At Close Range

by Jessica Andersen

  So finally, though she wished there was another option, she nodded. “Deal.”

  They didn’t shake on the agreement. She told herself it was because they didn’t need to, that their words were good enough. But deep down inside, she knew why she didn’t offer to shake his hand.

  She didn’t want to know what it would feel like to touch him. Rather, she wanted it too much, and physical attraction had been her downfall once before.

  She wouldn’t let that happen again.

  Chapter Three

  The next morning dawned a balmy forty degrees, which was both good and bad news for Cassie and Seth, who had decided to reexcavate the canyon gravesite in search of additional clues. It was good news because the ground would soften up quickly.

  Bad news because it meant they would be working in mud.

  Knowing it, Seth skipped his usual slacks and button-down shirt and went with jeans and a sweatshirt. He kept a packed overnight bag in his truck, which saved him from having to hit the local mall. He armed himself with the backup weapons he kept in the truck’s locked console, and pulled out of the hotel parking lot feeling more centered than he had the previous day.

  He’d considered spending the night on Cassie’s couch, but she’d nixed the plan in no uncertain terms and he hadn’t pushed because he’d needed the time away from her, needed to decompress.

  He’d worked hard to deal with the memories and the guilt, yet a few old headlines on a Web search engine had slammed him right back to that place, breaching his defenses and sweeping him into the memories before he’d been prepared.

  Seth braked the truck beneath a red light, and scrubbed a hand across his face, though that did nothing to erase the image of a delicate, dark-skinned woman with a riot of curls and laughing brown eyes. Robyn. Sweet, big-hearted, impulsive Robyn.

  They had met in college and immediately embarked upon a tumultuous relationship.

  The sex had been fantastic, their friendship less so, but that hadn’t seemed to matter. They broke up, got back together, broke up again and got back together again just after Seth entered the FBI.

  That time it had stuck. They had married a year later, and if marriage hadn’t ended their problems, it had given them a moral and legal imperative to stick it out. Seth didn’t believe in divorce. Hell, his parents had been together going on forty years.

  They’d taught their children—Seth and his older sister, CeeCee—that marriage was a forever thing. Choose it once and don’t falter.

  Well, Seth had tried not to falter, but he had in the end.

  An annoyed horn blast warned him that the light had gone green, and Seth hit the gas, angry at himself for going down that mental path when he had more relevant things to worry about.

  Like catching a killer while protecting an evidence tech who didn’t want to be protected.

  He’d asked the chief to send patrols past Cassie’s house at intervals throughout the night. They hadn’t reported anything suspicious—Seth had checked—but he didn’t relax until he arrived at the neat, two-family house she’d sublet.

  She answered the door at his knock, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt akin to his, along with a battered-looking parka and lace-up boots with a sturdy tread. Her glossy blond hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail that accented the graceful sweep of her neck. His eyes locked onto the soft spot behind her ear, and the ragged frustrations of a long, sleepless night redirected themselves into an unfamiliar sizzle.

  An unexpected want.

  She glanced over at him and her brows drew together. “You ready?”

  That was the question, Seth realized. He was ready for the case, but not for her.

  He wasn’t ready for the way his blood kicked when he saw her, the way he seemed to have already memorized her features, and the way he noticed how she always took a deep breath before turning on the attitude, as though it wasn’t entirely natural for her.

  That was why he’d driven to Bear Claw in the first place, he finally acknowledged.

  To test himself. To tempt himself.

  When he and Cassie has worked together earlier in the year, sparks had flown as they’d clashed over everything from fingerprinting techniques to lunch orders. At first that had been a relief, because he’d promised himself that when it was time to date casually again, he’d choose women he got along with rather than the ones who stirred him up. But once he’d returned to Denver, he’d found himself thinking about her, wondering how she was doing and who she was doing it with.

  Bad sign.

  “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.” He stepped back from the door and gestured to his truck.

  The sooner they got digging, the sooner he could get back to Denver with his question answered. Maybe he was ready to emerge from the isolation of the past four years and date again. But there was no way he was ready—or willing—to date Cassie Dumont. He wanted a calm, mature friendship with a woman, something based in common ground this time, rather than attraction and excitement.

  The decision should have made him feel better as they walked to his truck in silence, then drove out to the state forest.

  So why was he more frustrated than ever?

  He didn’t have an answer for that as he turned his truck into the Bear Claw Canyon State Park, bypassed the parking area and followed a narrow track into the park, almost to the edge of Bear Claw Canyon.

  When they’d both climbed out of the truck and shouldered their equipment, Cassie glanced sideways at him. “You okay?”

  “I have a bad feeling about this case,” he said, not really answering the question.

  She bristled. “If you’d bothered to let me help before, you’d know that I’m damn good at my—”

  “I’m not talking about your work!” he snapped. “I’m talking about your truck brakes and the guy in the red hat, about the fact that you’re in—” He cut himself off, snapping his jaw shut on the words because he already knew they wouldn’t do any good. Cassie was on a mission to prove herself to the other cops, and there was no way in hell she was letting him win this argument.

  Just like Robyn and her damned art show.

