The FBI dog handlers spread out and released the bomb sniffers. Muzzles up, panting for scent, they cast into the wind toward the statues. Back and forth they ran, coursing through the trees and the steel patrol soldiers. I stood beside Bree, looking around to spot my favorite part of the memorial: three statues crouched around a campfire, set on a granite slab inscribed with THE FORGOTTEN WAR.
“C’mon,” Bree said in a low voice. “Find it.”
At the northeast end of the memorial, two of the dogs circled a low, dark wall that read FREEDOM IS NOT FREE. They returned to their handlers waiting on the walkway. The third shepherd took a longer loop downwind of the MLK Memorial before trotting back to his handler and the others.
“Rio and Ben are not picking up anything here,” a handler said on the radio. “And Kelsey wasn’t smelling anything at MLK. We can run the Lincoln if you want us to.”
“Yes,” Bree said. “Better safe than sorry.”
Mahoney said, “This the boy who cried wolf?”
“An effective tactic,” I said. “Gets us all worked up, calls us to action. He probably gets a kick out of—”
The bomb exploded behind us.
Chapter 13
We dove to the ground and covered our heads. Bits of gravel rained down on my back. When it stopped, I lifted my head to see a thin plume of charcoal-gray smoke rising to the right of a walkway that led toward King’s Memorial.
“Jesus,” Mahoney said, getting up and dusting his suit off. “How’d we miss that?”
Bree, rattled but fine, said, “The dogs were just through there.”
The lead dog handler shook his head in bewilderment. “If there was a bomb they would have smelled it.”
“Well, they didn’t,” Mahoney snapped, before calling for a forensics team to gather the bomb debris for analysis.
We all put on blue hospital booties and moved toward the explosion site, everyone seeming jittery and uncertain. Yesterday he’d put two bombs on the National Mall. If the dogs didn’t smell the first one, couldn’t there be another?
No more than a foot across and five inches deep, the smoking crater was two feet off the pedestrian walkway, on the other side of a slack black chain fence. The bomb had been hidden under a low juniper, now charred and broken.
A mangled, burnt metal casing lay on the ground several feet away.
“Looks like a camera body,” Bree said. “Or what used to be one.”
That spooked me. How many tourists in DC carry a camera? It would never be noticed, at least not while the bomber was carrying it. He was smart. He was creative. But something about the explosion bothered me.
“It didn’t do a lot of damage,” I said. “I mean, it could have been bigger, made more of a statement.”
“He wounded two agents yesterday,” Bree said.
“I’m not discounting that. It just seems like this should have been an escalation.”
“Or at least two bombs,” Mahoney said.
“Exactly.”
Before Bree could reply, one of the dog handlers yelled. He’d found something on the north side of the memorial.
“Is your dog on scent?” Mahoney shouted as we hurried toward them.
“No,” the handler said when we got close. “I saw it in that clear trash bag there, a black fanny pack.”
Bree triggered her radio and said, “Bring the bomb team up.”
Within five minutes, FBI bomb squad commander Peggy Denton had arrived. We watched her iPad screen, showing the Andros robot’s camera feed and monitoring several electronic sensors. She shook her head. “We’re not picking up on a radio or cell phone. No timer, either. We can X-ray it.”
Mahoney nodded. Another tense three minutes passed while they moved a portable X-ray into position and looked inside the fanny pack. Aside from a water bottle and a shirt, there was an irregular rectangular item roughly three inches long, two inches wide, and two thick.