by CJ Lyons
“Anything I should know?” Morgan asked in a quiet tone, once Jenna’s breathing had steadied. “A new case, maybe? Someone you pissed off?”
Jenna shook her head. She took out her cell phone and then stopped, staring at it. “I’ll have to use the landline—the cell phone could trigger it.” She glanced at the door, considering, but then grabbed the phone from the desk to make the call to 911.
Once she hung up, Morgan said, “It’s okay. You should leave. And make sure no one else is in the building.”
“The art gallery downstairs is closed on Mondays, so it’s empty.” Jenna stood and paced—not toward the door but rather in the space behind the desk. She stopped, her gaze settling on a photo of her and Andre shaking hands with the mayor after one of their early big cases. She didn’t turn to Morgan, but addressed her words to Andre’s image. “I’m not leaving you. Not until the bomb squad gets here.”
“I’d rather not wait. There’s the Monday morning rush hour traffic, and the bomb squad’s stationed all the way out at the airport, so we’re talking thirty, forty minutes at least.” Morgan glanced around. The office had only been half-finished the last time she’d been here in March. “Can you get rid of the ficus and move that planter over here?”
Jenna sprang into action, clearly relieved to have something to do. She tore out the fake tree and its fake dried grass, crouched low, and pushed the planter, scraping the wood floors.
“Is Andre here?” Morgan asked. The Marine had more training in explosives than Jenna. But the offices behind the reception area were dark, so she assumed he was out on a job.
“He’s over visiting his gram. He had to move her into a nursing home a few weeks ago.”
Morgan nodded, making a note to visit Emma. She and Andre’s grandmother—actually his great-grandmother, who had raised him after his own mother went to jail—got along. She liked the woman’s no BS attitude and the way even diabetes, blindness, and a stroke had left her undaunted.
Jenna gave the heavy planter a final heave, positioning it just below Morgan’s hands. “Can’t be the same as the one the Judge got.”
“No, that was a pipe bomb. I think this one is some kind of plastic explosive.”
Jenna scrutinized the bottom of the envelope from her position on the floor. “There’s a bit of oil staining the edge. And it’s thinner and flatter than a pipe bomb. But C4 or the like, combined with shrapnel…”
“Might be even more deadly,” Morgan finished for her. “Got any Kevlar handy?”
Jenna scrambled to her feet and disappeared into Andre’s office. She returned with her arms laden with three tactical vests. Morgan hid a smile—they’d gotten one for her, despite not knowing if or when she’d be back. Probably Andre’s idea. Nothing said welcome home like a bulletproof vest.
“Ceramic plates?” Morgan observed, as Jenna tugged the Velcro apart to lower a vest over Morgan’s head before securing it around her torso.
“Of course.” She moved to Morgan’s front as she shrugged into her own vest. “No idea what might trip the trigger, though. I think you should wait for the bomb squad.”
Morgan considered that, and she might have waited if the package hadn’t begun to vibrate. It was just a slight tingle of electricity, but enough to spook her—and Morgan did not spook easily.
“Here’s what we’re doing.” She kept her tone calm; she wouldn’t have time to repeat herself. “I’m going to place the bomb into the concrete. You’re going to hand me the other vest, and then we are both going to run like hell. Got it?”
Jenna stood beside Morgan, the third vest resting on her palms. “Yes.”
Carefully, yet as quickly as she could, Morgan lowered the envelope into the cement container, their improvised bomb disposal unit. Jenna shadowed her, holding the Kevlar vest just inches over Morgan’s hands. As soon as the package was resting on the bottom of the planter, Morgan slid her hands free, took the Kevlar from Jenna, and slung it over the top of the planter.
“Now!”
At Morgan’s command, Jenna sprinted through the open door, Morgan fast on her heels. They careened down the brick walled staircase and into the art gallery’s storage area. They’d just turned the corner leading to the fire exit at the rear of the building when a boom sounded, followed by a blast of air with enough force to flatten them both against the wall.
