At Close Range (2 page)

Maybe they just hated her guts. Hell, who knew?

“Who cares?” she said aloud, and the words echoed in the dreary hallway. The walls were faintly gray, as though the white paint had given up all hope of brightness, and the carpet smelled musty with years of melted snow, rock salt and other things she probably didn’t want to think about. The elevator was posted with an “Out of Order” sign that was furred with dust.

“Nice place,” she murmured. “Wonder if they’ve got vacancies.”

Well, odds were they would have one soon. The chief’s message had said it was a single corpse, male, presumed murdered.

The word brought a shiver to the back of Cassie’s neck as she climbed the stairs to the third floor. Her imagination played tricks on her, creating the ghosts of other footfalls as though her normal partners flanked her. But Alissa was away with Tucker on very unofficial business rumored to involve a topless beach and mai tais, and Maya Cooper was off at a conference, leaving Cassie to man the crime lab alone.

That was okay. Being alone was far better than being with the wrong partner, which is what she would have gotten if she’d asked the chief for help.

Hell, look what she’d gotten during the Canyon kidnapping case, when she’d been forced to accept “help” she hadn’t needed or wanted.

A faint wash of anger swept away the hallway ghosts as Cassie paused at a doorway marked with police tape. She was faintly surprised that the chief hadn’t left someone at the door. Technically, he should have. But maybe it was a sign that the other cops were finally believing it when she said, “stay the hell out of my crime scene unless you have a damn good reason to be there,” or “touch that and I’ll break your fingers.”

Alissa and Maya were always telling her to be nicer to their new coworkers, but Cassie didn’t see the point. Who cared whether the other cops liked her or not?

She wasn’t in the job to make friends.

She was in it to do the job.

Thinking it was time to do just that, she paused for a moment to cover her shoes in a pair of oh-so-sexy paper booties she pulled from her evidence kit. She drew on powder-free gloves, snapped the lid on her kit—an orange plastic toolbox containing the basics of her trade—and breathed deeply, steeling herself for the first sight of death.

She hadn’t been raised around police work. Hell, she’d started life as a chemist, and found her way into forensics after some emotional bumps and bruises. She loved the challenges of her job, the opportunity to fight for justice.

But God, she hated dead bodies.

She was always struck by the fundamental wrongness of a corpse, by the way her mind tried to animate the features, tried to imagine the person still breathing and moving around. No matter how many crime scenes she worked, that first moment of shock was always the same.

But the weakness was her secret. Nobody knew about it, not even Alissa and Maya.

She took another breath, told herself not to be a weenie, and then twisted the knob, opened the door and stepped inside, all in one smooth motion that didn’t allow her any time to cut and run. Surprise stopped her just inside the door.

There was a man in the room, and he wasn’t dead.

An impossibly large figure crouched beside a sofa bed. His wide shoulders and thick muscular legs were outlined in the dim light that filtered through a set of cheap curtains.

Between one heartbeat and the next, training kicked in. Cassie drew the weapon tucked at the small of her back and leveled it at the intruder. “Freeze! Police!”

The moment hung in the balance of friend or foe, safe or unsafe. Adrenaline was a quick shot of fight or flight, along with the knowledge that even at five-foot-ten and a hundred-thirty pounds, she was puny in comparison to this guy.

Then he turned his face into a strip of filtered light and her stomach dropped to her toes.

She jammed her weapon back in its holster. “Damn it, Varitek! What are you doing in my crime scene?”

The light from the window shadowed the FBI evidence specialist’s rough-hewn features, turning his aquiline nose into a study of light and dark against the flat blades of his cheeks and the strong line of his jaw. His hair was black and buzzed, doing nothing to soften the rough edges. His eyes—pale green at the center and darker at the edges, surrounded by long, black lashes—softened the sum total of his features, but did nothing to blunt the annoyance on his face.

