Sharon and Deborah were on the far side of the concert site when Blair's announcement came over everyone's headsets. They sprinted across the open field, hoping that they would be able to get there in time to be of some help to Jim and Blair.
And praying that one of them could catch this guy before he killed anyone else.
The feds laughed as they heard the 'police consultant' say that they found Green when Agent Martinez was ten feet from that local Ellison and he hadn't seen a thing.
However, they changed their minds when they saw Agent Driver sprinting the field at top speed. No one knew where she got her 'instincts' from, but if she thought something was up, it was up. They drew their guns and quickly followed.
"Catch me, catch me if you can..."
Alex smiled as he used his zoom glasses to turn around and catch a glimpse of the armada of cops and FBI agents chasing him. Of course, he could always have left them in there, but once that boar Ellison saw him he figured he might as well draw them out and let them watch this one.
They'll get their chance soon enough.
He was close now, he could feel it. He hadn't taken his eyes off of Green from the moment he spotted him. Blair was following close, as always. He was even dimly aware of hearing Sharon and Deborah coming up behind them.
And then he heard it.
It sounded like a gun that had fired twenty-eight times. To anyone else, it would have been simply one loud explosion, but his instincts kicked in and his hearing was quickly able to distinguish the sequential pattern of the sounds.
He chanced turning back for a brief second, and saw that the grandstand had collapsed, erupting in smoke and flames.
Furious, he turned back to focus again on his prey, but the chaos of the crowd had swallowed him up.
A.J. Green had vanished.
Three stories underground, in an abandoned parking structure near the stadium, Alex laughed at those fools who had even thought to give chase. [Think they'll arrest me, do they?] As he walked to his car, he finished the childhood rhyme that he had thought of earlier...
"can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!"
Blair, Sharon and Deborah finally caught up to Jim just as he realized that Green was gone. To say Jim went ballistic would have been, well, putting it mildly. He yelled a string of curses that Blair figured Jim hadn't used since his army days, then started swinging his arm through the air in frustration. Sharon blocked his arm before he was able to hurt anybody, then Blair grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to get him to calm down. "Jim, Jim, calm down man! It's not going to do you or anybody else any good to get like this."
Jim was still thinking about Green. "I can't believe he got away, Chief! One minute, he was ten feet away from me and the next he was gone! It's like he vanished into thin air or something."
"Okay, Jim, nothing vanishes into thin air. Where was he last?"
Jim tried to move through the crowd to the last place he saw Green, but the rush of people trying to get past them was becoming too great. Jim sighed in resignation. "It's no use, chief. I can't track anything in this mess."
As if on cue, Jim's cell phone rang. Jim winced-whoever this was, this was not going to be good.
As the four of them returned to the concert site, the only thing that Blair could compare the sight to was a war zone. Dozens of people were wandering aimlessly, some of the still covered in the blood of loved ones. Dozens more lie on the ground, screaming in pain from their injuries. The rest had lost their ability to ever speak again the minute A.J. Green pressed that button. Jim heard the ambulance Sirens coming from all directions, and he silently hoped they would hurry. The press, who had come to cover the start of the Festival and the threat of a possible strike by the "Mad Bomber of Cascade", were swarming around the scene like locusts, viewing every bit of carnage as the greatest journalistic 'feast' they could ever stumble upon.
Simon Banks marched through this hell like it was the bullpen of the Major Crimes office. Apparently he had been helping the able-bodied survivors tend to those wounded who still had a chance of surviving. The blood that covered his clothes and the fury in his eyes were unmistakable. Seeing the tirade that was coming, Deborah excused herself and made her way over to the rubble that was once the grandstand to talk with Taggart and the other fire department people on the scene.
Blair asked Simon a casual, "how's it going, Simon?", and was rewarded back with "we've got ten thousand people who didn't know until about ten minutes ago that they were sitting in a minefield HOW DO YOU THINK IT'S GOING?! And can someone tell me why I see the four of you here and our friend Mr. Green is still wandering the streets of Cascade? And can you tell me how, with _all_ the security we had here, this clown could just waltz in here, plant bombs all over this field _and_ the grandstand, and walk out like he was on a Sunday stroll?" Since those was the question none of them wanted to answer, they all looked around nervously, not wanting to meet the bloodied and furious captain eye-to-eye.
