Jessica Andersen - Rapid Fire

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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

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 he’s 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 Claw’s police chief is under huge pressure to catch the criminal mastermind. When a suspended cop becomes the fiend’s 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.

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 he’d first conceived his revenge, he’d thought of himself as the planner. The cops had christened him the Mastermind, because he’d 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 Murderer—an epithet he blamed solely on the media—was in jail. The citizens of Bear Claw, Colorado, thought the danger was past.

They had no idea it was just beginning.

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 she’d 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 who’d 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, he’d taken his father’s one-room electronic repair shop and built it into an empire. Once he’d made his first million—or ten—he’d started giving back to the city that had brought him his success. He’d 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. He’d broken his own son’s arm three months earlier—nobody could tell her different—and 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 she’d 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. She’d 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 she’d 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 she’d done. Or so they said.

What if they kicked her off the force? Maya’s throat closed at the thought. She was already on the outside of the Bear Claw City Police Department—BCCPD—looking 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 wouldn’t dwell on that. The previous night she’d 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 she’d lost them to a mistake. To temptation.