Their gazes met and locked.
Jake swallowed hard, then straightened his shoulders. “Right. Well, we’re going to beat them at their own game.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she said, her voice barely more than a scratchy whisper.
Jake eyed her appraisingly. After a long moment, he gave a single nod. “Oh, I’m sure you can.”
Her mouth opened but no words came out. She could not imagine how he’d come to have such faith in her. He didn’t know her at all anymore. And after this was over—
“I need to get you a charging block,” he said. He retracted the phone from her grip and hit the button to turn off the display. “Save your battery as much as you can.”
“I keep a couple of magnetic chargers in my office. Didn’t think I’d need it today, but during the fair…” She let the words trail off with a grimace when he handed her mobile back. “Funny, I didn’t plan to be held hostage by a mad bomber today.”
The corner of his mouth twisted into a small smile as he pulled the police radio from his vest. “Ask one of your guys to grab them.”
Cassidy relayed the request to Thompson, who was the only member of her team with a key to her office.
Jake turned to survey the carnival midway as it whizzed past them. “Anyone have a status on the detonation site?” he asked into his radio.
“Contained,” Aronson replied. “No injuries. Property damage. This one packed more of a punch than the others.”
He reclipped the radio. “Okay, so we have identified six of what we think may be a dozen devices.” He leaned back, his expression calm but focused solely on her. “Let’s start at the beginning. What do we know?”
She quirked an eyebrow at his leading tone, but she understood exactly what he was doing. By breaking their situation down into increments, they might be able to parse more clues. She picked up her phone and opened her notes app. “I’m going to copy the messages in sequence. Maybe seeing them all together will give us a better sense of how things have unfolded.”
Jake nodded approvingly. “Great idea.” He pulled the map of the fairgrounds from his vest pocket. “Go low, Max.”
Despite the easygoing manner with which he delivered the command, the dog obeyed, immediately stretching out on his stomach at their feet.
“Such a good dog.” She didn’t look up as she copied and pasted each of the texts she’d received into a single document.
“I remember Muffin.”
Cassidy stilled, thrown off-kilter by his offhand reference to her childhood dog. Muffin had been her black Labrador retriever with a love of cheese and disdain for all forms of exercise, but she’d been sweet and loving, and would allow the mere mortals who served her to scratch behind her ears as much as they wanted.
Jake’s father had been allergic, so his family had never kept pets, thus he’d doted on her dog. Cassidy had little doubt in her mind he’d probably been more upset by the prospect of breaking it off with Muffin than with her. Still, there was no reason to rehash ancient history.
Without looking up from her task, she said, “She was a sweet girl.”
“Remember how she’d go around lying on everyone’s feet in the winter?”
She heard a smile caught up in the memory but couldn’t chance a glance to see it. Jake had loved her dog and remembered her fondly. The tug she felt in her belly was nothing more than motion sickness.
“She was a funny one.”
A full minute passed before he spoke again. “If we’re out in the car when they test the emergency sirens on Wednesdays, Max howls along.”
This tidbit was too much. She tore her attention from her screen but refused to look at Jake. Instead, she gazed down at Max, whose ears twitched as if catching every syllable they uttered.
“Are you in touch with your inner wolf, Max?” she crooned.
The dog gave her a sheepish side-eye, and she chucked. “I don’t blame you. I like to howl along with them, too.”
Jake laughed. “I bet you do.”
His chuckles proved too captivating to resist. She met his bright blue eyes and her heart began to thrum against her breastbone. Needing to regain some traction, she raised both eyebrows. “Because I’m a dog?”
She regretted the flippant comment as soon as she spoke it. His laughter died out, the dregs of it carried away on the breeze. The light in his eyes dimmed and a deep crease bisected his eyebrows. “What? No.”
