Rapid Fire

Alissa’s honey-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail and stuffed under a navy BCCPD ball cap, while Cassie’s straight, nearly white-blond hair was shorter now, cut near her shoulders. Tucker stood just behind Alissa and off to one side, shoulders stiff and protective. A wolf guarding his mate. Knowing that the task force had remained active even after the capture of Nevada Barnes three months earlier, Maya was faintly surprised by the absence of Special Agent Seth Varitek. Cassie’s nemesis-turned-lover had been loaned to the task force for help with the evidence work, but perhaps he was off on another case.

In Varitek’s place, a stranger stood at the edge of the group, part of the conversation but apart from the center of it. He was maybe a shade over six feet tall, lean but muscular. He wore navy pants and a crisp white shirt at odds with the heavy boots on his feet. His close-cropped sandy hair was standard military, as was his stiff-backed posture, and she sensed him studying her from behind his dark sunglasses.

She felt a shimmer of familiarity. A cold crawl moved across her shoulders and up her neck to gather at the base of her skull.

Who was this guy?

Her watch beeped to indicate sixty seconds left in the countdown. Thirty.

In silent accord, the cops turned toward the Chuckwagon Ranch as the seconds bled away. There was no way they could search the entire place in time. They didn’t even know where to begin.

As the final few seconds ran down on the digital display, Chief Parry nodded to Maya. “Good work getting everyone out. They’re safe, thanks to you.”

It was the first time he’d spoken to her since he’d taken her badge. The recognition warmed her, but she said, “I was just doing my job.”

Then the time ran out. Her watch beeped the end of the promised ten minutes. They braced for an explosion.

Nothing happened.

Seconds ticked by. Then minutes. Still nothing.

Maya’s brain sped up. Her thoughts quickened to a blur, but it was Sawyer who said, “Think it’s another dud?”

During the Museum Murder investigation, Cassie’s house had been rigged with a gas leak and a detonator that hadn’t triggered. Sawyer later determined that it had never been intended to blow. It’d been a fake, designed to confuse them. Scare them.

Could this be the same?

“It would fit with the Mastermind’s pattern,” Maya said quietly. “Hell, there might not even be a device. He probably got off on phoning in a threat and watching us scramble.”

She told herself not to be ashamed by the false alarm. There was no way she could have known, no way she could have chanced ignoring the call.

But still, she squirmed at the sidelong glances of her former coworkers and the stranger in the dark glasses.

Sawyer gestured to his team. “We’ll suit up and search the property to make sure. It’ll take a few hours.”

“With all due respect,” Maya said, “I’d suggest you check the vehicles first. The tourists are pretty edgy to leave.”

“With all due respect,” the chief said, “you should go with them. The media will be here any minute. If they catch wind that you’re involved with this bomb scare, the next thing we know, it’ll be splashed across the six o’clock news. Suspended cop receives bomb tip. Film at eleven. Hell, they’ll want to know why you received the call. Is it because you’re the last Forensics Department cop to be targeted? Or maybe it’s completely unrelated. Maybe this is about the Henkes trial next week. Lord knows, you’ve ticked off more than a few people with that.”

His words dug at Maya’s suspicions, at the places she hadn’t yet managed to armor. “That would make it completely related,” she snapped. “Why do you think I was here in the first place? Henkes is—”

“He’s right,” Alissa interrupted, though her voice was laced with apology when she said, “You should go. Leave your cell phone with us for analysis. Tucker and I will swing by your place later to get a full statement.”

Ouch. Maya fought the wince, crossed her arms and nodded tightly. “Of course. I’m sorry.” She forced the words through a throat gone tight with resentment.

Was this what she’d been reduced to? Waiting at home for her friends to drop by with a crumb of information?

When nobody argued, she swallowed the anger and pushed through the group. Her path brought her between Alissa and the stranger.

Alissa touched Maya’s arm and mouthed, “I’m sorry. We’ll talk later.”

The stranger just looked down at her through his shaded lenses with an intensity that set off warning bells.

Maya had the wild, uncharacteristic urge to reach up and pull those glasses down so she could see his eyes. But wild urges were self-destructive. She knew that much from experience. So she sniffed and pushed past him, bumping his arm with hers to let him know she wasn’t intimidated.

