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wasn’t about to let them try.
    The door banged open and Milton walked in.
    Kevin cleared his throat. “Anything?”
    Milton straddled a backward chair, slapped a folder down on the table, and drilled Kevin with his dark eyes. “You tell me.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Milton blinked twice and ignored the question. “The FBI’s bringing someone in on this. ATF wants a look, CBI, state police—the lot of them. But as far as I’m concerned, this is still my jurisdiction. Just because terrorists favor bombs doesn’t mean every bomb that goes off is the work of terrorists.”
    “They think this is a terrorist?”
    “I didn’t say that. But Washington sees terrorists behind every tree these days, so they will definitely go on the hunt. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the CIA picking through the files.” Milton eyed him, unblinking, for a few long seconds, and then blinked three times in rapid succession. “What we have here is one sick puppy. What confuses me is why he picked you. Doesn’t make sense.”
    “None of this makes sense.”
    Milton opened the file. “It’ll take a couple days for the lab to complete their work on what little we found, but we have some preliminary findings, the most significant of which is nothing.”
    “What do you mean, nothing? A bomb about blew me to pieces!”
    “No evidence of real investigative value. Let me summarize for you—maybe it’ll shake something loose in that mind of yours.” He eyed Kevin again.
    “We have a man with a low, raspy voice who calls himself Richard Slater and who knows you well enough to target you. You, on the other hand, have no idea who he could possibly be.” Milton paused for effect. “He constructs a bomb using common electronics available at any Radio Shack and dynamite, rendering the bomb virtually untraceable. Smart. He then plants that bomb in the trunk of your car. He calls you, knowing that you’re in the car, and threatens to blow the car in three minutes if you can’t solve a riddle. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls? Right so far?”
    “Sounds right.”
    “Due to some fast thinking and some fancy driving, you manage to drive the car to a relatively safe location and escape. As promised, the car blows up when you fail to solve the riddle and phone it in to the newspaper.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Preliminary forensics tell us that whoever planted that bomb left no fingerprints. No surprises there—this guy’s obviously not the village idiot. The explosion could have caused significant collateral damage. If you’d been on the street when it blew, we’d have some bodies at the morgue. That’s enough to assume this guy’s either pretty teed off or a raving lunatic, probably both. So we have smart and we have teed off. Follow?”
    “Makes sense.”
    “What we’re missing is the most obvious link in any case like this. Motivation. Without motivation, we’ve got squat. You have no idea whatsoever why anyone would want to harm you in any way? You have no enemies from the past, no recent threats against your well-being, no reason whatsoever to suspect why anyone on this earth might want to hurt you in any way?”
    “He didn’t try to hurt me. If he wanted to kill me, he could’ve just blown up the bomb.”
    “Exactly. So we’re not only clueless as to why someone named Slater might want to blow up your car, we don’t even know why he did . What did he accomplish?”
    “He scared me.”
    “You don’t scare someone by nuking their neighborhood. But okay, say he just wanted to scare you—we still don’t have motivation. Who might want to scare you? Why? But you don’t have a clue, right? Nothing you’ve ever done would give anyone any reason to hold anything against you.”
    “I—not that I know of. You want me to just make something up? I told you, I really don’t know.”
    “You’re leaving us high and dry, Kevin. High and dry.”
    “What about the phone call?” Kevin asked.