A Tangled Web (8)

The doctor's words washed over her like a bucket of ice water.

Immediately alert, Sharon stood up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. "What?"

"There were traces – very small traces, of persulfuric acid. And yes, I'm sure," he anticipated her next question, "I've worked here long enough to recognize it under a microscope. Now, I know persulfuric acid isn't exactly the rarest of chemical compounds, and there are plenty of harmless reasons for it to be on this guy's hands, but since you were worried about a bomb threat yesterday…"

"No, you did the right thing to call," she assured him. "I'm on my way. Can you look for any other traces, maybe indications of how it got onto his hands, what form it was in… anything else that could tell us… anything." Damn it! She'd wasted twenty-four hours dismissing the man and now a public site could be in danger and…

"Don't panic," Morales recommended. "I wasn't kidding when I said there were lots of explanations that don't involve bombs."

Sharon was already pulling an office outfit from her closet. "Until we find one, I'm going to treat this as a threat to the public safety." Which she should've done yesterday. How had she missed this? But there had been no signs, none… "Thank you, Doctor. Please let me know if you find anything else."

Once he said goodbye, she hung up and dialed Provenza while making her way to the bathroom to wash her face. The lieutenant's voice was grouchy when he picked up on the sixth ring.

"If this is because I woke you up yesterday, Captain, I would like it stated on record that payback is beneath you."

"Doctor Morales just found traces of explosives on James Donnell's hands." She launched straight into it; this was no time for humorous banter.

There was a brief pause, and when Provenza spoke again she could hear the change in his tone. "I'll be at the station in thirty minutes."

"Thank you – can you please –"

"I'll rouse the rest of the troops, don't worry," he acquiesced before she'd even finished asking, and Sharon thanked him again and went to rouse her own troops.

"'s not six-thirty yet…" The amount of grumpy whining the boy could infuse into five mumbled words was impressive.

"No it's not, but I have to leave right now," Sharon pulled on her blazer as she spoke. "You're on your own for breakfast, but keep your phone with you. And Rusty, I want you to avoid the high-traffic boulevards when you go to school today. And come straight home after class. Straight home, do you hear me? Rusty!" she snapped at his sleepy growl, causing his head to actually poke out from under the comforter. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Yeah…" he peered at her through half-closed eyes. "'s going on?"

"Nothing you need to worry about." She pulled open the curtains, although there wasn't much sunlight streaming in at six a.m.. Sunrise wasn't for another hour. "Just do as I say. And be careful driving to school."

She ignored his sigh and scowl, and the pointed way he pulled the comforter back over his head.

"Text me when you get there," she reminded him, and only had to repeat herself once before he offered a muffled acknowledgment and Sharon was confident that he was conscious enough to actually process her instructions.

By six-thirty, everyone was in the murder room, alert and annoyed and looking about ready to blow something up themselves.

"Do we still have Donnell's friends Danny and Diego?"

Julio nodded. "Yes Ma'am, we kept them here last night."

A decision for which Sharon was now twice as grateful. She'd wanted the two in custody overnight so she could ask an attorney in the morning if there was anything she could charge them with. Now, she cared far less about the tree frog toxin abuse; she sought a whole different set of answers from them.

"I want them brought back into separate interview rooms. And test them for traces of explosives, too!"

The detective left immediately; the atmosphere in the room only grew more intense as she continued to issue orders.

"Mike, Buzz – I need you to look through the footage from Donnell's home, through his personal files and anything else we know about him. Look for any indication of what his target might've been. Forget about trying to ascertain whether or not he was planning something – as of this moment we're assuming that he was, and trying to figure out where to look."

As soon as they acknowledged and started on the task, she turned to the remaining three members of the team.

"I want Donnell's locker searched. Call for a K-9 unit to detect the presence of explosives, and I'll notify the bomb squad to be on alert if we need to call them in. And let's have the dogs check his home, too – and the homes of his two friends," she added as an afterthought. "Lieutenant Provenza, I want you and Lt. Flynn on that, since you're already familiar with Donnell's house. Amy, you take the locker. Call the Animal Resources director to notify her of our search and get access to their facilities."

As Sykes and Flynn reached for their phones, Tao stood up from his desk and walked to the printer.

"This is a list of all the public sites Donnell mentioned in his blog posts in the last six months," he handed Sharon the page he'd just printed, "as you can see there's a lot of them, the aqueduct, the 110, Robertson Blvd., Staples Center, Griffith park… plus other parks, stadiums and shopping centers that he doesn't mention by name…"

"In other words," Provenza put in, "if we try to pick a place that Captain Planet didn't like, we're looking at a needle in a haystack kind of situation." He snapped his fingers at Tao, pointing silently to the change jar on his desk.

