The Price of Innocence Read Online Free PDF

outside under a gray sky. Most fretted about the work they had had to abandon, while some, especially the smokers, greeted the interruption as an unplanned break and used it as such.
    The Medical Examiner, Elliot Stone, did not find it a lark. He stalked up to Theresa in a swirl of expensive, weatherproofed khaki. ‘Do I have you to thank for this?’
    Theresa, still trying
not
to picture losing a leg, stammered. ‘No—’
    ‘Yes,’ Oliver said.
    ‘It was evidence,’ she added.
    Leo intervened. ‘It’s not our fault your tubby toxicologist overreacts at every opportunity.’
    ‘You ask those guys in the full body armor if I overreacted!’ Oliver shouted.
    The M.E. moved away to do just that.
    Leo went on, nearly nose to nose with Oliver and clearly unimpressed with both the toxicologist’s assessment of the situation and the extra two hundred pounds the man had on him. ‘Just so I have this straight – you called out the marines over a little rock that she’s been carrying around in the pocket of her windbreaker?’
    ‘It’s nitrogen triiodide. I don’t expect you to understand what that means.’
    ‘It’s made by soaking iodine crystals in pure ammonia and filtering until they’ll explode at the slightest amount of heat, pressure or shock. It’s a high school prank, something for nerds to cook up in second period. You honestly think they took the Bingham building out with nitrogen triiodide? No one could have enough of the stuff in one place without—’
    ‘Without blowing themselves off the map,’ Oliver finished. ‘Which is exactly what they did.’
    ‘They couldn’t have accumulated enough to take out a building,’ Leo repeated.
    ‘Maybe it was only the detonator, used to set off another explosive,’ Theresa thought aloud, though both men ignored her, as usual. Dark shapes appeared in the third-floor windows, the bomb squad invading Oliver’s assigned territory. They moved promptly until they reached his counter, then stopped, obviously regarding the silver tray and its burden. Had Oliver been wrong?
    Oliver said: ‘It must have impurities. That’s why it didn’t blow up little missy, here. They used household ammonia instead of reagent grade.’
    ‘Then how could it be powerful enough to destroy the Bingham?’
    The heavily armored men on the third floor still hadn’t moved, or were moving very slowly. She took this to mean that Oliver had not been wrong.
    He said, ‘Not having been to terrorism school, I haven’t learned all their tricks, one of which is obviously stabilizing nitrogen triiodide.’
    ‘There’s about a million more convenient explosives to use,’ Leo insisted.
    ‘More convenient, perhaps, but not easier to make. It’s got two ingredients, iodine and ammonia.’ Oliver’s voice dropped, and he began to look thoughtful.
    The bomb squad guys moved away from the window – very, very slowly, prompting Theresa to picture herself losing
both
legs. ‘But if it’s so stabilized, then why did it explode downtown?’
    Leo had begun to look thoughtful as well. ‘It depends on how it’s stabilized. It might just take more to detonate it, but once it does—’
    ‘Boom,’ Theresa finished.
    They watched the armored men come out of the building, towing a small but apparently very heavy square box. They parked it on the loading dock where their vehicle could back up and use a built-in forklift to take the box into its interior. Slowly. The M.E. office personnel scattered, giving the whole operation a wide berth.
    ‘It can’t be done.’ Leo decided, refuting the theory with all the fervency of a man whistling in a graveyard. Bad enough to lose the Bingham building, but a threat to his lab, his fiefdom, could not be imagined without abject horror. ‘There’s nothing to the stuff but iodine and ammonia.’
    ‘Nothing else could bond to it,’ Oliver admitted, ‘without changing the compound—’
    ‘And then it wouldn’t be