Death of a Blue Movie Star

"Miss, you know it's a crime to have a badge?"

"It's a crime for some people to have a badge."

Healy said, "Artie, she's with me. It's okay."

"Sam, she can't go flipping shields around." Begley turned to her. "Either open your bag or we'll have to take you to the precinct."

"The thing is…"

Eddie took the leopard-skin bag and handed it to Begley. He rummaged through the dull-clinking carnival of junk. He searched for a minute or two, then grimaced and dumped the contents out on the floor. There was no badge.

Rune pulled out all her pockets. Empty.

Begley looked at Eddie, who said, "I saw it. I know I did."

Healy said, "I'll keep an eye on her, Artie."

Begley grunted, handed her bag to Eddie and ordered him to fill it back up.

"She had a shield," he protested.

Begley said to Healy, "Got a positive ID on the body from dentals. It's that Lowe woman all right. Nobody else hurt. And you were asking last night about her phone call?"

Healy nodded.

"The security guard doesn't remember who the message was from. And the phone company's still running pen registers, trying to find out who called who. As soon as we know anything else we'll let you know."

"Thanks."

Begley left. Eddie finished refilling Rune's bag. With a cold glance at Rune he too left.

Rune turned and saw Healy reading her ID.

"You spelled Sergeant wrong."

She reached for it and he lifted it above her reach.

"Begley's right. You get caught with this, it's a misdemeanor. And wising off to a cop'll get you the maximum sentence."

"You picked my purse."

He slipped the fake-leather wallet into his pocket. "Bomb Squad's got steady hands." He finished his coffee.

Rune nodded after Begley. "You were asking them to check out phone calls and things? Sounds to me like you're more than just a grunt."

A nonchalant shrug. "You leave the camera off and I'll show you what 1 got."

"Okay."

They walked to a crater in the concrete floor. Rune slowed as she got close. Streaks of white and gray led outward from it. Above them was a black mess of a dome where the explosion had destroyed the acoustic-tiled ceiling. In front of Rune was the gaping hole where the outer wall had been.

Healy pointed to the crater. "I measured it. We can tell from the size how much explosive there was." He held up a small glass vial with cotton in it. "This has absorbed the chemical residue in the air around the site. I'll send it over to the police lab in the Academy near Second Avenue. They'll tell me exactly what kind of explosive it was."

Rune's hands were sweating and her stomach was knotted. This is where Shelly had been standing when she'd turned to make her call. This is where she'd been standing when she died. Maybe in this very spot. Her legs went weak. She backed away slowly.

Healy continued, "But I'm sure it was composition four. C-4 it's usually called."

"You hear about it in Beirut."

"The number one choice among terrorists. It's military. You can't buy it from commercial demolition suppliers. It looks like dirty white putty, kind of oily. You can mold it real easily."

"Was it like hooked to a clock or something?"

Healy walked to his attache case and picked up one of the plastic bags. It contained bits of burnt metal and wires.

"Junk," Rune said.

"Butimportant junk. It tells me exactly how the bomb worked, how she was killed. It was in the phone she called from. Which was on a wooden desk right about there." He pointed to a space on the floor near the crater. "The phone was a new-model Taiwanese import. That's significant because in the old Western Electric phones most of the space was take up by the workings. There's a lot of empty space in new phones. That let the killer use about a half pound of C-4."

"That's not so much."

Healy smiled grimly. "Oh, yes it is-C-4's about ninety-one percent RDX, which is probably the most powerful nonnuclear explosive around. It's a trinitra-mine."

Rune nodded, though she had no idea what that was.

"They mix that with a sevacate and an isobutylene, oh, and a little motor oil-those are for stability, so it doesn't go off when you sneeze. You don't need very much at all for a very, very big bang. Detonation rate of about twenty-seven thousand feet per second. Dynamite is only about four thousand."

"If you haven't sent it to the lab how do you know it's C-4?"

"I pretty much knew when I walked in. I could smell it. It was either that or Semtex, a Czech explosive. I also found a bit of plastic wrapper-with a U.S. Army code on it. So it'd have to be C-4, and old C-4 because it didn't completely detonate."

"What set it off?"

He was absently examining burnt pieces of metal and plastic in the bag, squeezing them, sliding them around.