At Close Range

by Jessica Andersen

  And if that meant he was ruled by his past, then so be it.

  He crossed the porch in three echoing strides and pounded on the door. “Cassie?

  Cassie, open up or I’m coming through.”

  He paused, counted to five, and when there wasn’t a hint of sound or motion from inside, he stepped back two paces and turned his shoulder toward the door.

  But before he could launch himself, the porch light snapped on, the neighboring door opened and a long shotgun barrel poked through. “Hold it right there,” a man’s voice said. “Drop the weapon and don’t move. I’m calling the police.”

  Seth froze in his tracks and hissed a curse between his teeth. “I’ve already called them. I’m an FBI agent and I believe Officer Dumont is in trouble.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not letting you bust into Cassie’s place without a look at your badge, mister.” The door opened fully, revealing that the shotgun owner was young, probably early twenties and baby-faced with it. But he held his pump action with the ease of familiarity, and an infant’s fretful cry emerged from inside, followed by a woman’s soothing tones.

  Seth could have the guy down in two seconds flat, but a new father with a gun? He didn’t want to go there. So he said, “I’m going to go for my ID, real easy, okay? I don’t want any trouble.”

  It took him under a minute to pull his ID and convince Cassie’s neighbor he was legit, but those seconds beat beneath Seth’s skin like the echo of a faltering heartbeat.

  Finally, the guy lowered his shotgun. “Sorry. I just needed to be sure, what with Cassie being a cop and all.” He rubbed his temples as though he had a headache, but focused his slightly bleary eyes on Seth. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to her? Do you want me to go in with you?”

  Untrained backup could be worse than no backup, so Seth shook his head. “No. Get inside with your family and lock up.”

  Then Seth took two running steps and slammed into the door. Pain sang through his body, but the heavy wood held. He cursed and tried again, wishing this crap was as easy as it looked on TV.

  The door gave on his third try, splintering around a sturdy dead bolt. He kicked it the rest of the way in, convinced now that there was something wrong. There was no way Cassie could have missed hearing that racket.

  He took a step inside her place. And smelled gas.

  Her half of the house was full of it.

  “Out! Get out!” Adrenaline sizzled through Seth’s body. He raced back onto the porch and hammered on the neighbors’ door. “There’s a gas leak! Get your family out and warn the neighbors.”

  Then he ran back inside Cassie’s home and swept the main room with his flashlight, barely noting the accents she’d added since his last visit, unexpectedly feminine touches of chintz and softness. “Cassie?”

  No answer.

  Knowing the gas leak was no accident, he turned for the kitchen, hoping it would be that simple. No such luck. The stove and oven were both electric.

  Damn it. The gas was coming from the basement. The bastard must have rigged a furnace line to fill her side but not the adjoining half of the house.

  Seth took a guess and yanked open a door off the kitchen, hoping she had basement access. He was rewarded with a flight of stairs stretching downward beyond the flashlight beam. He eased down, moving fast but testing each step for a tripwire or pressure pad.

  The smell was less intense in the cellar, suggesting that the gas line had been looped into one of the forced hot air vents.

  When Seth reached the bottom, he shined his light over the dusty space, picking out a neat stack of cardboard boxes, a discarded bicycle, a hot water heater, and finally the furnace.

  He froze and cursed at the sight of a wire-laden device duct taped to the tank. As he watched, the red numbers of the digital display ticked from twenty-one to twenty.

  Then nineteen.

  He spun and ran for the stairs. No time. There was no time to disarm the device, even if he had the knowledge. Once that thing blew, the spark would follow the gas trail up into the house. He had to get Cassie out of there, fast.

  Seventeen. Sixteen.

  He pounded up the stairs to the kitchen while the numbers counted down in his head. His flashlight beam carved through the darkness ahead of him as he bolted up to the second floor and shined the light into a short hallway, a bathroom, a bedroom.

  No Cassie.

  Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.

  Damn it. Where was she?

