Rapid Fire
Jessica Andersen
MILLS & BOON
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Contents
Cast of Characters
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Coming Next Month
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Maya Cooper Suspended from the Bear Claw Crime Lab, the psych specialist is alone in believing that a local philanthropist is responsible for the crime wave currently terrorizing Bear Claw City. Her only ally is a dangerous man from her past.
Thorne Coleridge Some cops say he has powers. Others think hes a brilliantly intuitive profiler. Thorne himself knows two things about the current case: one, Maya is the only woman who can save him from himself, and two, loving him could mean her death.
Wexton Henkes The local legend stands accused of heinous crimes. How far will he go to protect himself?
Alissa Wyatt & Cassie Dumont The other members of the Bear Claw Crime Lab try to protect Maya by shutting her out of the investigation.
Detectives Piedmont & Montoya The partners have been openly hostile to the three women of the new crime lab.
Nevada Barnes The museum murderer tries to cut a deal from prison. Can he be trusted?
Chief Parry Bear Claws police chief is under huge pressure to catch the criminal mastermind. When a suspended cop becomes the fiends next target, will he bow to pressure and use her as bait?
Drew Wilson When two police sketches help identify him as a suspect, he will do anything to avoid capture.
Prologue
He stood on a bluff overlooking green summer pastures and raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes as the morning sun climbed above the opposite ridgetop.
The target lay in the valley below, a jumble of Hollywood-false Western buildings and swirling bison herds. It would be so easy this time.
Almost too easy.
At the beginning, when hed first conceived his revenge, hed thought of himself as the planner. The cops had christened him the Mastermind, because hed so carefully organized his strategy and found men to do his bidding. Bradford Croft had been pliable, with a fondness for young girls that had made him easy to direct. Nevada Barnes had been less malleable. More angry. More dangerous. But he, too, had his weaknesses.
Croft was dead now and Barnes was in jail, but the plan lived on. Divide and conquer.
Revenge. Retribution.
The Mastermind tightened his fingers on the binoculars as a school bus lumbered into view below, passing beneath a swinging sign that promised authentic Wild West entertainment.
Children spilled from the bus and their shrill, excited voices filtered up to his vantage point. Then the adults emerged, moving more slowly, thinking themselves safe. The Canyon Kidnapper was dead and the Museum Murdereran epithet he blamed solely on the mediawas in jail. The citizens of Bear Claw, Colorado, thought the danger was past.
They had no idea it was just beginning.
Chapter One
Wearing jeans and a fitted blue T-shirt on her lean, five-foot-nothing frame, with her dark hair tucked beneath a straw hat and a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, Maya Cooper looked every inch the tourist shed intended to portray. But inside, she was all cop as she scanned the swept-clean brick roadway that ran down the center of the faux ghost town outside Bear Claw City.
Her training as a criminal profiler told her she was reaching, but her gut told her she was on to something.
She was positive the Chuckwagon Ranch was connected to the sick bastard whod planned two separate violent crime sprees over the past six months.
Wexton Henkes, part owner of the theme park, was a Bear Claw legend. Born in the city and raised up through the school system, hed taken his fathers one-room electronic repair shop and built it into an empire. Once hed made his first millionor tenhed started giving back to the city that had brought him his success. Hed funded everything from civic projects and art revivals to nature conservation and the local sports teams. In short, he was a prince.
On the outside, at least. Inside, Maya was convinced he was something else entirely. Hed broken his own sons arm three months earliernobody could tell her differentand he was poised to duck the abuse charges because he had money, power and influence.
Enough influence to get her in serious trouble the last time shed gone after him.
But not this time, she said aloud, earning herself strange looks from the passing tourists.
The June morning was warm and bright, perfect for a family trip. The Wild West theme park was cut down the middle by Main Street, a wide brick causeway flanked with false-fronted buildings that had been painted to look like a saloon, a general store and a livery. Tourists streamed into and out of the buildings in a chaos of movement and sound that made it almost impossible to pick out individuals. On either side of the buildings, bison-dotted pastures stretched for miles, taking up most of the shallow, hill-bounded bowl of land.
Maya scanned the low ridgetops that flanked the road and saw nothing. A faint feeling of wrongness prickled at the nape of her neck, a familiar sense of being watched. Of being alone.
But damn it, she was alone. Shed been suspended from the Bear Claw Police Department pending an inquiry into the incident at the Henkes mansion three months earlier.
Anxiety pressed at her, echoing her heartbeat in the low-grade headache that had plagued her ever since shed awoken in the Hawthorne Hospital with a knot on the back of her head and no memory of attacking Henkes in his own home.
But that was what shed done. Or so they said.
What if they kicked her off the force? Mayas throat closed at the thought. She was already on the outside of the Bear Claw City Police DepartmentBCCPDlooking in. Alissa Wyatt and Cassie Dumont, her best friends and coworkers within the start-up Forensics Department, had tried to include her in the gossip, but they were run ragged shouldering her work as well as their own.
The new three-woman forensics team was struggling to gain acceptance within the Bear Claw PD as it was. What if
No, Maya told herself, she wouldnt dwell on that. The previous night shed finally decided it was time to stop with the futile attempts at self-hypnosis, the painful efforts to force some remembrance of that night at the Henkes mansion. It was no use. The memories were gone, and she had an ugly feeling she knew why.
She touched a hand to her throat, where her charm necklace held five bangles. There should have been six more, but shed lost them to a mistake. To temptation.
Would she lose the remaining five charms as well?
What if she had to start over again?
No, she said aloud. Im stronger than that, and Im damn well going to prove it. Starting now.
