It was essentially a junkyard without the junk. Her feet bounced up and down on the floorboards as they pulled through the gate in the chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of razor wire.

To their left was the police shooting range. Rune heard the short cracks from pistols. To their right were several small red sheds. “That's where we keep our own explosives,” Healy explained.

“Your own?”

“Most of the time we don't dismantle devices. We bring them here and blow them up.”

Rune picked up her camera and battery pack from the backseat. There was a green jumpsuit there. She hadn't noticed it before. She tried to pick it up. It was very heavy. The helmet had a green tube, probably for ventilation, coming out of the top and hanging down the back. It looked just like an alien's head.

“Wow, what's that?”

“Bomb suit. Kevlar panels in fireproof cloth.”

“Is that what you wear when you disarm bombs?”

“You don't call them bombs.”

“No?”

“They're IEDs. Improvised explosive devices. The Department's a lot like the military. We use initials a lot.”

They walked into a low cinder-block building that reeked of city government budget. A single, overworked air conditioner groaned in the corner. Healy nodded at a couple uniformed officers. He carried a blue zipper bag.

She glanced at a poster. rules for boiling dynamite.

There were dozens of others, all with bullet points of procedures on them. The clinical language was chilling.

In the event of consciousness after a detonation, attempt to retrieve any severed body parts...

Jesus...

He noticed what she was reading and, maybe to distract her from the gruesome details, asked, “Hey, want to hear the basic lecture on explosive ordnance disposal?”

She looked away from the section on improvising tourniquets and said, “I guess.”

“There are only two goals in dealing with explosives. First, to avoid human injury. Destroy or disarm by remote if at all possible. Goal number two is to avoid injury to property. Most of our work involves investigating suspicious packages and sweeps of consulates and airports and abortion clinics. Things like that.”

“You make it sound, I don't know, routine.”

“Most of it is. But we also got odd jobs, like a couple weeks ago — some kid buys a sixty-millimeter mortar shell from an army-navy store in Brooklyn and takes it home. He and his brother're in the backyard playing catch with it. Supposed to be a dummy — all the powder drained out. Only the kid's father was in Nam and he thinks it looks funny. Takes it to the local precinct station. Turns out it was live.”

“Ouch.”

“We got it taken care of... Then we get a lot of false alarms, just like the Fire Department. But every once in a while, bingo. There's a suitcase at the airport or a bundle of dynamite or a pipe bomb and we've got to do something with it.”

“So somebody crawls up and cuts the wires?”