  He reversed direction and charged down the stairs, heart pounding in time with the seconds left on the digital timer.

  Twelve. Eleven. Ten.

  He skidded back into the living room, aware that the slightest spark, the smallest flame, and it was all over. His head spun with the foul air. Desperation pounded in his veins, along with the sudden, all-consuming fear that this had been a setup, that she’d been taken, that both of them would be presumed dead in the blast and nobody would know to look for her.

  Then he heard it.

  The faint moan came from behind an overstuffed sofa. He staggered when he turned toward it, and a foggy piece of his brain told him that wasn’t a good sign.

  “Ca-Cah-shee?” Hell, he was slurring like a drunk.

  Got to get out of here, he thought as he circled the couch and shone his light down.

  He saw Cassie lying motionless on the floor behind the sofa.

  Five. Four.

  He dragged her up. His muscles felt like putty and his coordination was off. He nearly fell, but forced himself to lift her, to stagger toward the door.

  Got. To. Get. Out. Of. Here. The words hammered in his brain, strengthening his legs and arms. He could hear sirens in the far distance, agitated shouts closer by, but the inside of the house was deadly silent.

  Three. Two.

  He ran for the broken-open door, putting one foot in front of the other by sheer willpower as the seconds ticked down in his brain.

  One. Zero.

  Boom.

  Chapter Four

  Only the explosion didn’t come.

  Seth staggered out onto the porch and into blessed, clean air. He sucked in a huge lungful and pushed himself down the front stairs on rubber legs.

  Cassie’s neighbor broke free from the knot of people milling in the street and charged across the muddy lawn. “Let me help. Come on, we’ve got to hurry. The house could blow flat any minute.”

  “I can…walk,” Cassie said, and struggled weakly.

  Seth set her on her feet. “Don’t walk. Run. There’s a bomb in the basement.”

  But the countdown in his head was at minus five seconds.

  The three of them bolted across the front lawn just as two BCCPD cruisers and the chief’s four-by-four screeched to a halt nearby.

  Seth pushed a dazed Cassie toward her neighbor and told the guy, “Make her sit down. As soon as the ambulance gets here, have the paramedics check her over.”

  He didn’t like how disoriented she seemed. Maybe it was because she’d inhaled way more of the gas than he had. Or maybe there was something else. Had she been hit? Drugged? Anger surged through him. He’d find out soon enough, and then there’d be hell to pay.

  She went with her neighbor rather than arguing, confirming that she felt terrible.

  If she’d had even an iota of her natural temper, she never would have let him order her around. That knowledge, that vulnerability tugged at him.

  But instead of following and standing over her until the paramedics arrived, he forced himself to meet the chief halfway across the street, which was rapidly filling with neighbors. “Everyone’s out of the house. Cassie’s rooms are full of gas and she was inside, unconscious. I’m betting she was either knocked out or drugged.” He took a deep breath of clean, cold air and felt his stomach pitch with the aftereffects. “There’s a detonator in the basement, but it didn’t go off.

  Must’ve been a dud.”

  Even saying the word made his head spin. He’d been so sure of th
e explosion. So certain of death as those numbers had ticked down in his brain.

  The chief barked orders as new sirens joined the melee. Sawyer and his bomb squad arrived on the heels of the ambulance, while the Bear Claw cops ushered the crowd back and cleared out the surrounding houses, just in case the structure blew.

  Seth stood aside and looked over to where the paramedics worked on Cassie. In the flashing lights of the rescue vehicles, her skin carried the waxy blue cast of a corpse.

  If he had gone upstairs to his hotel room instead of turning back around, she would have died. The knowledge fisted in his chest with a pressure unlike anything he’d felt in a long, long time.

  Knowing it, hating the emotion and fearing it at the same time, he gritted his teeth, turned away and stalked to where the chief was conferring with Sawyer at the back of the bomb squad van.