Damned if he didn’t flinch.

THE FLASH CAME THE MOMENT she touched him.

Blood. Death. Violence. Heat. Thorne held himself rigid and weathered the sensations, which were part memory, part anticipation. He gritted his teeth and forced himself not to show the whiplash of mental flame, of pain.

Hell, he thought when she was gone and the images faded, what was that?

It was a stupid question. He knew precisely what it had been. But why here? Why now? It had been years since his last vision, years since the doctors had assured him the flashes were nothing more than random synapse firings, courtesy of the drugs he’d been given during his captivity on Mason Falk’s mountain.

Years since he’d blocked the images, which had often come too close to prescience for his comfort.

He rubbed the place on his arm that she’d touched, where the contact had arced through the fabric of his shirt and punched him in the gut with the flash.

Or had that been nothing more than memory of their brief history?

She hadn’t recognized him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, given how much he’d changed since his brief stint teaching at the High Top Bluff Police Academy. His hair had been long then, and he’d been weak from the aftereffects of his captivity. Twitchy from the post-traumatic stress. He’d taken his first drink at ten each morning, and spaced five more whiskeys out through the day, staying sober enough to teach his classes, buzzed enough to avoid the memories. The visions.

He didn’t remember much about the half year after his captivity, but he remembered her. The moment he’d heard her name again after all these years, an image of her face had sprung into his mind full-blown.

Now, seeing her in person, he realized that she hadn’t changed a bit. She was still tiny, with every piece of her perfectly proportioned, just as she’d been when she’d taken his Advanced Criminal Psych class. Her dark hair was styled differently, hanging to her shoulders now in soft waves, but the face below was the same as he’d remembered, making him wonder whether the image in his mind had been memory or something born of another power, one he’d fought to block for nearly five years now.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned to watch her make her way down to the parking lot, shoulders tense beneath her blue short-sleeved shirt.

How could she still look the same when he was so different?

A phone rang, startling him with its strident digital peal.

“You take it.” The chief tossed him Maya’s cell.

Thorne caught it on the fly as it rang a second time. He struggled to refocus, to bring his wayward brain back from places it had no business being. His voice was gruff when he said, “Wouldn’t it be better to have one of the women answer and pretend to be Dr. Cooper?”

Parry shook his head. “He’ll know. During the other cases, he spliced a line into the PD security cameras so he could watch us at headquarters. Same thing at the museum when Barnes was captured. He’ll be watching somehow. You can bet on it.”

Accepting that, Thorne flipped open the phone and punched it to speaker before he said, “Hello?”

There was a pause—a long, thin stretch of silence with absolutely nothing on the other end.

“Hello?” Thorne prompted again, aware of the others watching him.

There was still no answer. Moments later, the call was disconnected.

Thorne muttered a curse. “Nothing.” He shook his head and returned the phone to Chief Parry, who had his own cell in his hand, perhaps to call in reinforcements at any hint of a break in the case.

Parry held Thorne’s eyes. “Nothing at all?”

Knowing what the chief was asking, Thorne shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m a cop, not a magician.”

Before the chief could respond, Sawyer’s voice crackled from a nearby radio. “We’ve done a quick scan and we haven’t found a thing.”

“There’s no bomb?” the chief said quickly.

Sawyer’s transmitted voice responded, “I can’t be entirely certain until we’ve done a more thorough search. With explosives technology being what it is, a charge could be hidden anywhere. But the other devices this guy used were all pretty standard—none of the molded polymers or really high-power stuff. If he’s sticking with the pattern, I’d expect to find a fairly traditional device. But we’ve got nothing here. Nada.”

“Keep looking.” But when the chief lowered the radio, his expression was pensive. He glanced over at Thorne. “With what you know of him so far, would the Mastermind go to a more advanced explosive?”

“In my opinion?” Thorne stressed the last word, trying to remind the Bear Claw chief that he didn’t specialize in parlor tricks. “I don’t think so. Granted, part of his pattern is that he has very little pattern, but I’d say he has an ego. He wants to be feared, wants to be seen as the best. If he had more advanced technological abilities, I think he would’ve used them already. That leaves us three possibilities.”

