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 had 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?