The lieutenant sighed. "Donnell saw problems with the emissions, the energy expenditures and the social impact of a lot of the city's infrastructure," he agreed as he dropped a dime into the jar. "But he doesn't single out any of them more than others – and like I said before, none of these posts are really threatening…"

"What about his search history? Emails?" Sharon browsed the long list that he'd handed her. "Do any of these places get repeated mentions?"

Another grimace from Tao. "He used his computer a lot. There are dozens of hits on search engines every day. I'll try to cross-reference everything and see what gets mentioned more than once," he agreed, "but that might not narrow down the list too much. So far the only place that stands out at all is the 6th Street Viaduct, and that one only because our guy jumped off it…" He gave the Captain a look that was almost apologetic. "Not exactly a great place to start."

"Might be a better place than we think," Sharon murmured thoughtfully. "We still don't know what Mr. Donnell was doing at the bridge, or even how he got there." She glanced at the map pinned to the murder board. "What did he have to say about it in his blog?"

Tao walked back to his computer. "He first mentions the viaduct in an entry about ten months ago, in relation to an old abandoned project that was supposed to design a more efficient irrigation system from the LA river to the inner-city parks…" He scrolled down the page, refreshing his memory. "Donnell makes the argument that the project should be revisited again, and how better irrigation might solve the city's growing water problem. Then there's a second mention in reply to one of his follower's comments…" he clicked to a different page, "…and it's again talking about sustainable civil engineering and efficient irrigation." The lieutenant shook his head. "Sorry. Still not very useful. He also has a few web searches on it, but nothing more recent than a month or so, and nothing out of the ordinary."

"I find your repeated use of the word 'nothing' in relation to our evidence extra-ordinarily disheartening." Provenza leaned back in his chair with a disgruntled sigh. "After we got up in the middle of the night two days in a row for this guy, at least he could do us the courtesy of leaving behind something to find."

The look that Sharon gave him made him sit a little straighter in his chair, and clear his throat.

"Not that I wouldn't greatly prefer it if there was no bomb, Captain," he amended, "but at this pace I'll be old enough to retire before we figure out if there is or there isn't and what exactly was going on with this Donnell kid."

"You're already old enough to retire," Flynn pointed out as he put down the phone on his desk; ignoring his partner's eye roll, he turned to Sharon. "We'll have dog units meeting us at Donnell's home and the university. Warrant's on the way for the other two houses."

"Ma'am." Julio appeared in the doorway again. "I've got Dumb and Dumber back in the interview rooms."

Sharon nodded her acknowledgment, and surveyed the whole team again with one final glance. Everyone had different duties, and she hated to split them up like that. But there was simply too much to do, and if there was a bomb out there, they were in a race against the clock.

"Lt. Tao. Contact Traffic and tell them to close the 6th Street bridge," she said quietly. "Have patrol cars on the scene, and send a unit to check for explosives." No one was asking her to explain herself, but she did anyway: "If it's the only lead we have, we can't afford to ignore it. That bridge is still a public site, and maybe blowing it up doesn't make sense to me or you, but at this point, I no longer feel confident in our ability to read James Donnell's intentions."

When Tao reached for the phone, Sharon directed her attention to the two other lieutenants and Det. Sykes, all of whom were ready to set out.

"Let me know the second you find anything," she asked them. "And please… be careful."

Then she followed Julio in the direction of the interview rooms, hoping with every step that they still had time.

Twenty-four year old Diego wanted a lawyer. Upon being informed that, not finding himself under arrest, he did not have the right to counsel, he demanded his dad. He also didn't know anything. He wanted his phone call. Could he use the bathroom?

They decided on a more direct approach with Danny.

" –up in flames! All of it! Context, gone…the crowds, gone! And you people…"

A burst of static masked the next words, then a few seconds of silence were followed by a distinct splatter sound and some metallic clanging. Danny Murray stared blankly at the recorder as the audio ended.

"That's Jimmy?"

Sanchez leaned forward slightly, hands flat against the table. "What was he talking about?"

"Uh… I don't know…?" The young man looked even more bleary-eyed and confused than the previous evening. "Are you sure that's him? He sounded kinda... weird."

"That's because he was high on the tree frog toxin." Julio scowled harder. "What. Was Jimmy talking about. Why was he at the bridge?"

"I don't know man, honest!" Danny scratched at his nose.

Sharon tapped her pencil lightly against the notepad in front of her. "Yesterday," she said in a conversational manner, "you told Det. Sanchez that you were supposed to meet Jimmy on Saturday night, and he never showed."

"Yea, but I didn't know he was – that he – I didn't know he, like…"

"What were you supposed to do last night, huh Danny?" demanded Julio. "Were you gonna go blow up something?"

The man's eyes widened. "No?"

"Are you sure, 'cause your friend there, he sounds like he was talking about blowing up a bunch of people! And we found traces of explosives on him!"

