Conard County Revenge. Rachel Lee

majored in chemistry and physics, and the way they explained the work intrigued me, made me feel I could do some actual good. They snapped me up just before I graduated and sent me for intensive training. They wanted a scientist more than a law enforcement officer. I’ve been working with explosives ever since.”

      He slipped his fork back into his bowl. “Do you ever wonder how they settled on you to begin with? I wasn’t the only double major in criminology and psychology.”

      “And I wasn’t the only one majoring in chemistry and physics. I don’t know about you, but I poked my head up. They had an interviewer on campus and I was just curious, so I went. I walked into their field of attention. But you didn’t?”

      He shook his head. “I still don’t know why I was approached, and I doubt anyone could even tell me now. It was a while ago. Then, like you, I went through a whole lot of training and testing and wound up in the BSU.”

      “Not a good thing, I gather?”

      He shook his head a little. “You know, it’s ugly. That kind of work is always ugly. But for a long time I was able to live with it because we were helping take some horrible people off the streets. It seemed like a fair trade-off. I was proud every time we could provide information that helped narrow the search and bring a creep to justice. For a while that was enough.”

      She hesitated, eating a bit more stew before taking a dangerous step. “Then it wasn’t.”

      He pressed his lips together before speaking again. “No. It wasn’t.” He forgot all about his meal and stared into space, seeming to be lost in memory. Then he shook his head. “You hear of the bicycle killer case?”

      Oh, she had. She drew a sharp breath. Even the bits she’d heard had been sickening. Little girls, a murderous serial pedophile, torture. “Alex, I’m sorry.”

      “Anyway, that was my last case. I had a daughter that age.”

      He didn’t need to say more. He probably saw his own child in every victim profile that crossed his desk, in every bit of suffering and torture. She didn’t even want to try to imagine it. She was sure he’d learned to keep a certain level of detachment, just as she had, but having a daughter the same age as the victims? Her own detachment would have shattered in the face of that, too.

      He probably carried scars and nightmares that would never go away.

      “Your daughter?” she asked presently.

      “She lives with her mother. I tipped off the rails for a while. Anger, not sleeping, nightmares... I wasn’t good for either of them. Hell, I wasn’t good for myself. But I don’t want to get into that.”

      “Of course not.” But she couldn’t quash the ache in her heart for him. God, she hoped none of her jobs ever brought her to that precipice. She lowered her head, giving him privacy, appreciating the honesty he’d just shared with her. He needn’t have been so frank with her, a woman who was nearly a complete stranger. What did they have in common, after all, except a background as federal employees?

      Eating halted conversation for a while and then Alex spoke again. “You probably don’t want me in the middle of things, since I’m so protective of my students.”

      She hesitated again, putting down her fork and dabbing her mouth with a paper napkin. “Depends on how you want to help.”

      He raised his head a bit from his intense study of the bowl in front of him and smiled faintly. “I know next to nothing about your technical end of it. I couldn’t intervene or interfere in any way. But I know quite a bit about human psychology.”

      She didn’t doubt it. Aberrant psychology mostly, but still useful. “Well...I was disturbed by something. I wanted to mention it to you, if you don’t mind.”

      “Sure, go ahead.”

      “When I arrived, the smell of fuel oil was still evident. The smell, as you must know, comes from the volatiles in the fuel—benzenes and xylenes for the most part. The fact that the odor was still apparent outdoors two days after the bombing means an awful lot of fuel soaked into the ground, rather than burning, and too much to evaporate quickly. Today the smell was gone, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be there as long as it was.”

      “Meaning?”

      “Too much was used. It never burned. It soaked the ground so that it evaporated more slowly.”

      “So an inexperienced bomber.”

      “Maybe.” She pushed her bowl to the side and lowered her voice. “Maybe an experimental bomb. Maybe a test run.”

      His face hardened into expressionless stone. “Let’s get out of here. We can talk privately at my house.”

      She thought that was a pretty good idea.

      The sun had long since disappeared behind the western mountains, making the light flat though it was far from dark yet. Nothing cast much of a shadow if it cast one at all.

      She drove behind Alex to his house, a small two-story near the high school with a well-tended yard. When she stepped inside, she knew what he did with his spare time, and to work out the demons. The place gleamed with loving care, the woodwork was amazing and classic. The oak floor beneath her feet in the entry didn’t creak even a little bit.

      “Did you do all this?” she asked as he closed the door behind her.

      “I bought it for a song and gutted it. It was bad, but the basic bones were sound.”

      “Beautiful work,” she remarked, touching the handrail on the staircase, then turning to admire the fine-looking wainscoting in white oak.

      “Let’s go to the kitchen. I didn’t get my usual coffee from Maude and I can make you a latte if you want.”

      The kitchen was as up-to-date as any she’d seen. “Let me guess, you made the cabinets, too.”

      He nodded while he tossed his jacket over a chair and turned to the coffee maker. “Old houses didn’t have a lot of cabinetry. I built more than I need, but I enjoy the work so I just kept going.”

      “Well, it’s gorgeous,” she told him frankly. Then she spied the kitchen table and pointed to it. “You made that, too?”

      “Yeah,” he said offhandedly.

      “You sure keep busy, and you do wonderful work.”

      He smiled as he switched the coffee maker on and faced her. “It’s nice to be able to do what I love. Grab a seat. Did you want that latte?”

      “Regular will be fine. Thanks for the offer.”

      He leaned back against the counter, folding his arms and studied her. “You’ve got an uneasy feeling with little to pin it on.”

      “Very good, Dr. Freud.”

      A snort escaped him. “I don’t think that way. No Oedipus complexes for me. No, it was pretty obvious from what you said. No kudos for me. So tell me.”

      “That’s the thing,” she admitted. “I want to pick your brain about the psychology of the bomber, because that’s not my area. How the bomb was built, yes. That’s what I do. But since I don’t have a whole team out here, what with everyone so busy on other cases...” She paused. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention since you left the bureau, but violence is on the rise. The kind of violence ATF deals with. Guns. Bombs. I don’t know whether it’s just a growing population or a genuine change going on.”

      “Change,” he said succinctly. “People are getting bolder about expressing themselves in deadly ways. Just as hate crimes are on the rise. I’d like to be able to point to one thing as the causative agent, but I think it’s a whole bunch of things, so I’m not going to trot out the list. It is what it is, and it’s getting worse. That’s all we need to know right now.”

      “Bad enough that’s it’s happening,” she