“We broke up.”

  A rush of cold came over Morgan. She glanced to the door of the conference room before standing up to shut it. When she sat back down, she grabbed Fiona’s hand and squeezed tightly before letting go and giving her space again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I wanted it.”

  Morgan licked her lips and checked out the glass leading into the hallway, wanting to know who was walking by and who wasn’t. “Then why so forlorn?”

  “No break up is easy, Morgan.”

  “True.” She knew that from some experiences but others were very easy for her and for the other person. That was why she went into every relationship with clear boundaries from the beginning. She wanted to ask more questions, wanted to open the floor for Fiona to talk, but they were sitting in a conference room in the middle of the bureau. Anyone could walk in at any point, not to mention, they did have actual work that needed to get done.

  Fiona brushed her hands over her cheeks. The confidence she had when she came into the bureau that morning was gone, and all Morgan saw was the broken woman who lived underneath. “Let’s find something today, please. I’m tired of coming up empty.”

  “You and me both,” Morgan muttered.

  They sat in silence for another five minutes before Morgan leaned back into her chair, bringing her knee up to rest on the edge of the table and staring over at Wexford who still had her nose deep in whatever report Morgan had handed her.

  “We’ve been going off the theory these bombings are related to a group, that while they might not be a group doing them, that whoever is setting the bombs and building them is part of some kind of hate and terrorist group.”

  “Yeah,” Wexford answered, finally looking up.

  Morgan stared out the window and to the sea that was Chicago before her. “What if they’re not?”

  “You mean like they just woke up one day and decided to bomb some factory and some pier?”

  Shaking her head, Morgan turned back to Wexford. “No, and yes. Whoever this is wouldn’t just wake up one day with that in mind. Something would have pushed them to do it, but if they are incredibly introverted or isolated, they may not have sought others with similar viewpoints. They have may just assumed these viewpoints need to be held by the majority and have a louder voice.”

  Fiona narrowed her gaze. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “They may actually be working entirely on their own, in which case, this is going to be a far more difficult case than we had originally suspected. It means it could end up being another twenty-plus-year case like Kaczynski.”

  “It won’t turn into that,” Wexford reassured.

  “I don’t think it will, but it will be much harder to find our suspect. This suspect is not as smart as Kaczynski, and seems to take a bit more gratification in the bombings themselves. Not to mention, these have all been localized to Chicago. There are no other reports of bombings in the country or in Canada that match the description of these ones.”

  “Really?”

  Morgan cocked her head to the side. “Yes. Didn’t you read the memo I emailed you early this morning?”

  “I…uh…was a little busy this morning, and then I came straight here.”

  “Hold on.” Morgan stepped out of the conference room and walked down to her desk. She printed out a copy of the memo she had emailed and remembered to grab her reading glasses last minute.

  When she got back to the conference room, Wexford was reading a new report. Morgan slid the paper in front of her and leaned over Wexford’s form, pressing a hand into the back of the chair and onto the conference table after sliding her glasses onto her nose.

  “See? I updated the profile.”

  Fiona ran her finger along the lines as she read quickly enough.

  “I estimate he’s smart, but he’s no genius. The bombs have been rudimentary at best. They have all been made in a similar fashion, but some of them have had mistakes, including the one that didn’t go off at the pier.”

  Wexford nodded. “What was wrong with it?”

  “They missed a wire, of all things. They completely missed putting it in there, not just that it came loose, but like forgot about it.”

  “Interesting.”

  Morgan nodded and stared down into Fiona’s dark eyes as she turned to look up.

  “You’re cute with glasses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with them.”

  Morgan shifted to shut the door again and sit down. “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making this personal.”

  “I thought…I realize we’re at work, but I thought we had an understanding.”

  “Right, we are at work. This is not the appropriate place to have this conversation. You know that. I know that. So why do we keep swinging back around to this?”

  Wexford’s lips parted in surprise. Morgan’s heart sank. She wanted to be that caring person, but she built her life on boundaries and not crossing them as much as she could. While she did want to cross them with Fiona like she occasionally did with Adena, it scared the living shit out of her.

  Fiona drew in a deep breath. “Let me get this right, so you can bring up whatever it is between us while at work, but I can’t?”

  “When have I—”

  “Last December. Crime scene.”

  Morgan flushed, her cheeks heating. She’d known exactly what Fiona was going to say, but she hadn’t wanted to remember. She’d felt awful for it two seconds after it happened. “I apologized for that.”

  “You did.” Fiona crossed her arms over her chest. “While at work.”

  “Fine. You’re right. Can we get back to the case now?”

  Fiona leaned forward and pressed a hand to Morgan’s knee, squeezing lightly before whispering, “Under one condition.”

  “And what condition is that?” Morgan’s heart raced. She wasn’t quite sure what was coming over her, but Fiona had never been one to avoid the topic at hand. She was far braver than Morgan in a lot of ways.

  Fiona smirked. “Lunch.”

  “No. I’ve got a conference call.”

