51
ROBIE STOOD IN FRONT of the terminal from where the doomed bus had left. In his mind he went over once more the events of that night. He had failed to kill Jane Wind and the backup shooter had done his job for him. Robie had executed his escape plan and come to this bus terminal to catch a ride out of the city. He had told no one. He had left no trail of any kind.
But I did reserve a bus ticket for that day and for that bus using an alias that only I was supposed to know existed. But someone else knew. And they were willing to kill all those people just to get me.
He glanced around. There was no way anyone could have planted that wheel-well bomb on the bus here. It had pulled into the terminal and people had boarded. As soon as the door closed after the last passenger, the bus had sped off. But there were other people around the terminal. Another bus was leaving soon to take people south to Miami. The bomber would have been seen. No, the explosive was not placed on the bus here.
Robie walked over to the terminal building. He glanced through the plate glass window and made sure the woman behind the counter was not the same woman who had sold him his ticket. It wasn’t. He had confirmed earlier that there were no surveillance cameras either inside or outside the building. The company probably didn’t have the money to spend on such things.
He went inside the terminal. It was as dingy as the buses used by the company. He walked toward the counter and stood in line behind a large woman with a baby clinging to her chest. Another child was in a car seat, which the woman was swinging back and forth. This image made Robie think of Jane Wind and her two kids.
When Robie got up to the counter the young woman looked back at him with a bored expression. It was nearly eleven and she probably wanted to get out of this place.
“Can I help you?” she mumbled.
He held up his creds. “I’m looking into the bombing of one of your buses.”
She sat up straighter and looked more attentive. “Okay.”
“I need you to tell me where the buses come in from before they arrive here and load up passengers.”
“We have a maintenance and prep center two blocks from here. The driver checks in there, goes over the trip schedule, and then does a bus safety inspection. It gets fueled and cleaned there too, stuff like that.”
“Give me the exact address.”
She wrote it down and passed the piece of paper to him.
“Thanks,” said Robie. “What time do you get off?”
She raised her eyebrows as though she thought he was hitting on her and was not pleased by it. “Midnight,” she said warily. “And I’ve got a boyfriend.”
He said, “I’m sure. You go to school?”
“Catholic University.”
He looked around the depressing interior of the cinder-block building. “Study hard,” he said. “And never look back.”
He climbed into his Volvo and headed two blocks south.
The gate to the maintenance and prep yard was shut and locked. Robie finally got the attention of a security guard who was making rounds. The guy was suspicious until Robie flashed his badge. The guard unlocked the gate.
“Had some FBI agents in here already,” the man said. “And some NTSB guys too, to see if the bus had something wrong with it.”
“Did it?”
“Beats me. So what can I do for you?”
“Walk me through the prep for the buses.”
“I don’t really know that much about it. I just get paid to walk around with a gun looking for trouble. And in this area you usually find it.”
“Who does know? Is that person here?”
The guard pointed to the old brick building. “Two dudes in there. They work until two a.m.”
“Names?”
“Chester and Willie.”
“They been here a while?”
“I’ve only been here for a month. They’ve been here longer. Don’t know how much longer.”
“Thanks.”
Robie swung the door open and looked around at a cavernous space with high ceilings, rows of tube lighting, five parked buses, rolling toolboxes, generators, and work lights in grill cages. Everything was drenched with the odor of oil, grease, and fuel.
He called out, “Anybody here?”
A tall, thin black man dressed in work overalls walked around the front of a bus rubbing his hands on a dirty cloth.
“Can I help you?”
Robie held up his cred pack. “Need to ask you some questions.”
“Cops already been by.”
“I’m just one more cop coming by,” replied Robie. “Are you Chester or Willie? Guard outside told me,” he added when the man looked suspicious.
“Willie. Chester’s under a bus pulling a transmission.”
“So run me through how the buses are processed.”
“They come in maybe six hours before they’re scheduled to head out. We go over them in here. Got a checklist of maintenance items. Check the engine, coolant, tire tread, brakes, steering fluid, clean the inside of the bus, pick up all the crap people leave behind. Then we take it behind the building to the washing shed. Clean the outside. Then we gas it up at the fueling station near the front gate. Then it sits until the driver checks in and takes it to the terminal.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I showed all them dudes the maintenance records. Ain’t nothing on that bus made it blow up. I know we don’t look like much, but we take our work seriously here. Had to be something like a bomb.”
“Could you show me where the bus would sit?”
“Look, man, I got a ton of shit to do on three buses.”
“I’d really appreciate it,” said Robie, motioning to the door.
Willie sighed and led him out and around the building. He pointed to a spot near the fence. “They’re parked right there until the driver shows up.”
“How many buses were sitting here the night the one blew up?”
“Two. Side by side. The one heading to New York and one heading south to Miami.”
“Okay, somebody looking to put a bomb on a particular bus. How would they know which was which?”
“You asking me to think like some maniac?”
“Nothing on the bus exterior to tell them?”
“Oh sure, there’s a number on the front of the bus. The 112 goes to New York. The 97 bus goes to Miami.”
Robie said, “So whoever put the bomb on there would be able to tell which bus was which if they had the bus schedule or checked online?”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Or if they worked here.”
Willie took a step back. “Look, man, I ain’t got no idea how somebody put a bomb on one of our buses, if that’s what happened. And I sure as hell didn’t help them do it. I knew two of the people got blowed up. One was a friend and the other knew my momma. Went up to New York once a month to visit her granddaughter. Wore a damn robe on the bus. I used to think it was funny. Don’t think it’s funny no more. Almost gave my momma a heart attack when she found out.”