  Cassie stepped closer, so close he could smell the faintest hint of woman over the earthy scent of the spring thaw. That fragrance tangled itself in his soul, where Robyn and Cassie had somehow gotten mixed up together. She said, “Look, Varitek.

  My mother died when I was a little girl, but I’ve never lost someone close to me as an adult. I won’t pretend to know how it feels. I can’t. But stop trying to put your past on me. I’m a cop. Either you find a way to treat me like one or this isn’t going to work.”

  “That’s—” ridiculous, he started to say, but couldn’t because they both knew she had a point. He wasn’t treating her like a cop. Hell, he wasn’t even treating her like the female agents and officers he dealt with on a daily basis. He was treating her like…what? A girlfriend? A lover?

  She was neither.

  So he inclined his head and stepped back, letting himself be the one to back down this time. “Fine. You’re a cop. Let’s dig.”

  THEY WORKED IN PARALLEL, setting up portable heaters to melt through what was left of the slushy spring freeze, and clearing away the mud layers they’d backfilled after the original excavation of the grave. There was no conversation, no banter between coworkers.

  At first, Cassie was grateful for the silence, which gave her time to settle down.

  After a while, she even admitted—to herself at least—that Varitek wasn’t the only one at fault. No matter what he said or did, her first response was to attack. Maya had commented on it during the earlier case, but Cassie had brushed it off as Maya being Maya. The psych specialist didn’t know when to turn it off and stop analyzing people.

  But now, soothed by the rhythm of digging, Cassie forced herself to take a good hard look at her behavior over the past day. Heck, the past six months, ever since the three women had moved to Bear Claw and set up the new department.

  The best def
ense is a good offense, her father always said. A man’s man, Cody Dumont had been far more comfortable with aphorisms and sports metaphors than one-on-one conversations. But was he right?

  Even Alissa had suggested she tone down the attitude, and that wasn’t Alissa’s style. As Cassie dug down to the farthest reaches of the original excavation and resieved the muddy slime for a bone or bullet fragment they might have missed, she wondered whether her friends had a point.

  It wasn’t Varitek’s fault she didn’t fit in. It was hers. Maybe Lee had been right, after all. Maybe she couldn’t cut it.

  At the thought, she heard the clatter of something distinctly unmudlike in her sieve. “Hey! I’ve got something!”

  Varitek was at her side in an instant. “Bone?”

  “No. Metal. Jewelry, maybe?” Professional excitement buzzed through her as she worked the object free of the clingy, frozen earth, careful to set aside the surrounding material for further analysis. “A ring, I think.”

  Sure enough, once she rinsed it in the bucket of water she’d set aside for the purpose, she caught the glint of yellow gold and the flash of a fat red stone.

  Varitek squinted at it. “A class ring, I think. Should be traceable.” He grinned at her and nodded. “Good work.”

  The two words shouldn’t have warmed her so thoroughly. She told herself it was professional pleasure that he’d credited her with the discovery, cop-to-cop.

  She almost believed it.

  She photographed, bagged and tagged the evidence, then stowed it in her kit to take back to the lab.

  They wouldn’t expect to get any trace evidence off it—previous testing of the strata and bones had indicated that the skeleton had been in the ground for ten to fifteen years—but if they were lucky, it would help them identify the remains.

  And from there, maybe the killer.

  “Want to keep going?” Varitek asked.

  She rocked back on her heels and surveyed the scene. “Well, we’ve gone down to the original excavation and past it by about six inches. We’re in undisturbed ground for the most part, so we probably won’t find anything else. That being the case, let’s go down another two inches just to be sure.”

  He nodded. “Works for me.” He glanced at the sky, which was clear and bright with spring. “The weather’s on our side, and putting a name to this skeleton would be a huge break.” He dug in. “Besides, the next task force meeting isn’t until this evening.”

  The chief had timed their meetings for the overlap when the day shift went off and the night shift was just coming on. It sounded good in theory, but in practice the task force cops worked pretty much round the clock and reported in when they had something.

  Knowing it, Cassie kept one ear out for the ring of her cell as she and Varitek skimmed off another layer of wet grit.

  The first call was from the ME, Boniface, who reported that the young man had died of strangulation, as the ligature marks had suggested, and that the finger wound had likely been caused by a smooth bladed knife. He couldn’t explain the cautery of the wound, but theorized that the knife could have been heated.

  Cassie made a mental note to check the wound scrapings for carbonization that might support the hypothesis.

  Other reports filtered in as the afternoon grew long and the grave widened.

  Mendoza and Piedmont reported that the apartment where the body was dumped had been rented six months earlier in the name of Randy Meyers, but things got complicated after that. Meyers, a midlevel extreme skier, had been tracked down in Tahoe. He claimed to have handed the apartment over to a female friend when he’d grown bored of the Bear Claw slopes. She, in turn, had sublet to some guy, first name Nevada, last name unknown.

  They would identify the body eventually, but it would take time.

  After that report, there was a lull in the phone traffic and the silence hung heavy.

  Finally, almost unwillingly, Varitek said, “You mentioned that your mother died when you were young. That must have been tough.”

