“Shit!”

“Her coworkers are checking it out.”

Jenks had won favor by returning from Monday’s predawn excursion alone, without Petey Moss. He had a story prepared to tell anyone inquiring after Petey: He’d had to hightail it to Tennessee to lay low with a cousin until his ex, who now lived in Wisconsin or someplace equally remote, stopped hassling him about delinquent child support checks.

Petey wasn’t likely to be missed by many. His ex was long gone. He never saw his kids, never bothered to contact them. He had lived alone and had claimed few friends.

Jenks had twinges of remorse whenever he recalled how trustingly Petey had accompanied him out to The Pit. Too large to be called a pond, too small for a lake, The Pit was an abandoned gravel pit that years ago the county had filled with water to create a swimming hole. The first summer it was open, two fourteen-year-olds had gone out there in the middle of the night to smoke dope and have sex. While skinny-dipping, both had drowned.

Their parents, looking for somebody to blame, had sued the county and won. After taking that financial drubbing, county officials hadn’t had the budget to reopen The Pit. The only thing out there now was a rusty eight-foot cyclone fence with rustier “Keep Out” signs posted every so often. It was a good place to do something you didn’t want witnessed.

Jenks had lured Petey to it by suggesting they kill a six-pack of Bud while watching the sunrise and commiserating with each other over the ass-chewing they’d received for botching the job at The Major’s place.

Of course that wasn’t what had gone down when they got there. Petey hadn’t been given time to drink even one beer. He didn’t regret tricking Petey. If he hadn’t acted first, Petey would have. In which case, his carcass would likely be decaying on the bottom of The Pit right now.

Anyhow, it was done, and now he was faced with new concerns, like the disappointment and anger he sensed coming at him through his phone from the man at the other end of the call.

“With Kerra wanting to go on TV again tomorrow evening and talk about the Pegasus, The Major’s near miss, all that, tonight’s timing was crucial.”

Jenks thought it best not to try to defend himself against the subtle rebuke. Instead he said, “What do you want me to do now?”

“I’m thinking.”

Oh, Christ. Rarely did anything good come of that.

Chapter 14

Frigid as it was outside, Kerra was smoldering. “Bait?”

“Well, when you say it like that—”

She unbuckled her seat belt, launched herself across the console, and grabbed Trapper’s arm. The SUV swerved, went into a three-sixty spin, then another, and when it stopped, its rear tires were in the ditch, and it was resting at an angle so steep its headlights were projecting up through the sleet and snow mix.

Trying to shake her off, Trapper shouted, “What the hell?”

“Turn this thing around and take me back to town.”

He swatted her hands away and yanked his head from side to side to prevent her from slapping him. “You could have gotten us killed.”

“I’m going to kill you!”

“Okay, you’re furious.”

“That doesn’t come close.”

She went for him again. This time her palm connected with his cheek, and it smarted. “Dammit, Kerra, stop it! I don’t want to hurt you.”

He finally managed to get hold of both her wrists and trapped her hands inside his coat against his chest, then took a moment to catch his breath. He said, “That was a dumb thing to do.”

“I lost my head. Can you blame me?”

“Maybe my tactic wasn’t the best.” She seethed, but that was all the apology she was going to get. “Ready to listen?”

Her eyes were still murderous. “Is this your scheme to prevent me from doing that interview tomorrow night?”

“This is about something a hell of a lot bigger than that.”

She continued to breathe heavily and angrily, but at least he had her attention. She had calmed to a simmer. “I want my hands back.”

“Are you going to pound at me like a crazy woman?”

“Maybe.”

He released her, but she didn’t go manic again. She settled into her seat. “All right, I’m listening.”

He opened the driver’s window a crack so he could safely leave the engine running, but he switched off the headlights. He organized his thoughts and decided to simply lay it out there.

“Kerra, twice in your life, you’ve narrowly escaped being killed. And both times you were with The Major. Now, you can lie to yourself, talk around it, rationalize, theorize about fickle fate, karma, and whatever other crap you want to throw into the mix, but you know, I know, there’s only one explanation. The two of you survived the bombing, and somebody is scared of what will come of you and The Major putting your heads together and comparing notes on what you saw and heard that day.”

“A generally speaking somebody?”

“A particular somebody. Which is why I kept going back to it.”

She shook her head in confusion and stroked the bruise above her brow.

The reflexive motion concerned him. “Kerra, are you dizzy? Feeling sick? Does your head hurt?”

“Yes. No. I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t have been flailing around like that.”

“You shouldn’t have kidnapped me.”

“Do you want me to take you back?”

“Not until I’ve heard this. I’m all right. Tell me what you meant when you said you kept going back to ‘it.’ The bombing?”

“I studied it from the inside out.”

“While you were with the ATF?”

“In my spare time.”

“To what end? The case was solved.”

“‘Solved’ isn’t the word I would use,” he said. “There was never a mystery as to who’d done it or why. The guy confessed, said that he and two other men carried the bombs into the Pegasus Hotel and set them to detonate because they held a grudge against the hotel’s parent company.”

“The petroleum company.”

“Yes. Everything he confessed to was substantiated by the FBI and ATF’s investigations. The blasts were devastating in terms of casualties and destruction of property. But as far as bombs go, they were nothing fancy, and nothing fancy was needed for a building only sixteen stories tall. C-4, a high explosive. Blasting caps. Timers. One of them, swear to God, was an egg timer.

“The blast radius of each wasn’t that large, but it didn’t have to be. What made the Pegasus bombs effective was that they were strategically placed. You know like when an old building is imploded, the explosives are set near support beams, either around the perimeter or in the center? Same principle. Collapse the infrastructure, building crashes down.”

“That sounds scarily simple.”

“It doesn’t take a genius. Nowadays we’re conditioned to be on the alert for stray backpacks and the like. But two decades ago, three men dressed as businessmen carrying briefcases and rollaboards into a hotel wouldn’t have been given a moment’s notice.

“The confessor was an architect. He’d acquired a set of plans, all the schematics of the building, knew how to access the areas they needed to get to, and he had his escape route mapped out.”

“Remember, I’ve studied the bombing, too,” Kerra said. “One of the things I found incomprehensible was that he was the one who set the timers, then lied to the other two about how much time they had to get clear before detonation.”

“Exactly,” Trapper said quietly. “He planned it so he would be the sole surviving bomber. But only so he could confess? Does that make sense to you?”

“That’s what bothered you, what got you interested?”

“It was one of the things,” he said. “When I first got into the ATF, I was merely curious to learn more about the event that had dominated my life since age eleven. I wanted to tackle it, like a foe, and now I had access to files, reports, information that the general public is never exposed to because it’s either too technical or too graphic, horrific, gruesome. I was like a scholar deprived of books who suddenly finds himself locked inside the Library of Congress. But for all the access I had, the deeper I dug, the more curious I became.”