  “Then dinner.”

  “I’m not getting out of this, am I?”

  “No,” Fiona answered with a grin.

  “Fine. Case?”

  Nodding, Fiona spun around the report she had been reading. It was the report Morgan had been trying to focus on for the better part of the morning. “You have a bomb maker in this group.”

  Morgan stared down at the paperwork, trying to see what Fiona saw. How she had missed it the first two times through, she had no idea. Right there was a report from her undercover that there had been talk of if there were to be an attack—which the undercover suspected would not happen—it would be done by bombing select targets. No targets were specified, however.

  “I’m going to make a phone call.” Morgan didn’t wait as she grabbed her phone and called the lead on the case. She needed more information than just that, and she needed a direct line to the undercover if at all possible.

  When she finished her call with a set up for a meet sometime that afternoon into evening, Morgan focused on Fiona. “You might want to read this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ray’s profile.”

  Fiona bit her lip as she read through it. “You think he was capable of violence?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think he was violent. Though, to be fair, I think anyone is capable of violence. I don’t think the circumstances were right for Ray to take that final step. I wish he would have talked when we interviewed him. I want to know what he thought he had to share.”

  “He never told any officers anything other than he knew something was going to happen. Then he just shut up.” Wexford grabbed a pen. “Okay, so what do we know?”

  “We know there was something that upset Ray. We know there have been at a minimum two attacks.”

  “Minimum?”

  “Well, if one bomb didn’t go off at the pier, I wouldn’t put it past this guy to have tried and failed before and we just be completely oblivious to it.”

  “Which, now that I’m reminded, did they ever find a match to those prints on the bomb that didn’t go boom?”

  Morgan smirked at Wexford’s joke. “No, they didn’t. But once we do find someone to bring the in at least we have prints to match to them.”

  “True, but not helpful in the current situation we find ourselves in.”

  “Nope. We know that the attacks seem to be growing in severity, and rapidly. There doesn’t seem to be an easing into bigger and better things. We went from one bomb that did minimal damage to three bombs that did a lot of damage.”

  Wexford wrote everything down in bullet-point form. “We know this guy is most likely high school educated at the minimum.”

  “I wouldn’t guess more than that.”

  “Oh?” Fiona raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Like I said, small mistakes here and there. There’s no game being played. This person isn’t out to toy with us, he’s out to make a statement, and he doesn’t care if he’s caught.”

  “So he’s bold.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that. Convicted of his beliefs is more like.”

  “Okay. What else do we know?” Fiona put the pen to her lips and stared down at the paper.

  “What we don’t know is if Ray is even connected or if that group he was a part of is connected.”

  “Hmmm, too bad they don’t have some sort of membership list.”

  Morgan snorted. “That would make life much easier.”

  “Perhaps too easy.”

  “We know there is at least one person involved. There could be more. We did find two sets of prints on the bomb that went off, but the second set was obviously only from carrying the backpack. It could be from who placed it and who made the bomb or it could just be the bomber used a used backpack.”

  Fiona wrote it down. “Were there prints on the others?”

  “Only partials that matched the ones on the bomb itself from what we could tell.” Morgan glanced at her watch. “I’ve got my conference call.”

  “About this case?”

  “No…about my other case.”

  “Your other case?”

  Morgan narrowed her gaze. “Yes. So, we can pick this up later, but this call is going to last hours.”

  Fiona had a slight frown on her lips. “Dinner?”

  “Let’s focus on this case first, and then we can do dinner. I never said dinner had to be tonight.” Morgan stood up and started gathering the files she had brought into the conference room. “I’ll call you when I hear back from our undercover about that one report and see what I find in it.”

  “All right.”

  Morgan didn’t miss the disappointment in Fiona’s voice as she sent her on her way. They were going to have to figure out how to continue to work together, but there was a newly niggling hope in the center of Morgan’s chest for what they may finally be able to explore. She just wasn’t ready to let Fiona in on that fact yet. First they had to talk about Morgan’s rules when it came to dating.

  Chapter Twenty

  Morgan was an hour into the debriefing on the human trafficking case when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She was sure it was her mother calling again at one of the most inconvenient times as was her norm, but when she glanced at the number, she realized it was an internal caller.

  Stepping out of the room, Morgan stood right outside the door to the lecture room as she answered, “This is Stone.”

  “Agent Stone, this is Sean Davis. I’ve been tracking your requests through BMAP.”

  “Oh.” Excitement rose in Morgan’s chest. She glanced at the conference room she had just vacated and stepped farther away from it. She had a piece of paper on the top of her file that she could write something on so long as she could manage to find a pen to write with. “Did you find something?”

  “Yes.”

  Morgan bit her lip, full of anticipation, but it felt as though she was going to have to drag the words from him one at a time. Morgan clenched her jaw and felt up the pockets on her pants and her jacket, trying to find the damn pen she knew she’d brought with her into that conference room, but she was pretty sure it was still sitting on the table.

  “And?” she asked impatiently.

