At Close Range

by Jessica Andersen

  “HE ASKED YOU to what?” Cassie nearly screamed. The noise bounced off the basement walls and reverberated among the pieces of equipment. “Ohmigod. Tell me what he said. What you said. Everything!”

  Cassie and Maya crowded close while Alissa held out her left hand, newly christened with a big, fat diamond in a platinum setting.

  “I was…” Alissa touched her throat with her hand, causing the ring to flash and sparkle under the fluorescent lights. “Shocked doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  When the three of us moved here, the first thing I learned was that McDermott was on his way out of the force, that he never stayed still for more than a couple of years, that he was the footloose kind. And now this…” She trailed off and a soft smile touched her lips. “I knew it was right between us. I was even ready to move with him if he wanted to keep wandering. But he says he’s home. He wants us to stay here for good, maybe even buy a bigger place.” The grin widened into a full-blown smile. “We could live in a tent for all I care. I’m that happy.”

  And for Alissa, with her unsettled childhood and deep desire to put down roots, to say something like that…

  It was real.

  Cassie hugged her friend, overjoyed. But deep inside, she felt a twist of something nasty, something she wasn’t proud of and didn’t like. It wasn’t jealously, precisely, it was more like a wistful question.

  Why not me?

  It was only recently, after Cassie first started hanging out with the neighbor’s baby, that she’d realized she wanted a family. Which—at least in her opinion—

  required a husband and a house. Future plans and 401Ks. All things she hadn’t thought about in a long, long time, ever since Lee had dangled those promises with one hand, and tried to snatch away her career with the other.

  Several years of hindsight and a brief stint in therapy allowed her to acknowledge that she’d given him that power, bit by bit. She’d been blinded to his true nature by the passion that had flared between them. She had stupidly equated good sex with a good relationship.

  How wrong she’d been.

  Which brought her thoughts full circle to Varitek. She’d kissed him in her own lab.

  Hell, she’d done more than kiss him. She’d groped him, encouraged him, tangled herself around him until they’d been moments away from—

  Well, something stupid, that was for sure. What had she been thinking?

  Clearly, she hadn’t been thinking at all.

  She drew back from her three-way embrace, and gave Alissa’s ringed hand a final squeeze. “I’m so happy for you two. I mean it. You’re perfect together.”

  Alissa snorted. “No, we’re not. We disagree with each other, push each other, challenge each other and…” She sighed. “Yeah, we’re perfect together.” Then, before Cassie could process that definition of perfect, Alissa poked her in the arm.

  “So what’s going on with you and Varitek?”

  “There’s,” nothing going on, Cassie started to say, but didn’t bother because all the evidence pointed to the contrary. “It’s complicated, and it was a mistake. One I’m not planning on repeating. Let’s just leave it at that and get back to the case.”

  Anyone else might have respected her wishes and moved on, but the three friends knew each other too well. Maya tilted her head to one side and asked quietly, “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay,” Cassie snapped on a quick wash of resentment. “My truck was impounded, my house is a crime scene, my arm hurts where I got a needleful of the black market sedative-of-the-week, my head aches where I banged it, and I cabbed here in a damn bathrobe.” Aware that her voice had risen on the last word, she took a breath and fought for calm because none of it was Maya’s fault. “The thing you saw with Varitek, it was just stress. Temporary insanity. There might be some attraction between us, but that’s all it is.”

  “And how do you feel about that?” Maya asked in her counselor’s voice.

  Cassie sighed, confused. “He could shut us down. You’ve heard the rumors—that it’d be cheaper for the chief to call in outside help when he needs it rather than keeping us on staff.”

  “Rumors are just that,” Alissa said quickly. “We’re an asset to this department and the chief knows it.”

  “If you say so.” Cassie didn’t believe it for a minute. “But if that’s true then how come the FBI has been all over our two major cases so far?”

  Because you’re the weak link, Lee’s voice whispered in her head. If you could hold up your end of the job, Varitek wouldn’t even be here.