Sharon noticed one of the ground craters that the bombs had made all over the park, and her natural curiosity kicked in. [How indeed,] she thought, [how indeed.] Her mind took its focus off of Simon and directed her over to the bomb site. She barely heard Simon scream behind her, "just a minute, I'm not finished with you yet!" and Blair back her up, "wait a second, Simon. I think she might be on to something." Once at the site, she knelt down and picked up one of the clumps of grass that the blast has thrown over a fifteen- foot radius. Something just didn't click. The security team had gotten there before the crowd, and the field had been a perfect blanket of green - no holes, and no large, scattered patches of black dirt. So how did he plant these without being detected? She called over to the guys, who were still being scapegoated by Simon, "Jim, Blair, could you come over here for a minute?"
As the three men jogged over to the blast site where she was standing, Sharon asked, "what do you make of this?" and handed the clump of grass to Jim.
Glancing over at Blair for a second, Jim calmed himself and opened up his senses. His head was swimming for a few seconds until Blair directed him to filter out the chaos so he could pick up anything 'unusual'. [Like there's anything normal about this,] he thought. Then he felt the slight waxiness of the grass in his hand, and his jaw clenched even more than usual. He looked around, and saw that the clumps thrown by the bombs were a slightly brighter shade of green than the grass surrounding them. He exclaimed in surprise, "Astroturf."
Sharon smiled for an almost undetectable split second, her suspicions confirmed. Blair and Simon, on the other hand, just looked at the two of them in confusion. Sharon explained, "Simon, when you mentioned the security detail, my mind flashed back to when we first got here this morning, and I realized something. The grass in this field was perfect - too perfect. He probably came here one night, sometime earlier this week, dug these holes in the ground, planted the bombs, and covered them with Astroturf, so they wouldn't be detectable."
Jim drew in a deep breath, and picked up an unusual scent from the bomb site. "He didn't just cover them with the Astroturf," Jim added, "he added coffee ground to the soil."
Blair thought out loud, "to throw off bomb-sniffing dogs should we happen to think of sending them in in advance?"
Sharon replied, "exactly. He's been planning this one for a long time. And we almost had him, too!" She pounded her fist against a small tree in frustration. It was the last straw for the poor sapling, though, and it broke in two, forcing Blair to jump five feet out of the way.
Innocently, Blair asked, "so what do we do now?"
Sharon replied to no one in particular, "we have to be totally prepared for Monday night - it's our last chance to catch him. It's _my_ last chance."
Absentmindedly, the heads of all three men nodded in agreement.
Blair cursed the broken elevator as he climbed the stairs in the pitch black stairwell to Sharon's fifth floor loft. After they had wrapped up the investigation of the concert bombing, Sharon mumbled something about "..needing to let off some steam.." and took off. No one thought anything of it until around one o'clock in the morning, when Jim and Blair were about to turn in and Blair noticed that Sharon hadn't come back. Jim wanted to shrug it off and go to bed, but Blair's persistence and concern for her won out and he took off. As he walked toward her apartment and climbed those infernal stairs, Sharon's last comment to them played at his thoughts. _Her_ 'last chance'? What did she mean by that? And the way she punched that tree startled him, too. Up to that point, she had been the picture of calm during the investigation; focused, sure, but everyone was. That little outburst, though, made him realize just how little he knew about this woman he had come to respect so much. Exactly what was she capable of? [If that tree had been Green...]
He finally made his way to the fifth floor, and stopped to take a breather. As he stopped to knock, he realized that the door was slightly ajar, and he heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight inside. Wishing for once in his life that he was actually carrying a gun, he slipped into the loft as quietly as he could to see what was going on...
And found Sharon in her workout area, wearing a tank top and shorts, literally beating the stuffing out of her punching bag. He relaxed immediately. The moonlight illuminated her face in such a way that he could tell just how fierce her concentration was. [She probably didn't even notice me come in,] he thought. He tried to edge himself closer to the workout area, when he was greeted with an abrupt, "oh, just come on in and sit down, Blair."
[So she did notice,] he thought. He took off his jacked and sat down on the floor near the workout area, using the jacket to brush away one of the piles of glass shards she must have swept off of the mats before her workout. She cautioned him, "try not to get any of that glass on the mats, okay?", after which he glanced at her feet and realized that she was barefoot. As carefully as he could in the dim light of the full moon, he checked for any glass shards around him on the mat and sat down.
Casually, he asked her, "so, do you do this often?"
In between kicks, she replied, "do what?"
"Kick the stuffing out of your punching bag in a pitch dark apartment in the middle of the night?"
"It's not that -" as she was about to say 'late', she looked at her watch. It was after 1:30 in the morning. She had been at the apartment for almost seven hours. With the cleaning and the work she had done on the short staff and the nunchakus, she had barely noticed the time pass. Defensively, she added, "and what business is it of yours anyway?"