“Still territorial as a pit bull, I see, Officer Dumont.” His voice was as dark as his looks, deep, rough and no-nonsense. He glanced up at her. “Your chief called and I happened to be in the area. You got a problem with that?”

Cassie nearly bared her teeth. Hell, yes, she had a problem. The BCCPD had its own forensics department now—there was no reason for the chief to call federal help before she was even on scene.

Not unless he thought she couldn’t handle things on her own. The frustration rose to clog her throat. She’d been trying to fit in, trying to make a place for herself in the Bear Claw force by proving that she was good enough and smart enough to be one of them.

So far she hadn’t made much progress, as shown by Exhibit A, who rocked back on his heels, waiting for her response.

She set her teeth. “No. I don’t have a problem with you.”

Varitek raised one dark eyebrow, but let the lie pass. He inclined his head toward the back wall of the single-room apartment. “What do you think?”

Until that moment, she had managed not to look at the body, had managed to block the smell of blood from her nostrils and the aura of death from her consciousness.

But now she swallowed and focused on the corpse.

The young man was posed naked on a pullout sofa bed, propped up against the cushioned backrest with his legs spread-eagled beneath a white bedsheet. His arms were stretched out and his head was tipped back as though he were napping, but his chest didn’t rise and fall. He was utterly still, his skin cast with a waxy, bluish sheen.

The faint burn of ligature marks at the base of his throat spoke of murder, the pose suggested a ritual. A symbol. But of what?

She glanced over at the FBI specialist. “Why did the chief call you in?” Why didn’t he wait for me to run the scene?

Varitek rose to his feet in one powerful movement, more graceful than his bulk suggested. He topped her by a good six inches and seventy pounds or so, and she was acutely conscious of the solidity and warmth that radiated from his body. He wasn’t traditionally handsome—his features were too strong for that—but when they had worked the Canyon kidnappings, attraction had flared between them, unwanted and unacknowledged.

The physical awareness hadn’t faded with time apart, Cassie realized with sudden electric shock. If anything, it had gotten worse.

Unsettled, she nearly stepped back, but that would be retreating, so she held her ground and looked up at him, waiting for an answer.

He gestured to the body. “Look at his hands.”

The young man’s right hand was intact, draped halfway off the sofa bed backrest.

But his left hand—

“Oh, hell,” Cassie breathed on a wash of shock. “The tip of his index finger is missing.” She glanced at Varitek. “The chief thinks it’s linked to the skeleton we found in the state park, doesn’t he?”

During the Canyon kidnappings, the perp had booby-trapped a side crevice of Bear Claw Canyon and set bait for the cops. The explosion and collapse had almost killed Alissa. She had lived, but the rescuers had uncovered an older grave when they dug her out.

The skeleton had been recovered intact save for two missing bones—the skull and the first bone of one index finger were unavailable. The skull had been destroyed when the kidnapper bombed the forensics department, wiping out their new equipment and most of their bona fides within the P.D., and the finger bone had never been recovered. They assumed it had disappeared from the grave, lost to scavengers or spring runoff.

What if it had been taken instead?

Varitek said, “It’s a possibility, especially given the suspicions that Croft might not have worked alone.” He glanced at the body, then back to her. “Has your department made any progress on identifying the remains from the canyon?”

Cassie stiffened. “We’re working on it.”

Truthfully, they’d been swamped by other cases. With Bradford Croft dead and the kidnapped girls home safe, identifying the skeleton had dropped on the priority list.

Without the skull, all they had to go on was the approximate age, sex and height of the skeleton—late teens, female, around five-six—and the fact that the bones had been in the ground for a decade, give or take. Feeling a sense of empathy for the girl, Cassie had run the database searches and had come up with a handful of missing-person reports in and around Bear Claw during that time period. None of them had panned out, meaning that the next step was to expand the search statewide. That’d give her a couple of hundred names, most of which—if not all—

would be dead ends.

With her current caseload, Alissa’s vacation and Maya’s conference, Cassie hadn’t found the time.

