ONCE IN A WHILE there are moments in this job when everything works out for you. Finding the Lightower baby at McDonald's was one of those times. The entire Hall seemed to breathe a deep, grateful sigh of relief.

I got Cindy on the line and asked a favor. She said she'd be delighted to put a little pressure on X/L.

I hung up with Cindy, and Charlie Clapper was knocking on my door. "Nice bust, Boxer."

"That's a little sexist, even from you," I said with a smile.

Clapper laughed. His Crime Scene team had spent the better part of the past day and a half picking through the bomb site. Charlie looked exhausted.

"FYEF, darlin'," he said, motioning with his head for me to follow. "For your eyes first. They're a whole lot cuter than Tracchio's."

"Knew I earned this gold shield for something."

Charlie took me to his office down the hall. Niko was in there, from the Bomb Squad, leaning back in Charlie's old hardwood recliner and picking something out of a Chinese food container.

"Okay, we've pieced together an idea of the explosive device." Charlie threw out a chair for me. On a poster board, someone had drawn a floor plan of the Lightowers' town house. "Traces of C-4 were all over the place. Half a pound's enough to blow a jet from the sky, so from the size of the blast, I figure this was about five times that. Whoever did it put it inside something like this" - he took out a black Nike sport bag - "and placed it in one of the rooms."

"How do we know that?" I asked.

"Easy." Clapper grinned. He pulled out a fragment of black nylon with a Nike swoosh on it. "We found this plas-tered against the wall."

"Any luck you could scrape a few prints off the bag?" I asked hopefully.

"Sorry, honey," Clapper snickered, "this is the bag."

"It was trigger............