  “Because they’re major cases,” Maya said. “Most local shops bring in FBI oversight for multiple kidnappings or murder.”

  “Oversight.” Cassie’s lips twisted. “Yeah, that’s me. An oversight.” Then she straightened. “But not anymore. I think it’s time we go to war.” She looked from Alissa to Maya and saw that the determination in their eyes mirrored her own.

  “Let’s prove that the chief didn’t make a mistake hiring us. Let’s get this guy before he has a chance to kill again.”

  “Too late.” Varitek’s voice broke in from the doorway.

  Cassie didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, didn’t know how much he’d heard.

  She glanced over and didn’t see any memory of their kiss in his eyes. He could have been carved from granite. He looked that cold when he gestured to the stairs.

  “Come on. There’s been another murder. A woman this time.” He took a breath and something passed across his face, an expression so fleeting she had hardly registered it before it was gone. But she caught an echo of it in his voice when he said, “Brace yourself. This one’s bad.”

  Chapter Seven

  As far as Cassie was concerned, no death was good, save perhaps for a dignified exit through old age or illness, one that gave enough warning for the family to gather and say goodbye but didn’t linger much beyond. The other kinds were almost universally bad.

  Her mother’s death from a quick-growing form of breast cancer had been bad, especially for the family she’d left behind—four teenage boys and a five-year-old girl, alone with a grieving husband who’d done his best, yet hadn’t always managed the details.

  But murder was a different sort of bad.

  “We’re here,” Varitek said unnecessarily as he pulled in amongst a cluster of official vehicles at another anonymous apartment building.

  He avoided her eyes as he unbuckled his seat belt and slid out of the truck cab.

  They hadn’t talked about what had happened between them, which in a way made it seem worse, more important, until those kisses had become an elephant riding in the truck between them.

  Hell, she didn’t even know what she wanted to say. Maybe it was better to just let it go.

  She jumped out of the cab and stumbled when she hit the ground. Her head spun and her stomach lurched unsteadily, but she braced her legs, refusing to let the weakness show. Maybe it was the bang on the head, maybe the drug, or maybe just plain old fatigue. Regardless, she wasn’t giving up another crime scene.

  Varitek paused on the sidewalk outside an apartment complex that was little more than a brown, characterless rectangle. “Come on. They’re waiting for us.”

  They walked in together and she paused at the entrance, noting that the “locked”

  foyer door lock was banded with several duct tape layers of varying ages, allowing easy access for the renters.

  Or a killer.

  Still not speaking to each other, as though they’d had a fight she didn’t remember, she and Varitek rode the elevator up to the fifth floor. When they stepped out into the drab hallway, the smell of death reached down Cassie’s throat and grabbed her lungs, sucking the air out of them and sending a slap of panic into her bloodstream.

  She braced her shoulders and forced her footsteps not to falter, too aware of the big man at her back.

  But when they paused outside the cordoned-off door, pulled protective equipment out of their kits an
d suited up, she realized that, oddly, the silence had become almost companionable, as though they’d been partnered for years and already knew each other’s moves and thoughts.

  Before she could enter the room, he held out a gloved hand to stop her. “Wait. We need to talk.”

  A spurt of alarm jolted through Cassie and she scanned the hallway, knowing that while she could trust Tucker, Alissa and Maya not to spread rumors, the other Bear Claw cops wouldn’t be so kind. But the immediate area had been cleared of unnecessary personnel until the evidence technicians gave the okay.

  Seeing that, she took a deep breath and squared off to face him on rubbery legs.

  “Fine. Talk.”

  He shifted to shove his hands in his pockets, realized they were gloved and let them hang at his sides. “Earlier, when I left the basement. I don’t want you to think that I—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted, not wanting to hear the excuse. “In fact, let me make this easy on you. What we did down in the lab was fun, but it was a mistake. I’m not what you’re looking for anymore than you’re my ideal man. Let’s just say it was the stress of the moment and move on, okay?”

