by Rachel Lee
He half expected fire to light her green eyes, full consciousness to return and a fight to begin.
But it didn’t. Instead she let her eyes close again and sighed softly. By the time he placed her carefully on the couch, she was sound asleep once more. He grabbed the throw that hung over the back of the couch and spread it over her.
She was done. Cooked.
Amusement followed him back to the kitchen. Past midnight. He ought to be turning in, himself. Instead he dumped out the coffee and got himself a glass of ice water.
Darcy Eccles was something else. He really didn’t know a damn thing about her except that she was driven. He’d like to know what was behind that. He knew what had once driven him, propelling him into the BSU, into an unending nightmare that would never depart; he even understood what was driving him now. But Darcy? He couldn’t begin to guess. Surely, it had to be more than simply doing a good job.
Hell, he understood what Jack was up to better than he understood Darcy, and he’d been working fairly closely with her since her arrival. She seemed glad to have another Fed around, glad to hear what he had to say as a result of his experience with aberrant psychology. Not that he’d given her a whole lot.
Mainly because he didn’t like to jump the gun, but if he were to be perfectly honest, right now he’d say that bombing didn’t look like a one-and-only. Other than getting some attention, it had accomplished nothing beyond a disruption of shop classes for the rest of the year and the burned-up dreams of some students.
He had the feeling whoever had set that bomb hadn’t even thought of the students, except to make sure none of them got hurt. He supposed he ought to be very grateful for that.
Well, if he couldn’t figure out yet what was driving Darcy, he supposed he could apply his much-vaunted knowledge of psychology to the perp. After all, he was apparently more comfortable with sick minds than healthy ones.
Hell, that was some commentary on the man he’d become, he thought with a distinct lack of amusement. He’d gained understanding of teens over the last few years, but nothing like he’d gleaned from serial killers and rapists.
What he understood about himself, however, was that he’d fled. He wasn’t proud of it. But once the nightmares and rage had become an almost-permanent part of his personality, he was good to no one, not even his colleagues.
He’d shattered his detachment and distance because he got a real taste for catching the bicycle killer. He’d broken the rules.
It wasn’t as if the agents of the BSU felt nothing for the victims. They were human. You couldn’t hold up a photo of a tiny torn, bloody pair of underpants without feeling something. Rage, yeah. Fury, of course. But then you had to let go of it and focus in on what those tears meant with every other piece of evidence. You couldn’t hang on to it.
With the bicycle killer it had been different for him. He hadn’t been able to back out once he started to enter the sadistic mind of the killer. That time, not all the practice in the world, all the years of carefully developed walls, had saved him. He’d gone where he wasn’t supposed to go.
He’d been consumed then subsumed. No more clinical statements about the killer, what he might be thinking, what he was revealing through his actions. There’d been nothing clinical left in him.
That he’d been largely responsible for taking the guy down was small solace. He’d lost his wife; his own daughter looked at him with fear, and he’d become a man alone with part of himself forever entangled with a sick mind. The years here hadn’t quite erased the stains.
Now he needed to put those skills to work again. Darcy hadn’t exactly asked, except once when she’d wanted to pick his brain, but he could tell she needed him. She was a technical specialist. His specialty was very different.
Right now every finely honed instinct from his old job was telling him that this bomber had just begun.
He cussed under his breath and paced the kitchen. Darcy might have lost the battle against fatigue, but he doubted he would get any sleep himself tonight. His mind had latched onto a problem, and it wasn’t about to let go.
His initial response to the bombing probably hadn’t been far different from Darcy’s. A student pulling some kind of prank that had probably gone awry.
He knew kids, and they were capable of amazing stupidity if only because they were incapable of considering consequences. Larks gone awry were common.
But he knew the kids in his shop classes well enough to be fairly sure none of them would have thought of doing any such thing, certainly nothing that would have damaged their achievements over the past years. So at first he thought maybe the explosion had been bigger than anticipated. Maybe some kid had bound together too many heavy-duty fireworks...
Nah. Those hopes hadn’t lasted long, not when he really looked at the damage. Then Charity Camden, the arson investigator, had discovered chemical signs of ANFO.
At that point he had known it was no gag gone wrong, and he’d become certain it had not been one of his students, easy as it would have been to point out that the shop appeared to be the target.
But he’d been looking and thinking since the first shock, and certainties were beginning to settle in him. No accident. A lot of preparation and study. Not necessarily directed at the shop rooms. ANFO bombs didn’t just happen. They had to be carefully and deliberately executed. No one would do that without a purpose.
He retrieved a few more ice cubes and refilled his glass with water.
Darcy’s attention to the corner of the building the bomber had chosen also interested him. Poor view from the street was probably the least of it.
No, external, reinforced cinder block walls. A type of construction found in many places. No windows on that end of the building, just some exhaust vents to keep down the sawdust.
