her I’d drop the copies off as soon as I could and ended the call.
It was far too early to draw any conclusions, but I began to wonder how close she was to her husband.
“Jesus,” Dave said across the squad room. He and Marty were huddled behind Patrick’s desk, staring over his shoulders at something on the screen of his iPad.
“What are you guys looking at?”
Dave glanced at Patrick, who nodded.
“You should come over here,” Dave said.
“What is it?”
“It was your car,” Marty said.
They made room for me behind Patrick. Before I got a good look at the image on the screen, Patrick started side-scrolling through photographs. “You should start with this one,” he said.
I looked down at the screen and saw a straight-on side view of my Camry. The front and rear ends were both relatively intact, but the same couldn’t be said for the middle. Where the driver’s door should have been was a gaping hole. It looked like a giant shark had opened its jaws wide and taken a huge bite. The driver’s seat was completely gone, as were the steering wheel, much of the dashboard, and a significant portion of the roof. What remained was a jagged mess of metal and plastic, upholstery and fabric, all twisted and blackened by the explosion. Part of the passenger’s seat was pressed against the door on the other side, and all the windows had blown out. What remained of the roof bulged upward like the top of a botulism-tainted can.
It suddenly became difficult to think of anything other than what would have happened if I’d been inside when the bomb exploded. There wouldn’t have been much of me left. My shoulder and arm tightened and I leaned into the pain.
“You would have been even deader than we thought,” Dave said.
Marty clapped me on the back. “Bet no one’s ever been so grateful for a bad spark plug.”
“ATF confirmed that it was a South African land mine.” Patrick checked his notes. “A Mini MS-803. It’s like a smaller version of the claymore.”
I was still looking at the photograph. “That’s the small one?”
Patrick nodded. “The feds thinks we might get lucky with the source. They found another one of the same model, undetonated, a few weeks ago.”
“Where’d they find it?”
“Some Serbo-Croatian crew in the valley,” he said. “We’re running them down now. Looking for possible Long Beach connections.”
“Keep me in the loop, okay?” I’d worked several cases involving eastern European gangs in the last few years, but none with any known connections that fit.
“I will,” he said. Then he added, “As much as I can.”
Back at my desk, I found a voice mail from Ethan. “Only one set of prints from the Kobayashi Maru apartment,” he said. “But no matches to anything in the databases. Maybe we’ll get a hit on the DNA.”
Maybe, I thought. And maybe Kobe would turn out to be one of those Asian Serbians we always hear so much about.
“Somehow it never occurred to me that I’d have to get a new car,” I told Julia on the phone. After a pit stop at home to pick up fresh clothes, I was settling in for another evening at Jen’s house. The days were getting shorter, but dusk was still hanging in the air.
“What do you think you’ll get?”
“I don’t want a new car,” I said. “I want my Camry.”
“It was pretty old. Didn’t you say it had a lot of miles on it?”
“Two hundred fifty-seven thousand.”
“Danny, I don’t know much about cars, but I know that’s a lot. You even said you didn’t think it would last much longer.”
“I know. It’s just that I thought it would go from natural causes.”
I thought I heard her stifling a laugh. “What are natural causes for a car?”
“I don’t know. A cracked engine block? Transmission cancer?”
She went ahead and laughed out loud.
“I know how it sounds,” I said. “One of my first homicide cases was a ninety-three-year-old lady. Grandmother, great-grandmother, big family, everybody loved her. A stray bullet from a drive-by went through the living-room window right into her chest. I could never shake that. To live so long and then die just like that. It didn’t feel right.”
“Would it have been better if she had to suffer for months with some debilitating illness?”
“No,” I said.
“Is that what you’d want?”
When I realized we weren’t really talking about my car anymore, I said, “You like your Subaru, right?”
I used to listen to the BBC Overnight broadcast on KPPC, one of the