Page 6 of Delusional

“In his damn bedroom.”

“You should be happy he found us this place. You can always go sleep in your storage locker if you want. But now we each have our own room in a nice clean house with decent heat. I noticed when it gets real cold, you forget about that cot over at the storage locker.”

Pry let out a low growl and stomped away.

Owens said to Kimmy, “Is he your boyfriend?”

“No. I don’t have a boyfriend.” She patted the bed next to her and waited until Owens sat down. She scooted closer to him. Then she draped an arm around his shoulders. She leaned in close and said, “You’re way too smart to let a guy like Pry scare you. You’ve turned our whole group around. Look at the way you made that bomb and planted it at the Office of Technology. It was genius. And it’s the only thing anyone’s talking about on TV. You’re going to do great things for us.” Then she leaned over and kissed Owens on the cheek.

He could feel his face flush. He knew she was right. Their first lesson to society about the dangers of technology had been almost flawless. He was only sorry there hadn’t been any customers inside the office when the bomb went off. That would have brought even more attention.

The photos of the young clerk who had died—Abby something—seemed to be getting a lot of play on TV. Even CNN had run a story on it. The newscaster had speculated it was a disgruntled citizen. Owens always thought most New Yorkers were disgruntled. The newscaster’s statement had made no sense. When Owens thought about it, most statements from the media made little or no sense.

He wondered what he could do to make more of a statement. Bring down a building? Plant a bomb in the sewer system and collapse a road? Maybe. He glanced into the open closet.

At least now he had plenty of supplies to make a bomb that would really take over a news cycle.

CHAPTER 7

I WAS ENCOURAGED by the prospect of working with a bright ATF special agent. I had to trust that Maggie Chin would stand by her pledge to be open with any results she found. That was the reputation of the ATF. They worked a lot more closely with local agencies than some of the other feds.

I didn’t like leaving a crime scene, but I couldn’t linger at Picatinny Arsenal. I had too much work to do on my own case, especially with my partner out of commission, on his way to Bozeman, Montana.

It was late in the afternoon by the time I made it to Brooklyn. This was not an assignment I was particularly looking forward to. I needed to talk with the mother of Abby Boyd, the victim from the bombing at the Office of Technology.

When Joyce Boyd opened the door to her brownstone, I could tell it was during a brief pause in a day full of weeping. Her eyes were red, and her hair hung to the side like she had been lying down.

She made a brave effort to get it together and invited me into the house after I introduced myself. I sat on a floral couch while Mrs. Boyd took a chair facing me from across a coffee table. I’d been through enough of these sensitive interviews to know not to rush things. There were a few key pieces of information I required, but she needed to talk. The most heartbreaking thing she told me was that she’d also lost her son five years earlier.

After a while, we tracked back to today’s tragedy.

Mrs. Boyd said, “How could someone do something like this?”

“I wish I had a good answer.”

The question had plagued me since my first days with the NYPD, when I’d discovered a homeless man beaten and left to die in an alleyway. I’d turned to my partner and asked, “How could someone do something like this?” My partner had replied, “Imagine what it would be like without us around.”

That was one of my motivations in the job. What would happen if I wasn’t here?

I glanced over at a photo of Abby at about age sixteen, holding a soccer ball. Her long brown hair was tied in a ponytail and her smile looked like it could be used for an advertisement. Swap the soccer ball for a basketball, and it could have been a photo of one of my own teenage daughters.

Her mother said, “She was so bright. And friendly. Everyone loved her. Who would want to hurt her?”

“That’s what I intend to find out, Mrs. Boyd.”

I was here for information and had to eliminate some of my theories about who had planted the bomb. I asked the standard question about her daughter’s love life and circle of friends.

Mrs. Boyd thought about it and said, “Abby was dating a nice young man named Jimmy Pinter for most of this past year. But they broke up last month. She said she just didn’t have serious feelings for him. It seemed to really shake him to his core. I spent one evening trying to comfort him when he dropped some roses off and found out Abby was out on the town.”

“Can you tell me more about Jimmy?”

“He is about the same age as Abby, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Nice enough. Average height. Nothing really unusual about him.”

“Do you know what he does for a living?”

“He’s some kind of construction manager.”

I asked about some of the construction sites, and Mrs. Boyd told me they were bigger ones mostly in Manhattan. That gave me pause. Who had control of explosives used on the big sites? Usually, it was a construction manager.