  “We can’t send in the remote because of the terrain,” Sawyer said. Whip-thin and bald beneath his BCCPD baseball cap, the bomb squad captain was known for his quick mind and long, agile fingers. Now, those fingers tugged at the brim of the navy and yellow cap, and frustration narrowed his brown eyes. “The technology just isn’t good enough to get the robot up a flight of stairs, through the house, through a door and down into the basement. It’ll have to be one of my men.”

  They quickly discussed and discarded several other plans including fiber optics and sound wave technology. In the end, Sawyer went in himself, wearing a flak jacket, shield and respirator, which seemed like pitiful protection against the possible blast force.

  A tense five minutes later, he radioed in. “There’s a detonator, but Varitek’s right.

  It’s a dud. The readout is in the minus digits by ten-plus minutes, but it looks like the charge fizzled.”

  Ten minutes, Seth thought. He and Cassie should have died. He couldn’t really get his mind around the concept, couldn’t find anything inside except cold numbness.

  Then a spurt of anger.

  It was true. The killer had targeted Cassie.

  “I’m disconnecting it now,” Sawyer’s voice reported. There was a pause, then, “It’s disarmed. If it was ever armed in the first place. This is a damn crude setup compared to the pieces we recovered from the canyon and the lab. You sure it’s the same guy?”

  “We’re not sure of a damn thing,” Chief Parry responded, but he kept his voice low enough that the nearby civilians couldn’t hear. “What’s the deal with the gas?”

  There was a pause, then Sawyer said, “The line to her side of the two-family was patched over to the forced hot air ducts. Sloppy but effective.”

  And that very sloppiness was a problem, Seth thought. The explosive devices used against Alissa Wyatt during the kidnapping case had been sophisticated designs.

  Not sloppy. But what did that mean? Had Croft planted the earlier devices? Was this a different perpetrator, not a partner?

  Seth scowled and grabbed the radio. “Don’t disturb anything more than necessary.

  We’ll need to get in there and process the scene.”

  The scene. He wasn’t sure whether it helped or hurt to think of Cassie’s home as a crime scene. On one level it helped distance him, helped remind him that this was the job. But on another level it rattled him to think of how close she had come to death.

  How close they both had.

  “What have we got?” Cassie’s voice spoke at his shoulder, making him flinch.

  He spun and scowled down at her, noting that her color was better but her eyes were still unfocused, her legs slightly wobbly. “Get back to the damn ambulance until they figure out what’s wrong with you.”

  Her eyes focused and narrowed. “I know what’s wrong with me. I was gassed.

  Before that, I was grabbed and injected with a tranq. And don’t you dare tell me what to do. Not when there’s a scene to process.”

  “Glad to see you’re feeling better,” Seth growled, “but there’s no way in hell you’re processing that scene. You’re too close to it. And besides,” he pushed on her shoulder hard enough to send her staggering back two steps, though he stayed close enough to catch her if she went down, “you can barely stand. I don’t want you falling down and screwing up the evidence.”

  She drew breath to argue, then paused and let it out again. “You’re right. I hate that you’re right. You process it.”

  “I don’t think either of us should be on scene right now,” he said. His professional side itched to climb down into the basement and get a look at the device, at the furnace patch, at the living room, at all the things the bastard might have touched.

  But he wasn’t willing to take the risk of screwing something up if he was shakier than he thought.

  Besides, he wanted Cassie out of there, the sooner the better. It was tempting to figure they were safe surrounded by Bear Claw cops, but what if they weren’t?

  Their perp had broken pattern so many times already that he didn’t have any damn pattern left.

  “What do you suggest we do?” she challenged. He saw from the spiky anger in her eyes that she knew damn well what they should do. She just didn’t like it.

  “We need to call in the FBI’s mobile unit.”

  She lifted her chin, but didn’t argue, probably because Chief Parry was still standing opposite them.

  “Good idea,” the chief said as Sawyer emerged from the house, walking carefully.

  “Call them in.” His eyes flicked to Cassie. “With Wyatt and Cooper away, you’re out of backup.”

  But Seth didn’t move. He spread his hands and waited until she looked full at him.