"I was worried. The way you ran off at the blast site-"
"You thought I would take off the head of the next person who looked at me the wrong way?"
Even in the dim moonlight, she could see Blair's gentle smile. "Yeah." She took a deep breath, and replied, "you shouldn't have come Blair," then started throwing another barrage of kicks and punches at the bag.
Blair would have tried to stop her and get her to listen, except for the fact that the obvious power that was going into those kicks and punches probably would knock him cold if any part of his body got in contact with them. So he sat on his jacket at the edge of the mats and declared, "you shouldn't be alone right now."
"I can take care of myself," she replied, as she landed a spinning roundhouse kick to the punching dummy's knees.
"That's not what I meant." He paused for a minute, then asked, "why did you say that this is _your_ last chance to catch Green?"
She picked up the short staff and started going after the dummy with it. "If we don't catch Green by the end of the Festival, I'm leaving the Bureau."
As Blair tried to recover from his surprise at what seemed to be such an absurd statement, Sharon continued, "Did I ever tell you about my family?"
Blair shook his head, "no, you never did."
"I'm the seventh of nine children. I never asked my half- sisters their exact ages, but I could bet easily that my oldest half-sister is about 25 years older than me. I know she's within five years of my mom's age. Between all of my half-sisters I have fifteen nieces and nephews."
Blair smiled, remembering his own lonely childhood. "It must be nice to come from such a big family."
Sharon replied, "well, it does have its moments. Anyway, I got a hold of the file on the victims of the movie theater bombing, and I stumbled across one of the victim's pictures. He was a dead ringer for my oldest nephew."
Blair thought for a minute of how he would feel if he found a victim photo and the woman looked like Naomi. "That must have been hard on you."
"It was hell, especially since the sister of this nephew passed away a few years ago. I pictured all those parents who had to go through what my half-sister went through when my niece died. All of my energies went into catching this guy-everything I did had no meaning behind it unless it was one step closer to finding Green. And when we lost him in that crowd today-"
Blair nodded his agreement. Judging from Jim's emotional reaction earlier in the day, they were all feeling the same frustration.
Sharon dropped the staff and started kicking the bag again. "Sometimes Diane looks to me like I'm one of her psychics; like I can pick up one of those detonators and tell her who this guy is, where he is, why he does what he does and when he plans to strike next. But I'm not!" She threw a side kick at the bag with all the frustration she had in her. It sent the bag back a few feet, and she had to catch and steady the bag before she could continue. "I just look at the evidence and try to figure out what type of person did it and why, same as you guys do." As she landed three solid kicks to the dummy's 'chest', she emphasized, "I just-look at it-from a different angle."
The exhaustion of the workout finally catching up with her, Sharon crumbled to the ground, almost passing out. Blair rushed to her side, and instead of pushing him away like he expected her to do, she clung to him like a scared child. He pushed back the loose strands of sweat-soaked hair from her face as she confessed, "that whole thing today was a lucky break. I'm scared we won't get another opportunity like that at the Mystic Center."
He held her a little tighter, trying to comfort her. He started to realize that quite a few tears were mixed in with the sweat from the past hours. She continued, "I wish I really was psychic, you know? Then at least I'd have some clue as to what Green's next move is going to be."
Blair reassured her, "but you're not. None of us is. You're just doing the best job you can, and between you and Jim, I'm sure that's going to be more than enough." It seemed like she was trying to shoulder the burden of the responsibility for the entire investigation herself, and it would be a cold day in Hell before he'd let her get away with that.
She choked back a few hard tears. "You seem to have a lot of faith in your partner."
Blair tilted her chin upward so she could look at her face. It struck him again how young she looked. [How young she is,] he reminded himself. She acted so much like Jim sometimes that he could easily forget that they were around the same age. With every ounce of conviction he had, he looked into her eyes and stated, "Share, I have a lot of faith in both of you." He kissed her gently, as if he needed to seal that statement as fact.
She returned the kiss, but then her body's need for rest decided to override anything else she might have been feeling at the moment, and she fell asleep in his arms. Smiling, he whispered, "it's a good thing the competition doesn't start until Monday. I have a feeling you're going to have a hard time waking up tomorrow."
Even asleep, she smiled and snuggled into his arms a little more.
It took some effort, but he finally got her up off the mats and carried her to her couch, which was relatively free of the glass from the explosion. Since there was no way she was going to be able to get her back to the loft, he rummaged around for a blanket, and after finding one, covered her with it. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, then went to see if the bed was in any condition to be slept in. After shaking the glass shards off to the floor on the other side of the bed, he took off his shoes and climbed in. As he drifted off to sleep, he decided he would call Jim and let him know what's going on...in the morning.