  Cassie wasn’t sure which surprised her most, that he’d made a personal comment, or that he remembered her passing mention. Then again, they were up to their elbows in a grave. Death seemed like a reasonable topic.

  “My father raised me from five on,” she answered, “and my four older brothers pitched in. They nearly smothered me with their good intentions, but I love them dearly.” She paused, then added, “From a distance.”

  Varitek smiled slightly. The expression softened his face just enough to take it from fierce to unexpectedly sexy. “I have an older sister,” he said. “CeeCee was overprotective as hell when we were kids. I can’t begin to imagine what four brothers must’ve been like.”

  “A little like you times four,” she said without thinking, disarmed by the fact that they were actually having a pleasant conversation, “only they don’t have the tall, dark and handsome thing going for them.”

  Then she froze. Oh, God. Please tell me I didn’t just say that aloud.

  But his sudden, complete stillness told her that she had, indeed.

  She climbed to her feet, stripped off her gloves and faced him. Blood tingled in her cheeks. “Sorry. That was uncalled for, especially after I lectured you about treating me like a cop. Let’s forget I said that. Let’s forget I even thought it.”

  But when Varitek stood and faced her, his expression was intent and wholly focused on her. “You want to know why I reached the crime scene before you yesterday?

  Because I was already in town. I’d driven down here for no real reason except to drop in on you and see…” He twisted his lips with more self-deprecation than humor.

  “Hell, I don’t know why. Because I couldn’t get you out of my head, I suppose.”

  Blood skimmed through her body, just below her skin, warming her, worrying her.

  She blew out a breath and said, “Look, Varitek—”

  “You should probably call me Seth at this point, don’t you think?”

  “Look,” she said, and skipped the name entirely, “this is a really, really bad idea. We can barely hold a civil conversation, and I’m not in the market for a…whatever.”

  She’d been uncomfortable talking about her emotions ever since her relationship with Lee, who had been a master of taking those emotions and turning them back on her until she wasn’t sure where her opinion left off and his began. Besides, she wasn’t about to name the things that flitted through her mind, like…lover.

  Boyfriend. Husband. Soul mate.

  “I’m not in the market for a whatever, either.” A dark, introspective smile touched his lips. “I think maybe that’s why I came down. So I could remind myself that we’d be wrong together.”

  “We’d be terrible,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I’m cranky and territorial. You’re controlling and overprotective. Hell, we don’t even work well together.” Although they had excavated the grave shoulder-to-shoulder and it hadn’t been as awful as she’d feared. Indeed, it had been almost…solid. Good. She felt the hard bump of the class ring folded in its plastic envelope and knew they’d made progress.

  But she’d let physical attraction override common sense once before and it had been a disaster. Hell, it’d nearly ruined her career. No way she was letting that happen again.

  She was older and smarter now.

  Wasn’t she?

  HOURS LATER, after they’d attended the task force meeting and logged in the evidence from the old grave site, Cassie finally signed out and headed home. With her truck impounded as evidence—wasn’t that ironic?—she had no wheels, so she didn’t even bother with a token protest when Varitek offered to drive her home.

  She bristled when he walked her to the door.

  Key in hand, she faced him on the front porch. “I’m not asking you in.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “I didn’t expect you to. I’ll stay out here while you check the house.”

  “Go.” She waved him off with a shooing motion, too tired
to deal with him. “I’ll be fine.” When he didn’t budge, she said, “Come on, give me a break here. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m armed. Just go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  After a momentary stand off, Varitek scowled. “Fine. See you tomorrow.” He stalked away, leaving her feeling like she’d been childish and surly.

  Which she had been.

  “Oh, fine,” she muttered under her breath, stabbing her key into the lock. “I’ll apologize to him tomorrow.” She twisted the knob and pushed through the front door as Varitek’s truck pulled away.

  Two steps inside her door, someone grabbed her. She screamed and tried to spin, but he yanked her arm up behind her back. The sharp pain of a needle flared in her shoulder, followed by cool, burning numbness.

  Then nothing.

  SETH MADE IT ALL THE WAY to his hotel before he turned back. He told himself not to bother, that they could talk it out in the morning when one—or both of them—was in a better frame of mind. But something compelled him to spin the truck around and head back to her yellow house on the outskirts of town.

  When he got there, he saw that the other half of the side-by-side two-family was lit. A shadow skimmed past a curtained window as he watched. The neighbors were still up. In contrast, all of the lights on Cassie’s side of the house were off—not just the outside light that had been burning when he’d left, but the room lights, as well. It was as though she’d never come home.

  She’s asleep, he told himself, though it wasn’t much past eight o’clock. She skipped dinner and headed straight to bed.

  Then he saw the barest hint of motion at the corner of the house, near Cassie’s side window. It could’ve been a small animal in search of scraps.

  It could’ve been an intruder.

  Seth slapped the truck into Park, radioed an alert to the Bear Claw dispatcher, grabbed his flashlight and service revolver and hastened across the muddy lawn. He didn’t even think about chasing the shadow. He needed to get to Cassie first, needed to know she was okay.