Death of a Blue Movie Star

Rune looked around. She said, "This looks just like the Underworld."

Healy frowned. He asked her, "Eliot Ness?"

"No, like Hades, I mean. You know, hell."

"Oh, yeah-your analysis of the crime scene the other day." Healy looked back to the men in the pit. He said to Rune, "You have to understand something about explosives. In order to be effective, they have to be explosive only under certain conditions. If you make this stuff that blows up when you look at it cross-eyed, well, that's not going to be real useful now, is it? Hell, most explosives you can destroy by burning them. They don't blow up; they just burn. So to make it go bang, you need detonators. Those're powerful bits of explosive that set off the main charge. Remember the C-4 that they used in the second bombing? If you don't have the detonator surrounded by at least a half inch of C-4 you might not get a bang at all."

She heard enthusiasm in his voice. She thought how good it is when you've found the one thing in life that you're really good at and that you enjoy doing for a living.

"That's what we look for," Healy continued. "That's the weak point in bombs. Most detonators're triggered electrically. So, yeah, we cut the wires, and that's it. If somebody wants to get elaborate they could have a timed detonator and a rocker switch, so that even if you cut the timer, any movement will set off the bomb. Some have a shunt-a galvanometer hooked up to the circuit so that if you cut the wire the needle swings to zero because the current's been cut andthat sets off the bomb. The most elaborate bomb I ever saw had a pressure switch. The whole thing was inside a sealed metal canister filled with pressurized air. We drilled a tiny hole to test for nitrate molecules- that's how bomb detectors at airports work. Sure enough, it was filled with explosives. There was a pressure switch inside. So if we'd open the canister the air would have escaped and set it off."

"God, what did you do?"

"We brought it up here and were just going to detonate it but the word came from downtown they wanted to check the components for fingerprints. So we put it in a hyperbaric chamber, equalized the pressure inside and outside, opened it up and rendered it safe. It had two pounds of Semtex in it. With steel shot all around.

Like shrapnel. Purely antipersonnel. Mean, son-of-a-bitch bomb."

"You got the robot into the chamber?"

"Well, no. Actually I dismantled it."

"You?"

He shrugged and nodded to the pit, where the two men had finished their wrapping exercise and were retreating to a bunker of concrete and sandbags.

"They're practicing setting off military charges. That's an MI 18 demolition block. About two pounds of C-4. For blowing bridges and buildings, trees. They've wrapped it with detonating cord and'll set it off by remote control."

Over the loudspeaker came a voice: "Pit number one, fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"

"What do they mean?" Rune asked.

"That's what they used to yell in coal mines when they lit the fuse on the dynamite. Demolition people use it now to mean there's about to be an explosion."

Suddenly a huge orange flash filled the sky. Smoke appeared. And an instant later a clap of thunder slapped their ears.

"Boaters hate us," Healy explained. "City gets a lot of claims for broken windows."

Rune was laughing.

Healy looked at her. "What?"

She said, "It's just weird. You brought me all the way out here to give me a lesson on IEDs."

"Not really," he said, considering.

"Then why did you invite me?"

Healy looked away for a moment, cleared his throat. His face was ruddy to start with but it seemed he was blushing. He opened his attache case and took out a couple of cans of diet Coke, two deli sandwiches, a bag of Fritos. "I guess it's a date."

CHAPTER TEN

He may have looked like a cowboy but he wasn't the silent type.

Detective Sam Healy was thirty-eight. Nearly half of his fellow Bomb Squad detectives had gotten into demolition in the military but he'd gone a different route. First a portable-a foot patrolman-then working an RMP.

"Remote motor patrol. It means police car."

"Initials, I remember."

Healy smiled. "You're talking to an MOS."

"Moss?"

"Member of Service."

After a few years of that Healy'd gone into Emergency Services: New York 's SWAT team. Then he'd signed up for the Bomb Squad. He'd taken the month-long course at the FBI's Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama, and then was assigned to the Squad. Healy had majored in electrical engineering in college and was studying criminal justice at John Jay.

He talked with excitement about his workshop at home, inventions he'd made as a kid, his twenty-year, uninterrupted subscription toScientific American. Once he had come up with a formula for a chemical solution to neutralize a particular high explosive and had almost gotten a patent. But a big military supplier beat him to it.