When the phone rang, FBI evidence specialist Seth Varitek
was sitting in his personal vehicle — a jade-green pickup
truck with flare sides and a top-notch sports package —
trying to figure out what the hell he was doing parked on
the side of the highway.
This was his first weekend off in nearly a month. He
should be at home, working on his long-delayed plans to
turn the studio into a gym, or kicking back with a beer
and a game or something. Instead, he'd found himself in
the truck, headed south toward the ski areas with no
intention of skiing.
He flipped open the ringing phone. "Varitek here."
"I've got a problem."
Seth instantly recognized the caller's gruff voice. Chief
Parry ran the police department in Bear Claw Creek, a
smallish city south of Denver, Colorado. The middle-aged
man was as sturdy as a bulldog and twice as tenacious, and
Seth had learned to respect him during the Canyon
kidnapping case earlier in the year. "What kind of a
problem, Chief?" Even as he asked the question, Seth
glanced overhead and appreciated the irony that he was
parked beneath the "Welcome to Bear Claw" sign.
Damned if he knew what had drawn him back to the city two
months after the kidnappings had been solved.
No, that wasn't true. He knew exactly what had drawn him,
or more precisely who. A quick image of a long-legged
blonde snapped into his head. She was all sharp angles and
prickly attitude, which was just as well. He wasn't in the
market for...well, for anything that was leggy, blond and
irritating, that was for sure.
Which still didn't explain what he was doing in her
hometown.
"I've got a murder," the chief answered. "I want your
opinion on it before I reactivate the task force."
The words wiped all other thoughts out of Seth's brain and
brought him upright in his seat.
When three teenage girls had been kidnapped earlier in the
year, Chief Parry had set up a task force made up of his
best officers, ranging from old-school homicide detectives
to the three female techno-jockeys of the new Bear Claw
Creek Forensics Department — BCCFD. Three weeks into the
investigation, they'd asked the FBI for help and had
gotten Seth's coworker out of the Denver office, Lionel
Trouper.
When a series of attacks made it clear that the perp had
targeted one of the forensic investigators —
reconstruction and scene expert Alissa Wyatt — Trouper had
called Seth to be a second set of eyes on the gathering
forensic evidence.
The Bear Claw Crime Lab's in-house evidence specialist,
Cassie Dumont, had taken it badly, but despite the
friction — or maybe because of it — the task force had
managed to find the girls, identify the kidnapper and
close the case.
Or so they had thought.
Sharp interest quivered through Seth's body. "You think
it's connected? How? Bradford Croft is dead."
"True," the chief answered, "but remember how he talked
about 'the plan," and how he didn't fit all of the
evidence? We've kept an eye out, just in case there was a
partner." Parry's voice dropped. "I'm afraid this might be
proof positive. When can you get here? I've already
cleared it with Trouper."
Seth glanced at the sign overhead. "As chance would have
it, I'm about five minutes from the station house. I
was..." He shook his head. "Never mind. I'll see you soon."
WHEN SHE REACHED her crime scene, Cassie Dumont paused on
the sidewalk and scanned the area, trying to get a feel
for the neighborhood and the people.
The actual scene was inside a dingy apartment building,
one of many built in the late seventies to handle the
influx when the skiers discovered Bear Claw. The rear
parking lot was peppered with older trucks and SUV's, most
boasting four-wheel drive, a requirement for spring in
Colorado. Closer to the back entrance, a pair of BCCPD
vehicles and a couple of uniformed officers blocked the
growing crowd.
Knowing the crowd would only get worse, Cassie pushed her
way through and nodded at the uniforms. "Dumont. Crime
scene."
The grim-faced men let her through, but they didn't say
anything, didn't give her an update on the situation or
a "hey, how's it going?"
Their silence didn't bother her. She told herself she was
used to it as she entered the dingy building.
The Bear Claw P.D. had mourned the abrupt retirement of
their former evidence wizard, Fitzroy O'Malley, and they'd
made life hell for the three women hired to replace him —
scene specialist Alissa Wyatt, psych specialist Maya
Cooper and Cassie, who worked the lab and the evidence.
Over the six months the women had been in Bear Claw, the
other cops had softened toward Alissa, partly because
she'd made nice, and partly because she'd hooked up with
Tucker McDermott, a renegade homicide detective who seemed
to have gotten partway domesticated in the past few
months. But if the Bear Claw cops liked Alissa and
tolerated quiet, reserved Maya because she did her work
and didn't cause a stir, they had no such feelings of
amnesty for Cassie.
They plain didn't like her. Maybe it was because she
wasn't the sort to play nice, or because she'd shredded
all of Fitz's evidence report forms — which had to be
twenty years old if they were a day — and computerized the
filing system. Maybe it was because she bawled out anyone
who messed with her evidence, from senior detectives down
to the greenest rookie. Maybe the other cops feared
change. 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.