  She expected him to be relieved. Instead, he looked annoyed. “How do you know what I’m looking for?”

  “I’m only guessing that you’re looking for peace. Someone who won’t pick fights.

  That isn’t me. Besides—” she shrugged, gaining momentum now, feeling as though she was trying to convince both of them “—I know for a fact that you’re not what I’m looking for. For one, I don’t date cops.”

  He shifted close to her. Dangerously close. “I’m FBI.”

  “That’s worse.” Her head spun, forcing her to lean back against the nearest wall. “I grew up with four brothers watching my every move. I’m not looking for someone else to babysit me.”

  “What are you looking for?” He threw the question down like a challenge. A gauntlet.

  A husband, she thought. Children. But those wishes were too new for her, so she said, “Respect. I’m looking for a man who’ll treat me as an equal rather than thinking he can order me around.” Anger stirred in her chest, as memories of Lee and Varitek got a little mixed together.

  Varitek scowled. “I don’t—” Then stopped himself and his expression shifted to something she couldn’t quite read. “Never mind. You’re right. I don’t know why I even brought it up.” He gestured to the door. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

  He pushed open the door and gestured her through, not giving her time to brace herself. Refusing to show the weakness, she marched into the room and faced the scene of the crime.

  She saw the body immediately. There was no way not to.

  And yeah. It was bad.

  The naked girl was propped up in an open sofa bed, with her arms stretched out along the back and a thin blood trail leaking from her severed index finger. The stump looked cauterized, similar to the murdered young man’s finger. That particular detail hadn’t been released to the media, which argued against a copycat.

  Only this time, the killer hadn’t stopped with the finger. The girl had been carved with a circular cut that removed her navel and laid her abdominal cavity open for their inspection.

  Cassie swallowed her gorge, averted her eyes from the gaping wound, and tried to see the girl as she might have been in life. She’d been thin, blond and pretty, with long legs and good skin that was glossed with a touch of makeup. Her fingernails were expensively manicured, her hair cut in the latest style. Her sightless eyes were blue. Ligature marks at her neck indicated the same cause of death.

  A cold, nauseous chill shivered through Cassie’s stomach.

  Looking at the victim was almost like looking at her own senior picture from high school.

  When Varitek cursed low, she knew he saw it, too.

  Pulse pounding, Cassie swallowed the nasty aluminum foil taste that had gathered at the back of her throat and tried to push past the awful reality of the girl’s grayish blue skin to see the evidence beneath. She cleared her throat. “Same souvenir, same pose, except for…” She gestured at the girl’s belly, where blood had leaked down to stain the sheet that lay across her spread legs.

  Varitek nodded, his attention fixed on the body. “Yeah. It’s the same, and she fits the pattern of the others—young, pretty, female. So what was the deal with the John Doe? And what’s with the additional cut?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out.”

  Neither of them mentioned the obvious—that the girl could have been Cassie’s sister.

  Thinking that, Cassie realized there was a hell of a lot that she and Varitek didn’t say to each other. She wasn’t sure why, but the thought brought a surge of sadness as she set down her evidence kit, popped the top and prepared for the first round of photographs. The sooner they worked the scene, the sooner they could start putting the pieces together. The sooner they figured out what the hell was going on, the sooner they could nab this bastard.

  Then Varitek could return to Denver where he belonged.

  THEY PROCESSED THE SCENE for nearly three hours. By the time they were done, the new day had brightened outside the dingy studio apartment and Seth’s knees were aching like fury, reminding him that he’d been going for nearly twenty-four hours and needed to catch some downtime before he dropped.

  Cassie couldn’t have been any better off—though maybe her tranquilized snooze behind the sofa counted as a nap—but he couldn’t see the fatigue in her as she worked the scene, skirting the dead girl as wide as possible when she thought he wasn’t looking.

