The Puppy Bomb

The inevitable descent into gallows humor had begun. Jonah LeClaire lay on the sofa in Randal Bunker’s office. They were waiting for the telephone to ring. They knew it would not be good news. It was Sunday, and both would rather have been with their families. Somehow they had begun to amuse themselves with how the telephone company would tell you that you’re dead. Their little game made no sense, but it kept their minds from straying into what awful things they might hear when the call came.

Bunker played first. “You’ll know your time has come when your phone bill says ‘Sorry, you have been permanently disconnected.’”

Jonah smiled. “Or the bill might say ‘You have no more use for Call Waiting.’’’

Jonah and Bunker were in the office on a Sunday morning because a Texas State Highway Trooper, Troy Plum, had disappeared near Dallas. Trooper Plum had reported for work at the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) district headquarters in Garland, a suburb east of Dallas, on Saturday night at about 11:30 pm. His shift started at midnight, and he was assigned his usual stretch of rural Interstate 30 east of Dallas. He stopped three speeders before 1:00 am, and his last radio contact with the Garland dispatcher was at 1:10 am.

Jonah flinched when a telephone rang in an outer office but shrugged it off and continued the game. “Your dial tone won’t be coming back?’’

“Good one, Sparky. Mine is ‘You reached out and touched someone once too often!’”

Randal Bunker is the supervisor of the Major Crime Unit of the Texas Rangers, and Jonah is his deputy supervisor. The Texas Rangers, like the Texas Highway Patrol, are a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. The Rangers serve as the major state crime investigators in Texas, usually helping local police departments on difficult cases. Both Bunker and Jonah are based in Austin, but their investigative jurisdiction extends statewide. Bunker always calls Jonah “Sparky,” and Jonah calls Bunker “Boss.”

The disappearance of Trooper Plum was the top news story across Texas that Sunday, and as soon as they knew where he needed to go, Jonah would leave to head the investigation. Bunker would be the senior state investigator when he arrived, but he had to leave for someplace else later that afternoon. The threat of terrorism had caused the travel plans of all senior state personnel to be kept secret and the State of Texas name and flag to be removed from most state airplanes. Bunker would join Jonah when he got there, but until then, LeClaire would be in charge. Until the phone rang, Jonah and Bunker continued to concoct telephone-company euphemisms for death.

Jonah suggested, “You’re where no operator can assist you now.”

Bunker shot back with, “Roaming charges, no longer an issue.”

The disappearance of a State Trooper while on duty focused the attention of every law-enforcement officer in Texas to East Texas. Fifteen minutes after Trooper Plum’s last radio contact with the Garland DPS dispatcher, a long-haul truck driver dialed *377 (*DPS) on his cell phone and reported to the DPS dispatcher that a car was on fire on the eastbound shoulder of Interstate 30. The dispatcher asked the driver if he was able to see anyone inside or near the car. The trucker said that there was no one in sight but that the car was an inferno and that he heard what he thought were gunshots, as if someone was shooting at the highway near the burning car. Later it was determined that the “shots” were the extra rounds of ammunition that Troy Plum had stored under his front seat, exploding from the heat of the flames. Two cars westbound on the Interstate were hit by shrapnel, one suffering a broken rear window and the other a quarter-sized hole in its front fender. When the fire was out and what was left of the car had cooled, the county coroner and the state crime tech at the scene both concluded that there were no human remains in the car. Trooper Troy Plum was not trapped inside; he was simply missing.

The missing trooper was twenty-seven years old and six feet tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. Troy had been a trooper with the Highway Patrol for five years. He grew up in Didmur, Texas, not far from where he had disappeared. A natural athlete, he lettered in both baseball and football at Didmur High School and still ran at least five miles every day. Many bets had been pla