Rapid Fire. Jessica Andersen

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