  “Time to call it quits,” he said finally. “There’s nothing else here.” At least nothing he could see, and he didn’t think that was fatigue talking. “Let’s let the ME have the body. Maybe we’ll get something off the autopsy.”

  She nodded and started packing the labeled plastic and paper evidence bags into her kit, but she didn’t look any happier than he felt. “It doesn’t make any sense,”

  she said finally. “There should be more.”

  “Yeah. This guy’s either very lucky or very good. Since we’ve got three other scenes that seem equally clean…” He trailed off, bothered by the fact that his team had found almost nothing at Cassie’s house or in her truck, and they’d already come up nearly dry at the first murder scene.

  Cassie nodded. “I know. I’m betting he’s very good. Nobody gets this lucky four times in a row.” She finished packing and stood, evidence kit dangling from her fingers. A shadow crossed her face. “We never did figure out how the bomber got in and out of the forensics lab without being seen. The security videos were all screwy, and nobody on the main floor saw anything before or after the fire drill that emptied the building.” She cleared her throat and planted her feet firmly as though she’d only just noticed she was nearly swaying. “Add that to the lack of evidence, and I’ve been thinking that maybe…” She trailed off.

  “Maybe it’s a cop,” he finished for her. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking along the same lines. I hate it, but it’d explain a few things that just don’t work any other way.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, shoulders tensing at the thought of the flak they were going to cause by bringing it up. “When we get back to the P.D., let’s start by running the prints we’ve collected against the in-house database. We’ve mostly got partials, but if we keep the search parameters pretty wide, we might get something.”

  He hated the thought of doing the search almost as much as he hated the suspicion that they were going to get a hit. He respected the Bear Claw cops. He didn’t want it to be one of them.

  But hell, he’d learned a long time ago that sometimes wanting something just wasn’t enough.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Cassie sat down in the task force briefing room that she realized she’d just about kill for a bottle of water. A soda. Anything. Her throat was parched and the back of her tongue still tasted like tinfoil.

  “Ugh,” she muttered, and earned herself a startled look
from Maya. As they had from the very beginning of their time in Bear Claw, the three women sat in a front corner of the briefing room, slightly separated from the rest of the group. Only now, instead of the three sitting shoulder to shoulder, Cassie and Maya sat together and Alissa sat one row back, beside Tucker.

  Her fiancé.

  Normally, Cassie didn’t give a damn about the seating arrangements, but now they bothered her, reminding her that things had changed, that Alissa had moved on.

  “And you need to get over yourself,” Cassie said, only afterward realizing she’d spoken aloud.

  “Cass, what’s wrong with you?” Maya said, poking her. “You’re squirming and talking to yourself. Can I get you something? A bathroom pass? Glass of water? Prozac?”

  Cassie scowled at her friend’s lame attempt at humor. “I’m fine. A bit of a headache, that’s all. You got any aspirin? Maybe some juice? My system’s whacked out from the lack of sleep.”

  “I’ll be right back. Aspirin and juice coming up.”

  It wasn’t until she’d gone that Cassie realized Maya was acting strangely. Or rather she was acting normally, but her voice was brittle and unfamiliar stress lines cut grooves on either side of her mouth.

  Captain Parry started the meeting before the psych specialist returned. He took his position at the front of the room just as he’d done months ago, when they’d been racing the clock trying to find three kidnapped girls before they became a trio of murder victims. Then, the case board had been hung with school pictures of the missing girls.

  Now, it bore photos of the dead. The crime-scene pictures—the first set shot by Cassie, the second by Alissa—were tacked behind Parry’s head, alongside morgue shots that served as grim reminders of their goal.

  What if it’s a cop? The refrain beat in Cassie’s head, in her heart, because she knew it made too much sense, fit too many of the small, contradictory details.

  “Here you go.” Maya returned and handed Cassie a couple of tablets and a bottle of vending machine fruit punch. “Take these, you’ll feel better.”