“We have already questioned everyone in the production division, and I can assure you, this random act of violence…it was not caused by someone who works at Chuck’s.”
And with that, Donna Timko started to cry.
Jansing said, “Donna, calm yourself, dear. It’s all right. We have nothing to hide from the police.”
And then he looked back at us.
“Do what you have to do, Inspectors. But do it fast so that we don’t have to take legal action for harassment by you.”
Chapter 26
While the FBI shut down Chuck’s central meat-processing plant in Petaluma and began sifting through I don’t know how many tons of beef, Conklin and I spent the next day at Chuck’s Prime’s HQ, taking statements from executives and office staff.