After hearing about Sharon's little 'outburst' at the blast site, Diane went over to Jim's loft first thing on Sunday morning, peppermint tea and sausage biscuits in hand. She wasn't surprised to see Jim answer the door, but she was a little surprised to hear that Sharon hadn't come back to the loft that night. She was even _more_ surprised to hear that Blair went out to look for her, and hadn't come home either. Jim was growing concerned, suspecting foul play on the part of their friend, A.J. Green, and initially Diane agreed with him. Then mysteriously, she thought for a minute, and smiled. "I think I have an idea of where Sharon is, and where the Professor might be too. Come on."
They took her Jeep and drove over to Sharon's apartment. As he got out, Jim looked up at the blown-out windows on the fifth floor, but could see or hear no signs of a struggle. Diane got out of the car, grabbing the bag with breakfast in it, and smiled at Jim's show of concern for his partner. They made their way to the apartment and found Sharon on the couch and Blair in the bed, both still fully clothed and sound asleep. Diane and Jim glanced at each other; Jim motioning that he would go wake up Blair, and Diane motioning that she would take care of Sharon.
The Commissioner sat on the edge of the bed and gently tapped the young agent on the shoulder, whispering, "Share! Time to get up Share!"
Sharon woke up slowly, blinked against the bright morning light, then turned her head into her pillow and groaned loudly. Every move she made hurt. "Do I have to?" Diane's eyes widened a bit at her friend's obvious discomfort. "Jeez, Share, how long did you work out?" The muffled response came back, "oh, about five hours or so. After a while I just lost track." Diane drew in a deep breath, released it, and muttered, "angst before the storm, I take it?" She saw the pillow move up and down, and assumed it was a nod of affirmation. Five hours? That had to be a record. How long had _this_ one been building up? "And Blair? How long was he here?" "Only the last half-hour or so. Right now he's probably thinking I'll jump off a bridge of something if we don't close this case." Diane patted Share on her visible shoulder and declared, "you just get some rest, dear. I'll bring you some tea and Aleve." "And biscuits?" Even buried under the pillow, Sharon could still smell them. Diane smiled. "And biscuits."
"Did someone say biscuits?" chimed in a familiar voice from the bedroom area.
Sharon giggled, "Ah, sleeping beauty awakens!" The two women looked up (or as up as Sharon could raise her neck to look) to find Jim and Blair heading toward the couch area. Blair cleaned off some of the glass from the coffee table near Sharon's head, and sat down to check on her. Concerned, he asked, "how are you feeling?"
That 'mothering' tone in Blair's voice was exactly what Sharon wanted to avoid. Still, she appreciated the heart behind it. He had, after all, never seen this side of her before, and he was handling it rather well. She gently pushed the pillow off of her head and slowly sat up. "Actually, I'm feeling much better. I could probably use a full body massage, but other that that everything's okay."
Not knowing the full details of her workout, Diane called from the kitchen, "need some ice, Share?"
"No," she replied, then added, "but if you could get me my heat lotion I'd appreciate it." Diane rummaged around in the 'junk drawer', then tossed the requested bottle to Jim. He gave the bottle to Sharon, but Blair stopped her before she could open it, asking her, "would you like me to-"
She understood exactly what he was getting at and smiled her agreement, handing her the bottle. "Sure." She moved forward slightly on the couch to allow him easy access so he could massage her neck and shoulders. Jim raised an eyebrow at how 'familiar' the two of them had seemed to become with each other, but Diane shrugged it off, and Blair gave him a look that screamed, 'not now', so he let it go, promising himself to ask Blair about it later. As the heat from the lotion helped her to immediately relax, Sharon's curiosity took over, and she asked Jim, "so what are you guys doing here, anyway?"
Jim replied, "Diane came over this morning, and since you two hadn't come back yet, we went out looking for you. She seemed to figure that this was the most likely place you'd be. So for the most part, I'm just along for the ride on this one."
Diane brought over the tea, the biscuits, and her briefcase. "Well, besides hearing about what happened at the concert yesterday, I was hoping that I could get some input from the three of you on how we should set up the security for tomorrow night..." Above all else, Diane knew that the best thing for Sharon to do when she had a night like the one she just had was to dive right back into the case. The young agent often did her best thinking once she literally beat the frustration out of her system. As Sharon sipped her tea and looked at her with increasing interest, the Commissioner pulled out the floor plans for the Mystic Center and they got started.