quiet, swift professionalism, the paramedics went to work, swapping out his soaked shirt for real bandages, putting a neck brace on her to prevent her head from moving, starting an IV, taking her pressure. He heard a buzz of words, saw them slide Quinn onto a backboard and then lift her onto a gurney.
She’s going to be okay. Has to be okay. I can’t lose her.
Everything inside him fought to run back to his truck, race after the screaming ambulance. Follow her to the hospital, make sure she got treated, hover until she opened her eyes and looked at him.
West clenched his hands and unclenched them. Using a breathing technique he’d learned from a therapist who’d treated him for PTSD, he centered himself and his thoughts.
The best way he could help Quinn was by doing his job. The sooner he helped catch the bastard doing this, the safer she and the town would be.
“Brand!”
He turned at the sound of Finn Colton’s voice. The chief looked at the departing ambulance, his expression grim. “What happened?”
West told him about finding Quinn, as others arrived and began to work the scene.
He knew cops, knew the tight brotherhood. Quinn had been injured—one of their own, family—and they were going to work this case hard.
West didn’t need to get insider information on the local cops to ascertain this. He knew human nature.
Finn gave him a hard look. “Brayden and Shane are on their way to the hospital, and they’ll question Quinn if she wakes up. I need you to stay here, work the scene.”
West nodded, though he fought the instinctive need to rush to the hospital with the chief. He turned back to his truck to fetch his equipment.
No one knew what Quinn meant to him. They had kept their relationship secret on purpose. But right now, as he jogged back to his truck, Rex at his side, he was the one who could openly claim her and join her brothers at the hospital.
* * *
Firefighters had quickly doused the flames and now the cops were working the scene. Someone had marked Tia’s body.
What was left of it.
He saw a high-heeled red shoe attached to a section of bloodied leg sticking out from beneath half a large-screen television. High heels. Quinn had not worn high heels. Not during the day. At night she liked wearing them when they met in secret outside town. Dinner, a show, good times.
He liked her in high heels, and when she wore them to bed last week...
Was she okay?
Focus, Brand. Focus.
West dragged in a breath and studied the body with cool, professional detachment. Tia lay on her side. One of her arms had been torn off in the blast, and her torso was horribly mangled.
Burns covered her body and part of her head...
He looked at Tia’s head, noting the head injury and exposed brain matter with analytical coolness. If she had died before the explosion, the autopsy would confirm it.
“Find,” he ordered Rex, his death grip on the leash making his palm sweat through the latex gloves.
Rex combed through the building’s rubble to search for secondary devices. Nothing found. But near what had been Tia’s desk, West found pieces of the bomb, including the detonator.
Cell phone. Same kind of burner phone used in the first bombing.
Until the pieces were tested, he couldn’t be certain, but he suspected it was the same type of bomb that had gone off earlier in the abandoned building. The first bomb was a trial run, probably to see how much damage the unsub could inflict.
But something had gone wrong. The killer hadn’t known that Quinn delivered lunch here every day around noon. Nor had he anticipated the device wouldn’t totally destroy evidence.
Or had he? Quinn had told him that everyone knew her schedule—that every day she hand delivered lunch to Tia, one of her best clients. Tia always ate at twelve thirty sharp. The woman ran a tight schedule.
He returned to his truck, fetched his equipment. With methodical care, he combed through the scene. Gray file cabinets were dented, some of their contents blown out. The computer was in shards, but if Tia backed her files up to a cloud, they could access them.
Maybe one of her clients had a grudge. Damn, it was better than thinking someone had it in for Quinn, or wanted to cause more than one injury.
In the rubble, he found the thin stump of a cigar. West bagged and tagged the evidence. Tia smoked. A fact Quinn relayed to him previously, her pert nose wrinkling in disgust. Tia even liked to light up Cubans after hours. But everything had to be looked over.
Something glinted among the rubble in a shaft of late-afternoon sunshine.
West crouched down and studied the fragment. The edge of a key chain, rounded, with the etching of a pine cone. He could just make out part of an address.
#5 Pine P.
Pine Paradise? Acid crept into his throat. Too much of a coincidence.
He knew this.
Pine Paradise specialized in cabins in the thickly wooded canyon south of Red Ridge.
After Quinn had told him she had a key to a cabin there, he planned to take her for a weekend. Maybe taking Quinn with him for hikes in the woods, long bouts of lovemaking into the night. He liked that area of South Dakota; it was quiet, peaceful, and enabled him to think and find peace. Get away from all the people in town and the nosy neighbors. He could use his gray matter to fit together pieces of a complex puzzle called the Coltons, figure out if they were covering up evidence of Demi Colton’s whereabouts.
Question her further.
Pine Paradise offered quiet, small cabins near a creek reputed to have excellent trout fishing. Each cabin was set back from the road, nestled in the thick woods. Isolated and accessed only by a dirt road, they were far apart from each neighboring cabin to offer seclusion and privacy.
When he’d first arrived in town, he’d asked Tia, Red Ridge’s reigning queen of real estate, about renting a Pine Paradise cabin. She’d haughtily informed him that the cabins were occupied. The property is unavailable, Mr. Brand. Got it?
The woman was just...nasty. He could understand why she mistrusted him for being an outsider and FBI, to boot. Some locals had looked at him with suspicion. Small town, strangers. But Quinn had told him the real estate agent was one of her best clients and a cold, demanding person. It wasn’t him. It was Tia’s personality.
Did that personality get her into trouble? Had the real estate agent gotten into a squabble with someone who decided on permanent payback by killing her?
Until the autopsy was performed, they could not confirm his suspicion that Tia had been killed prior to the explosion, and the killer had used the bomb to cover his or her tracks.
There was another
