Free The Devil's Banker by Christopher Reich Page A

body parts, but scraps of flesh and muscle, and Montbusson didn’t know what, hid beneath every concrete fragment and hung from the walls like tattered pennants.
    The blood—it was everywhere.
    Montbusson sighed. Twenty years on the force and he still wasn’t accustomed to the sights, the smells, the textures of death. Frankly, he hoped he never would be. At mass each Sunday, he thanked God for the love of his wife and his two daughters, asked forgiveness for his sins, and prayed for the strength to make it through another week on the job. Tonight, however, the work was particularly grim, and he knew that if he stayed at it much longer, he risked losing his humanity.
    Five men blown up in such a small, contained space. There were no words to describe it. He kept asking himself the same question: Where was God in this place? Though he thought himself a pious man, René Montbusson could find no response.
    A flutter of white at his feet caught his attention. A piece of paper, hardly larger than a few postage stamps. Kneeling, he took a pair of tweezers from his pants and bent toward it. The tweezers dropped to the ground and he saw that his gloves were too smeared with blood to hold them. After changing the translucent, polyurethane gloves, he managed to pick up the paper. One side was white, the other, at first glance, multicolored. The edges were charred, but otherwise it was in good shape.
    The same couldn’t be said for the apartment. The charge had destroyed every piece of furniture in the living room, blown out the windows and curtains, and blasted a hole in the floor as well as through the drywall separating the living room and bedroom. The first persons allowed on the scene, besides medical technicians, were the structural engineers. An examination of the building proved it to be sound. As a precaution, the engineers installed eight floor-to-ceiling braces in the apartment.
    The ordnance experts had come and gone hours ago. A swab of the walls subjected to a handheld ion mobility spectrometer confirmed the presence of RDX and PETN, the two principal ingredients of plastic explosives. The vapor detection device also found the presence of ethylene glycol dinitrate, a chemical marker that identified the explosive as being “Semtex,” a product of the Czech Republic. The ordnance team estimated Taleel had used about a half-kilo of the professionally manufactured, and all too easily available, plastique to blow himself to kingdom come.
    Standing, Montbusson raised the paper so that the light from one of four industrial-size paint-drying lamps brought in to illuminate the crime scene caught it squarely on its face. It was a map—that much he could tell right away. He could see the horizontal lines that denoted streets, a comma of green that indicated a park, and a ribbon of red and white that probably meant a section of freeway. He had more of a problem making out the letters. Dropping a hand into his jacket pocket, the forty-five-year-old crime-scene investigator fished out his bifocals and balanced them on his nose. “—nt St. De” Here the paper ended. A narrow expanse of blue curled across the bottom left-hand corner of the paper. Running through its center were larger, well-spaced, letters— “m a.”
    Carefully, Montbusson retraced his steps to his collection tray and laid the paper in a plastic folder, pasting a number onto it, and cataloguing the piece in his notebook as “Remnant: city map. America???” On a hand-drawn site map of the apartment, he placed a dot where he had found it, along with its corresponding evidence number.
    A check of his watch showed the time to be eleven o’clock. Montbusson sat down. He felt tired, older than his years. Through the window—or rather the gaping maw where the window used to be—he viewed a chain of headlights negotiating the roadblocks and moving rapidly up the street. Strobes atop the cars spun blue and white. Mercifully, the sirens were silent. No doubt it was