You’re cutting it close, Kevin.

He whirled and ran back down. The supply closet was to his right, in the back. The building lay in silence now except for the urgent padding of his feet. What was it like to be caught in an explosion? And where would Slater have planted the charges?

He threw the door open. “Carl!”

The janitor stood by a stack of boxes with the words New Bookswritten on pink sheets of paper.

“Carl! Thank God!”

Carl smiled at him and nodded his head to whatever music pumped into his ears. Kevin ran over to him and pulled the headphones off. “Get out of here! They’ve evacuated the building. Hurry, man! Hurry!”

The man’s eyes widened.

Kevin grabbed his hand and shoved him toward the door. “Run! Everyone else is out.”

“What is it?”

“Just run!”

Carl ran.

Two minutes. There was a second, smaller closet to his right— overflow supplies for administration, Carl had once told him. Mostly empty. Kevin leapt for the closet and pulled the door open.

How much explosive did it take to blow a building this size? Kevin was staring at the answer. Black wires protruded from five shoe-boxes and met in a contraption that looked like the inside of a transistor radio. Slater’s bomb.

“Jennifer!” he yelled. He twisted for the door and yelled again, at the top of his lungs. “Jennifer!”

His voice echoed back. The building was empty. Kevin ran his hands through his hair. Could he carry this thing outside? It’ll blow there. That’s where the people are. You have to stop it! But how? He reached for the wires, paused, and pulled back.

Pulling the wires would probably set it off, wouldn’t it?

You’re going to die, Kevin.Any split second it could go. He could set it off early.

“Kevin!” Jennifer’s scream carried down the stairs. “Kevin, for God’s sake, answer me! Get out!”

He fled the supply room in a full sprint. He’d seen the movies a hundred times—the explosion behind, the billows of fire, the diving hero rolling to freedom just out of the blast’s reach.

But this wasn’t a movie. This was real and this was now and this was him.

“Kevin—”

“Get out!” he yelled. “The bomb’s in here!” He cleared the first four steps, and his momentum carried him to the top in two more bounds.

Jennifer was at the door, holding it open, face white. “What are you thinking?” she snapped at him. “It could go early. You’ll get us both killed!”

He ran out and tore for the parking lot. Jennifer kept pace.

A huge arc of onlookers stood a hundred yards off, watching them run. “Get back!” she yelled, sprinting for them. “Farther back! Get—”

A deep, dull whompcut her off. Then a louder, sharp blast and the crash of shattering glass. The ground shook.

Jennifer grabbed Kevin by the waist and pulled him down. They landed together and rolled. She threw her arms over his head. “Stay down!”

He lay smothered by her for a few long seconds. Screams rolled across the lawn. Jennifer pushed herself halfway up and looked back. Her leg was over the backs of his legs and her hand pressed into his back for support. Kevin twisted and followed her gaze.

Half of the Divinity School of the Pacific’s crown jewel lay in a heap of smoking rubble. The other half jutted to the sky, stripped of glass, naked.

“My God, my God, help us all,” Jennifer said. “He blew it early, didn’t he? I could kill Milton.”

Still breathing hard from the run, Kevin dropped back down and buried his face in the grass.

19

Sunday

Night

THE LIBRARY EXPLOSION on the heels of the bus bomb put Long Beach at the world’s center stage. All the networks played and replayed live footage of the library being blown to smithereens, courtesy of an alert student. Helicopters circled the hole that had been a building and relayed stunning images to millions of glued viewers. The world had seen this before and everyone had the same question on their minds: Terrorism?

But the explosion was the work of a madman known only as the Riddle Killer, the networks all said. Miraculously, no one had been hurt in the blast; in fact, no life had been taken by any of the three incidents. Nevertheless, they all knew it was only a matter of time. He’d killed in Sacramento; he would kill in Long Beach. Unless the authorities stopped him first. Unless his intended victim, Kevin Parson, confessed what the killer demanded he confess. Where was Kevin Parson? He’d last been seen running from the building with a woman, an FBI agent by some accounts. They had them on the student’s video. Stunning footage.

The ATF had entered the fray after the first bomb; now they came in force. The state police, local police, sheriff, a half-dozen other task forces all poured over the library.

Jennifer did her best to keep Kevin beyond the reach of the media’s long tentacles while making sense of the scene. She avoided Milton, for the simple reason that she didn’t trust herself in his presence. He’d come within a few seconds of killing Kevin and countless others by talking to the press. If she’d been frustrated with him before, the sight of him running to and fro made her seethe now.

Still, he was an integral part of the investigation, and she couldn’t avoid him once he finished his rounds with the press.

“You knew this was coming?” he demanded.

“Not now, Milton.”

He took her arm and steered her away from the onlookers, squeezing with enough force to hurt her. “You were here. That means you knew. How long did you know?”

“Let go,” she snapped.

He released her arm and glanced over her shoulder, smiling. “The word negligencemean anything to you, Agent Peters?”

“The word carnagemean anything to you, Detective Milton? I knew because he wanted me to know. You didn’t know about the library because he said that if you were told, he’d blow the building early. In fact, he did blow it early, because you had to announce to the world that we’d found Kevin. You, sir, are lucky we got out when we did or you’d have at leasttwo dead bodies on your hands. Don’t ever touch me again.”

“We could have put a bomb squad in there.”

“Is there something with the air down here that messes with your hearing? What part of ‘he told us he’d blow the building early’ didn’t penetrate that thick skull of yours? You almost killed us!”

“You’re posing a danger to my city, and if you think I’m just going to stand by and let you, you’re naive.”

“And you’re posing a danger to Kevin. Take it up with the bureau chief.”

His eyes narrowed for a brief second, then he smiled again. “We’re not through with this.”

“Sure we are.” She walked away. If not for the fact that half the world was watching, she might have taken the man’s tie and shoved it down his throat. It took her thirty seconds to put the man out of her mind. She had more important things to dwell on than an overzealous fool. So she told herself, but in reality Milton sat in her gut like a sour pill.

Two questions soon preoccupied her mind. First, had anybody seen a stranger enter the library in the past twenty-four hours? And second, had anybody seen Kevinenter the library in the last twenty-four hours? Samantha had raised the question of Kevin’s involvement, and although Jennifer knew the idea was ridiculous, the question raised others. Samantha’s theory that someone on the inside might be somehow tied to Slater bothered her.

The Riddle Killer was remarkably elusive. The last three days were no exception. Sam was in Texas, flushing out something that had her hopes high. No doubt she’d come waltzing in tomorrow with a new theory that would set them back to square one. Actually, the CBI agent was beginning to grow on her, but jurisdiction had a way of straining the best relationships.