Free Touchstone by Laurie R. King Page B

one to stop the girl from going up for her coat.
    “The one thing I did find was the kid who’d delivered the box of groceries. He’d been stopped on the street and given a quarter to take it to an address, that was all he knew. By an Englishman with a moustache.
    “Okay, that was last July. Then in November, a hard-guy judge in Cranston was about to present a key ruling on a Union dispute, and he got in his car to drive to work one morning—driving himself that day, as his driver had called in sick—and half a mile down the road, the car burst into flames. He was quicker than you’d guess, looking at him, and scrambled out with nothing worse than blisters all up his back, but it was a close thing. We figured that one was in a china doll sitting on the back seat—he had a granddaughter, no doubt thought it was hers until
whoosh,
up it went.
    “We had no reason to think it had anything to do with the July bomb, you understand, except they were two incendiary devices, which may have been placed inside everyday objects.
    “And in January, my bottle bomb, as nice a piece of death-dealing as you could ask for. Three
booms,
three innocuous settings, two Englishmen, nothing to tie them together but one agent’s suspicious mind.”
    “What aren’t you telling me?”
    Stuyvesant glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry?”
    “Mr. Stuyvesant, your voice drips with the memory of blood. Why is that?”
    “Bombs are bloody things.”
    “There is a personal element in your intonation.”
    Stuyvesant went to the cupboard for two cups, came back to the sink, and set them beside the coffee. “I don’t talk about my personal life.”
    “If you want my help, you had better change that policy.”
    “It’s nothing to do with the investigation.” Not really.
    “Nonetheless.”
    Son of a bitch. Damn Carstairs, anyway. Stuyvesant leaned both hands on the tiled surface and spoke to the window.
    “That riot, last July? My kid brother got caught up in it. Tim’s fourteen years younger than me and our dad died when he was five, so I’ve always been more like a father than a brother. He’s followed on my heels since he could crawl, enlisted when he was still just sixteen—lied about his age—and showed up on the Front six months after I did. I didn’t even try to get him sent home, just tucked him under my wing and kept him from doing anything too stupid. After the War, I made him go to college. And when he graduated and wanted to follow me into the Bureau, I kept an eye on him there, too. Just…not close enough.
    “He was off duty when the riot started up, but he knew I was out of town so he went to help out and got caught up in it. Nearest doctors could figure, he got knocked down and someone kicked him in the head. He lived, sort of. He can sometimes remember his wife’s name.”
    Stuyvesant turned around to look at the other man.
    “So yeah. I’d say there’s a personal element in my goddamned intonation.”

Chapter Nine
    T HE SILENCE HELD for a minute, then Grey said, “I’m sorry.”
    Sorry about Tim or sorry to have asked? “Yeah, well, these things happen.”
    “And you say you feel that bomb was linked to the others.”
    “I did.” Stuyvesant shook off the guilt and grief that rode his days, and gave the coffee a stir. “Where was I? Oh yeah, the Englishman. I took the description we had and compared it to passenger manifests, to and from England, at the dates involved. And eventually I narrowed it down to one man.”
    “Sounds like a lot of work.”
    “Understatement of the year.”
    It had been a ridiculous amount of work, and of the kind Stuyvesant was least suited for—his forte was fists, not files. The worst of it was, because his boss thought he had a bee in his bonnet, most of it needed to be done in his off hours. First combing through what seemed like a thousand manifests covering the periods before and after the three incidents, poring over fine print by his desk lamp, looking for men with