"What? No, man," Danny shook his head frantically, "Jimmy uh, he'd never like, hurt people, dude! He's a good guy! He likes people! He wanted to save them!"

"Save them from what?" asked Sharon, and the young man visibly pulled back and gave a confused sort of shrug.

"I don't know… it says on his blog. Like, global warming and crowd thinking and stuff. Jimmy really cared about people," he repeated. "He'd never hurt anyone! Seriously!"

Sanchez leaned forward again, the same no-nonsense glint in his eyes. "Why were you gonna meet him on Saturday night?"

"…uh… just to like, hang out." Danny swallowed and scratched his neck.

The detective adopted a hard glower. "Are you sure about that?"

"…yes…?" the young man answered, looking not sure in the least.

"Think very carefully about what you're saying, Danny," Sharon advised in a friendly tone. "Because we're going to search Jimmy's house, and your house, and his workplace, and if we find evidence that he was planning anything and that you knew about it," her eyebrows arched meaningfully, "you are going to be in a lot more trouble than you are now."

His mouth dropped open again. "Uh. Wait. You're going to search my house?" A beat, then. "All of it?"

Sharon paused for a moment. "Well… uhm, yes…" she cleared her throat and smiled, "…unless… you exercise your right to… constitutional domestic privacy," she finished with a slow nod.

Sanchez nodded in agreement.

Danny stared.

"What's that?"

"Well, according to California law," Sharon explained in a serious tone, "you have the inalienable right to maintain certain parts of your home private from police searches. So if you choose to exercise that right, then we'd be obligated to forward the search team a list of places they're not allowed to touch."

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah," said Julio. "But anything not on that list is fair game," he barked menacingly. "And you didn't give us a list, so we're gonna be searching your entire home, from top to bottom, and anything we find there can be used against you!"

"Wait!" Danny nearly fell out of his chair. "Wait man… can I still like, tell you where you're not allowed to look?"

The two police officers exchanged a glance.

Sharon checked her watch. "The search team is probably at your house already," she mused, "so you'd have to tell us very quickly in order for us to inform them in time…"

"I think he knows something he's not telling, Ma'am," Julio said as soon as he'd closed the door to the interview room.

Sharon let out a slow breath. "I don't know. He seems convinced that 'Jimmy' wouldn't hurt anyone, but you're right, he's definitely hiding something. Unfortunately, I can't tell if it's anything useful to us." She tore the first page from her notepad and handed it to him. "Make sure Flynn and Provenza start by searching these locations at his house. And remind them to be careful, let the dogs run through first."

Tao looked up from his computer as soon as they'd re-entered the murder room.

"Captain, Traffic closed the 6th Street Bridge and they're checking it for explosives, but so far they haven't found anything. And I've been looking through Donnell's papers and files," he pointed to the recycle bin that Flynn and Provenza had brought back from the man's house, "but no luck yet. All his correspondence is just bills and ads, and other than that there's only a couple of grocery lists and some post-its with online game passwords."

Her tension headache was getting worse. Sharon glanced into the recycle bin, half-filled with envelopes, coupons and the assorted junk mail that was impossible to get away from no matter where one lived. "All of his mail was in here?"

"Uh, there were a couple of fliers for pizza places and stuff on his coffee table, too, I guess…?" Buzz had followed her and Sanchez over from electronics as soon as they'd ended the interview. "But the lieutenants didn't think there was anything worth counting as evidence," he told her. "Here, you can see in the footage I got at his house…"

He sat down at his computer and pressed a few keys, then turned the screen for her to see. Sharon watched the panorama of a small and somewhat messy living room, the video going over a couple of common wall decorations, focusing for a few seconds on a dinky bookshelf with an assortment of sci-fi books and some vegetarian cookbooks, then moving to a close-up of an old coffee table. The camera zoomed in on a menu from a local organic pizzeria, a flier for a new shopping center opening, and a pamphlet on how to recycle electronics.

In other words, absolutely nothing that would've suggested any nefarious intentions.

If James Donnell had indeed been planning to blow up a public site, he had done a stellar job hiding his tracks. The only reason they'd had any suspicions in the first place was because he'd announced the bomb threat himself! And yet, there was no evidence. There was never no evidence. No one was that good – especially not a twenty-three year old 'eco hippie', as Provenza had called him, whose idea of a good time was getting high on psychedelic frogs.

Maybe Danny hadn't been kidding when he'd called Jimmy 'real smart'.

Or maybe Morales was right… maybe the traces of an industrial oxidant on the man's hands had a different explanation, maybe it was all just innocuous coincidence.

Maybe if it came from Lt. Provenza's Guinness Book of Coincidences.

Her phone went off in one of those odd instances of synchronicity. "Yes, lieutenant."

