“I’m headed your way,” Connor messaged. He pocketed the phone, kenneled the dog and headed out the door again. He still had a long day ahead of him. Better not to think about Agent Anthony or Stacy or all the other things and people he couldn’t control.
Stacy and herdad had to hike two miles in the snow to approach the ranch house from the back side. By the time they were in sight of the house, Stacy was tired, achy and overheated from the strenuous trek. But they had encountered no one on this section of the ranch. They paused on a slight rise a few hundred yards from the house and surveyed their target.
George scanned the area with a pair of binoculars, then passed them to Stacy. “I don’t see any signs of life.”
“There’s smoke from the chimney,” she said. “Someone could be inside.”
“Or they’ve gone out and want the house to be warm when they return.” He sat back. “We’ll wait another half an hour. If there’s no sign of movement by then, we’ll get closer.”
She took out her phone. She had silenced her alerts but could still receive messages. “Connor texted to see if we were okay,” she said. She sent back a thumbs-up emoji.
“He would have been good to have along,” George said. “An Army Ranger and all.”
“He has a job, Dad.”
“I know. And he’s probably having more fun blowing up things than sitting here with us.” He raised the binoculars to his eyes once more. “I remember doing surveillance one winter in Maine, up near the Canadian border. We were tracking a kidnapper. My partner at the time lost two toes to frostbite.”
“Did you catch the kidnapper?” she asked.
“We did. And the little girl was safe. Her grandfather had hired a guy to take her from her father—his ex-son-in-law—and bring her over the border.” He lowered the binoculars. “It was one of those cases that hit a little too close to home. I would have moved heaven and earth if anyone had tried to take you from me.”
Stacy swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I worked a human trafficking case last year,” she said. “Teenage girlsbrought to the US with the promise of an education, forced to work for an escort service in Houston. It felt good to put the creeps responsible behind bars.”
“The Bureau does good work,” George said. “If they could clean house of a few rotten apples, they would do even better.”
“One fight at a time, Dad.”
He stood. “Let’s move a little closer.”
She stowed the binoculars and prepared to head out once more. But they were just starting downhill when a tremendousBoom!shook them.
“Down!” her father shouted and shoved her to the ground.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hey, Connor. Come take a look at this.”
Connor was attempting to go to lunch for the third time that afternoon when Cerise hailed him from her post on Lift Four. The busy quad lift ran from above the main parking lot to the top of the westernmost peaks at the resort. Connor detoured to meet her outside the lift operator shack. Her partner today, Saska, paused in her work of scraping collected snow away from the loading area to wave.
“Hey, Cerise,” Connor said. “What’s up?”
“Get a load of this.” She passed him a battered cardboard box. “Open it.”
“This doesn’t have one of those exploding snake gags inside of it, does it?” he asked.
“No. Just take a look.”
He lifted the lid on the box and stared at a cast booster, complete with attached detonator. He stared. “Where did you get this?”
“Don’t freak out. It’s not real. Take a closer look.”
He peered into the box again. The detonator was wrong—too many squiggly wires. It looked like someone’s idea of a detonator. And the can itself wasn’t quite right. He picked it up and heard a rattle, like rocks or marbles. “It’s a painted soda can with pebbles or something inside,” he said. “Made up to look like a bomb.”
“Sick, right? I found it tucked up above one of the chairs when we started up this morning.”
“Did you call security?”
“I wanted ski patrol to take a look first. It would be just like one of you guys to try to scare the daylights out of me with this.”
