"Well, I just found one thing, but there might be more. I'm afraid to look in case he's planted a bomb someplace."
"Who's he?"
"I don't know. I mean the person who broke in."
"Okay. So what's the one thing?"
"This is what's so weird. It's a backpack full of ammunition and, you're not going to believe this, it looks like about a half dozen hand grenades."
"Hand grenades?"
"Yes, sir. As you may know, I've been over to Iraq several times. I know the ordnance. And these look like fragmentation grenades to me."
FREED AND HIS PARTNER, a middle-aged fireplug named Marcia Riggio, sat with Nolan on the small, oak-shaded back patio. Inside the townhouse, a three-man team of forensics specialists, having already confiscated the backpack with its contents, were fingerprinting every clean surface and cataloging anything that might be of interest-Nolan's other gun from the bed's headboard, the digital camera in the desk drawer, downloading his hard disk.
Nolan didn't want to rush anything with these federal cops. He didn't want to appear to point them in any specific direction. But now, as Agent Riggio looked up from her notepad, Nolan decided that it was getting to be the time. "Let me ask you something," he said. "Is there any scenario you can think of that makes any sense of this to you?"
The two agents exchanged a glance. Riggio got the nod from Freed and took point. "Do you have any enemies?" she asked.
Nolan frowned. "Even if I did," he said, "what does this do to hurt me? Unless I pulled the pin on one of those grenades, which anybody who knows me knows I'm not going to do."
"Maybe it's not about hurting you," Riggio went on. "Maybe it's about framing you."
"For what?"
But Freed stepped in. "Before we get to that," he said, "let's go back to your enemies."
This time, Nolan broke a grin. "I don't see it, really. I like people. I really do, and they tend to like me. My boss thinks it's a flaw in my character." He shrugged. "So I'd have to say no. No enemies."
"Okay," Riggio said. "How about rivals?"
"In business?"
"Business, pleasure, whatever."
He took his sweet time, savoring the anticipation. "The only even remotely…" He shook his head. "No, never mind."
Freed jumped on it. "What?"
"Nothing, really. Just a guy I knew in Iraq who used to date my girlfriend. But that was a long time ago."
"If he's in Iraq," Freed said, "he's out of this."
"Well, he's home now. Here."
"And he's not over her? Your girlfriend?" Riggio asked.
"I don't know. He had a hard time with it at first, but now I haven't seen the guy in months. But, look, this is a dead end. He's a good guy. In fact, he's a cop. He'd never-"
Freed interrupted. "He's a cop?"
"Yeah, here in Redwood City. His name's Evan Scholler. He got hurt over there and they let him out early."
"So he would have had access to these types of grenades over there?"
"Yeah, but he wouldn't have taken any home. He did a few months at Walter Reed before he came out here."
"Soldiers have been known to send illegal ordnance and contraband stateside as souvenirs on the slow boat," Riggio said. "It's a problem. It happens all the time."
"Well, I don't know what Evan would have…I mean, what's the point of putting hand grenades in my closet? I'm not going to blow myself up with them. It's not like they're going to get rid of me as his rival."
Riggio and Freed again shared a glance, and again exchanged the imperceptible nod. Riggio came forward, elbows on her knees. "Do you know a man named Ibrahim Khalil?"
"No," Nolan said. "Should I?"
"He was a local businessman with ties to Iraq. He and his wife were killed last weekend."
"Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but I've been out of town. I haven't heard about it."
"Would Evan Scholler have known you were gone?"
Nolan shrugged. "If he knew where I lived, he could have just checked to see if my car was in the garage. If it is, I'm home."
"Has he ever, to your knowledge, been up here?" Riggio asked.
"No. As I say, we're not exactly pals anymore." As though it had just occurred to him, Nolan added, "But he's a cop. He could find out where I live easy enough, couldn't he? That's what it looks like he's done."
Freed picked it up. "So Sunday morning early you were with this same girlfriend that this Evan Scholler likes?"
"Tara," Nolan said. "Tara Wheatley. And, yes, she's the one. So what's this all about?"
"Those pictures you couldn't identify on your computer?" Riggio said. "They were pictures of Mr. Khalil's house before somebody killed them and hit it with a fragmentation grenade, and before it burned down."
"A frag grenade…" Nolan didn't want to overplay his apparent naïveté. Both Freed and Riggio knew that he had seen combat, and they might even know more than that. This was about the moment in the interview that, against his own deep-seated reluctance to believe ill of a fellow soldier, he might finally come to accept the apparent truth. So he nodded somberly and met both of their gazes in turn. "He's trying to set me up. Christ, he killed them, didn't he?"
