3rd Degree - James Patterson [13]
“Please, Momma, it’s a McSundae,” Cherisse cried.
“You can buy your own McSundae or whatever you like when it’s your dollar sixty-five going across the table. Now both you come get yourselves cleaned up. Momma’s got to go.”
“But I am clean,” Cherisse protested.
She dragged them out of the booth and hurried toward the bathroom. “Yes, but your brother looks like he’s been in a war.”
Lucille pulled her kids along the back corridor leading to the bathrooms. She opened the door to the ladies’ room. It was McDonald’s. No one would mind. She raised Marcus on the counter and wet a paper towel and started to rub at the mess on his collar.
The boy squirmed.
“Damn, child, you want to make the mess, you got to own up to the cleaning. Cherisse, you got to pee?”
“Yes, Momma,” the girl replied.
She was the cleaner of the two. They were both five, but Marcus barely knew how to pull down his own zipper. Some of the ketchup was starting to come off.
“Cherisse,” Lucille barked, “you going to get on that toilet seat, or what?”
“Can’t, Momma,” the child replied.
“Can’t? Who’s got time for this, young lady? Just drop your stockings and pee.”
“I can’t, Momma. You gotta come see.”
Lucille sighed. Whoever said time is on your side sure never had twins. She took a quick glance in the mirror, sighing again, not ever a single second for herself. She helped Marcus to the floor, then went to open Cherisse’s stall.
She said impatiently, “So what you crying about, child?”
The little girl was staring at the toilet.
“My God.” Lucille took a breath.
On the toilet seat, wrapped in a blanket in a bassinet, was an infant.
Chapter 22
ONCE IN A WHILE there are moments in this job when everything works out for you. Finding the Lightower baby at McDonald’s was one of those times. The entire Hall seemed to breathe a deep, grateful sigh of relief.
I got Cindy on the line and asked a favor. She said she’d be delighted to put a little pressure on X/L.
I hung up with Cindy, and Charlie Clapper was knocking on my door. “Nice bust, Boxer.”
“That’s a little sexist, even from you,” I said with a smile.
Clapper laughed. His Crime Scene team had spent the better part of the past day and a half picking through the bomb site. Charlie looked exhausted.
“FYEF, darlin’,” he said, motioning with his head for me to follow. “For your eyes first. They’re a whole lot cuter than Tracchio’s.”
“Knew I earned this gold shield for something.”
Charlie took me to his office down the hall. Niko was in there, from the Bomb Squad, leaning back in Charlie’s old hardwood recliner and picking something out of a Chinese food container.
“Okay, we’ve pieced together an idea of the explosive device.” Charlie threw out a chair for me. On a poster board, someone had drawn a floor plan of the Lightowers’ town house. “Traces of C-4 were all over the place. Half a pound’s enough to blow a jet from the sky, so from the size of the blast, I figure this was about five times that. Whoever did it put it inside something like this”—he took out a black Nike sport bag—“and placed it in one of the rooms.”
“How do we know that?” I asked.
“Easy.” Clapper grinned. He pulled out a fragment of black nylon with a Nike swoosh on it. “We found this plastered against the wall.”
“Any luck you could scrape a few prints off the bag?” I asked hopefully.
“Sorry, honey,” Clapper snickered, “this is the bag.”
“It was triggered by a fairly sophisticated device,” Niko explained. “Remote detonation. Blasting cap was hooked up to a cell phone.”
“There’s a market for C-4, Lindsay. We could look into any construction-site thefts, missing military inventory,” said Charlie Clapper.
“How are you with babies, Charlie?”
“If they’re eighteen or over,” the CSU man said, grinning. “Why? You finally getting the itch?”
If Clapper were a foot taller, fifty pounds lighter, and hadn’t been married for thirty years, I just might take him up on his little flirtations one day. “Sorry, this one’s a little younger.”
“You mean