At Close Range (9 page)

What would Alissa and Maya say if they came home to pink slips? They would try to be brave about it, Cassie knew, because they were classier, kinder people than she.

But the three friends would be split up again, sent to cop shops elsewhere in the state.

You need to try making friends, Alissa’s voice said in Cassie’s brain. Or maybe it was Maya’s voice. God knew they’d both been on her to ease back, chill out, try to get along. But she hadn’t bothered, because she’d been so damn sure she knew better.

Cassie’s eyes threatened to fill again and she snuffled back the tears. She’d never been a weepy drunk before, and she didn’t intend to start now. Besides, she could feel the glow wearing off by the moment, leaving achy tiredness and bruises behind.

Out of nowhere, determination grabbed her, driving away the shakes and the tears.

She’d show them. She was good enough. Smart enough. She had the class ring they’d found, along with a few other bits of evidence from the grave. She had the hat and jacket from the guy who’d messed with her brakes. Let Varitek’s people have her house.

She was going to solve the case from the other end.

Stone-cold sober now, and almost sorry for it, she pulled on the hotel robe and tucked Varitek’s backup gun inside, where the terry-cloth belt would hold it in place. No way she was going back to the lab unarmed. Hell, it was bad enough she was going there nearly naked. But she had a change of clothes in her office, and it was late enough that she could probably get herself through the back entrance without seeing anyone in person.

Yes, she’d show up on the security cams—the ones that had been suspiciously blanked when the lab was sabotaged during the kidnapping case. The other cops were sure to print off some ridiculous picture of her wandering the halls in a bathrobe and nothing else, but she told herself she didn’t care.

They already didn’t like her. It didn’t matter if they hazed her further. What mattered was getting to the bottom of this case, identifying the murderer and protecting Bear Claw.

Her city.

Knowing this was the best answer, the only answer, she called down to the front desk and asked to have a cab meet her at the back stairs. When the phone rang to let her know the cab was in place, she gathered the robe around her with as much dignity as she could muster, took a faint breath of confidence from the body-warmed weapon cinched at her waist and headed out the door.

Varitek could go to hell. She had a case to solve.

IN HIS ROOM, Seth paced as he made the necessary phone calls, organizing his technicians and calling in favors, threats, whatever it took to get the job done yesterday.

His system was tight with too much energy and no outlet. He would have liked to go for a run, but he couldn’t leave Cassie unprotected. She was safe a few doors down the hall, he told himself, and for the fifth time in a half hour, stopped himself from checking.

He already felt a sting of guilt that he was holding her hostage through lack of clothing. His team wouldn’t be able to release her belongings until the following afternoon at the earliest. Until then, she’d be trapped in her room wearing a robe.

When Seth’s mind locked on the image of long legs and fluffy white terry-cloth, he wondered whether his plan was entirely ethical. He was doing this for her own good, he told himself, but the words rang hollow in his head.

Knowing he was a better man than that, he called down to the front desk. “Officer Dumont needs a change of clothes.” He didn’t elaborate, but kept his voice steely, daring the desk clerk to comment. “I can’t leave her, so I need you to send someone to that 24/7 megamart down the street. She’ll need everything from the skin out.

Shoes, too.” Seth thought a moment and tried to keep it impersonal when he said,

“She’s about five-ten, probably one-thirty. Skinny, but she’s got muscles, and—” He broke off, realizing the clerk didn’t need to know any of that. “Damn it, just get me some sweats and underthings. A few toiletries. Socks and a pair of sneakers that look like they’ll fit a tall, slender woman. Got it? She needs something she can get out the door in.”

Granted, he didn’t intend to hand over the clothes until the next day. She was going to rest if it killed him.

The silence on the other end of the phone dragged on so long that Seth thought he’d been put on hold. But then the clerk’s voice returned, sounding confused as hell. “Sir? You’re referring to the lady in Room 421, correct?”

“Of course,” Seth snapped. “The one I checked in on my card. Why? What’s wrong?”

“She asked me to call her a cab an hour ago. She’s gone.”

“Damn it!” Seth slammed down the phone without another word. “Stubborn—” He stopped himself before he said something he’d regret. But he didn’t stop the forward motion. He yanked on his boots and laced them with quick, angry jerks.

A stream of curses worked its way between his teeth. She just hadn’t been able to wait for him. She just couldn’t force herself to trust that maybe this time he was right, maybe this time she should stay put and let everyone else do their damn jobs.

As he jammed his weapon into its holster and drew faint comfort from the fact that he’d given her his drop piece, Seth realized he was muttering to himself.

“That’s fine,” he said aloud. “She’s going to get more than a grumble when I catch up with her.” He grabbed his jacket and dragged it on over the holster. “In fact, she’s going to wish she’d never left.”

And if as he stormed out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot, a little piece of him realized he was overreacting, he decided it didn’t matter. She’d knowingly endangered herself—again—and had disobeyed a direct order. Again. It almost seemed like she was trying to get herself killed.

If so, he’d be damned if she did it on his watch.

CASSIE HAD EXPECTED the lab to feel a shade creepy. Hell, it hadn’t felt totally safe since the blast that had destroyed all of their equipment and had nearly killed Alissa.

