Afterburn

"Detective Maza!" a female's voice called out over the general noise of the precinct's squad room. It was almost time for the day shift to take over, and with the shift overlap temporarily doubling the amount of people in the building, the noise level usually grew to the point of needing to shout to be heard.

Elisa looked up towards the voice to see Jackie, the overnight dispatcher, hurrying to make her way towards her. Jackie had to dodge officers who were lingering from their shift and the oncoming officers about to start theirs, but did so with the efficiency of someone who had worked in that environment for years.

"Hey," Elisa called back, a slight frown crossing her face. "What's up, Jack?"

Jackie "Jack" Greene finally came within easy hearing range. "I know you're almost off for the day, but I just heard a call over the radio from the fire department. Suspicious package left on the stoop of a beauty salon."

Elisa's frown deepened. "Anything to indicate it is related to the package bomber case?"

"Sounds like it." Jack said apologetically. "You're the main detective on the case, so I thought you should know, but I can assign someone else if you need to go home."

"No," Elisa said, standing to put on her jacket. "I just need to make a quick call, and I can head over."

Jack nodded. "Okay. I will get the address for you."

Elisa shifted some papers on her desk to at least appear semi organized, then purposely strode to the assignment desk.

"Here you go," Jackie said, holding out a square yellow post-it. "I called out and let them know you would be coming.

"Thanks, Jack," Elisa said, turning to head out to the officer parking area where her red Fairlane was waiting.

She had been working on this case for almost 3 months now. Plain brown boxes were appearing seemingly out of nowhere, each containing a pipe bomb.

There was nothing connecting the locations that the bombs were left, and nothing connecting the victims themselves. They didn't even use the same supermarket or cable company. Nothing.

Elisa, having been a detective for years now, didn't believe in true randomness. There was always a rhyme or a reason to criminals doing something…

But even she was hard-pressed to find something here. There had to be a connection.

She just hadn't found it yet.

The bombs had caused several injuries, some requiring amputations, and even a few deaths.

The description was always the same. Plain brown boxes, similar to what would show up if a person ordered goods from a catalogue or online, were being left in plain sight. Some on the front porches of homes, the front stoops of businesses, and one was left on a sidewalk of a residential area just across the river.

The bombs, either due to poor construction or design, went off with the slightest bump or movement. There was still some debate among the experts on that one, but Elisa had to believe that unless the bomber was suicidal, it was not on purpose. Maybe he was just lucky, and the workmanship was just poor, but the bomber had to transport it somehow, and with as touchy as the explosives were to go off that easily, he would have blown himself up long ago.

If only, Elisa thought, uncharitably. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain and heartache.

The first two had gone unconnected, being that they had happened on opposite sides of the river. One to a home in New Jersey, and one to a school playground in the Bronx.

The third was left on the curbside in the middle of a neighborhood where theft was a well-known problem. Elisa was sure that the person thought they were stealing someone's ordered package, picked it up to run with it, and lost an arm in the process.

The thief was, sadly, one of the more fortunate ones. There were the joggers in the park, both had legs amputated because the explosion was at the ground level. There was the mother of five who worked as a secretary at a church, who had thought the box had been their delivery of church bake sale fundraising flyers. She was still hospitalized after two weeks, but the plastic surgeons were working to keep the facial scarring to a minimum.

The worst had been the 9 year old boy. His worst crime was letting his new, shiny bike get a little too close to the mysterious package on his doorstep.

His funeral had been last week.

Elisa was angry, frustrated, and as a mother herself, she wanted to get this monster off of the street before she had to go meet another grieving family.

She stopped at the front desk to call Skyler, her nanny that looked after Liam, her adopted son. After assuring Skyler that she was alright, but had a last minute call, Elisa hung up and ran to her car. Officers from the 18th precinct were already on scene, but in a show of police and professional courtesy, they had agreed to wait for Elisa.

After all, she had been on the case since the first bomb, and had been the one to make the connection between the scattered bombsites.

Elisa shivered. The first bomb had been a close call.

The first bomb, or what they now knew was the first, had been a box that had been left on a low stone wall on a playground. Luckily no kids had touched it, as it had been put out sometime after dark.

Broadway and Angela had been patrolling the area, found a couple of rough looking teens arguing over who was going to take the box and what might be inside.

Thinking that the teens were going to steal someone's property, the gargoyle duo had faced off with the kids. One of the teens had thrown a half full soda bottle at the gargoyle mates, missing, and knocking the package down.

The resulting explosion had scared all involved, knocking them to the ground. Luckily, it had fallen on the other side of the wall, and the short decorative stack of brick and mortar had shielded both the gargoyles and the humans from the shrapnel.

The teens ran away screaming, and the Gargoyle couple had come home, ears ringing, but otherwise unharmed.

They had alerted Elisa, who had been first on the scene. She had done her usual routine of taking photographs of the scene, talking to onlookers hoping for a witness who may have seen who had planted the box, and calling the explosion in to the bomb squad.

Two days later, the explosion on the Jersey side had happened. Elisa had heard about it in passing, and thought the timing was coincidental. Possibly a copycat bomber.

Unlikely, but not unheard of.

She had reached out to the New Jersey department that was handling the case, and compared notes. The box was destroyed, but at best guess from what little they'd managed to salvage, it was just an ordinary brown box, with no markings.

Elisa had left her name and personal cell phone number with them, in case something else happened.

The next bomb was back on Manhattan Island. It had been left outside of the locked security door of an apartment building in the center of a large apartment complex. It had been near Christmas time, so it was just enough to tempt a thief into thinking they might get something good from it.

From the reports of the responding ambulance crew, he was lucky to only have lost an arm. He had minor shrapnel injuries to his side and leg, but he had lived.

That was the bomb that had sent up red flags. The news hadn't gotten a hold of it yet, as it had happened late at night, but the next morning, a young boy was killed in his own yard by one of the same kind of bombs, and the news reports ran rampant.

Fingers were being pointed, and mainly at the police. What were they doing about it? Why hadn't they found and arrested the person or persons involved?

As if it were that easy.

Whoever was doing this was smart. No DNA, no fingerprints and nothing about the bomb parts that pointed to any specific retailer. Even the casings, the "pipes", were unlabeled and generic. There was no such thing as a perfect crime, and the perpetrator would slip up eventually.

Elisa just wanted it to be sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, the NYPD was on high alert, the bomb squad was on standby until further notice and Elisa was to be contacted should any more suspicious packages happened to show up.

Sometimes they would go a couple days in a row with nothing, the longest pause between bombings had been a full week. Some days there were two or three in a single day. People were being cautious, calling in any suspicious packages that were seen, and giving them a wide berth.

It was now March, and the bombings had been going on for almost four months now.

The longer that time went on, the more people seemed to panic. Neighbors were reporting neighbors for suspicious comings and goings. In a single night, ten people had been taken in for questioning, only to be released when a traffic camera caught the first ever footage of the perpetrator while they were all in holding.

Finally, they had something. Not much in the way of a physical description, though. The camera was too far away and the perp was wearing an over-sized hoodie sweatshirt, but from that footage, Elisa was able to surmise a few things.

The perp was on foot, so chances were that he may live near that area.

She had visited the location, and determined that the perp was roughly 5'6" to 5'8" tall, according to where his head had been in relation to a no parking sign.

It wasn't much, she admitted, but it was more information than they'd had.