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speed. “This is about twenty minutes after she entered the building,” Clint said.
    James leaned down so he could see more clearly, clenching his jaw when a furtive figure emerged from the darkness and headed toward Mandy’s car. He watched as the shadow dropped to its knees and pushed an object under the driver’s side seat beneath the carriage of the vehicle. After a few minutes, the figure – completely shrouded in black, including a knit mask covering everything but its eyes – glanced around the parking lot before leaving in the direction of the adjacent ghetto.
    “Someone planted a bomb,” James said grimly.
    “Yeah,” Clint said. “We’re going to send the footage to the state lab to see if they can enhance it. I thought you would want to see it first.”
    James slapped Clint on the back. “Thank you for showing me this.”
    “You’ve kept her safe before,” Clint said. “I’m hoping you can do it again.”
    “I will do it again,” James promised. “Before you send it to the state boys, can you make sure we get a copy at the office?”
    He was expecting Clint to balk. Instead, the security guard merely nodded. “Absolutely.”

Five
    “Someone tried to kill her.”
    James had managed to contain his rage long enough for the Hardy brothers to make it to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. He was inconsolable now.
    “It looks like it,” Finn said, not bothering to attempt a lame lie. “I have trouble believing someone picked her car out at random.”
    James ran a hand through his unwashed hair, leaving it in a haphazard mess when his fingers retreated. “This is my fault.”
    “How do you figure?” Grady challenged.
    “She drove her car because I was being an ass,” James said. “We would have been together if I had just gone with her like she wanted.”
    “How do you know that someone just wouldn’t have planted a bomb under your Explorer and killed you both?” Grady asked.
    James faltered. “I don’t.”
    “We need more information,” Finn said. “We need specifics on the bomb. We need to know if it was set on a timer, which doesn’t seem very likely right now since you two left early, or we need to know if someone triggered it remotely.”
    The tension in James’ shoulders amplified, pressing inward. “You think someone was watching her?”
    “I think that someone made a decision,” Finn said carefully. “They decided to press the trigger when they realized Mandy wasn’t getting into her car. You said you called her over and she was going to ride with you. If she’d driven that car home, she surely would have died.”
    “But … .”
    “But nothing,” Grady said. “Finn is right. The odds are that someone planted the bomb and then watched. Whoever it was didn’t expect Mandy to have another ride home. If you’d arrived together, you would have died together.
    “However misguided your fight with Mandy was, maybe it happened for a reason,” Grady continued. “That fight essentially saved her life.”
    James pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand who would target her. Her only enemy was Troy, and that idiot is dead.”
    “We have to approach this in the same way we did the initial stalking,” Finn said. “It could be someone from the courthouse.”
    “We can’t be a hundred-percent sure she was specifically targeted either,” Grady added. “While I think it’s unlikely it was random, it’s still a possibility.”
    James didn’t like either scenario. “The only thing we have going for us is that she’s going to be relegated to the apartment for the next two weeks,” James said. “She’s going to have to recover. It’s going to be easy at first. She’s not going to have the energy to leave.”
    “What are you going to tell her?” Finn asked.
    “The truth,” James said. “I’m not going to start lying to her now. If I explain how dangerous things are, then she’s more likely to agree to house arrest.”
    “That doesn’t