"You need to knock first." Jamie snapped, quickly hiding behind a locker door. This time he was still in his towel and was about to get in his boxers. He blushed and scolded Janko how that the men's locker room was, well really a place for men.
"nah." Eddie seemed to not even be fazed by the fact that Jamie was naked. She held in her hand and Jamie put on his pants wail she waited impatiently, holding it out to him
"Well. What was so important that you couldn't wait outside? Or at least until I was at lease in some underwear?" Jamie put on a shirt and leaned against a locker. It had been a long tour and he wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. But instead he had to go Christmas shopping.
Eddie rolled her eyes. "One of my Dads ex business partner's wife gave me some tickets to see the city ballet production of The Nutcracker. I was wondering if you knew someone that might want them." She gave him the tickets and sure enough they were front row seats.
"Do I seem like I go to the Ballet Janko?" Jamie smiled
"No but, it was a really well thought out gift. I would hate to see it go to waste. The women who gave them to me thought I was still in contact with this girl I babysat. But after everything with my dad we lost contact." The two went the front desk and turned in the keys to the cruiser and walked out the front door.
"How old is the kid now?" Jamie asked. Eddie talked so little about her time before joining the NYPD that he really tried to pull information out of her when he could.
"She would have been seventeen in October." Eddie said and got in her car, and quickly changed the subject. "Do you want to go get a drink? Because I don't know about you but I'm preparing for Christmas, and at my place it ain't pretty."
"No I have to go shopping. One of my nephews wants a drone for Christmas, What 14 year old asks for a drone" Jamie was about to walk to the subway station, when a girl stumbled on to the precinct steps. She seemed to be drunk, she was stumbling around. Her cloths where oversized and ratty, like they came out of a yellow bin, zipped up to her neck. Her red hair was in dread locks, and she had a scar down her face.
"Miss, do you need any help?" He asked slowly approaching the teenaged girl, Eddie got out of her car and did the same.
"They told me I had to talk to Jamie Ragan." She turned frantic. Maybe it was because she might have been outside for the past few nights, her face was black with frost bite.
"Okay. I'm officer Ragan and this is my partner officer Janko. Who told you that?" Jamie ask. "What do you need to find me for?"
"They said to tell you that you'd pay for screwing with them. You thought the Los Lunas where bad, when they are threw with you, the Bittermen projects and Vinny would seem like nothing." The homeless girl let out a deep breath almost like relief. She took off two oversized heavy coats, reveling a bomb strapped to her chest.
"Bomb!" Jamie screamed and jumped covering Eddie with his own body. The homeless however could not have been helped. She screamed for a second and then everything was buzzing.
Eddie was trying to push Jamie off of her, but he was too heavy. Jamie had been it in the head with a chunk of the precinct step, and bleed from his ear. Some of it dripped on her face. "Jamie, stay with me Jamie.
"Sir." Backer addressed Frank like she did every day and fallowed him into his office. Listing off conferences he had to go to committees they had to meet. The 12th precinct bombing made it all worse. "Your son is also getting discharged at Noon. ADA Ragan called asking if you could pick him up. She is busy moving into the 54th precinct for the joint taskforce you requested. Should I call her back?"
"What about detective Ragan?"
"He is working on the 12th precinct bombing, same as ADA Ragan."
"Linda?"
"The Hospital Emergency room is over flowing. Victims from the bombing keep coming in."
"Nikkei?"
"She has a finale Exam."
"Well by the sounds of it I really don't have time either. He might just have to wait until tomorrow." Frank slumped into his desk.
"I will do that sir." As she left Garratt walked in, ready to go to the first of many press conferences about the bombing. He had no clue what he was going to say. The only death was the bomber, but some of the things that he hired about that women said before her death made him shiver. What made it worse it that she targeted his son, and a New York City police officer.
"The Mayor wants to know how many more patrols will be put on teen homeless shelters." Frank looked at Garret His mustache bunched up to the point you couldn't see his top lip any more.
"Why would I do that?" Frank asked.
"Reports from Officer Eddie Janko, Jamison Regan, and several other officers and detectives depicted her as a homeless girl, age 16 or so."
"But we have no proof that she was actually a homeless teenager?" Frank took a very condescending tone.
"No official reports, but I think the citizens would feel safer if you were to put a few extra officers in those areas. These people aren't messing around Frank, they tried to blow up of a Precinct." Garret snapped. He himself felt strongly that those homeless shelters be secured.