Chapter Four
Morgan threw herself against Jenna, shoving her forward through the fire door. Glass and paper and smoke and plaster and drywall and shards of brick rained down on her, thudding against the Kevlar vest, as they toppled through the door and out into the alley.
Smoke billowed out behind them, accompanied by the wail of the fire alarm. Morgan wrapped her arm around Jenna and they fled past the trash bins to the mouth of the alley facing Braddock Avenue. Braced against the wall of a coffee shop, they both bent over, coughing and heaving oxygen into their lungs. Morgan’s ears felt like they needed to pop—a good thing because it meant they hadn’t ruptured from the bomb’s concussive blast—and she kept swallowing hard until they finally did.
Her hearing rushed back with the sounds of traffic passing and pedestrians talking on cell phones. What she didn’t hear surprised her, though: no car alarms, no screams, no sirens wailing. Leaving Jenna, she pushed off the building and stepped out onto the sidewalk. No glass. No debris. She moved closer, glancing into the first floor art gallery’s windows. A few paintings had fallen to the floor, but that seemed to be the only damage. Craning her neck, she looked up to the second floor office windows—only one was starred with a crack, and the rest were intact.
Jenna came up behind Morgan, her fingers poking and pulling at her ears. “You okay?” she shouted. She swallowed hard, then tried again. “Are you okay?”
Morgan nodded. She could hear the fire alarm, but it was faint behind the thick glass and old-school construction. Most of the buildings on this block were pre-World War Two era, but never before had she appreciated their solid craftsmanship.
“Whoever bought that ugly planter deserves a raise,” she said with a wry chuckle. “That thing saved our lives.”
“We’ve got Tim to thank for that. He handled the waiting area design.”
“Who’s Tim?”
“The receptionist.” She shrugged. “We had to hire someone when you went AWOL.”
AWOL. After killing her father and nearly dying herself, then spending a month in a coma and another two learning how to walk, talk, and do everything again, Morgan didn’t really think taking the summer off could be considered being absent without leave. Especially as officially she didn’t even work for Jenna, much less take a paycheck or earn benefits. Hmm…after just saving the boss’s life—again—maybe it was a good time to ask to be put on the books officially. She couldn’t keep living off the radar indefinitely, not if she ever wanted to do normal things like travel, and she needed to have at least one legit tax-paying identity to use as cover.
“How do you want to handle this?” Morgan asked. “You going to call your old friends at the Postal Service? Especially if this has anything to do with your grandfather’s case. They were the lead on that.”
Jenna frowned, obviously not relishing the idea of letting her old compatriots rummage around in her personal affairs. She glanced up at the office windows, her expression morphing back into the stubborn take charge, do-it-my-way Jenna that Morgan was used to. “Do we need to report it at all?”
“Given the cops are on their way—”
“I can take care of that. I can just call them back and tell them it was a mistake.”
“We’ll need them if you want any forensics.” Which Jenna damn well knew. “But maybe you could be in shock long enough for me to get out of here so I can go over the security footage.”
“You think they were dumb enough to get caught on camera? Could it be that easy?” Jenna turned to the coffee shop. “Let’s go see.”
Morgan trailed after her. Jenna was missing the point. That bomb ha
d been remotely triggered—Morgan had felt it come to life. Which meant that the bomber had been watching, waiting for the perfect moment to detonate. Frick Park was across the street from the office; no vantage point there. So either he’d hacked Jenna’s security cameras or had planted one of his own to monitor the office.
If he was smart and planted his own, he would have put it close enough to where the bomb was triggered to make sure it was destroyed in the explosion. Of course, he hadn’t counted on Morgan’s makeshift bomb disposal unit to mitigate the damage.
Or the fact that Morgan had her own surveillance cameras in the office. She struggled out of the heavy tactical vest, dropped it to the sidewalk, and slid her phone from her pocket. Still working; the screen wasn’t even cracked. Thank you, ceramic plates and Kevlar.
