My Secret Valentine. Marilyn Pappano

the yellowed grass. As he crouched beside her, from the house behind them came a panicked cry.

      “Katy? Oh, my God, Katy!”

      His heart pounding, he gently touched the girl with a shaking hand and spoke her name. “Katy? Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”

      At his touch, she launched herself into his arms with enough force to push him off balance. She clung to him, her thin arms wrapped around his neck in a choke hold, her trembling body pressed so tightly to his that he couldn’t have peeled her away without help. Quickly getting to his feet, he headed for Fiona’s back door and met her halfway, coatless, shoeless and damn near hysterical.

      “Katy? My God, is she all right? Is she hurt?” she demanded, keeping pace when he didn’t slow down.

      “I don’t know. Call 911. Get an ambulance and the police.”

      She ran ahead into the kitchen and was stammering on the phone when he got there. He set the girl on the counter, or tried to, but she refused to let go. She held onto him as if he could keep her safe, but it was too late for that.

      “They’re on their way.” Shaking as badly as her daughter, Fiona joined them. “Katy, baby, come to Mama. Let me look at you. Let me see… Oh, God, Justin, she’s bleeding.”

      He’d seen the blood before she plastered herself to him, but not where it was coming from. Her hands, most likely, since her digging had apparently triggered the blast, and her face. God, he hoped she hadn’t lost any fingers! He’d seen it before with blasting caps, and experience suggested that was what she’d unearthed.

      With Fiona’s help, he gently forced Katy’s hands from around his neck. Though her hands were, in fact, the source of at least some of the blood, he counted all ten fingers and gave a quick prayer of thanks. In the seconds before the still-wailing girl grabbed hold of her mother, he saw cuts on her hands and face, none that looked serious.

      “It’s okay, baby,” Fiona crooned, holding her daughter tightly and rocking her side to side. “Everything’s going to be all right. Don’t cry, baby doll.” Sparing a steely glance for him, she asked, “What the hell was that?”

      “I don’t know—a blasting cap, I think. I’ll find out.” But instead of heading outside, he went down the hall to the front door, reaching it just as an ambulance screeched to a stop at the curb. Two police cars were only seconds behind. He unlocked the door and left it standing open, then returned to the backyard. He was kneeling beside the hole in the ground when the two cops joined him.

      “What happened here?” the taller of the two asked.

      Justin automatically reached for his credentials, then realized they were locked in his bag in Golda’s guest room, along with his weapon. Getting to his feet, he offered his hand. “Justin Reed, ATF.”

      “Colton Stuart, chief of police. You’re Golda’s nephew. I’m sorry about her death. We’ll miss her a lot.”

      Justin nodded in acknowledgment.

      “What happened?”

      “The little girl was digging in the yard when she hit something.” He gestured to the hole. “It’s an old ammo can. I’d guess it had at least two blasting caps inside, maybe more. They must have been pretty unstable. When she hit the can with her shovel, they went off.” He glanced back at the house. “Is she okay?”

      “She seems to be, except for getting the scare of her life.” Stuart combed his fingers through his hair. “Couldn’t ask for better luck than to have an ATF agent next door when something like this happens. Do you happen to work on the explosives side of the house?”

      Justin nodded.

      “You have any suggestions on how to proceed?”

      “You have a camera I can use? And an evidence form?”

      Stuart gestured to the officer with him, who immediately left.

      Once more Justin knelt a few feet away from the hole. There were bits of shrapnel on the ground—probably the cause of Katy’s cuts—as well as pieces of twisted metal. The blast had been powerful enough to raise the lid on the steel can a few inches, until its hinge caught, but fortunately the can had contained much of it. If not… As close as she’d been, Katy could have suffered some damned serious injuries.

      “Any ideas how the can got here?” Stuart asked, crouching on the opposite side.

      Justin gave the area a critical look. “This used to slope down, and there was an alley separating these houses from those.” He nodded toward the houses on the back side of the block. Come to think of it, Golda’s yard had had the same slope. She’d complained that run-off from rain and snow created problems with erosion and kept her yard from being perfect. “You have any idea when it was filled in, by who and why?” The box could have been buried elsewhere, dug up and hauled in here. If it had been a few years, the caps wouldn’t have been so unstable then. It was possible they could have survived the move, possible the can could have gone unnoticed with a ton or two of topsoil.

      “Three years ago,” Stuart replied. “The area had some major mudslides, and this was one of them. The city hauled out what it could and spread the rest around.”

      Justin looked up at the mountains that rose around the city. The ammo can could have been buried anywhere from the next block to the tops of any of a half-dozen peaks miles away. Finding its original resting place and the person who’d put it there would be tougher than identifying a single grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean.

      The young cop returned with the equipment Justin had requested. “Chief, the paramedics want to know if they can go ahead and take Katy and her mom to the hospital.”

      “Sure. We’ll talk to her later, after she’s been checked out by the doctors and calmed down. Poor kid. She’ll never enjoy the Fourth of July after this.”

      As Justin set up the thirty-five-millimeter camera, he casually asked, “You know Katy and her mother?”

      “Sure. We just live a couple blocks away. We go to the same church, and our kids go to the same day care. Fiona watches our son, Martin, from time to time, and we keep Katy sometimes. Martin thinks of Katy as the big sister he never had. She thinks of him as a baby doll that won’t stay put when she’s tired of him.”

      Smiling faintly, Justin snapped a few shots of the area, followed by several of the can still in the hole. Laying the camera aside, he lifted it out, then opened the lid. “Holy…”

      “What is it?” Stuart looked over his shoulder but didn’t seem impressed. And why should he be? He’d never seen the carved wooden boxes before. He’d probably never heard of John Blandings, who’d celebrated his fifth wedding anniversary by giving his wife Anita an exquisite, one-of-a-kind, damn near priceless necklace and bracelet, each in its own hand-carved, ivory-inlaid wooden box. He’d probably never heard of Patrick Watkins, either, who’d relieved Mrs. Blandings of her jewels and, on his way out, left the garage in shambles with two well-placed explosives.

      Quickly, Justin took several more pictures, then laid the camera aside and reached for one of the boxes. The lid was damaged, with flash burns and shrapnel embedded in its surface, but the gems inside…

      All the Reed women—except Golda—loved flashy jewelry. They’d never seen a necklace too gaudy, a ring too ostentatious or a stone too big. Even so, not one of them had a piece that could compare to this. The emeralds were top quality, rich, deep, dark, damn near glowing inside, and the diamonds were as good or better. He’d estimate the smallest stone at three or four carats, the largest probably three times that.

      Stuart gave a long, low whistle. “That must be worth—”

      “One point two million. The matching bracelet—” Justin pointed to the other box “—is another half mil. It was stolen from a couple in the D.C. area four years ago. The thief slipped right through their elaborate security system, pocketed these and left another couple million dollars worth