  “What do you say? This is your case. Your evidence. I’m just the muscle.”

  For now.

  She held his gaze for a long moment, then her shoulders slumped with defeat, or maybe relief. “What the hell. Call your people. This isn’t about my territory anymore, is it? It’s about catching a killer before he catches me.”

  VARITEK DROVE HER to his hotel in silence, and pretended to browse through the brightly colored ski brochures racked near the door while she rented a room of her own.

  “Will this be cash or charge?” asked the bored-looking desk clerk.

  Cassie swallowed hard when she realized she didn’t have either. She didn’t even know where her purse was. It might have fallen in the first moments after she was attacked. It might have been stolen altogether, though the bastard clearly wasn’t after money. A bubble of emotion lodged in her throat. Anger, maybe, or frustration. Not fear. She wouldn’t accept fear.

  She gritted her teeth and turned to where Varitek feigned interest in the spring skiing rates at Bear Claw Peak. “Can I borrow a credit card? I’ll pay you back,” she said quickly, more for her own benefit than that of the desk clerk or Varitek himself. “Better yet, I’ll get the P.D. to pay you back.”

  Saying it that way steadied her and beat back the awkwardness. They hadn’t yet talked about the fact that he’d saved her life. She didn’t even know where to begin, or how to process the surge of joy she’d felt when she regained consciousness and found herself cradled in his arms.

  “For the lady’s room,” Varitek’s deep voice said at her elbow, startling her. She hadn’t seen him move, but there he was, standing beside her, sliding a credit card across the counter.

  The warmth from his body reached out to her, tempted her to lean. Her head ached, her arm hurt where the needle had left a fist-sized bruise, and she was tired. So tired. She had the almost overwhelming desire to ask for a hug.

  Instead, she wandered over to the brochure rack while Varitek paid for her room, and tried not to feel as though it was somehow tawdry.

  The impression was only magnified when they rode up in the elevator together and he followed her to her door. She didn’t bother asking why. She already knew.

  “I’ll pass the clothes out in a minute,” she said, tight-lipped.

  He shifted, and she thought she saw discomfort in his cool expression. “Sorry, no can do. I’ve pushed it as f
ar as I can by letting you leave the scene. I’m not willing to let the evidence out of my sight. If—and it’s unlikely, but still—if we get something off your clothes and I wasn’t in the room when you changed out, then there’s no chain of evidence.” He spread his hands and something like regret flickered in his eyes. “No chain of evidence, no evidence at all.”

  “Fine.” She forced the word between her tense lips because he was right, damn it.

  She should have stripped on-scene. Who knew what contact evidence her attacker had left on her? Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But she hated that once again, Varitek had control of the situation, control over her.

  She jabbed the keycard into the electronic door lock and pushed through. The room looked like any other midpriced hotel room she’d ever seen—beige and generic with the odd splash of color and polished wood. There was a bathroom to the right of the door with a closet beside it, and then the room opened up into a large rectangle with a big bed.

  A really, really big bed.

  The tawdry feeling increased a thousandfold when Varitek followed her through.

  She wondered whether this was what a wife felt like when she started an affair, knowing it was wrong but not able to stop the momentum that had built up.

  Not that she and Varitek were going to have an affair, of course. But stripping for him was pretty damn close, official business or not.

  He made a noise that sounded halfway between a laugh and a growl, and crossed to the full-length sliding window at the far side of the room. He pushed the curtain aside and looked down at what she assumed was the parking lot. His shoulders were tense, as though he was looking for their perp out there among the four-wheel drive vehicles and their ski racks.

  But when he spoke, his voice was low as a lover’s. “They stock hotel robes in the closet.”

  She slid the mirrored door aside and found a heavy terry-cloth robe folded and sealed in plastic. No doubt it would go on Varitek’s credit card, too.

  “Fine.” She told herself that this was nothing, that they’d agreed to keep their relationship professional. “I’ll leave the door open to preserve the chain of evidence. Okay?”