Jenna was holding the coffee shop door open for a man carrying a take-out container. He glanced at her vest along with her mussed up hair, its normal copper-red powdered white with debris, and did a double take. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine. We’re filming a movie.” With the back of one hand, Jenna smudged away some of the dirt and plaster that streaked her face and held it up as if proof. “It’s just make up.”
“Cool. Which movie?”
“A new Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise is coming in next week for principal production. We’re doing fillers and B-roll now.”
He nodded and moved past. Regent Square was frequently used for movie productions, as was much of Pittsburgh, so it was a good cover story for almost any out-of-the-ordinary activity.
Jenna stared at Morgan. “Coming?”
“You decide about the cops. I’m going to clean up.” She strode past Jenna and entered the coffee shop, heading toward their restrooms.
Once inside, she logged into her cloud account and accessed the security footage from her cameras—the ones Jenna didn’t know about. The bomber must have left the package the night before, sometime after Jenna and Andre had left for the day. And with them living right upstairs from the office, it would most likely have been in the middle of the night after they’d fallen asleep.
She scrolled through the footage at a fast speed until a blur of motion caught her attention. She replayed at a slower speed, and watched as someone opened the office door. It was a man, dressed all in black, including a ski mask—if she hadn’t equipped her cameras with thermal imagery he wouldn’t have shown up at all. He took two steps, set the package onto the desk, and left. It was all done in less than three seconds—he hadn’t even needed to deactivate the alarm, it was over so fast.
She played through the imagery frame by frame. Not that three seconds took up much—Jenna’s cameras only shot one frame every three seconds, so they might have missed the man altogether, if he was lucky. Considering that most systems shot every six seconds, maybe he’d been counting on an even longer window of time.
There was no way to make out any defining features, not with the blur of the thermal imaging and his concealing clothing. It was even hard to tell his height, given the angle of the camera, but he definitely wasn’t very tall. He was simply a man-shaped white blob; except for one frame at the very end before he vanished. He was heading toward the door and his escape, but then he stopped, raised a hand, and waved right at the camera, giving it a gleeful thumbs up.
Morgan blinked, and watched it again in misbelief. He wanted anyone surviving the bomb to know exactly how much he enjoyed his work—destroying a woman and splattering her flesh and bones in a melee of devastation. This was fun for him.
Not since her father had she seen anyone take such delight in bloodshed.
And this killer was targeting Jenna. He wouldn’t give up; she felt that in her bones. He was having way too much fun. He’d been watching this morning, deciding when to trigger his little present. Probably hacked into Jenna’s own camera feeds. It was just pure dumb luck they’d moved faster than he had—maybe that three-second delay in the images had saved them.
Or maybe it wasn’t an accident that they’d survived the bomb unscathed.
Maybe he’d never planned to kill Jenna with the bomb, but rather to maim and scar her for life? That was how Morgan’s father would have done it. Clinton Caine had loved toying with his prey, torturing them for as long as possible before ending things.
If this was only the bomber’s first move in a game of cat and mouse, what was next?
Chapter Five
Jenna approached Lynda, the barista behind counter of the coffee shop. Lynda was a twenty-something with a degree from Carnegie Mellon and no ambitions beyond mastering new flirting techniques to coax better tips from her clientele. One nice thing about people with no ambitions, Jenna had learned, was that they seldom roused themselves to be curious enough to ask questions.
She slid a five into the tip jar before ordering coffee for herself and Morgan. “Also, I’ll need a computer.”
Lynda twitched her lips as she stared at Jenna’s appearance, almost but not quite mustering enough energy to ask something, but then turned to get their coffees and a computer access code. As she worked, Jenna kept an eye out for Morgan. She wouldn’t put it past Morgan to run out the back and ditch her. Morgan had a definite aversion to any contact with law enforcement.
Right now, though, Jenna couldn’t blame her. There was a good chance that she’d know whoever arrived from her own days as a federal agent. She imagined their sneers and jokes now that she was the victim, stupid enough to pick up a suspicious package.
