Page 20 of His Forgotten Colton Fiancee

“Brand!”

He turned at the sound of Finn Colton’s voice. The chief looked at the departing ambulance, his expression grim.“What happened?”

West told him about finding Quinn, as others arrived and began to work the scene.

He knew cops, knew the tight brotherhood. Quinn had been injured—one of their own, family—and they were going to work this case hard.

West didn’t need to get insider information on the local cops to ascertain this. He knew human nature.

Finn gave him a hard look. “Brayden and Shaneare on their way to the hospital, and they’ll question Quinn if she wakes up. I need you to stay here, work the scene.”

West nodded, though he fought the instinctive need to rush to the hospital with the chief. He turned back to his truck to fetch his equipment.

No one knew what Quinn meant to him. They had kept their relationship secret on purpose. But right now, as he jogged back tohis truck, Rex at his side, he was the one who could openly claim her and join her brothers at the hospital.

* * *

Firefighters had quickly doused the flames and now the cops were working the scene. Someone had marked Tia’s body.

What was left of it.

He saw a high-heeled red shoe attached to a section of bloodied leg sticking out from beneath half a large-screen television. Highheels. Quinn had not worn high heels. Not during the day. At night she liked wearing them when they met in secret outside town. Dinner, a show, good times.

He liked her in high heels, and when she wore them to bed last week...

Was she okay?

Focus, Brand. Focus.

West dragged in a breath and studied the body with cool, professional detachment. Tia lay on her side. One of her armshad been torn off in the blast, and her torso was horribly mangled.

Burns covered her body and part of her head...

He looked at Tia’s head, noting the head injury and exposed brain matter with analytical coolness. If she had died before the explosion, the autopsy would confirm it.

“Find,” he ordered Rex, his death grip on the leash making his palm sweat through the latex gloves.

Rex combed through the building’s rubble to search for secondary devices. Nothing found. But near what had been Tia’s desk, West found pieces of the bomb, including the detonator.

Cell phone. Same kind of burner phone used in the first bombing.

Until the pieces were tested, he couldn’t be certain, but he suspected it was the same type of bomb that had gone off earlier in the abandoned building.The first bomb was a trial run, probably to see how much damage the unsub could inflict.

But something had gone wrong. The killer hadn’t known that Quinn delivered lunch here every day around noon. Nor had he anticipated the device wouldn’t totally destroy evidence.

Or had he? Quinn had told him that everyone knew her schedule—that every day she hand delivered lunch to Tia, one of herbest clients. Tia always ate at twelve thirty sharp. The woman ran a tight schedule.

He returned to his truck, fetched his equipment. With methodical care, he combed through the scene. Gray file cabinets were dented, some of their contents blown out. The computer was in shards, but if Tia backed her files up to a cloud, they could access them.

Maybe one of her clients had a grudge. Damn,it was better than thinking someone had it in for Quinn, or wanted to cause more than one injury.

In the rubble, he found the thin stump of a cigar. West bagged and tagged the evidence. Tia smoked. A fact Quinn relayed to him previously, her pert nose wrinkling in disgust. Tia even liked to light up Cubans after hours. But everything had to be looked over.

Something glinted among the rubblein a shaft of late-afternoon sunshine.

West crouched down and studied the fragment. The edge of a key chain, rounded, with the etching of a pine cone. He could just make out part of an address.

#5 Pine P.