The tall blond bombshell who’d been introduced to him as the evidence specialist, Cassie Dumont, raised her eyebrows. “Which are?”

Her prickly tone indicated that she had no intention of liking him.

Thorne answered, “Well, the first option is that our mastermind is playing with us again, that he phoned in a false threat just to watch us scramble. If so, we need to address the question of why he phoned Officer Cooper.” It felt odd to use her title, but it would be equally awkward to use her name for the first time in five years, for the first time since he’d woken up and found her gone after their one strange, disjointed night together.

They’d meant nothing to each other, yet she’d changed his life. A better man would thank her for it.

Instead, Thorne was lined up to take her job.

“He’s targeted her because she’s a woman,” said the lean, rangy cop who’d identified himself as Detective Tucker McDermott, Homicide, “and because she’s a member of the Forensics Department.”

“Maybe,” Thorne said. “Or maybe there’s something else going on here. Option number two is that—regardless of the mechanized voice, which seems to indicate the Mastermind—this could be about a different case entirely.”

Cassie scowled. “Henkes.”

“Right,” Thorne said. The chief had brought him up to speed on the case during the ride to the ranch. “What if one of his supporters is trying to discredit her?”

“Then they’re a bunch of idiots,” Cassie snapped. “Maya’s reputation is impeccable.”

Except for the part where she was suspended for accosting a suspect without proper procedure or backup, Thorne thought, but didn’t say it aloud because the psych specialist’s friends were going to like his third possibility even less.

The chief must have sensed his reluctance, because he said, “And the third possibility?”

Thorne tried not to feel a beat of empathy when he said, “Maybe there was no bomb threat in the first place.”

He’d expected Cassie to blast him, and was mildly surprised when it was Alissa who got in his face in a single smooth, nearly deadly move. She didn’t raise her voice, but her tone was chilly when she said, “What, precisely, are you implying? Are you saying that Maya—logical, grounded, patient Maya—phoned in a fake bomb threat?”

He glanced down toward the parking area. Sawyer’s men must have cleared the vehicles to leave, because he saw a gaggle of kids being herded back onto a school bus. Unerringly, his eyes were drawn to the dainty, dark-haired figure of a woman standing near another woman, apparently deep in conversation.

“Nobody knows precisely what happened that night. All we know for sure is that Henkes was shot with Officer Cooper’s weapon,” he said, more to himself than to the others. “What if…”

He trailed off as he saw her peel away from the others down in the parking lot and head toward the main park entrance.

“What if?” the chief prompted.

“Never mind. I’ll be right back.” Without waiting for the chief’s okay, Thorne picked his way down to the main parking lot. He wasn’t sure what prompted him to follow her—curiosity, maybe, or the memory of the strange flash he’d experienced when she’d brushed past him. But as he hopped over the turnstile and tried to figure out which way she’d turned on the deserted main street, he felt an unfamiliar, unwanted prickling in his brain.

Danger.

“HANNAH?” SEEING NO SIGNS of the little girl who had slipped away from her mother out in the parking lot, Maya cursed under her breath and turned down a cross street toward the pony rides.

She’d promised to find the child, wanting to keep the mother outside, where it was supposedly safe.

Now she wondered whether she should have passed off the request to one of the uniforms, someone with a gun and backup, just in case.

She heard the bellows of agitated bison from the other side of the buildings. According to the ranch hands, the police sirens and unusual activity in the park had upset the animals, leaving them tense and edgy.

She was thankful that the creatures were safe behind the wood-and-electric-wire fencing.

The bomb techs were working somewhere in the park, sweeping each building for explosives, but Maya was alone when she reached the pony ride area and shouted, “Hannah! Hannah, are you in here?”

Smothering the unease, she scanned the scene. Eight shaggy, child-sized ponies were tied to a railing near the entrance to a small sand-covered riding ring. Their eyes rolled white at the edges and their feet moved quickly, tapping up clouds of restive dust. She heard a low rumbling noise, like a plane flying overhead, though there was no sign of a contrail in the blue sky.

“Hannah?” she called again. “Your mother sent me to get you. Come on out, honey!”

