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shelf. “What do you need these
for?” I asked, holding up one of the grey wigs.
    “Oh my
goodness,” Gertie said, taking it from me. I could see from her eyes the wig
was taking her back in time. Way back. “We used these to disguise ourselves as
seniors. Back when we were not much older than you.”
    Ida Belle
nodded. “You’d be amazed at the types of things people say around old people.
Either they don’t notice us sitting there or they figure we can’t hear them or
we’re too senile to understand what they’re saying. Those disguises yielded
some of the best intel we every got.”
    “Now we
don’t need them.” Gertie’s voice took on a wistful tone. She gazed at Ida Belle.
“When did that happen?”
    Ida Belle
shrugged. “I didn’t notice.”
    * * * * *
    We gave ourselves an hour to shower
and change clothes before reconvening at Ida Belle’s dining-room table, now functioning
as command central.
    Although
Gertie’s fake funeral had only lasted a half hour before we detected the bomb,
plenty of people at the funeral shot photos and videos before and during the
service. Since we had planted the idea of us sifting through information and
videos for the ATF to the people at the after-party, we had a treasure trove of
texts and videos to sort through. Ida Belle’s job was reading texts. Gertie was
responsible for examining photos and videos.
    My job involved
sifting through the debris we collected behind the rec center. I may not have
been an explosives expert, but I’ve had to make my own bombs on numerous
occasions, so I was probably the closest to an expert Sinful had. And by
looking at a few pieces of the bomb itself, I could tell one thing…
    “This is
homemade.”
    Gertie’s
face blanched. If this bomb had been the work of an expert, there was a
likelihood of it coming from the man who had a contract out on me. But no pro
made this bomb.
    “It was
meant for me,” Gertie said.
    “Most
likely. And he didn’t do a great job of putting the bomb together.”
    “How so? It
exploded, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah, but
believe me, that explosion could have been much worse. And from what I saw, the
top of the casket wasn’t in that bad of shape, meaning the force of the blast
went down, not up. I would have positioned it so the force of the blast would
go upward, into the intended victim’s body. And, from what I observed at the
bayou, that explosion didn’t have a lot of power behind it. Whoever made this
didn’t read the instructions very well.”
    Ida Belle
and Gertie got up from their chairs and crowded around me.
    “Granted, I
don’t have much to work with, but I would bet whoever planted this bomb was
hasty and cheaped out. A professional hitman would take his time and go for
top-of-the-line materials. And I would also bet that whoever planted it was within
a hundred feet when he remotely set the timer to start the countdown.”
    “Which
meant he would probably have been close enough to show up in the pictures and
videos many people were taking while standing in line,” Ida Belle said.
    Gertie
waved her hand in the air like an excited student. “There’s a park bench right
outside the rec center.”
    “Check all
the footage people sent to Ida Belle,” I told Gertie. “And wear your glasses.”
    Gertie
pursed her lips and slapped her hands to her hips. “I can see just fine.”
    “I’ll do
it,” Ida Belle said.
    I wasn’t
taking any chances. “You both do it. One and a half sets of eyes are better.”
    They
scurried back to their chairs. Ida Belle pulled hers next to Gertie in front of
the laptop. “She was insulting you, in case you were wondering,” Ida Belle
said.
    I brought
up Facebook on my own laptop, then slid it over to Gertie. “Log me into your
Facebook page. I want to check your Sinful friends to see if anyone posted a
selfie while standing in line.”
    She reached
over and typed in her user ID. “Don’t look,” she said to Ida Belle as she typed
her