"And the only thing all those homeless kids have in common is they don't that have a home. Do you know how many cases we had of homeless freezing to death? I don't want those kids to be scared to not find a warm place to sleep." Frank Yelled. "So there for we don't know enough about the situation to make the people scared."
"If that's what you want." Garret and Frank left the office in silence.
"Mr. Ragan, You fathers office just called. You're going to have to stay here one more night, none of your family members are able to pick you up." The Nurse Gave Jamie his lunch and some more blankets.
Jamie didn't know why someone had to come pick him up. It was only a small concussion and he could walk just fine. It wasn't enough that he hated hospitals, but, his family couldn't pick him up either. "Can you call Officer Eddie Janko?"
"Sure thing." She smiled sweetly at him and left the Room.
Jamie let his head fall back and knocked it against the wall. "Ouch!" He let out the cry.
"Carful Reagan." Eddie pulled back the curtain. She looked like she hadn't had the chance to shower or change. Her cloths still looked chard and smelled like smoke.
"Where you here the whole time?" Jamie asked, and by the way she was smiling, it looked like a yes.
"I was just letting you squirm. But I did pick us up some Lunch. Sorry I left all, I like you Regan but I wasn't eating that sludge." Eddie was holding a box from Frankie's Pizza. "I asked them to discharge you and hour ago. Get your cloths on then we can leave."
After a couple seconds a staring Jamie says "Um do you mind." Eddie made an Oh face and shut the curtain behind her.
"This is just sick. Who straps a bomb to a kid's chest and has them blow up a police station." Danny kicks a piece a of the entrance. "She was just a kid."
"Yeah that kid just got a name and face. Her name is Thressa Gallo. She ran away from her foster home two years ago. She was 19 and living at the better hopes homeless shelter, it's a new program. For four bucks a week you can have a bunk and one hot a day. They have social workers help them get jobs and work their way out of the shelter. We have Thressa's social worker back at the precinct for questioning." Baeza said.
"It just doesn't all make senses. A 19 year old homeless kid who doesn't know Jamie at all is walking around looking for him, and make a preface to the loss of his last partner and what happened at the Bittermen houses." Jamie never talked about what happened at those projects, but Danny knew that losing a partner was haunting. He'd seen a lot of good cops go down a bad road after the loss of a partner. To have a stranger open those wounds and then blow up, must have been a whole new kind of hurt.
"So Thressa Gallo was your case?" Danny asked Rodnie Heller,
"Tess was my case, and that girl was many things, but suicidal wasn't it." Rodnie was scrolling through papers, and took out a stack of what looks like five different cases. But he had to open each one just to find Thressa basic shelter information.
"Mr. Heller, I don't think you understand, Tess, as you call her, blew up a police station and almost killed two off duty police officers." Danny slammed his hands on the table. It annoyed him that this guy didn't seem to get how important it was that knew everything about Thessa Gallo.
"Did Thressa have any gang ties or drug problems? Did she even know how to make a bomb?" Baeze asked.
"The kids have to take drug test once a week, and gang membership is 0 tolerance. Thressa, as far as I can tell, was clean." Heller fumbled a little bit more looking at a sheet that said Anthony Green on top.
"You barely knew the girl!" Danny said. "So how do you really know what she was up too?"
"I am working fifteen other cases and Thressa was about to be kicked out of the shelter anyway. I stopped paying attention after she missed last week's rent. Out of all the runaways I've seen in my fifteen years of work, Thressa was the most hopeless. She couldn't hold a job and barely made her rent. It got to the point that she was looking for pennies on the floor Friday morning to make Friday night payments." Heller gritted his teeth. "At first I cut her some slack, she was sexual abused as a child in the system by an older sister, but as time went on she seemed off. We couldn't prove that she was getting high so we let it go."
Danny, and Heller where looking at each other like two dogs, fighting over the last scrap of meat. "I'm sorry detective, but I don't know why Tess would do something like this. Now I have an appointment to help my other cases get to keep a job after this whole damn thing. More people are skeptical that our kids are going to blow themselves up now."
Danny took a deep breath. "Can we at least go to her shelter and interview the other kids?"
"I'm sorry detective but I believe that the director will agree with me, when I say you need a warrant to do that." Heller pushed up his glasses and stumbled out of the precinct holding an armful of paper.