Conard County Revenge. Rachel Lee

      “No kidding,” he answered. “Do you know what I’m seeing?”

      She turned her head toward him, curious. “What?”

      “A lot of opportunity smashed. A lot of really good projects my students were working on, destroyed. We might be able to get this shop up and running by next fall, but there are a lot of seniors who had some really fine stuff underway here, and it’s gone. Son of a...” He stopped himself, but while his face remained emotionless, she could feel anger seething in him. Then he looked at her. “They don’t get their dreams back. Their excitement over all they were achieving.”

      “No.” Her answer might have been flat, but she felt her heart squeeze. He’d hit on the part she tried to avoid thinking about. “Collateral damage.” There was always collateral damage.

      “Yeah,” he agreed. “Collateral. Such a cold word.”

      No point standing here and grieving. Tucking her hands into one of the many pockets on her overalls, she passed him some disposable booties, then donned a pair over her work boots. “Less contamination,” she remarked out of habit. God, was she becoming one of those people who persisted in telling others what they probably already knew? But Alex didn’t take it amiss.

      “I’ll stay out here,” Charity said. “God knows what’s on my boots and you don’t have any of those that’ll go over these things.”

      It was true. Darcy tossed her a smile, pulled a couple of high-intensity penlights out of another of her pockets and began to scan what she could see without moving from top to bottom. Alex took the other flashlight and followed suit. “Anything unusual?” he asked.

      “Anything. Just point it out to me if it catches your eye.”

      “Got it.”

      “Charity? I don’t smell the fuel oil in here. It’s all outside. It wouldn’t dissipate in here, not as fast, so...”

      “I read you. Excessive fuel oil was used, so there ought to be some scent in here. Definitely seems like the explosion was just outside.”

      Darcy nodded. “I suspect that what we’ll find in here will mainly be blast debris, not much from the device itself. But we still have to look.”

      And what a job it was going to be, she thought as she looked around. She’d seen plenty of scenes like this; she had no illusion about the painstaking work facing her. No illusion, either, about the fact that she’d get on-site help only if some were freed up elsewhere. Conard City, Wyoming, was kind of off the map and radar with so many other important things happening. Unless she found some kind of indicator signifying militants or terrorists in the area, she was pretty much on her own. A vanguard without follow-up.

      “Damn,” Alex said emphatically.

      “What?” Darcy immediately followed the beam of his flashlight. He wiggled it over some blackened heap that seemed to have at least one thick leg attached.

      “Chuck Ingram was working on that. A butcher-block island for his mother. She’d wanted one for years, but they were out of reach, so he saved up money for the last two years from his part-time job to buy the best, hardest wood. Glued the wood together, braced it, tooled the legs... He was going to give it to his mom for Mother’s Day. He was almost done.”

      Darcy stared at what was now a charred lump and felt a growing flame of anger deep inside. This was about a lot more than a bomb, how it was built and who built it. This was about lives, hopes, dreams. “Hell.” She usually avoided swearing, but that word seemed mild right now.

      “There are other projects like that in here,” Alex said grimly. “We gotta get this guy. That’s the only way I can help these kids now.”

      With that, he passed back the flashlight and eased out of the room. Darcy saw Charity watching him as he left the building.

      Then Charity leaned her head through the door. “It’s probably too late to clean up this mess,” she said. “I mean, we could get more wood for Chuck, but we can’t give him back the hours he spent on that. Even if we could arrange for him to work in the shop at the college.”

      “No.” Darcy scanned the room some more. “Okay, I’m going to need to take a lot of photos before I even start looking around. Then the tarps.”

      “My guys can help you on the roof, when you’re ready to check it.”

      “Thanks. I’m definitely going to need some help with this.”

      She eased back out of the room and pulled off her booties, folding them inside out in case they’d picked up something that might prove useful.

      “I’m surprised you’re alone,” Charity said.

      “I wouldn’t ordinarily be. Bad time. The bureau is overtaxed right now. Hopefully that’ll change soon. Either that, or I find a lead to the bomber. Meantime, preserve the evidence.” The endless mantra. Preserve the evidence.

      And try not to think too hard about all the students who’d just had their work blown up by some jackass.

       Chapter 3

      Two days later, all the debris that had been bagged and tagged had been moved into the gymnasium, laid out in a duplicate of the grid outside, preserving positions. Off-duty firefighters and cops had volunteered to comb the ground outside, many of them on their hands and knees, gently raking over soil that had been trampled. A tarp covered the hole in the building. Surprisingly little had been found on the steel roof, arguing that the bomb had indeed been placed low.

      With Alex’s help, Darcy had taken measurements of everything: the size of the hole in the building, the blast radius, the area of damage in the shop. A surveyor had accurately measured the bulge in the interior cinder block wall.

      Diagrams had begun to sprout on her computer—vectors of force running outward until she was fairly certain she’d localized the center of the explosion. All of this she’d sent back to the field office for analysis along with carefully preserved samples of the ground, the burned wood, the soot. Soon they’d be able to tell her more about the bomb’s force and content.

      But the smell of fuel oil outside still bothered her. A couple of evenings later, Alex asked her to join him at the diner for supper and she agreed, even though she knew she should feel wary of the attraction she felt for him. Boy, it was getting bad, so bad that she couldn’t even think of him without tingling in her most feminine places. She couldn’t remember the last time any man had made her feel that way just by virtue of existing.

      She desperately turned her thoughts back to business and ordered her body to shut up.

      Maybe she’d get the opportunity to talk to him in a more speculative way than she could allow at the scene. There she had to be the ultimate science expert, relying on proof, on actual evidence. That would be Alex’s trained inclination as well, which is why she trusted him not to misunderstand if she discussed her thoughts tentatively. Brainstorming was something you could do with a colleague.

      But Alex’s thoughts were headed in a different direction, so she let him lead the conversation. Her opening would come and maybe she’d stop trying to imagine that spark she saw in his blue eyes reciprocated her growing desires.

      “So how’d you get into the ATF?” he asked as they ate a delicious beef stew accompanied by fresh crusty bread.

      “Probably the same way you got into the FBI,” she said humorously. “A recruiter came to my college.”

      He laughed. “Uh, yeah. Same here. Except they didn’t want to snap me up right away. I had a double major in criminology and psychology. They suggested that there’d be a job waiting for me if I did well in civilian police work.”

      “I guess you did.”

      “So it would seem. Three years into my