Special Agent Mason Randolph barely nods at the observation—because he’d reached that same conclusion hours before he even stepped foot inside the bank.
He came to it before his team boarded the Bureau-owned Gulfstream bound for Plainview. Before he even took his cowboy-booted feet off his desk on the third floor of the FBI’s El Paso field office.
As he told his colleagues as they sped toward the local airfield, sirens blaring, Mason was aware they were dealing with some smart-as-hell bank robbers the moment he heard about the simultaneous bomb scare on the other side of the city.
But that didn’t worry him. In fact, he was looking forward to the challenge.
Mason had built his meteoric eighteen-year career at the FBI by cracking the Southwest’s toughest cases. Serial killers. Kidnappings. Drug trafficking. Human trafficking. Both bank robberies and potential terrorist threats—though never a deliberately fake one, and never together in the same case.
Mason knew the region better than anybody in the Bureau. The land, the people, the culture, the criminals. And he knew how to use all that to his advantage.
He also knew just how much he’d sacrificed throughout his life to get where he was today. At forty-one, tall and handsome, with a full head of thick, wavy brown hair, he’d had plenty of girlfriends, but none of them turned into a wife.
He’d had plenty of “kids,” too—crime victims, that is. Countless innocent people, both living and dead, toward whom he’d felt sympathetic, protective, almost fatherly.
It wasn’t the same as having a family of his own. Not even close. He knew that. But solving the trickiest crimes, putting away the worst of the worst—it was worth it to him. That’s just who Mason was.
Today’s bank robbery/bomb threat wasn’t going to be any different.
While their plane was cruising over the Texas desert, Mason and his team reviewed the facts.
Earlier that morning, a suspicious package was discovered outside the Hale County Courthouse. It turned out to be empty—except for a handful of Tannerite, a legal explosive used to make novelty exploding gun-range targets. But that was enough to get a state-police bomb-sniffing dog barking. The entire block was evacuated. Every cop, sheriff, and ranger in the county was tied up for hours.
Meanwhile, not two miles away, four armed men wearing gloves, hunting camo, and Halloween masks of four ex-presidents waltzed into a Key Bank and waltzed out with over eighty large. They disappeared into the scorching desert before the local dispatcher could find a free unit to respond.
Yep, these bad guys were smart.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Mason replies to Texas ranger John Kim, the FBI’s local case liaison, as both men step around the bank’s shattered glass entrance.
Born, raised, and employed in the Lone Star State his whole life, Mason has met thousands of Texas lawmen of every stripe. But a paunchy, bedraggled Korean American one with a drawl as thick as tar was a first.
“I think that’s your job, agent. You’re the boy wonder, from what I hear.”
Mason steps farther into the stiflingly hot lobby. The air-conditioning had been switched off to preserve possible evidence—which also preserves the triple-digit heat.
The agent doesn’t want to spend more than two, maybe three uncomfortable minutes inside, tops.
But that’s all he needs.
He scans the crime scene with squinted blue eyes. He notices two spent shotgun shells and two clusters of buckshot. Some are embedded in the ceiling tile, others near a splotch of dried blood on the marble floor.
“I’d normally suggest sending those shots to the lab,” Kim says, “but why waste the taxpayers’ money?”
Mason knows what the ranger’s getting at. The inside of a shotgun is smoothbore. Unlike with a bullet, running ballistics on recovered buckshot or casings is almost always a total wash.
But Special Agent Mason Randolph cuts no corners, spares no expense.
“I wish I had superpowers like you, ranger,” Mason says, rolling his eyes. “You can tell just from looking, we won’t be able to pull any prints, any fibers, any DNA. Should we bother running tests on that dummy bomb by the courthouse?”
Kim sucks his teeth. Doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm. Doesn’t like being called out for an oversight, either.
“I heard you watched the security tapes,” Kim says. “In that case, it almost wasn’t worth y’all making the trip. Get anything on the suspects besides their heights and builds?”