  “We have some suspicious activity that has been reported to us.”

  Morgan rolled her eyes. This guy was slow with the uptake on giving her the necessary information. “Do you think you could email me the report? I’m not at my desk right now, so writing things down is going to be tough.”

  “I can do that. But ma’am…”

  Ma’am? When was the last time anyone had called her ma’am? Least of which by a fellow agent at the bureau even if he wasn’t a field agent, they still usually called her by her last name. Putting off her unease, Morgan swallowed. “Yes?”

  “You should know the information we have hasn’t been verified.”

  “I’ll verify it after I look at it. Just send it to me.”

  “All right.”

  He hung up without so much as a goodbye. Morgan stared at her phone for a minute before she headed to the floor with her desk on it and slid behind the computer. As soon as she sat down, she woke her screen up and checked her email. Nothing. Grabbing her glasses, she checked it again. Nothing. For a guy who called supposedly with information she needed, he sure was taking his sweet time emailing.

  Morgan grabbed her coffee mug and went for a refill, hoping by the time she got back to her desk, the report would be there. Sure enough as she slid into her chair, she saw the email from Sean Davis right at the top of her lists, along with one from Wexford. She ignored Fiona’s and read Sean’s.

  He was right. There was not a whole lot of information and whatever had been bought—if it was to build a bomb—had been a very small amount of material. It wouldn’t result in anywhere near the number of bombs that had been created already, although, she did suppose they could do multiple purchases to try and keep the suspicions down, though she wasn’t convinced their suspect was quite smart enough to think about that. Or if he was smart enough that he cared enough.

  The guy they were looking for had literally done nothing to try and hide his identity. He didn’t wipe fingerprints off anything. He put bombs in places that were obvious. There wasn’t a whole lot of time between them, and he didn’t play games. In some ways, she wondered if he wanted to be caught. If he wanted to be made into a martyr.

  Grabbing her cell phone, Morgan called Wexford, but it went straight to voicemail. “Fiona, give me a call asap.”

  Morgan delved into the financial records for the three individuals who had purchased the materials that were flagged as suspicious. Two had been done by the credit companies themselves and one had been done by a shop owner. She’d start with the shop owner, because that was a far more rare way for someone to be reported to BMAP.

  When her phone rang, she had a small thrill go through her chest when she saw Fiona’s name flash across the screen. “Wexford.”

  “You called?”

  “I need you to come back up here.”

  “I—really?”

  “You need to come now. We’ll debrief everyone when we figure some more out, but we may be making arrests today.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  Morgan hung up. In the interim, while she waited for Fiona to arrive, she stared the backgrounds on each of the three individuals, starting with the one who set off her radar. She wanted to know who they were, what they were doing, what group they were a part of, and what exactly they believed. If these people were any way connected to the ones she was hunting for, she wanted to know.

  Wexford showed up exactly twenty minutes after the phone call. She waved down Morgan, who called her over to her desk. Morgan didn’t hesitate pulling Pax’s chair out for Wexford to sit in as they leaned over her desk. Morgan shifted one of the files in front of Wexford, the one she was most interested in.

  “Tell me what you see in here.”

  Fiona read through the file, sighing and making little noises as she went. Morgan skimmed one or two gazes in her direction to check in while she pulled more reports, arrest reports, financial reports, anything she could find on the background for the other two suspects and made files for them. She was about done with the third when Wexford let out a large breath of air and slid the folder onto the table.

  “Does the material purchased match the material in the bombs that we know about?”

  Morgan’s lips thinned. “About a third of it does. The rest? No.”

  “And this was purchased in Cook County?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m asking you.” Morgan pulled her glasses off her nose and plopped them onto her desktop. It was a bit of a test. Fiona had been fascinated with profiling and the type Morgan did for years. That had been how they’d first met, so she wanted to know how Fiona’s brain worked and if she was going to make some of the same connections Morgan did.

  “I think it’s likely he’s making bombs. Is it our guy? Not sure on that.”

  “Why?” Morgan crossed her arms and leaned into her chair.

  “Aside from the materials not completely matching up, he’s a bit young for our profile. Still within the range, but if we’re truly talking about someone with a vendetta and who wants to make a difference, the likelihood that they’ll have met some hardships is good. So, I’d presume, they’d be at least about ten years older.”

  Morgan smirked. “You’re good.”

  A blush rose to Fiona’s cheeks. “Why do you say that?”

  “This person has a college education.” Morgan pointed at the paperwork. “We’re likely looking for someone who doesn’t.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  Morgan nodded. “Right. Let’s look at these other two, and while we may make some arrests today, I doubt it’ll be the arrests we want.”

  ###

  It took them two hours to get everyone ready to go and everyone in place. Morgan had insisted she and Wexford be there for the arrest of Nicolas Schohl. Morgan was pretty sure after a few more hours of research and investigation that he was at the very least making bombs. The other two could have been doing anything, she wasn’t sure, they would find out during interviews—which she would supervise only.