“I’m not ready now. Half an hour, on your desk.”

They held stares.

Milton snapped his fingers at Kevin. “Let’s go.” He headed for a late-model Buick on the street.

The station’s air conditioner was under repair. After two hours in a stuffy conference room, Kevin’s nerves finally began to lose the tremble brought on by the bomb.

An officer had fingerprinted him for comparisons with the prints lifted from the Sable, then Milton spent half an hour reviewing his story before abruptly leaving him alone. The ensuing twenty minutes of solitude gave Kevin plenty of time to rehash Slater’s call while staring at a large brown smudge on the wall. But in the end he could make no more sense of the call than when it had initially come, which only made the whole mess more disturbing.

He shifted in his seat and tapped the floor with his foot. He’d spent his whole life not knowing, but this vulnerability was somehow different. A man named Slater had mistaken him for someone else and very nearly killed him. Hadn’t he suffered enough in his life? Now he’d fallen into this, whatever thiswas. He was under the authorities’ microscope. They would try to dig into his past. Try to understand it. But even Kevin didn’t understand his past. He wasn’t about to let them try.

The door banged open and Milton walked in.

Kevin cleared his throat. “Anything?”

Milton straddled a backward chair, slapped a folder down on the table, and drilled Kevin with his dark eyes. “You tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

Milton blinked twice and ignored the question. “The FBI’s bringing someone in on this. ATF wants a look, CBI, state police—the lot of them. But as far as I’m concerned, this is still my jurisdiction. Just because terrorists favor bombs doesn’t mean every bomb that goes off is the work of terrorists.”

“They think this is a terrorist?”

“I didn’t say that. But Washington sees terrorists behind every tree these days, so they will definitely go on the hunt. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the CIA picking through the files.” Milton eyed him, unblinking, for a few long seconds, and then blinked three times in rapid succession. “What we have here is one sick puppy. What confuses me is why he picked you. Doesn’t make sense.”

“None of this makes sense.”

Milton opened the file. “It’ll take a couple days for the lab to complete their work on what little we found, but we have some preliminary findings, the most significant of which is nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? A bomb about blew me to pieces!”

“No evidence of real investigative value. Let me summarize for you—maybe it’ll shake something loose in that mind of yours.” He eyed Kevin again.

“We have a man with a low, raspy voice who calls himself Richard Slater and who knows you well enough to target you. You, on the other hand, have no idea who he could possibly be.” Milton paused for effect. “He constructs a bomb using common electronics available at any Radio Shack and dynamite, rendering the bomb virtually untraceable. Smart. He then plants that bomb in the trunk of your car. He calls you, knowing that you’re in the car, and threatens to blow the car in three minutes if you can’t solve a riddle. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?Right so far?”

“Sounds right.”

“Due to some fast thinking and some fancy driving, you manage to drive the car to a relatively safe location and escape. As promised, the car blows up when you fail to solve the riddle and phone it in to the newspaper.”

“That’s right.”

“Preliminary forensics tell us that whoever planted that bomb left no fingerprints. No surprises there—this guy’s obviously not the village idiot. The explosion could have caused significant collateral damage. If you’d been on the street when it blew, we’d have some bodies at the morgue. That’s enough to assume this guy’s either pretty teed off or a raving lunatic, probably both. So we have smart and we have teed off. Follow?”

“Makes sense.”

“What we’re missing is the most obvious link in any case like this. Motivation. Without motivation, we’ve got squat. You have no idea whatsoever why anyone would want to harm you in any way? You have no enemies from the past, no recent threats against your well-being, no reason whatsoever to suspect why anyone on this earth might want to hurt you in any way?”

“He didn’t try to hurt me. If he wanted to kill me, he could’ve just blown up the bomb.”

“Exactly. So we’re not only clueless as to why someone named Slater might wantto blow up your car, we don’t even know why he did. What did he accomplish?”

“He scared me.”

“You don’t scare someone by nuking their neighborhood. But okay, say he just wanted to scare you—we still don’t have motivation. Who might want to scare you? Why? But you don’t have a clue, right? Nothing you’ve ever done would give anyone any reason to hold anything against you.”

“I—not that I know of. You want me to just make something up? I told you, I really don’t know.”

“You’re leaving us high and dry, Kevin. High and dry.”

“What about the phone call?” Kevin asked. “Isn’t there a way to track it?”

“No. We can only track a call while it’s being made. What’s left of your cell is nothing more than a lump of plastic in an evidence bag anyway. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a shot next time.” He closed the file folder. “You do know there’ll be a next time, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily.” Actually, the thought had plagued him, but he refused to give it any serious consideration. Freak occurrences like this happened to people now and then; he could accept that. But a deliberate, drawn-out plot against him was unfathomable.

“There will be,” Milton said. “This guy went to great lengths to pull this trick. He’s after something, and we have to assume he didn’t get it. Unless this was random or some kind of hellacious mistake, he’ll try again.”

“Maybe he mistook me for someone else.”

“Not a chance. He’s too methodical. He staked you out, wired the car, knew your moves, and blew it with careful deliberation.”

True enough. Slater knew more than even the police knew. “He scared me. Maybe that’s all he wanted.”

“Maybe. I’m open to anything at this point.” Milton paused. “You’re sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me? We don’t have much on you. Never been married, no record, college grad, currently enrolled in seminary. Not the kind of person you’d expect to be involved in a crime of this nature.”

Slater’s demand crossed his mind.

“If I think of anything else, trust me, you’ll be the first to know,” Kevin said.

“Then you’re free to go. I’ve put in an order to tap your phones as soon as we can clear the red tape—the boys should be out first thing tomorrow morning. I may also place a black and white outside your house in Signal Hill, but I doubt we’re dealing with anyone who would approach your house.”

“Tap my phones?” They were going to dig, weren’t they? But what was he afraid of, as long as they didn’t start prying about his past?

“With your permission, of course. You have any other cell phones?”

“No.”

“If this guy makes contact in any other way, I want to hear about it immediately, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“And pardon my insensitivity, but this isn’t just about you anymore.” His eyes twinkled. “We have reporters all over the place and they want an explanation. You might have some media attention. Don’t talk to them. Don’t even look at them. Stay focused, capice?”

“I’m the victim here, right? Why do I get the feeling I’m the one under investigation?”

Milton placed both of his palms on the table. The air conditioning kicked in above them. “Because you are. We have a monster out there and that monster has chosen you. We need to know why. That means we need to know more about you. We have to establish motivation. That’s the way it works.”