She remembered the federal agents and police officers swarming her grandfather’s home after the Judge had received his bomb. They’d been no help at all, and had left her grandmother and father both in tears and her mother shouting and calling her lawyer. They most definitely had not made Jenna—or anyone in the family—feel safer. If anything, the overheard conversations and debates had left her even more terrified, unable to sleep for fear of a masked madman creeping into her room planting a bomb under her bed.
Nothing had helped back then. The blast had left her grandfather in a persistent vegetative state—it had taken him nearly a year to die. It wasn’t until she watched him being put into the ground that for the first time since the explosion Jenna felt she could breathe.
And now it was happening all over again.
“Green ink,” she muttered, waiting for Lynda to make change. No one knew about the green ink. The police and FBI hadn’t released that to the press. Which meant…the same bomber striking the same family almost twenty years later? How was that even possible?
Her parents. She had to warn them. Andre—did the bomber know about him? Was he in danger as well?
She grabbed the tray and forgot about her change. Then she froze for a moment, the weight of the tray against her palm eerily similar to the feel of the bomb. She shook herself and headed to the table in the far corner, where she could sit with her back to the wall and keep an eye on everyone. Was he watching her now?
Jenna tried Andre. No answer—she wasn’t surprised; Emma had a strict no-cell-phone policy for her visitors. He knew she’d text if it was a real emergency…and she almost did. Except she had no idea what to say. Look out for green ink? He’d think she’d gone around the bend.
So instead she took a sip of coffee, hoping it would calm her nerves, and gathered her strength to call her parents. Dad would be easy—but also fruitless. He’d fret, then ramble about his own life and problems until he’d erased the threat from his mind, and finally make an excuse to hang up. Any threat to his safety was her problem, not his. It was Peter Trindle’s way, perpetually passing the buck.
No. She had to call Mom. Mom never rambled or fretted, she just got stuff done, without regard to her emotions…or anyone else’s. Judge Robot, Jenna had once heard one of the defense attorneys call her.
With the time change between Pittsburgh and LA, she might catch her before court started—her mother would never take a personal call after. Jenna’s finger missed the first time she aimed for her mom’s number in her
contact list—she didn’t need it often enough to have it on speed dial—and had to hang up after calling Giovanni’s Pizza instead. On the second try she got it.
“Judge Galloway.” Mom had never taken her husband’s name, and had insisted Jenna be given the more lofty Galloway name as well. “Jenna, why are you calling? I’m preparing for court. Couldn’t this wait until the weekend?”
Jenna noticed her mother hadn’t offered a time slot for tonight or any other night between now and Saturday. Obviously Helen Galloway had much more important people to spend time with than her daughter.
“Something happened.” A quiver escaped her emotional barricade, slithering into her voice, and Jenna caught her breath.
“You’re upset. Why on earth would you call me if you’re upset? It was that man, the one with all the scars, wasn’t it? Well, dear, you learned your lesson. Sorry, but that’s all the time I have for relationship counseling. I’ve got to—”
“Mom!” Jenna shocked herself. No one interrupted her mother. No one. And definitely not in that tone. If Judge Galloway had been near her bench, she would have hammered her gavel. “Mom. Listen to me. He’s back. The bomber. The one who killed the Judge.” No matter how high Helen Galloway rose in the judiciary ranks, even if she one day made it to the Supreme Court, there would only ever be one “Judge” in the Galloway family. “He just tried to kill me.”
“Nonsense,” Helen said, running over Jenna’s words she answered so fast. “That’s impossible.” She took a breath. “It’s been almost twenty years. You’re mistaken.” Of course. That final conclusion was the most likely one—a fact of Jenna’s entire life. Her mother was always right, and the rest of the world was always wrong.
The sad thing was, Helen Galloway was almost always right. Long ago Jenna had given up even trying to find the rare times when she wasn’t. It just wasn’t worth the battle.
