My Secret Valentine

“They’re on their way.” Shaking as badly as her daughter, Fiona joined them. “Katy, baby, come to Mama. Let me look at you. Let me see… Oh, God, Justin, she’s bleeding.”

He’d seen the blood before she plastered herself to him, but not where it was coming from. Her hands, most likely, since her digging had apparently triggered the blast, and her face. God, he hoped she hadn’t lost any fingers! He’d seen it before with blasting caps, and experience suggested that was what she’d unearthed.

With Fiona’s help, he gently forced Katy’s hands from around his neck. Though her hands were, in fact, the source of at least some of the blood, he counted all ten fingers and gave a quick prayer of thanks. In the seconds before the still-wailing girl grabbed hold of her mother, he saw cuts on her hands and face, none that looked serious.

“It’s okay, baby,” Fiona crooned, holding her daughter tightly and rocking her side to side. “Everything’s going to be all right. Don’t cry, baby doll.” Sparing a steely glance for him, she asked, “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know—a blasting cap, I think. I’ll find out.” But instead of heading outside, he went down the hall to the front door, reaching it just as an ambulance screeched to a stop at the curb. Two police cars were only seconds behind. He unlocked the door and left it standing open, then returned to the backyard. He was kneeling beside the hole in the ground when the two cops joined him.

“What happened here?” the taller of the two asked.

Justin automatically reached for his credentials, then realized they were locked in his bag in Golda’s guest room, along with his weapon. Getting to his feet, he offered his hand. “Justin Reed, ATF.”

“Colton Stuart, chief of police. You’re Golda’s nephew. I’m sorry about her death. We’ll miss her a lot.”

Justin nodded in acknowledgment.

“What happened?”

“The little girl was digging in the yard when she hit something.” He gestured to the hole. “It’s an old ammo can. I’d guess it had at least two blasting caps inside, maybe more. They must have been pretty unstable. When she hit the can with her shovel, they went off.” He glanced back at the house. “Is she okay?”

“She seems to be, except for getting the scare of her life.” Stuart combed his fingers through his hair. “Couldn’t ask for better luck than to have an ATF agent next door when something like this happens. Do you happen to work on the explosives side of the house?”

Justin nodded.

“You have any suggestions on how to proceed?”

“You have a camera I can use? And an evidence form?”

Stuart gestured to the officer with him, who immediately left.

Once more Justin knelt a few feet away from the hole. There were bits of shrapnel on the ground—probably the cause of Katy’s cuts—as well as pieces of twisted metal. The blast had been powerful enough to raise the lid on the steel can a few inches, until its hinge caught, but fortunately the can had contained much of it. If not… As close as she’d been, Katy could have suffered some damned serious injuries.

“Any ideas how the can got here?” Stuart asked, crouching on the opposite side.

Justin gave the area a critical look. “This used to slope down, and there was an alley separating these houses from those.” He nodded toward the houses on the back side of the block. Come to think of it, Golda’s yard had had the same slope. She’d complained that run-off from rain and snow created problems with erosion and kept her yard from being perfect. “You have any idea when it was filled in, by who and why?” The box could have been buried elsewhere, dug up and hauled in here. If it had been a few years, the caps wouldn’t have been so unstable then. It was possible they could have survived the move, possible the can could have gone unnoticed with a ton or two of topsoil.

“Three years ago,” Stuart replied. “The area had some major mudslides, and this was one of them. The city hauled out what it could and spread the rest around.”

Justin looked up at the mountains that rose around the city. The ammo can could have been buried anywhere from the next block to the tops of any of a half-dozen peaks miles away. Finding its original resting place and the person who’d put it there would be tougher than identifying a single grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean.

The young cop returned with the equipment Justin had requested. “Chief, the paramedics want to know if they can go ahead and take Katy and her mom to the hospital.”

“Sure. We’ll talk to her later, after she’s been checked out by the doctors and calmed down. Poor kid. She’ll never enjoy the Fourth of July after this.”

As Justin set up the thirty-five-millimeter camera, he casually asked, “You know Katy and her mother?”

“Sure. We just live a couple blocks away. We go to the same church, and our kids go to the same day care. Fiona watches our son, Martin, from time to time, and we keep Katy sometimes. Martin thinks of Katy as the big sister he never had. She thinks of him as a baby doll that won’t stay put when she’s tired of him.”

Smiling faintly, Justin snapped a few shots of the area, followed by several of the can still in the hole. Laying the camera aside, he lifted it out, then opened the lid. “Holy…”

“What is it?” Stuart looked over his shoulder but didn’t seem impressed. And why should he be? He’d never seen the carved wooden boxes before. He’d probably never heard of John Blandings, who’d celebrated his fifth wedding anniversary by giving his wife Anita an exquisite, one-of-a-kind, damn near priceless necklace and bracelet, each in its own hand-carved, ivory-inlaid wooden box. He’d probably never heard of Patrick Watkins, either, who’d relieved Mrs. Blandings of her jewels and, on his way out, left the garage in shambles with two well-placed explosives.

