Demolition Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

instant coffee. She swallowed two Tagamet, then lit a cigarette before letting herself out into the sultry night air.
    It was not quite five, and the world was quiet. A kid in a beat-up red hatchback was delivering the L.A.
Times
, weaving from side to side in the street as he tossed out the papers. An Alta-Dena dairy truck rumbled past.
    Starkey decided to drive back to Silver Lake and walk the blast site again. It was better than listening to the silence in her still-beating heart.
    Starkey parked in front of the Cuban restaurant next to a Rampart radio car watching over the scene. The mall’s parking lot was otherwise deserted, except for three civilian vehicles that she remembered from the night before.
    Starkey held up her badge before she got out.
    “Hey, guys, everything okay?”
    They were a male/female team, the male officer a skinny guy behind the wheel, the female short and chunky with mannish blonde hair. They were sipping minimart coffee that probably hadn’t been hot for hours.
    The female officer nodded.
    “Yeah. We’re good, Detective. You need something?”
    “I’ve got the case. I’m gonna be walking around.”
    The female officer raised her eyebrows.
    “We heard a bomb guy got creamed. That so?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Bummer.”
    The male officer leaned past his partner.
    “If you’re gonna be here a few, you mind if we Code Seven? There’s an In-’n-Out Burger a couple blocks over. We could bring you something.”
    His partner winked at Starkey.
    “Weak bladder.”
    Starkey shrugged, secretly pleased to be rid of them.
    “Take twenty, but you don’t have to bring me anything. I won’t be out of here before then.”
    As the radio car pulled away, Starkey clipped her pistol to her right hip, then crossed Sunset to look for the address that the Emergency Services manager had provided. She brought her Maglite, but didn’t turn it on. The area was bright from surrounding security lights.
    A pay phone was hanging on the side of a Guatemalan market directly across from the mall, but when Starkey compared it to the address, they didn’t match. From the Guatemalan market, she could look back across Sunset at the Dumpster. She figured out which way the numbers ran and followed them to find the pay phone. It was housed in one of the old glass booths that Pac Bell was discontinuing, one block east on the side of a laundry, across the street from a flower shop.
    Starkey copied the name of the laundry and flower shop into her notebook, then walked back to the first phone and checked to see if it worked. It did. She wondered why the person who called 911 hadn’t done so from here. The Dumpster was in clear view, but wasn’t from the other phone. Starkey thought that the caller might’ve been worried that whoever set the bomb could see them, but she decided not to worry about it until she heard the tape.
    Starkey was walking back across Sunset when she saw a piece of bent metal in the street. It was about an inch long and twisted like a piece of bow tie pasta, one side rimed with grayresidue. She had picked up nine similar pieces of metal the night before.
    She brought it to her car, bagged it in one of the spare evidence bags she kept in the trunk, then walked around the side of the building to the Dumpster. Starkey guessed that the bomb hadn’t been placed to damage the building, but wondered why it had been set beside the Dumpster. She knew that satisfying reasons for questions like this often couldn’t be found. Twice during her time with the Bomb Squad, she had rolled out on devices left on the side of the freeway, far away from overpasses or exits or anything else they might harm. It was as if the assholes who built these things didn’t know what else to do with them, so they just dropped them off on the side of the road.
    Starkey walked the scene for another ten minutes and found one more small bit of metal. She was bagging it when the radio car returned to the lot, and the female officer got