Chapter 1 #2
“No idea. The judge is distraught, but he said he hardly glanced at the package while he was talking to the detective. The wrapping is probably shredded and burned. With luck, the cop will have noticed.”
“Okay. I’m grabbing a sandwich to eat on my way and will head directly to Rosendaal. Ah…”
“Expect me to be your concierge, do you?”
Nolan smiled but didn’t answer.
“I’ll get my assistant to make reservations and text that info, too. Keep in touch.”
“Will do,” Nolan agreed, ending the call.
No more than fifteen minutes later, sandwich in hand, he was back on the road.
In one way, his mood had improved; he must’ve been a hunter by nature, because he thrived in his job.
He was already turning over the little he knew in his head, anticipating learning more.
He was a natural to head this investigation because he was one of the few current agents in the Seattle FBI office who had any background with bombs.
He’d done a number of years in the military as an explosive ordnance disposal technician.
When he chose not to re-up, a recruiter from the ATF had been waiting with a job offer he had immediately declined.
The members of the rapid-response teams were almost entirely made up of people like him who’d learned the trade courtesy of the US Army or another branch of the military.
Yeah, he knew IEDs, but he still came awake from a nightmare every month or so reliving his experiences.
Flashback might’ve been a better word. Despite his confidence and experience and faith in his teammates and the trained dogs that assisted them, he’d developed a phobia that last year.
Every time he approached an explosive device he thought, This might be the one.
He knew he wouldn’t survive to retire, to go home again.
And yet he had. So now he had a familiar crawling sensation up his spine, ending with the prickle of the close-cropped hair on the back of his neck.
He would be unlikely to be the one laying hands on future devices, assuming there were any. But if worse came to worse…he was damn good at defusing them.
What he needed first was to talk to the cop who’d had a sharp enough eye to recognize something that didn’t belong and reactions quick enough to save at least one life while risking her own.
Unless, of course, she’d planted the bomb to make herself appear a heroine. Unlikely, but something he’d have to rule out.
His phone had been dinging with incoming texts. Shortly after the exit, he pulled off the road to glance at them and saw her name: Detective Roanne Engle, currently to be found in the small community hospital.
He’d go there first.
* * *
ROANNE EMERGED FROM darkness to a massive headache. She lay still, not sure she wanted to open her eyes. She thought there was a beep, beep, beep coming from nearby but might’ve been imagining things. Her ears felt as if they’d been stuffed with wax. What if she couldn’t open her eyes?
She hurt other places, too. Shoulder, hip, one wrist that seemed to be encased in wrappings or a cast.
“Roanne,” said a quiet and familiar voice. “Your breathing has changed. Are you back with us?”
Her father. For him, she had to try.
Somehow she pried open eyelids that had to weigh ten pounds each. Her eyes felt gritty, and her reward was a blurry scene that was too bright. Her father gradually came into focus.
He didn’t look like himself. Wrinkles she hadn’t known were there had become crevasses.
“Dad?” she said uncertainly.
“Oh, thank God!” He seized one of her hands and squeezed. “You scared the daylights out of me!”
Her, too. Except she didn’t remember what she’d done to deserve taking a pounding.
Had she been beaten up? No, she’d had to pee—she did remember that much—and been sick to her stomach besides.
In fact, it chose to lurch now. Her father read her well enough to whisk a basin at hand for her to bring up a thin stream of bile.
He helped her rinse her mouth afterward, too.
“How long have I been out?” she mumbled. “Is this the same day?”
“Yes. It’s about nine o’clock in the evening.”
Evening. Her brain struggled to assemble the facts.
“Bomb.” It came to her in living color, and she struggled to sit up. “Uncle Charles?” She’d called the judge that since her earliest childhood years, except not in public. Not once she’d signed on with the Rosendaal Police Department anyway.
“He’s fine.” Her dad’s hand gently pressed her back to her pillow. “Thanks to you. I think he’s going to write his boys out of his will and leave everything to you.”
Roanne chuckled weakly, undoubtedly what he’d intended.
“Do you remember what happened, then?”
She started to nod before cringing and squeezing her eyes shut. Don’t move head. Check. “Yes.”
