Free Touchstone by Laurie R. King Page A

or two Communist meetings, and we figured someone had to open the door for the bomber.
    “One witness said she’d been talking with a man, earlier that day. The description the witness gave was pretty useless—slim, slicked-down hair, smoky glasses, thin moustache—but one of the girl’s neighbors had seen her a day or two earlier with a man who fit the same description, guy with an English accent. We figured she’d let him in to set the bomb, then either ran away with him, or heard what he’d done and got scared and took off on her own. She was foreign—Mexico, maybe Central America.
    “Now, in and of itself, an English accent doesn’t tell us much—half the men in New York have an accent of some kind—but it was a thing I’d heard before, an Englishman in the vicinity of a clever device. So I took the description and I—”
    “What were the other devices?” Grey interrupted to ask.
    Again Stuyvesant hesitated; again he shrugged, and told him about the fire that had started it all.
    “Last summer, a number of us Bureau agents were in Chicago, helping the local force with some agitators, when somebody had the bright idea of holding a raid. And not just a raid, but they thought it would be good to give the Reds warning, to give them time to clear out. Make ’em look like cowards, you know?
    “Of course, Reds are more likely to want martyrdom than to save their skin, and what the warning gave them was time to summon a mob. However, the cops had said they were going to do a raid, so they did the raid, broke down the door and started hauling people away. And it would have been okay, since there were plenty of cops on hand to keep the mob under control, but before they got the house cleared, a fire broke out in the kitchen, on the middle floor. And unfortuantely, one young woman had gone back upstairs to get her coat, and when the whole center floor went up in flames, she had no place to go but up, and finally off the roof. Margery Anne Wallingford was her name. She died. The mob watched it happen, blamed the cops, a riot started up, half the city began to beat on each other’s heads.”
    Stuyvesant kept his voice even, but it took some effort. He took a steadying breath, and went on.
    “When the riot was over and the coals were cool, we went sifting through them for evidence that they’d been assembling bombs and set one off, on purpose or by accident, but we didn’t find any other equipment. Which may have meant they’d just had the one that they’d intended to set elsewhere, but when I talked to the Reds they’d arrested, one of them happened to mention a box of groceries that had been delivered earlier that day. He’d just carried it up and left it on the kitchen table, because who had time for groceries when a raid was coming?
    “Tell you the truth, the whole thing was damn confusing. I might’ve thought there was some rival group, except that this bunch had so many internal disputes they were beginning to break into factions, anyway. I spent a long time digging around to see if this particular crew had stepped on the toes of some Comrades, but I couldn’t find anything. But if not rivals, why would the Reds burn down their own house? It couldn’t have been an accident—if the bomb was intended for elsewhere, they had all the time in the world to get rid of the thing before the raid. And if they’d meant it as a trap to kill cops, the timing and the location were both rotten.”
    “You don’t entertain the thought that the girl chose deliberately to go into the fire?”
    “Martyrdom to rally the cause? If there’d been more noise around it, I’d have wondered, but there wasn’t, not even a letter.
    “My nasty suspicious mind even began to wonder if it had started as a fake, designed to play on public sympathy—you know, evil cops setting fire to honest Communists’ headquarters. In that case, only the leaders would have been in on it, and once they were in the paddy wagon there was no