Sawdust. He straightened a little, thinking about those flammable properties. The exhaust fans worked constantly to keep the dust down so an errant spark didn’t cause a conflagration. It was an extremely well-ventilated area even without doors and windows. What if the bomber hadn’t known that? What if he’d expected the sawdust to ignite?
It would have been a disappointment. Not only did his students use shop vacs throughout the day, but those exhaust fans never quit. It was almost clean enough to perform surgery in there.
Well, okay, not quite. But safety was paramount.
Maybe the choice had nothing to do with the shop, simply with the construction as Darcy had remarked at some point, which he was getting too tired to recall.
Maybe the perp had a different target in mind and this was indeed a test run. He knew the thought had been running around in Darcy’s mind—and his as well—because building that kind of a bomb didn’t seem like something anyone would do just once, unless they’d made a mistake.
This didn’t smell like a mistake.
He leaned back against the counter once more, closing his eyes to think.
A purpose?
Another bomb?
Not enough yet to give him a line on anything, but enough to make him uneasy.
He strode down the hall and turned on his computer to look up bombers. He wanted to know something about the profile, about how often they struck again. He wanted some facts on which to base the suppositions he felt he was going to build, want to or not.
He was back in the game.
Damn it.
* * *
Darcy woke in the morning to gray light streaming through a window. It took her nearly a minute to realize where she was. Sometime during the night she had been put on a couch and covered with an afghan.
She sat up quickly, a little confused but mostly embarrassed. It must have been Alex, and to think she’d fallen asleep in the middle of their conversation...
She remembered being at his kitchen table with coffee. She had the vaguest memory of being carried. Oh, my God, had he carried h
er to the couch? Had she done that to him?
Sheesh, she owed him a huge apology. How rude.
But she smelled toast and coffee and possibly bacon, so she tried to organize her hair into its usual neat bun, then gave up before dropping the blanket and standing.
She felt icky, but from the aromas she guessed she wasn’t going to be heading back to the motel immediately for a shower and change.
Alex must have heard her footsteps. “Darcy? Bathroom’s down the hall, first door on the left.”
“Thanks,” she managed, surprised at how much her own voice croaked. Gads, she hoped she hadn’t been sleeping with her mouth open and snoring. Or at least she hoped he’d gone to bed before he learned any such thing about her.
The bathroom was a full bath, which she hadn’t expected. Fresh towels hung from a rack. Inviting, but she’d have to climb back in her dirty clothes.
A look in the mirror told her that death probably had an edge on her this morning. Alex had been right. She’d been pushing too hard. Her watch said she must have slept about six hours, but she didn’t feel like it. She suspected that if she let her eyes close, she’d drift off standing here at the sink.
She forced herself to clean around the edges, freshening her face, finger combing her hair so she looked a little less like Raggedy Ann. Then there was nothing more she could do. It wasn’t as if she carried lipstick in her overalls, and she’d need more than that to conceal the circles under her eyes.
Almost reluctantly she went to the kitchen, where she found Alex looking reasonably fresh and busy cooking breakfast. “I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” he said, “because I’m making bacon and eggs.”
“You know I’m not,” she reminded him. She’d eaten a steak sandwich with him on the day of her arrival.
He flashed a grin. “Just making pointless conversation. There’s a fresh mug by the coffeepot. Help yourself.”
She was grateful that he didn’t try to wait on her. He must have been the one who had got her to the couch and covered her last night, and that realization made her feel a touch fragile, this morning. Nobody had ever done that for her, at least not since early childhood, and it felt like a weakness.
“How much rye toast?” he asked.
“Two slices,” she answered as she carried her mug to the table. “Can I help?”
“Probably not,” he said lightly. “I’m used to doing this by myself. I’d need retraining to share my kitchen again.”
“Thanks for the couch,” she offered, feeling almost tentative.
“Hey, nobody else was using it.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Next time I tell you you need some sleep, maybe you should listen.” Then he winked and returned his attention to the frying pan.
Despite the oddity of the situation for her, she laughed. He had a morning sense of humor. Kudos to him. She wasn’t sure she did and hadn’t spent much time trying to find out. She almost never talked to anyone before her second cup of coffee.
There was probably a good reason for that, she realized as the words popped out of her. “You should let your hair grow out.”
That stopped him midmovement and he turned. “Answer quick. That bacon needs to come out of the pan. Why?”
She flushed. “You’d look even more like a Viking,” she admitted.
At least he laughed, apparently taking it as a joke, thank God. He went back to cooking and she downed the first cup of coffee as fast as she could without burning her mouth, then grabbed another.
The stack of bacon was growing. An open carton of eggs sat near the stove. A loaf of bread was ready beside the toaster and two slices popped up as she watched. She really felt as if she ought to help, but at that moment didn’t trust herself.
How had those words popped out of her? Dang, she was probably still too tired. What if she screwed up today because she’d been shorting her sleep?
What if she’d already screwed up? Horrifying thought. She stared down into her mug, her hands growing tight around it, and hoped that she hadn’t already made a mistake too big to be corrected.
