AN explosives expert was summing up as Sigrid entered the conference room at headquarters and Captain McKinnon waved her to an empty chair near his while the expert continued.
Judging from the crumpled napkins, soda cans and coffee cups, and the deli smells of pastrami and onions and mustard still redolent in the air, this session had begun with lunch.
Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry were among the dozen officers seated around the long table. Sigrid had worked with the two younger detectives before and had watched with a slightly jaundiced eye the more-than-professional relationship developing between them. Lowry discreetly pantomimed that he'd get Sigrid a cup of coffee if she wished, but she shook her head and turned her attention to the bomb expert.
He had covered a chalk board with diagrams of possible ways the bomb had been wired. Precisely how the detonation had been accomplished appeared open to question, since only slivers of wires, cherry wood, and battery fragments remained after the violence of the explosion.
On the table before her lay one of the cribbage boards which the bomb squad had picked up at the Maintenon. Milled from heavy close grained cherry, it was twelve inches long by four inches wide by three-fourths inch thick, divided lengthwise on top by a curving pattern of two parallel rows of pegging holes. One row for each player, thought Sigrid, recalling the details Tillie had told her about the game. Each row contained one hundred twenty pegging holes so that whichever player pegged a hundred and twenty-one points first would win.
The hardwood must have been difficult to work, but with a fine drill it would have been possible to hollow out quite a nice-sized chamber on the bottom. An hour or so of painstaking effort and the chamber would have become roomy enough to hold a small wad of explosive and some sort of trigger mechanism.
When everything was taped into place, a piece of cardboard was probably cut to cover the hollow and the green felt backing neatly reglued. To the casual eye there would have been nothing to distinguish that cribbage board from the one Sigrid was holding.
"No traces of radio or clock components," the bomb expert was saying, "so we don't think it was detonated by remote control or timer switches. Witnesses say play had begun about twenty minutes before the blast, so it was probably a switch that closed a simple circuit from batteries to the explosive itself. It takes about twenty minutes to play a game-in fact, some of the contestants were already beginning their second-so the switch probably involved a game-marking peg. Pull it up and zing went the springs of his heart. Or, just as easy, push it into the hole that stood for the first win and he turns out all his lights."
"Any ideas about who?" McKinnon's face was grim.
The expert shrugged. "Anybody who wants to spend an hour with a couple of technical encyclopedias could pick up the theory. And any bright ten-year-old could make the stuff with the right chemicals.
"One thing, though," he added. "Whoever did it has probably done it before. There's a certain finesse here. This bomb wasn't meant to kill more than the one or two people in direct contact with this particular cribbage board. I don't care how many nuts call in and claim to have struck a blow for the freedom of caged canaries or death to all cribbage players-"
"A private kill?" nodded McKinnon. "I wondered why the Feds weren't busting down our doors."
"He could just as easily have blown up the whole ballroom if he'd wanted to," the expert hedged.
"And you think he's done it before?" asked Elaine Albee, a fragile-looking blonde who'd made detective last year after bringing in three Central Park muggers single-handedly.
"Look, people, this stuff packs a hell of a wallop. More than an amateur realizes, so amateurs always wind up with overkill. This guy used just enough to do the job.
I don't say he's a professional killer, but I do say he's experienced."
"Like a demolition worker," suggested Lowry as he doodled an exploding cribbage board on his note pad.
"Or an ex-frogman," said the expert, who'd helped mine Haiphong Harbor.
"Or one of those Mideast crazies," someone contributed.
"Or maybe," suggested someone else, "a disgruntled bank teller with a grudge against Maritime National."
"I'll run my data through the FBI's computers," said the explosives expert. "Maybe we'll get lucky."
"In the meantime," Captain McKinnon told his troops, "we do it the old-fashioned way, people-shoe leather and interviews. Peters, what've you got on Wolferman?"
"Wolferman, Zachary Augustus, of Central Park South," said Detective Peters, reading from his notes. "Caucasian male, age sixty-one, unmarried. Chairman of the board and principal stockholder in Maritime National Bank. According to his lawyer, after all the debts and some hefty bequests to distant relatives.
servants, and various charities, the residual beneficiary is a cousin, Haines Froelick. The lucky Mr. Froelick will probably wind up with around six million."
With two pre-school daughters and a third child on the way, Bernie Peters was lucky if he had six dollars left over between paychecks and his wistful sigh echoed around the room. Almost palpable in the air were visions of Caribbean resorts, sleek cars, and expensive baubles.
"The cousin was at the Maintenon last night, too, wasn't he?" asked McKinnon.
"Yes, sir. Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper said they spent a lot of time together. Met for dinner and played cribbage two or three nights a week. They were in last year's tournament out on Long Island and the year before that at one down in Raleigh. Housekeeper says they bickered a lot but that they were as close as brothers. Mr. Froelick's parents died when he was a kid and his aunt, Wolferman's mother, sort of adopted him."
"What's Froelick's financial standing?"
"I haven't gotten that far on him yet, but he has rooms at the Quill and Shutter Club about two blocks from Wolferman. I figure he's not living on food stamps."
"Quill and Shutter? Is he a writer?"
"Amateur photographer. Putters around in the club's darkroom and gets some of his pictures in group exhibitions once in a while."
Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper had proudly shown Peters a collage of hand-colored Polaroid prints of herself in her best black silk with her grandmother's cameo at her neck, a collage that had won Mr. Froelick first prize for best nonprofessional work in the club's annual exhibition four years ago.