No, she corrected herself with brutal honesty. She hadn’t made the time. So she squared her shoulders and said, “I ruled out some local missing person reports, but haven’t taken it any further than that. My bad.”

But Varitek didn’t respond to the apology. His attention was fixed on the severed index finger. Cassie saw that a thin trail of blood had leaked onto the upholstery beneath, but the larger wound area was sealed over.

“Looks like it was cauterized premortem,” Varitek said, so quietly he was nearly speaking to himself. “Souvenir, maybe?”

Disgust and a low-level horror twisted in her gut. Every now and then during the course of her work it hit her. This was real. It wasn’t a movie set or a scene playing out on TV. The body belonged to a real person. Someone’s son. Maybe someone’s lover.

Cassie swallowed a quick bubble of nausea, while a fragment of a half remembered conversation surfaced in her brain. Face it, you’re not tough enough to hack it in the field, Lee Adams had said. You’re a chemist, not a cop.

Lee had been five years older than she, an instructor at the master’s level forensics program she’d attended outside of Chicago. He’d been handsome and a little bit mysterious, and for a while, she’d bought into everything he said. Years later, some of his comments still snuck up on her when she least expected it.

Like now.

She set her teeth, swallowed the weakness and forced herself to think about the corpse at its most basic—as a piece of evidence in a case they’d thought was closed.

“If this body is connected to the skeleton in the canyon, then Alissa was right. She did hear someone else when Croft was holding her captive. There was another man.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Varitek stepped back so they were shoulder-to-shoulder, staring down at the body. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

She felt the warmth of him and wished she didn’t notice such things. He was attractive, yes, but he already had three strikes against him in her book. He was in law enforcement. He was controlling. And he was impossible to get along with. The first was a fact. The other points she’d discovered months earlier, when she’d been forced to let him into the kidnapping case and he’d taken over, brought in his own people and shoved her to the edges of the investigation, claiming she’d be safer there.

Well forget him. She wasn’t looking to stay safe at the expense of the job.

She scowled. “I’m not jumping to conclusions, I’m using my version of the razor theorem—the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. We’ve got a body tied to a crime scene from the kidnappings. The kidnapper is dead, so we know he didn’t kill this guy. Other lines of evidence have already suggested Croft had an accomplice. Ergo, we’re looking at a partner.”

“We’re not looking at anything but the evidence,” Varitek said bluntly. He turned away and reached for his bigger, meaner-looking crime-scene kit, which Cassie knew from experience contained everything hers did, and then some. He said, “Let’s get to work. The sooner we release the body to the ME, the better. We’re going to need a cause of death, time of death, ID…anything we can get. The chief said that based on our findings, he’ll decide whether to recall the task force.”

And that quickly, that easily, he took over her crime scene.

Again.

Cassie fisted her hands at her sides, so tightly that her blunt nails dug into her palms. She thought about going for her weapon. Instead, she said, “Agent Varitek?”

He didn’t even turn around when he answered, “Technically, it’s Special Agent.”

“Yeah, you’re special all right,” she muttered loud enough that he could damn well hear. Then she raised her voice, but fought to keep it level. Businesslike. “Until the task force has been officially reopened and your assistance has been requested by the proper channels, I consider this my crime scene. I’d like you out of it.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” he said, and his voice held a thread of something she couldn’t quite interpret. He glanced back at her, pale green eyes unreadable. “Your boss called my boss—that’s proper channels. You don’t like me being here? Take it up with the chief. If you’re not going to do that, then suit up.

We’ve got a scene to work.”

FOUR HOURS LATER, with the body long gone and the empty, dismal-feeling room nearly processed, Seth straightened to his full height and stretched, groaning when his joints popped in protest. His knees still ached from time to time, a legacy of his younger days when he’d gone from catcher’s mitt to goalie’s mask and back again, depending on the season. Not quite good enough to go pro as either, he’d slid sideways into law and then law enforcement, gotten married and then—