“I was up a little late last night, too,” Alex remarked as he dropped more bread into the toaster and brought plates with scrambled eggs and bacon for each of them to the table, plus two slices of buttered toast for her. “Dig in. My timing’s off. No point letting the eggs get cold while I wait for my toast.”
She was happy to pick up a fork. There was cheese in the scrambled eggs. Yummy. “Why were you up late?”
“Thinking. I may as well be honest. Since you arrived I’ve been fighting old instincts. I swore I’d never again get into a sick mind. So I’ve been avoiding doing what I’m most qualified to do. That’s not right.”
Her chest tightened for him. Already she cared this much? “You don’t have to do that.”
“But I do. You’re the tech expert. I’m the mind expert. And last night I could no longer pretend to myself that I don’t think this is a test run.”
Her heart stilled. “I’d love you to tell me you’ve changed your mind.”
He pulled out the toast and began buttering it. “Sorry, can’t do that. I ran myself around the Maypole last night and kept reaching the same conclusion.”
Her stomach began to sink. Eating became difficult, but she forced herself to continue. She’d already cheated sleep enough. If she stopped eating she’d become a royal mess. “So you’re expecting another one?”
“Afraid so. Although at this point I couldn’t begin to tell you when and where. Not enough information. Assuming the bomber didn’t get the results he wanted, we might have some time while he fiddles with his recipe.”
She swallowed more coffee, trying to wake her brain up the rest of the way. This was important; she needed her wits about her. All of them. When a guy with Alex’s training and experience voiced an opinion, it would be irresponsible to ignore it.
She waited while he ate a bit before asking the paramount question while ignoring her own concern about the excessive fuel spill. That wasn’t irrelevant, but she needed to hear his reasoning. “Why would you think he didn’t get the results he wanted? It was a fairly good blast.”
“Right.” He reached for his toast. “But you saw the inside. Unless this guy is hell-bent on blowing down walls, he accomplished remarkably little. Some fire inside. Almost none outside. His blast didn’t escape the shop rooms and get into the rest of the building. In short, it was a stab, not a bullet.”
She froze, forgetting everything—her plate, the man across from her—everything except the blast site.
It arose vividly in her mind, and she felt the truth of what he was saying in a place she usually ignored when it came to her work: her gut. She always tried to rely on evidence and scientific knowledge. Heck, that was a large part of her job. Estimating whether a bomber would strike again was not. Yet she felt the truth of what Alex was saying. Had even suspected it, though she’d pushed it away to deal with what she already had on her hands.
Heck, she could remember speaking those words herself her first day: Maybe this was a test. A trial run. Mistakes had been made. She’d even thought that the bomber was probably learning as much from this blast as she was. Maybe more.
The suggestion had been there all along. Hearing it confirmed by a man with Alex’s background brought it into the harsh light and made it impossible to ignore.
“You mentioned it yourself early on,” he remarked, almost as if he were reading her mind.
She had indeed. She clearly remembered the moment when the idea had struck her. And how quickly she had dismissed it. There had to be more proof.
Which was pretty much what he was saying. Without further evidence, he couldn’t assess and predict. Neither could she.
Yet something about the entire bombing was wrong. Something had grated on her at the outset, and apparently it hadn’t stopped grating on him.
> “I’m afraid you’re right,” she said finally. She looked at him, into eyes the blue color of the North Sea on a sunny day, and felt some spark of understanding leap between them. At least she thought it was understanding. “I need to get back to work. We need clues, and so far all I’ve got is a lot of detritus that isn’t adding up to much except that somebody made an ANFO bomb. Nothing to trace it back to anyone. No answers to any questions, except that I would almost be willing to testify under oath that he made a big mistake with the fuel oil spill. It didn’t go off the way he thought it would. Which means—”
“May mean,” he corrected carefully.
She nodded. No time for imprecision. “May mean. May mean he’s not satisfied, and if for no other reason he’ll try again.”
He nodded. “Now, eat. Damn it, Darcy, you need to be at the top of your game, and you don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve got a plate full of protein. Brain food. Swallow it.”
She complied, although what had tasted so good when she started now tasted like dust. Her body was shifting into high gear, her mind beginning to race with ideas about what she needed to look into.
“What’s your propellant?”
The question startled her and she raised her gaze from her plate. “What?”
“What drives you? Because you’re pushing way too hard. The fact that you’re alone out here? Or do you always operate in hyperdrive?”
Maybe she had a morning sense of humor after all because she felt a smile twitch the corners of her mouth. “Hyperdrive, huh?”
“Sure looks like it. You’ve been pushing past your physical limitations. Not your mental ones, I’m sure, but you’re wearing yourself out awfully fast.”
“Mainly because my mind won’t stop working,” she admitted. “I want this solved, yes, but I’m not alone out here. The fire department, the sheriff’s department... I’ve got lots of help.”
He nodded and used a serving fork to put two more slices of bacon on her plate. “If you don’t want them now, we’ll make you a bacon sandwich for midmorning.”