Robie thought back to the bus ride, to the old lady in her robe who had been screaming.
“So the 112 goes to New York.” He eyed the fence. Easy enough to get over. The bomber could have hopped the fence when the guard was on the other side of the property. Plant the bomb and then be gone. Less than a minute.
He looked at Willie. “That night, how long was the 112 bus sitting out here before the driver showed?”
Willie thought about this. “Didn’t have much work to do on it. It got in early from the last trip. Chester did the checklist, vacuumed the interior. I did the outside wash, fueled and then parked it. Maybe two-three hours.”
Robie nodded. “Did you notice anyone suspicious around?”
“I’m inside most of the time working on the buses. Guard might have seen something, but probably not.”
“Why’s that?”
“He does more eating in his little guard shack than walking, you get my drift. Why he’
s so fat.”
“Okay.”
“Can I get back to work now?”
“Thanks for the information.”
Willie left him and walked back into the building.
Robie stood there in the dark and eyeballed the spot the 112 bus had been in. Bomber did the bus. Robie got on the bus. Robie got off the bus. Bus blew up. They sent a shooter into the alley to finish the job. Someone really wanted him bad.
Another thought occurred to him. But maybe not that bad.
“Doing some private sleuthing on your off time?”
He turned and looked through the chain-link fence.
Nicole Vance was staring back at him.
CHAPTER
52
ROBIE WALKED THROUGH the open gate.
“Where have you been all this time?” asked Vance.
“Let’s go back to Donnelly’s,” said Robie.
“Why?”
“I want to check something I should have already checked.”
Fifteen minutes later Robie stood in the same spot he had on the night an MP-5 had tried to rip his life away. He eyed where the SUV had been, then his defensive position behind the trash cans, and then over his shoulder at the shattered plate glass window. He walked back and forth and framed, in his mind’s eye, the shot pattern of the attackers.
“Total number of dead and wounded as of right now?” he asked Vance, who was watching him.
“Six dead, five wounded. One’s still in the hospital but looks like he’ll make it.”
“But not us,” said Robie.
“What?”
“We’re not dead.”
“A somewhat obvious deduction,” Vance said dryly.
“Eleven people shot, six fatally, and yet the shooter misses us? We were the closest target, right out in the open. Aluminum trash cans the only thing between us, thirty-round clips, and a cooler bed at the D.C. morgue.”
“You’re saying the shooter missed us on purpose?”
He looked over to find Vance staring at him, a perplexed look on her face.
“How does that make sense?” she asked.
“How does it make sense that the guy missed us at basically point-blank range with a weapon that is designed for mass destruction in narrow fields of fire? There should be at least eight dead, including you and me. Look at the shot pattern. He was firing around us.”
“Then are you saying they killed all those people for what? A warning? Something to do with the Wind case? The bus bombing?”
Robie didn’t answer her. His thoughts were racing ahead, taking him in a direction he had never expected to go.
“Robie?”
He turned to her.
Vance said slowly, “I guess looking at it that way, what you’re saying makes sense. I guess we should be dead. Then it has to relate to the Winds, or the bus, or maybe both.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“But Robie—”
He turned back away from her to stare at the spot on the street again from where the SUV had launched its attack.
Someone has tagged me. Someone is playing mind games with me. Someone close is trying to get to me, screw with me.
“Robie, do you have any other enemies?” asked Vance.
“None that I can think of,” he said absently.
Other than a few hundred, he thought.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asked.
He broke off his thoughts and rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you tell me everything?”
“What?”
He faced her. “Do you tell me everything?” he demanded.
“I guess not.”
“Then you have your answer.”
“But you told me I could trust you.”
“You can, but you have your agency and I have mine. I’m assuming you’ll tell me everything you can and I’ll do the same. I’ve got people to report to and so do you. It all has limits. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to get the job done.”
Vance glanced down at her feet, poked a cigarette butt lying on the street with the toe of her shoe. “So you find anything over at the bus maintenance shop that you can tell me?”
“That bus was parked there a long time, long enough for someone to plant the bomb on it.”
“So the bomber knew the target was going to be on the bus.”
“Do we have a passenger list?”
“Only partially. For those who paid with a credit card, not for those who paid with cash, unless a family member or friend came forward and told us a person was on the bus.”
“So how many people on the bus?”
“Thirty-six plus the driver. We’re doing background checks on all known persons that were on the bus. That’s twenty-nine people. That leaves eight unaccounted for. They were probably walk-ups that night who paid cash for the tickets.”
Robie thought, That includes Julie and the hit man.
“Can I see the list?”
She slipped out her phone and hit some buttons. She held the screen out to him.
He ran his gaze down the list. Julie wasn’t on it. And thankfully neither was Gerald Dixon, which meant Julie had not used his credit card to buy her ticket. But no other name on the list meant anything to him, other than the alias Robie had reserved his ticket under.
Okay, he had been the target, not Julie. But then why really try and kill him on the bus and then miss him on purpose when the MP-5 had him in the kill zone?
The plan changed, that’s why. They wanted me dead. Now they want me alive. But why?
“Robie?”
He looked up from the screen to find Vance gazing at him.
“I don’t recognize anyone on that list.” His lies to her were piling up quickly.
“So we still don’t know the target.”
Robie did not want to lie to her again so soon, thus he said, “Anything new on Rick Wind?”
“ME did the post. Cause of death was suffocation.”
“How?”
“Petechial hemorrhaging was the main clue. But he wasn’t initially sure how it was accomplished. No pillow over the face, nothing like that.”
“Why hide the manner of the killing?” asked Robie as he drew in a long breath.
“Harder to find out who did it.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”