But there was no sign of the child. Check the pony rides, the girl’s mother had said, she loves animals.

Well, that hadn’t panned out.

Maya reversed her direction and headed back toward Main Street. The girl couldn’t have gone far. Maybe she’d wandered into the livery building to see the baby goats.

Or else she didn’t wander at all, instinct whispered. The Mastermind had kidnapped children before and used them to draw Bear Claw officers into danger. The entire bomb squad was in the theme park. The chief and the others were nearby.

A big detonation would wipe out a big chunk of the task force.

Maya nearly spun and ran, nearly shouted for Sawyer to get his people out of the park. The only thing stopping her was the look she’d seen in the eyes of the other cops when her watch had run down and nothing happened. The look of disbelief.

They thought she’d called in a false alarm, just as they thought she was wrong about Henkes. If she evacuated the park again and nothing happened, her credibility would be shot once and for all. Did she dare run that risk?

Did she dare chance the alternative?

Maya swallowed hard and called, “Hannah?” one last time, thinking it futile.

Then she heard a small voice call, “Mommy?”

Relief spiked and Maya zeroed in on the livery building. The airplane noise increased as she bolted into the building and stumbled to a halt at the sight of a small girl, maybe six or seven years old, strapped upright to one of the leaning columns.

The dark-haired child was wearing a pink shirt and denim shorts, with sandals on her feet and tears streaming down her face. Her lips trembled when she saw Maya and she quavered, “I want my mommy!”

She struggled against her bonds, flailing with her feet and head, but making no progress against the thick leather strap that had been lashed across her chest and buckled on the other side of the pillar.

“Hold on, Hannah, I’ve got you!” Heart pounding, Maya crouched down beside the girl and went to work on her bonds, cursing the bastard who used innocents in his sick games. “Are you hurt?”

“N-no.” The girl’s voice cracked on the word and fresh tears streamed. “The ranch man told me—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Maya said as she yanked the buckle free and hurled the leather strap to one side. She wanted to hear about this “ranch man,” wanted to know if he looked like Henkes or one of his associates, but first things were first. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of there.”

The airplane noise increased to a ground-shaking roar, only it didn’t sound like an airplane anymore. It sounded more like…

Hoofbeats, Maya thought with a clarity born of terror.

The goats and sheep inside the petting zoo galloped in circles, becoming a bleating, milling mix of hooves and bodies. The lone bison in the far corner stomped, shook his head and reared partway up, as though he might jump out of his enclosure at any moment.

Maya’s heart rabbited in her chest. “Come on!” She scooped the girl up and ran for the entrance, staggering beneath the weight of the child.

They were twenty feet from the door when a splintering crash sounded over the mind-blowing rumble that went on and on and on. Maya risked a look back, and nearly tripped and fell at what she saw.

Bison. Five, maybe ten of them, had broken through the back wall of the livery and were bearing down on her at a full-out gallop. Their small eyes were wide and scared, their nostrils flared with deep, sucking breaths, and their stubby horns cut the air as they charged. The penned animal bellowed and crashed through his fenced enclosure to join the others.

Maya turned and ran for her life.

Hannah’s arms were wrapped around her neck in a chokehold that nearly cut off her breath, but Maya didn’t care. She had to get the girl to safety. Had to get herself to safety.

But where was safe?

She burst through the petting zoo doors and skidded onto the main road. Thinking that the bison would follow the path of least resistance, she bolted for the ticketing area, hoping the buildings and the turnstiles would deflect them. She could jump over while the bison turned, like some mad reenactment of the running of the bulls.

She heard shouts and gunshots, saw figures running along the ridges on either side of the ranch, and felt the growing hoofbeats in the trembling of the ground.

But the noise wasn’t coming from behind her anymore. It was in front of her.

Suddenly, dust gouted from beyond the snack bar, which was the last building in line before the ticketing area. The noise increased to unbelievable proportions, as though Maya was caught in a tunnel with trains bearing down on her from either side.

She ran for the turnstiles, legs weak, lungs burning, too aware of the dozen bison bearing down on her from behind.