As though on cue, her cell phone rang, a digital bleat that cracked through the background hum of tourism. Not expecting a call, Maya slapped open the unit and checked the number, but the ID was blocked.
Annoyed, she flipped the phone shut and dropped it in the front pocket of her canvas bag. These days most of her calls came from media hounds looking for quotes on the dismissal of the Henkes child-abuse trial, or supporters of Wexton Henkes himself calling to threaten her, somehow still believing the bastard had a solid shot at the upcoming Congressional election. She didnt need to talk to either group.
Focused on her own special way of doing the jobmore organic than straight detecting, more regimented than pure profilingshe followed the flow of tourists toward the livery building, which held a petting zoo.
She wanted to get a feel for the theme park and the man whod bankrolled it.
Inside the building, rough-hewn boards and crooked center beams gave the sense of an old, rundown barn, though a closer look showed her that everything was neat and new, and painted to look old. The place was packed with excited children, along with adults wearing expressions that ranged from enthusiasm to exhaustion. Small goats and lambs wandered a straw-bedded center pen, begging for handfuls of pellets that could be bought from quarter-operated machines on the wall. Box stalls on either side were set up to hold larger animals, though only one was occupied, holding a shaggy bison that looked close to five feet tall at the shoulder and probably weighed in well over a thousand pounds. Its short, curved horns were dulled at the ends, but that did little to blunt the physical impact of the creature as it snorted and stomped in its enclosure.
Maya noted the people and animals, then turned her attention to the building. She wasnt even sure what she was looking for. A sense of the place, maybe, or insight into the man who had financial ties not only to the ranch, but also to the state park where Alissa had found the kidnapped girls during the first crime wave, and to the Bear Claw Natural History Museum where Cassie had nearly lost her life in the second.
During her terrifying ordeal in the museum, Cassie had heard the computer-altered voice of a third man, one who called himself the planner.
He had promised more violence to come.
The members of the special BCCPD task force assembled to deal with the crimes had vowed to find the Mastermind before he could strike again, but their leads had fizzled out in the months since. They needed an accurate psychological profile of the criminal, but their quarry was too many things and none of them all at once. It was nearly impossible to separate his ego from the works of the men hed coerced into executing the actual crimes, but Maya was damn sure going to try.
So what if she was off the case, off the force entirely? That didnt stop her from being a cop. Didnt stop her from wanting to prove that she wasnt
The phone rang again, startling her. Though the ID was still blocked, she stepped outside the petting zoo and answered it, planning to give the persistent journalist an earful. Maya Cooper speaking. Who is this?
You dont know me, said an eerie, mechanized voice.
A jolt slapped through her. The distorted sound matched Cassies description of the Masterminds voice.
She swallowed and said, Hello, Wexton. Hows the arm?
She was sure of her suspect. She just had to convince the rest of the BCCPD.
Dead silence echoed over the digital airwaves. For a moment she thought hed hung up. Then the mechanized voice returned. You think youre so smart, dont you? Well, Ive got a surprise for you.
Mayas fingers tightened on the cell phone. What kind of surprise?
The voice held a hint of metallic amusement when it said, Theres a bomb hidden somewhere in the Chuckwagon Ranch. You have ten minutes to evacuate.
YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT? Thorne Coleridge stopped pacing the small office and stared at Bear Claw Citys Police Chief.
William Parry, grizzled and bulldogesque with his jowly face and sad eyes, leaned back in his desk chair. Do you want the job or not?
Thorne jammed his hands in the pockets of the navy wool slacks hed worn as a concession to the interview. Hed gotten a quick trim of his short, sandy hair and donned a white oxford-cloth shirt, but had skipped the tie, figuring he should begin as he meant to go on.
The question echoed in his brain. Did he want the job? Did he want to get in at the ground level of a start-up forensics department? Hell, yes. Did he want to get out of the Wagon Ridge PD, where conversations stopped the moment he entered the room and the whispers began the moment he left? Hell, yes. That was why hed jumped at the chance when his bosses in Wagon Ridge had asked if he would drive down to Bear Claw and help with an ongoing case. He needed a fresh start.
But he wasnt sure he wanted to make that start at the expense of a colleague.
He resumed his pacing before he said, Nobody told me Id be replacing another psych specialist. I thought you were looking to fill a vacancy.
It can become a vacancy if you do your job. Hell, Ill probably have to replace her either way. But Parrys frown drooped lower, cutting deeper lines in his sagging face. The three women came with glowing references and wanted to work together. I was looking to upgrade my forensics team. It seemed like a match.
I take it things havent gone smoothly?
Parry snorted. You could say that. If it isnt one thing with those three, its another. At first, they couldnt manage to get along with the rest of the PD. They did their jobs well enough, but it was tense as hell. Then once all this trouble started, my crime scene expert and my evidence tech wound up snuggling with my best detective and my FBI liaison. His expression darkened. Hell, they wound up being targeted by the damn killer!
You cant blame them for the criminal mind, Thorne said, avoiding the touchy issue of interdepartmental romance. He didnt need to go there. Not now.
Not ever again.
True, but whether its their fault or not, things have been unsettled in the PD since they came on board. The chief shifted in his chair. Then add on this business with Wexton Henkes He trailed off, but his sour expression left no doubt that hed had it with his crack team of investigators. My so-called psych specialist accused Bear Claws biggest philanthropist of child abuseagainst the sworn testimony of his wife and son, mind youand then attacked him in his own home before she collapsed and remained unconscious for nearly three days. Parry muttered a curse. I just dont think shes an asset to the PD at this point. Id like to replace her with someone more stable. More qualified.