Chapter 3 - Aftershock

Spencer was alone. The office was completely dark except for the light from his computer screen. He couldn't leave yet, not while there were so many puzzles to piece together.

It had been forty-nine days since Harry & Glenn's had gone up in a ball of fire. Forty-nine days since Cat disappeared. Forty-nine days since they had any hint to where she and the Bomber had fled.

Spencer opened her file and stared at her photo. He'd been doing that a lot lately, he realized. Looking at her, memorizing her face, trying to glean any sort of hint from her resilient glare. He slammed her file shut and looked back up at the computer. He had been watching the interrogation of the brunette from the bar, the one they had fatally mistaken for the Bomber. He ran a tired hand through his hair and pressed play.

"—paid me, through Venmo even. I thought she was just another girl asking for help."

"And you help girls like this a lot?"

"I do, all the time, I swear. You can ask anyone. Or look at the Craigslist posting. When girls are going on first dates with guys they meet online, they want someone there, you know? Someone who has their back?"

"So she paid you to…. do what exactly?"

"Just sit at the bar. She asked me to just sit and watch her to make sure the guy didn't try anything. She asked me to be ready to call a number for her mom if anything fishy was going on, that's all, I swear, I didn't know wh—"

Spencer paused the video again. Mindy Smithson's story had checked out. She had been following girls for over a year, ever since her roommate had been attacked by a blind date she had met on Tinder. This girl had just been trying to do the right thing when Cat had emailed her. Cat had implied she'd gone on a date that ended dangerously before, and was extremely anxious about that night. She offered to pay double Mindy's rate if Mindy would hold a phone with a pre-dialed number all night.

They'd traced the email Mindy had received. Dead end, of course. The phone number hadn't even been tied to the bomb. Cat clearly didn't trust this girl to not blow them all sky high if she thought Spencer looked like a date rapist.

He groaned, pushing away from his desk and standing. He always mocked people who paced when they were thinking, but lately he couldn't help it. The explosion had shaken his nerves.

It had shaken the whole team, to be honest.

The bomb itself wasn't as bad as it could have been. A bomb squad agent confirmed it had only been a single charge of C4. The bomb had misfired, and the gas lines were never in any danger. However, it has caused a considerable amount of damage. Several of the employees at the bar had been injured when part of the kitchen collapsed. JJ and Rossi both were still out on mandatory leave for serious burns. JJ's left arm and neck had needed a skin graft, and Rossi had nerve damage across his back. He claimed to not remember what happened, but they all knew he had shielded JJ from the blast by putting himself in front of her.

Rossi had tried come back into the office a few times before being chased away and threatened with his badge if he didn't take time to heal properly. Spencer had seen JJ only once, at the hospital while she was asleep, but after that she had refused all visitors. They all knew she didn't want to be seen while she was weak, so they were respecting her space. Spencer called her physical therapist after each of her sessions, but he would wait for her to reach out first. He knew that more painful than any physical injury, it was the fact that their pride as capable agents had been hurt.

The whole team had been wrong, so wrong, and it had thrown everyone off.

Garcia has been taken into protective custody. She was still contacting them regularly, but he had no idea where she was physically. Her messages had been growing more and more anxious, and he was worried she was about to either implode on herself or quit contacting them at all.

Meanwhile, Spencer's work was taking him three times as long. He was triple checking every tiny detail, terrified something would slip through and cause someone on his team to get hurt. And now, here he was in the office at 2am, trying to find anything, anything, that would lead him to Cat and the Bomber.

He walked back to his desk and picked up her file again, pulling out three large, grainy photos from inside the transport van. He spread them out and stood over them. The first showed Cat whispering into his ear. He hadn't known it at the time, but she had been looking right into the camera and he could see her face clearly. Her expression was eerily calm. The second was taken seconds after the bomb went off. A young man, with an Asian or Hispanic background, was climbing up into the van with a large pair of clippers. The third was showed Cat about to jump down from the van. He could see the bright light from the fire through the open transport doors. She was silhouetted by flames, and the man was holding his hand up to help her down.

They had tried every database to find this man, but the picture was too grainy. The explosion had damaged the contrast of the video they were able to pull. These three stills were the best images they had of that night, and still, all they'd been able to determine was that he was probably under 30 and ethnic. Was he the Bomber, or just an associate of Cat's?

Spencer shook his head, his hair falling over his eyes. It was too late. His brain had felt like it was slogging through mud lately, and he had no idea what to make of any of this. He pushed the three photos back into the file and traced his finger over the mugshot he had paper-clipped into the front of the folder.

He paused, fingers resting on her hair, then whispered into the dark office. "I will find you, Cat Adams. And when I do, I will make you pay."