Christmas at Timberwoods - Fern Michaels [17]
“Sit down, Heather. Take it easy. It isn’t as bad as you think.” Lex’s protective instincts kicked in. He put his arm around her and led her to a comfortable chair.
“The hell it isn’t! Oh, why should I care, anyway?” She sat down and buried her face in her hands. “If I get fired, I can collect unemployment—but—Felex, I should have written out that report. Not just for Harold. For Eric and the rest of those poor people who are wasting their energy trying to track down a bomb and find the person who made the threat. I have a very good idea who it is.”
“Maybe. And maybe not,” Felex emphasized. “You only know what the girl told you and you said yourself she wasn’t very specific.”
Heather squeezed her shaking hands together to control her nervousness. “I’ve been through this before, remember? I know what goes into checking out these threats. From what I hear, this one is different.”
“Right,” Lex encouraged. “I didn’t come forward with what little I knew about Angela because I thought it was your place. Secondly, things just don’t fit. The note says seventy-two hours, but Angela was asking questions about the peak of holiday shopping. If it was Angela who sent the threat, wouldn’t she have offered details to back up her story to you about her visions?”
“Who the hell knows? Crazy people don’t think rationally.”
“Do you think she’s crazy?”
“No,” Heather said slowly. “I didn’t then, and I still don’t. Maybe troubled is a better word, really troubled. I don’t know exactly what I saw in her eyes. Nothing you could put into an official memo. But it was still my decision to keep it to myself.”
“You shared it with me, right?”
“That’s not going to get me any points with upper level management.”
“Look, we’ll square it with Eric Summers. Okay? I’ll have him come up here and we can both talk to him.”
Heather managed a grateful smile and touched his hand. “Yes, Lex. Please.”
Eric Summers brought the walkie-talkie to his lips and spoke softly. “Summers here. Give me the head count.”
“Are you ready?” a voice asked. “We’re up to 276,543. Alderman’s has a two-day sale going on. This mall is jammed. You can’t move. But no mad bombers. So far.”
“They don’t wear identifying T-shirts,” Eric snapped.
“Roger that. We did nab four pickpockets. They’re on the way back to the chief’s office right now.”
“Are you sure of the count?” Eric asked sharply, getting back to the original topic of conversation.
“Positive. I double-checked it and Manners verified it. Wait till Monday. I just saw the flyer for Skyer’s. They’re having the same sort of sale, and you know what happens when Skyer’s says ‘half price.’ ”
Eric quickly calculated the timing of the sale with the seventy-two-hour deadline of the bomb threat. He shivered. Only a lunatic would conceive of destroying a complex like Timberwoods Mall, he acknowledged. It was a monument to human construction skills. Millions of square feet of shops, food stands, indoor waterfalls, living trees, and exotic plants. There was a Japanese lotus garden with a fishpond, a German beer garden, a Parisian bonbon shop, an Italian villa—all of it sheltered beneath a single gigantic roof. Movie houses, restaurants, and auditoriums, housed within a climatically controlled atmosphere. It was spring all year round in here. People came from around the state and beyond to shop at the famous Timberwoods Mall.
A lot of lives were at stake.
The beep of the walkie-talkie interrupted Summers’s horrified thoughts; he answered tersely. “Summers.”
“Conrad on the promenade. A-okay. Listen, Baumgarten just squawked my box and said he was pulling me off the upper level and assigning me to the Christmas parade on Friday. Thought you should know.”
“No problem. Out.”
Jesus, another problem. He’d totally forgotten about the parade. He counted on his fingers. Friday. Seventy-two hours away. He pressed a button on the gizmo and asked for last year’s attendance figures for the parade. “And give me the estimated head count during the Skyer’s half-price