“There’s already an FBI agent here, sitting in the waiting room hoping to be able to talk to you. I can tell him he has to wait until tomorrow—”
“No. It was so close. If I hadn’t gone upstairs to use the ladies room, if I’d hesitated, Uncle Charles would have been killed. Wouldn’t he?”
Her father’s usually genial face appeared even grimmer. “From what I hear…yes.”
“Send him in. I can tell him…” Well, she wasn’t sure what. She’d acted on instinct. If she’d paused to think, she felt sure she would have convinced herself there was a nice present for the judge inside that package and that she’d break it by tossing it down the hall.
“Okay.” Her dad bent over, kissed her forehead and said, “I’m proud of you. But don’t do it again.”
She thought she was smiling. Her eyes sank closed again as she heard the curtain rattle. Beep, beep, beep. She was the one being monitored.
Another faint rattle. She didn’t hear so much as a footstep, but she could feel a presence. She fluttered her lashes and finally opened her eyes again.
The man standing beside her bed came into instant focus in a way her father hadn’t.
He wasn’t linebacker big, but he would have several inches on her father, who wasn’t a short man.
Broad shoulders, lean muscles like a basketball player rather than a weightlifter.
His hair was dark, ruffled as if he hadn’t combed it in the last day, and his eyes were a startling blue.
“Hello,” she croaked.
He smiled, his grave expression surrendering to a warm flicker. “Detective Engle, I’m told.”
“Yes.”
“I’m FBI Special Agent Nolan Cantrell. I’m here ahead of the hordes that will probably follow me.”
She looked at him in perplexity. “Hordes?”
“Someone tried to kill a judge in the courthouse with a bomb. That tends to get the attention of federal agencies. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has a team of experts on the way, but they’re coming from Southern California, so we won’t see them until tomorrow.”
“Oh.” This was a big deal. If she’d had time to think about it, she’d have known this wasn’t an investigation to be left in the hands of a smallish city police department. “You’re from the Seattle office?”
“I am, although I was heading toward Stevens Pass after a visit with family in Moses Lake. When I reached Everett, I turned north on I-5 instead of south.”
“Have you…been to the courthouse?”
“No, we have it roped off until the NRT—the rapid-response team—gets here. They’ll be hunting for every shred that will tell them what they need to know about the bomb.
How skilled was the bomber? Did he have experience, or was this a crude first attempt that surprised even him by working?
” Special Agent Cantrell said. “The judge ran out after the bomb went off, but he was focused on you and getting medics there. I gather he saw light flash beyond his office door and heard the boom, but he didn’t actually see the detonation. ”
“Oh. I wish I hadn’t.”
“You mind if I pull up a chair?”
So this wasn’t going to be a fleeting visit. Roanne felt something that surprised her: relief because she mostly could hand this over to him.
“Of course not.”
The chair scraped across the vinyl floor. He settled his long body into it, bringing that intent gaze to a level that required her to turn her head slightly.
“Do you know anything about IEDs?” she asked.
“As it happens, I do.” He hesitated. “I was a bomb-disposal expert in the army. I’ve only had a few occasions to deal with bombers since, though.”
She would have nodded, except that wouldn’t be a good idea. “What can I tell you?”
Predictably, he wanted to know what had caught her attention about that particular package and if anyone had threatened the judge.
“No one that I know of,” she responded. “Honestly, I was trying to dodge him and use the restroom down the hall, but he heard me. He’s a good friend of my father’s. I’ve known Judge Anderson my entire life.”
Nobody had ever looked at her with such intensity. He hardly blinked as he waited.
So she tried to put into words what hadn’t exactly been a reasoned suspicion and clear-headed decision.
“He wasn’t paying any attention, just slitting his mail open while he talked to me.
The package just looked wrong. Poorly wrapped, strange big block letters addressing it, and…
I can’t swear to this, but I thought I saw the end of a wire under the clear packing tape.
I think it was that. It would have been embarrassing if it was a gift, but—”
“Sometimes you can’t afford to pause. At worst, you’d have broken a nice mug somebody bought him.”
“It didn’t seem…quite big enough to have a mug in it, but…you’re right, of course.”
“Could you tell if it came through the US Postal Service?”
She stared at him, thinking. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. That may have also been part of what set me off. How did it get in the pile of legitimate mail?”
“That,” he said, “is an excellent question, Detective. One we’ll be asking.”
Copyright ? 2025 by Janice Kay Johnson