ticked down on the digital display of her wristwatch.
The explosive could be in any one of the buildings. Or it could be in one of the cars. Even in the big yellow school bus parked in the corner of the lot, Maya thought with a faint shudder as the numbers clicked down from five minutes to four.
“Let’s get in the cars and get out of here,” a man’s voice called, and others shouted agreement.
“I’m sorry, that’s not an option.” Maya glanced to her right and left, where two terrified-looking ranch employees were helping her keep the group in check now that the initial rush to get people the hell out of the ranch had passed. The three of them were holding the line, but the crowd could turn at a moment’s notice.
Maya had studied mob mentality. She’d been in situations like this before.
But back then, she’d had a badge and a weapon, and street cops backing her up.
“Why not?” shouted the same voice, irritated now. “And who put you in charge?”
She glared in the direction of the heckler. “I’m a member of the Bear Claw Creek Police Department, which puts me in charge.”
She didn’t give her name, because it had already been splashed too loudly in the media, and she didn’t give her rank or show her badge, because she’d been stripped of both until Internal Affairs finished looking into the Henkes incident, a process that had been stalled several times by red tape she could only assume came from Henkes’s supporters within the force.
Three minutes, thirty seconds.
She tried not to think about her first impressions of the theme park, how a sniper could sit up on the low ridge of hills nearby and fire down into the crowd she had assembled in a too-convenient knot. But what other choice did she have? She’d needed to get them the hell out of the park, and the vehicles weren’t an option.
Three minutes.
Then she heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly.
“Thank God,” Maya whispered to herself, knowing she couldn’t say it aloud, couldn’t let the crowd know she was worried.
They needed her to be strong, to keep the peace.
Precious seconds ticked by as the Bear Claw cops pulled in, led by Alissa and Cassie, riding with Tucker in his he-man truck. The chief’s car followed moments later. The sight of her friends loosened the tight band around Maya’s heart, even as the suspicious looks she got from the other arriving officers made her feel worse.
Uniforms ranged out around the rapidly quieting crowd. As the tension subsided a degree, a youngish cop jogged over to Maya and said, “We’ll take it from here, ma’am. The chief would like a word with you.”
She tried not to wince at the “ma’am,” which served only to underscore her status as not-quite-a-cop. But there wasn’t time for regrets, not while her wristwatch clicked down past two minutes thirty seconds.
She hastened to the knot of cops gathered near the chief’s car just as two vans and a box truck arrived in a cloud of dust, bearing John Sawyer, the leader of the Bear Claw Bomb Squad, along with his team of experts.
“He said I had ten minutes,” she told the group. “We’ve got two-thirty left, give or take. The park is cleared of people, but there’s a petting zoo in the livery building and close to three hundred head of bison pastured right behind the buildings.”
“Not much we can do about that now,” Chief Parry said pragmatically, but his grizzled, careworn face settled into deeper lines at the prospect of bloodshed, human or otherwise. When Sawyer joined the group, the chief quickly updated him. The two put their heads together to rough out a plan, which gave Maya a moment to glance at the others.
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,
