Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,46

runs her fingers through it. It’s blond, although it doesn’t look it anymore, not today. Most of her face, like mine, was protected by the mask and goggles, but her hair and the exposed parts of her face—her forehead, the tops of her cheeks—are covered in greasy soot. She looks like some variety of raccoon, and I’m sure I do too.

Inside the vacant store, electrical cords are everywhere; computers have been set up on card tables and on every other available flat surface. A map of Chicago is taped on the lavender wall, and there are thumbtacks on the bomb site and on the perimeter of interest. I glance at a clock on the wall, which features a painted birthday cake in the middle of it. Could it really be six o’clock at night? It doesn’t seem possible.

In one corner, some chairs have been set up, and a number of people are gathered there, most of them law enforcement but some civilians too. Wilson, the assistant special agent in charge for Chicago, locks eyes with us and waves us over.

“Okay, let’s start,” says Wilson. He has the same raccoon face from the soot that everyone else does. Nobody who got within a city block of that crime scene came away unscathed.

“I’m going to introduce some folks,” he says, looking at a clipboard. He gestures to a number of people and gives their names. The payday-store owner. The store manager. The security guard. The cleaning-service crew. The armored-truck employees. The manager of the Horizon Hotel for Men.

Everyone, to a person, looks exhausted and traumatized but also energized at being a part of something this big.

Each employee of Cash 4U Quick tells us that nobody set off alarm bells in terms of suspicious behavior over the past week. It’s possible the bomber actually entered the store at some point during his reconnaissance, so we have to ask, but I doubt he did. He only needed to access the side door to get in and plant his bomb in the utility room, and the online architectural drawings of the building would have told him where that was. If he’s any good, he would never have set foot in that store.

“We did the cash transfer at six, like always on Saturday,” says the security guard, Ron Sims. “I locked up a few minutes later. Didn’t notice anything funny.”

“The door to the utility room was always locked?” asks Wilson.

“Yeah, lock and key. I have a key. But I never went in there.”

“You passed by that utility room, though, on your way out?”

“Yeah, I left through the side door to the alley. The utility room was right there.”

“You didn’t look inside the utility room Saturday night, I assume?” asks Wilson.

He shakes his head. “No, wouldn’t have done that. But I didn’t smell gas. And if the door had been broken open, I sure would’ve noticed that.”

We haven’t had much access to the bomb site because of the heat and because it remains a rescue situation. But what we believe was the door to the utility closet was found across the street from the payday store and half a block down, and from what can be discerned from it, it appears the lock was busted, not picked. The handle was missing altogether. Had it stayed in the wreckage, we might have thought it had just melted, but it blew clean from the site. So we’re assuming the bomber, alone in the store, busted it off to access the utility room.

The older of the two cleaning-service people, Alice Jagoda, who has gray hair pulled into a bun, confirms in halting English that they didn’t enter the utility room either because they didn’t clean inside that room and they bring their own cleaning supplies. But like the security guard, she came and went through the side door to the alley and passed right by the utility room. “The door…not broken,” she says. “I notice if broken.” She looks at her partner, a young Latina named Acevedo, who concurs.

When a timer is involved, as it was here, you always consider the possibility that the bomb was planted days, even weeks, in advance. But because a gas line was cut, it wouldn’t have been weeks—somebody would have smelled the gas and called the gas company—and it likely wouldn’t have been days either.

But the fact that nobody saw a busted-open utility-room door closes the window even further. The cleaning-service women were the last ones to leave, at approximately 9:30 p.m. Saturday, and