Quickly, Justin took several more pictures, then laid the camera aside and reached for one of the boxes. The lid was damaged, with flash burns and shrapnel embedded in its surface, but the gems inside…

All the Reed women—except Golda—loved flashy jewelry. They’d never seen a necklace too gaudy, a ring too ostentatious or a stone too big. Even so, not one of them had a piece that could compare to this. The emeralds were top quality, rich, deep, dark, damn near glowing inside, and the diamonds were as good or better. He’d estimate the smallest stone at three or four carats, the largest probably three times that.

Stuart gave a long, low whistle. “That must be worth—”

“One point two million. The matching bracelet—” Justin pointed to the other box “—is another half mil. It was stolen from a couple in the D.C. area four years ago. The thief slipped right through their elaborate security system, pocketed these and left another couple million dollars worth of jewels in the safe. Presumably they didn’t meet his standards.”

“And you know this because…?”

“To ensure that his cleverness didn’t go unnoticed, as he was leaving, he blew up their garage. Did close to a million dollars damage there, including the Rolls, the Ferrari and the limo that went up with it.” Justin shook his head wonderingly. “I’ve been after this guy for eight years. These were his fourteenth robbery and bombing. We’re up to twenty-four now. I cannot believe he’s been in Grand Springs.”

Quickly he checked the other wooden box, then the velvet boxes underneath. He recognized every piece—knew who it had been stolen from, how much it was worth and what kind of blast had accompanied the theft. For years, he—and the owners, the insurance companies and other law enforcement agencies involved in the cases—had wondered what Watkins had done with the gems. Very few had been recovered, apparently fenced when he needed money, but the really exquisite pieces had never shown up on any market. Everyone had had their theories, but no one had ever suspected they were buried in an ammo can somewhere in the Colorado Rockies.

An ammo can containing blasting caps that had been guaranteed to become unstable and go off at the slightest disturbance—or, hell, no disturbance at all. Static electricity in the air could have caused them to detonate, and the damage could have been much worse than a petrified kid.

Though that was bad enough, he thought grimly, hearing in his mind Katy’s hysterical tears and the panic in Fiona’s voice. It was past time to put a stop to Patrick Watkins’s games.

And he had a pretty good idea how to do it.

Fiona stood beside Katy’s hospital bed, watching her daughter sleep, thanks to the sedative they’d given her. Her injuries had been relatively minor—cuts on both hands and her face from flying shrapnel, a few bruises from both shrapnel and small rocks blasted loose by the explosion. She’d been incredibly fortunate, the ER doctor had stressed, and Fiona had given thanks for it repeatedly.

Now that she knew Katy was safe, she was feeling the aftereffects of the day’s emotional overload. The temptation to lower the side rail, crawl into bed with Katy and fall asleep holding her tight was strong, but she remained where she was, watching her, savoring the mere sight of her.

When the door opened, she didn’t look up. Her parents had spent several hours at the hospital, as well as her sisters and several of her friends, and the hospital staff had been in and out. Whoever it was could take care of business, then leave them alone. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want food, didn’t want anything but to watch her daughter and make sure she remained safe.

The visitor stopped just inside the door. Fiona had pulled the shades to block the afternoon sun and turned off all but one dim light over the bed, so he stood in shadow, but she knew who it was. “She’s asleep,” she said quietly. “You won’t wake her.”

Justin came forward until he stood opposite her. “How is she?”

“Just bumped and bruised.” That was Katy’s favorite description for all the little injuries she suffered in her tomboy play. Smiling at the memory of the phrase in her little girl’s voice, Fiona rubbed her arm, found it cool to the touch and gently tucked it under the sheet. “They had to put a few stitches in the worst cuts on her face, but she’ll be fine. They’ll hardly even leave a scar.”

“How long are they keeping her?”

“Just until tomorrow. Her injuries are minor, but she was so upset…”

“She’s lucky.”

“I know.” Fiona rested her arms on the rail and finally looked at him. He still wore jeans, but he’d changed from the shirt that had been splattered with their daughter’s blood. Now he wore a leather jacket open over a dark blue dress shirt that brought out the color of his eyes—of Katy’s eyes. He looked handsome, tired, serious—and just a bit excited. Because his uncomfortable duty trip to Colorado had turned into the work that meant so much to him?

Her resentment skyrocketed. Their daughter was lying sedated in a hospital bed, and he was happy to have a case to occupy his few remaining hours in town. But when she spoke, she kept the anger and shock out of her voice. “What happened? What exploded and how did it get in my yard?”

“It was an ammo can, a small steel case the military uses to store ammunition. Chief Stuart’s theory on how it got there is the mudslides a few years ago that leveled off your yard.”

Fiona was puzzled. “You mean, the military’s responsible for this?”