The lab called it in at noon.
McGee got there before Anderson did. The tech — a wiry man named Park who hadn't slept, by the look of him — had the fragment under the scope and the lift up on the big screen. A twisted piece of the detonation housing, magnified until the metal looked like landscape. And there, in the valley of a scratch, the whorl of a fingerprint, cleaned and contrasted until it stood out like a thumbprint on glass.
"He wore gloves everywhere else," Park said. "The cameras, the scenes — always the black leather gloves. But inside the device housing?" He shook his head. "You don't wear gloves doing fine assembly. Too clumsy. He knew that."
"So he left us one," McGee said.
"So he left you one," Park agreed. "On purpose or not, I can't tell you. But it's his. Nobody else touched that device."
Anderson arrived mid-explanation, took it in with two glances, and said: "Run it."
They ran it. The system chewed for eleven minutes. McGee stood with her arms crossed and watched the progress bar crawl, and Hannah came in halfway through with coffee she didn't drink, and nobody talked. Eleven minutes of the room holding its breath.
Then the screen changed, and the room went very quiet.
A juvenile record. Sealed, flagged, cracked open by federal warrant before the coffee got cold.
**Matthew Blake.**
McGee stared at the name. Said it in her head once, trying it on. It didn't fit the mask. It didn't fit anything.
The file was thin. Father: suicide — the record didn't flinch. Cause of death: suicide, the way records didn't. Mother: cancer, two years before that. No known family — no one listed, no one looking. The boy had gotten into some trouble after. Then nothing. No adult record. No driver's license, no passport, no tax filings, no address. A ghost for twenty years.
And a photograph. Eleven, maybe twelve. A boy with a flat stare and a too-big shirt, holding the little placard with both hands like he'd been told to.
McGee looked at it for a long time.
She tried to find Thomas in it. She didn't know she was trying — her eyes just went there on their own, the way eyes did. The shape of the jaw, the set of the eyes. But it was just a young boy. Anybody's young boy. Twenty years and a lifetime between that face and any face she'd ever seen.
"Nothing?" Hannah asked quietly, beside her.
"Nothing," McGee said. "He's just a kid."
Anderson was already moving — the name going out to every database, the photo to the age-progression unit, the net widening by the hour. "I want to know every address associated with this name, every relative, every school record. If he bought a pack of gum in 2011, I want the receipt." He looked at the boy's photograph on the screen. "Twenty years. Find me the twenty years."
For the first time since the fundraiser, the task force had something that wasn't a riddle or a crater. A name. A face, twenty years stale.
Matthew Blake.
Hannah waited until the room thinned before she came to stand beside McGee. They looked at the photograph together — the flat stare, the too-big shirt.
"He was just a kid," Hannah said quietly.
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
McGee thought about it. "He had a father who died and then he disappeared. Twenty years later he's dancing on camera before he levels the Federal Reserve." She shook her head. "I'm fine. I'm just — doing the math on what it takes."
Hannah didn't have an answer for that. Nobody did.
In the afternoon, McGee found herself alone in the conference room with the file still open on the table. The boy stared up at her with that flat stare, and she thought about the corridor footage — the dance, the spin, arms out wide, joy in the dark. She tried to draw a line between the two and couldn't. Whatever had happened between eleven and now, it had burned the bridge behind it.
She'd read the father's cause of death twice that morning. Suicide. And for just a moment she'd heard Thomas's voice from the restaurant — I lost my father years ago — the quiet in it.
Half the world had lost a father. It didn't mean anything.
She looked back at the boy instead.
The officer at the desk looked at the coffee, the bakery box, and Thomas, in that order.
"Can I help you?"
"Detective Summers, please." Warm, unhurried. "I'm her boyfriend. She's having a day, and I come bearing tiramisu."
"Sir, this is a secure facility—"
"He's fine." Hannah appeared in the doorway, took in the coffee and the box, and grinned. "Boyfriend, huh?"
"Don't," Thomas said mildly. "She hasn't said it yet."
Hannah laughed, and waved him through.
---
Hannah found McGee in the conference room. "Miggy. There's someone here for you."
McGee followed her out to the bullpen — and stopped.
Thomas stood by the desks with a paper coffee cup in each hand and the little white bakery box tucked under his arm, looking entirely out of place and entirely at ease. A couple of agents were staring. He smiled when he saw her.
"You sounded tired this morning," he said. "I come bearing caffeine. And tiramisu — I remembered."
McGee crossed to him, half-laughing, half-mortified. "You can't just walk into a federal—"
"Hannah let me in." He glanced at Hannah. "After interrogating me."
"I asked one question," Hannah said.
He handed McGee the coffee. Their fingers brushed. For a second, with the smell of the coffee and the ordinary miracle of him standing there, the day receded — the crater, the boy's photograph, all of it.
Then Thomas glanced past her shoulder at the board — and his eyes moved across it the way they moved across everything, unhurried, taking it all in. The photographs. The timelines. The juvenile mugshot of an eleven-year-old boy pinned at the center.
"Who's the kid?" The question was casual. Idle curiosity, nothing more.
"Matthew Blake," McGee said. "Our bomber, twenty years ago."
Thomas looked at the boy for a long moment. Eleven years old, holding his placard, staring flatly into a camera. Then he looked back at her, and smiled, and held out the bakery box.
"Tiramisu?"
She took the box. They ate standing up in the bullpen, balanced on a filing cabinet, while the task force worked around them — and the whole time, the boy on the board watched with his flat stare.
It was the most normal thing that had happened all day.
When the box was empty, Thomas glanced at the clock and made a face. "Well — I'd ask you out for dinner, but I think I just spoiled it with dessert." A beat. "So. How about tomorrow?"
McGee looked at him. The bullpen, the board, the boy's flat stare — all of it behind her, and him in front of her, real and warm and here.
"Why don't you come over tonight?"
Chapter 31