The housekeeper was younger than her late employer and his cousin, yet she seemed to look upon them both with a sort of maternal indulgence. "Not a bit of harm in either of them," she had told the detective, wiping away genuine tears. "Who could have done such a wicked thing?"
"The housekeeper can't name a single person that didn't like him. Chauffeur says the same. Ditto the lawyer."
"Everybody has enemies," rasped McKinnon.
"Maybe the cousin was in a hurry to inherit," said Jim Lowry.
"And what does an elderly Park Avenue club man know about building bombs?" Albee objected.
"The battery for that bomb could have come from one of those instant cameras," the explosives expert reminded them.
They grudgingly agreed that Haines Froelick should receive further attention.
"What about Sutton?" Captain McKinnon asked Elaine Albee.
"Not too much yet," she answered, absently pushing a pencil through her blonde curls. "His wife's really torn up about it. She's on a heavy guilt trip because apparently she's the one who signed them up for the tournament. He taught modern history over at Vanderlyn College; she's a curator at the Feldheimer Museum up near Lincoln Center. Two kids."
"Money?"
"Just their salaries, as far as I can tell. They were out at McClellan State before coming here and I got a printout of their rap sheets.
"The protest movement," explained
Albee, seeing their surprised expressions. She shuffled through the papers before her and read off some of the main dates and places: the sit-ins, unlawful assemblies, and marching without permits; more than a dozen incidences of civil disobedience on John Sutton's part, fewer by Val Sutton. Mrs. Sutton had been fined twice and acquitted of any serious charges. John Sutton had spent fifteen days in a Chicago jail for assaulting a police officer during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Their records were not unusual for committed campus activists of that period in American history, she summed up. "Both were questioned after something called the Red Snow bombing, but no charges were filed."
The bomb expert's head came up. "Red Snow? Were they involved with those bastards?"
"What's Red Snow?" Albee asked, who was in grammar school in the late Sixties.
"One of those violent underground groups that splintered off SDS around sixty-nine or seventy," he replied sourly. "Sometime in early 1970-"
"January ninth," Elaine Albee interposed from her printouts.
"January ninth," he nodded, "a group of radicals bombed a draft board in Chicago. What they hadn't bothered to check was that the draft board only took up part of the building. The other part opened onto a side street with just a flimsy wall between. Draft board on one side, day-care centre on the other. Four little kids were killed outright, along with one of the teachers and a couple from the draft board. It had snowed that morning and kids were blown out into the street, mangled and bloody in the fresh white snow.
"That's what I mean about amateurs," he said grimly. "They always use too damn much. Anyhow, that's supposed to be where they got the name. Red Snow. The papers had another version, though. Said the leader, Fred Hamilton, was a Ho Chi Minh sympathizer hooked on cocaine at the time."
"Yeah, I remember now," said one of the older detectives. "Weren't they the ones that blew themselves up in a fancy fishing lodge up around the Finger Lakes?"
"Yeah, that was Red Snow," McKinnon rumbled reminiscently. "Funny how you forget about things like that. It was a seven-day wonder with the papers. Beautiful young debutante."
His younger officers were looking blank again, so he refreshed their memories.
"One of the Red Snow members was the only daughter of a wealthy stockbroker who owned a twelve-room vacation cottage on Cayuga Lake.
"He knew she'd been a member of a radical SDS chapter at college that winter, but he thought she'd broken with them and joined some sort of back-to-nature outfit. At least that's what he told the FBI and the state troopers later. I guess granola and free love sounded so much better to him than riots and sit-ins that he let them use the place that summer while he and his third wife went off to Europe for a couple of months."
"She'd left SDS all right," said the bomb expert, picking up the story, "but Red Snow was no love-happy commune. They'd begun to stockpile weapons and explosives and they must have had several hundred pounds of the stuff because somebody got careless one August night and the place went up like Nagasaki. They say you could see the flames as far away as Syracuse, a hundred miles away.
"When the ashes cooled, seven bodies were found, but they were so badly burned that four of them were never positively identified. The house was built out over the lake and a couple of canoers swore they saw three people dive off an upper balcony with their clothes afire. The debutante's burned body was floating in the lake the next day, but they never found the other two."
"Red Snow had a meltdown," someone quipped.
McKinnon scowled. "And the Suttons were mixed up with them?"
"They were questioned," said Albee. "In January and again in August of that year."
"Probably because Sutton was active in SDS at McClellen State," said Sigrid, entering the discussion for the first time.
The others looked at her curiously. "You knew Sutton?" asked the captain.
"A friend of mine over at Vanderlyn first met them when John Sutton was head of McClellan's SDS. As I recall, Fred Hamilton was from McClellan, too. That's probably why the Suttons were questioned."
"So Sutton's wife might know how to make a bomb," said Peters.
Albee shook her small blonde head in vigorous denial. "No way. That was no act that lady put on last night. Besides, Sutton's not the one with the six-million estate."
"Keep an open mind," growled the captain. "He could have been carrying insurance. Check it. And check what the marriage was really like before you say 'no way' again. We're looking for somebody with bomb-making experience and for my money, and SDS background puts Mrs. Sutton on the charts. You've already said the tournament was her idea."
"My friend says he and Sutton were at the Maintenon on Wednesday," Sigrid said quietly. "They were actually in the same ballroom."
A babble of questions erupted just as a uniformed sergeant put his head in the door. "Captain? There's some guy here from the Navy to see you about the Maintenon bombing."
The captain heaved himself to his feet. "Take over. Lieutenant Harald," he said and went out to see what the Navy wanted.