"Captain," greeted Provenza, "there were no traces of explosives at Donnell's house. We just got to Murray's ten minutes ago and we're having the dogs run through the locations Sanchez gave us. Somehow… I don't think we'll be getting exactly the answers we're looking for."

"What do you mean?" Sharon frowned. "Did you find anything so far?"

"Well – yes, but like I said, not what we were looking for."

Provenza studied the array of random plants growing in a small unkempt patch in the back area of Danny Murray's roof. Well hidden by a roof fan and a TV antenna and masked by a large plastic cover of sorts, the search team might've missed it, had the owner of the house not helpfully pointed them in the right direction.

Except the right direction, in this case, wasn't also the useful direction.

Judging from the sigh on the other end of the line, the Captain agreed. "Is there anything else at the house, other than his illegal marijuana crop?"

"Yes, in addition to Mr. Murray's obvious green thumb, we found a stash of Xanax pills in the microwave – for which shockingly he has no prescription – but, no traces of explosives so far. We'll let the dogs do another run, then Flynn and I will look through his files and personal things."

Down in the street, he could hear the garage door opening with a loud metallic shriek.

"We'll keep you posted of any new discoveries," he promised Raydor, then rolled his eyes and stepped out of the way as another police dog bounded excitedly past him. Briefly, Provenza wondered what it must have been like for the dogs, with their advanced canine sense of smell. Their trainers might have to deal with a serious case of the dog munchies by the time they left Murray's little botanical garden of wonders.

"Hey. Provenza." Flynn's voice floated up to him, and the older lieutenant glanced over the side of the house, to see his partner standing by the garage. "Come take a look at this."

Sharon hung up the phone with a frustrated sigh. It didn't exactly surprise her that Danny's earlier apprehensions had to do with controlled substances, rather than a bomb plot… but even so, she couldn't shake the feeling that he did know more than he was telling them. What had 'Jimmy' shared about his plans? Were there even any plans to speak of?

She lowered her gaze to the new list that Lt. Tao had handed her. After cross-referencing the 'Zero Footprint' website and Donnell's emails and web searches, he'd narrowed it down to ten places that got repeated mentions. Unfortunately, other than the 6th St. Viaduct, none seemed to distinguish itself from the rest, and there was simply no way to dispatch units to search every single one. Two of them were public parks, for one, which would take forever to search… and then there was a major traffic artery, which if she so much as mentioned shutting down, the Mayor would probably kill her.

No, searching each of the sites would take more time and manpower than she could employ; they had to narrow it down more, find more evidence as to what Donnell was thinking in the hours before he died, see the picture better…

"Buzz." She spoke his name quietly as she walked up to his desk. "Can you play the crime scene audio for me again?"

It took a few seconds for Buzz to retrieve the file, and then James Donnell's staticy voice came through the speakers, the words now almost familiar:

"…not the way to do it, man…who's gonna get it if we just blow everything up… this – the way to go – make everyone listen… everyone, listen‼ Listen to me!"

Sharon bit her lips. It seemed that she was staring at scattered pieces of a puzzle, with no idea what the big picture was even supposed to look like. The signs they had so far pointed in opposite directions, the man's lifestyle, his writing and the testimony of his friends suggesting a peaceful outlook on life, while the traces of explosives on his hands and his last words gave a completely different impression.

" –doing it all wrong – not how it's supposed to be! –zero footprint – don't need another – for – crowd… don't you see? It's all social pressure… impulse-driven behavior… but take away the context, and you change the behavior! "

Something else occurred to her. "Mike." She handed the list of locations back to him. "Can you check these places against Donnell's blog entries that use the expressions 'social pressure' and 'impulse-driven behavior'? See if that narrows it down any further for us?"

As the lieutenant took the page from her and went back to his keyboard, Sharon's phone buzzed again, and she saw Lt. Flynn's name on the screen.

"So Captain – there are no explosives at Murray's house either," he told her without preamble, "but other than the weed on his roof and his stashes of Xanax, there's another thing you might want to ask him about…"

She listened to his explanation, trying to put the new information into context, and again falling just short of figuring out the big picture. But Andy was right, she now had more questions to ask Danny Murray, and maybe this time he'd be scared enough to give her better answers.

"Julio," she turned to him as soon as she'd finished the call, "let's go talk to …" She trailed off, noticing that the detective had also been talking on his phone; he lowered it a few seconds later with a serious look.

"That was Sykes, Ma'am. Dogs went crazy over Donnell's locker," he told her. "Bomb squad just opened it, and found explosives stored inside."

And just like that, time seemed to halt again.

This chapter ran a little long, and that's because I really wanted Sharon and Sanchez to interview our stoner friend 'on screen' rather than behind the scenes. Can we really ever have *too* much of those two interviewing clueless suspects? I do not believe so ;).

Thank you for reading!