Then the dust in front of her thickened to shadows. Legs. Horns. Mad, panicked eyes. Twenty bison burst around the corner and turned down Main Street. Forty more followed them. A hundred. A full, panicked stampede of thousand-pound animals galloping hell-bent—

Directly at Maya and the little girl.

Chapter Three

Heart pounding a panicked rhythm in her ears, Maya bolted across the street, toward the snack bar, which had an ice cream booth on the flat-topped roof. She tightened her grip on Hannah and fixed her eyes on the stairs leading up to the snack area. Up. If she could just get up, she would be—

A heavy, hairy weight slammed into her from behind, driving her to her knees. Hooves struck her in the side and she curled her body around Hannah in a futile effort to protect the girl.

Then the pain and the blows were gone. Too quick, Maya thought. That couldn’t have been the whole herd.

It wasn’t, she realized moments later when she uncurled and looked around. She’d been struck by the offshoot group, the dozen animals who had burst through the livery after her. They had turned and galloped down Main Street.

The ground shook as the main herd bore down on her, no more than a city block away. The noise increased by the moment, hoofbeats overlaid with snorts and bellows and the sound of gunfire.

Maya saw white-rimmed eyes, red-flared nostrils and pounding, pulverizing hooves coming closer. Too close.

Knowing she was too late, that there was no way she was going to make it, Maya dragged herself to her feet, hauled the girl onto her hip and took two stumbling steps toward the stairs, toward safety. Her knee sang with pain. Her legs folded beneath her—

And strong arms grabbed her, lifted her and half carried her across the road as the air thickened with dust and fear.

Rough hands shoved her toward the stairs and a man’s voice shouted, “Climb, damn it!”

Disbelieving, heart pounding, Maya climbed, aware of being crowded, being hustled, being shielded as her feet hit the stairs. She stumbled, needing both arms to hold the girl, and felt strong hands grab her waist and boost her upwards.

The leading edge of the stampede hit them. A big male bison demolished the lower stairs, blasting through the two-by-four construction as though it was made of matchsticks.

With nothing holding them off the ground, the upper stairs sagged and began to fall.

“Go!” Maya’s rescuer shouted. He nearly threw her up over the edge, onto the low roof of the building. Wood splintered and Maya screamed as the stairs peeled away from the building to fall into the sea of hairy bodies below.

Carrying the man with them.

She pulled Hannah’s arms from around her neck, set the girl on a safe spot well back from the edge and yelled, “Don’t move!” Then she scrambled back to the place where the stairs had been, lay flat on her belly and poked her head over the precipice.

She saw a hand. A forearm. The top of a man’s head. Her rescuer was clinging to the edge of the building as the herd passed below in a deadly thunder of hooves and horns.

“Hang on!” Maya lunged forward and grabbed his arms, his shirt, anything she could get hold of to help him up and over.

His muscles were hard beneath her hands, his body powerful as he dragged himself over the edge and flopped down beside her, breathing heavily, one forearm thrown across his eyes.

“You okay?” he asked, voice ragged.

She took stock. Her body sang with the ache of bruises but not breaks, and when she glanced at Hannah, she saw that the girl was crying softly but appeared otherwise unhurt.

As the rumble of the stampede faded and human shouts and whistles took over, Maya cleared her throat of the hot, choking dust and the knowledge that without his help, she would have died. She swallowed hard and said, “We’re okay. I can’t thank you enough…” She trailed off, wanting a name for the stranger.

“Don’t thank me. Let’s just say this makes us even, okay?” He dragged his arm off his face, sat up and turned toward her.

Without the sunglasses, his eyes were two different shades of hazel, one so light as to border on amber, the other darkening to green, giving his face a skewness that should have been lopsided but instead was arresting. Interesting.

Familiar.

“Thorne!” she gasped, voice sharp with shock and memory.

For an instant, she was back in the High Top Bluff Police Academy. She’d seen him across the cafeteria, where he’d stood out from the others because he’d kept his long, sandy hair tied back in a ponytail, and wore a burnished gold, almost auburn five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. He’d carried a casual air that was part poet, part surfer dude, and was the center of a growing throng. Maya later learned that people flocked to him, wanting to be included in the friendly, whiskey-laced charm that hid deeper things.