The bomber shouldn’t have been able to get inside the P.D., shouldn’t have gotten in and out undetected, but he had. For a time, there had been whispered suspicions.

What if he’s a cop? What if he has access? That would’ve explained a number of seeming coincidences, like how the bastard had known which car was Alissa’s and how he’d slipped an anonymous envelope into the P.D. under the desk sergeant’s nose.

When Bradford Croft confessed, the missing girls were found and there was no evidence of another person’s involvement, the whispers had died down. It wasn’t a cop, after all. The perp was just lucky.

Or very smart.

Now, Cassie wondered as she laid out the bagged pieces of evidence on a wide, waist-high table in the main lab. The overhead light was harsh and unnatural, underscoring the windowless walls. But where fatigue had dragged at her back at the hotel, now a fine quiver of nerves and focus sharpened her senses and drove her brain at top speed.

Could there be a cop involved? Could that be why they were making so little progress on the new murder, why the older case had hit so many roadblocks along the way?

Her gut twisted at the thought, but her brain picked through possibilities. If anyone was going to see it, she would, because she wasn’t one of them. She was an outsider, whether she liked it or not.

While her brain tweaked at possibilities, she picked up a shallow plastic container filled with a muddy liquid. When she moved the jar, metal clinked on plastic as the class ring swirled at the bottom. She’d dipped the ring in a mild astringent solution earlier, before the task force meeting. She and Varitek had agreed there would be little hope of pulling trace evidence off the ring, which had been buried too deep for too long, amidst the freeze-thaw mayhem of the Colorado frost line. So their best hope was that the ring would prove to be an identifier.

Since they didn’t have the skull anymore, they would have to work the ancillary evidence.

Humming tunelessly beneath her breath, Cassie selected a pair of blunt, rubber-tipped tweezers and used them to lift the ring from the jar. She’d examine the sediment later, if the ring proved unhelpful.

“But you’re going to help us, aren’t you?” she asked, telling herself it was okay to talk to the evidence, because there was nobody else in the P.D. basement to hear.

A skeleton crew of cops manned the desks and phones above her. Task force members buzzed in and out, though there had been little progress on IDing the dead man. There was movement overhead, giving Cassie a faint sense of security.

Added reassurance was provided by the motion detectors Chief Parry had ordered installed after the lab bombing. The alarms could be armed or disarmed a room at a time, so Cassie had reset the motions in the rooms between her and the stairwell.

She was wearing her spare clothes and had a gun, there were cops on the floor above, and two rooms worth of alarms between her and the outside world.

So why didn’t she feel safe? Why was she so aware of the open door at her back and the darkness outside?

“Stop being a weenie,” she said aloud, and focused on the ring. On the evidence. On the case.

Her case.

The astringent had eased away the grime and gunk, leaving the brassy metal as clean as new. A quick visual scan showed that the ring was worn thin at the bottom, which surprised Cassie. The ME had tagged the skeleton as belonging to a young woman, late teens, maybe early twenties. That wasn’t much time to wear a class ring to thinness, suggesting one of two things. Either the ring was a hand-me-down from a friend or relative…

Or it didn’t belong to the body at all.

“It was buried a layer down,” she reminded herself, and had a brief thought of turning on the radio for background noise. But her mind quickly skimmed ahead of the inconsequential details and focused on the thought process that marked her as a good evidence tech. Maybe not a brilliant one, but a good one. A thorough one.

It was true that the ring hadn’t been precisely in the grave-site. It could’ve been lost years ago, or it could’ve been dropped by a passing hiker and wound up mixed in with the grave fill.

“Work the evidence, not the hypothesis,” Cassie reminded herself. It wasn’t about whether she wanted the ring to belong to the girl or not, it was about what she could empirically determine about the evidence.

Knowing it, she carried the object across the lab to the stereomicroscope. She set the ring on the platform and pressed her eyes to the scope, preferring the old-fashioned immediacy of the eyepieces over the distance of sending the image to computer.

The ring looked like gold plate over a duller, silver metal. She could see where the gold had rubbed away and the silver—stainless steel, maybe?—shone through. There were scuffs and scratches on the outside of the worn section, as though the wearer was used to physical labor.

The decorated upper part of the ring had a flame insignia opposite some sort of animal. The metalwork was crude enough that she couldn’t tell whether it was a bear, a boar or a dog. The carvings flanked a red stone, probably a ruby, though not a high quality one. She saw the cloudy streak of a flaw within the stone, and a fine crack along one edge.

There was no date, which was a shame, but when she flipped the ring over, she could just make out the worn shadow of a maker’s stamp. Three letters that looked like PRK or maybe PEK.

It wasn’t an easy answer, but it would do for a start.

Cassie typed shorthand notes on a small computerized notepad while she scanned the ring, knowing it was best to record even the smallest observation right away.

Sometimes, first impressions were the most telling.

That thought brought a flash of memory, a hint of the first time she’d seen Varitek. The chief had sent her to the airport to pick up the FBI interloper, and she’d been justifiably ticked off over the whole thing. Tangled with annoyance had been her concern for Alissa and the kidnapped girls, and a slash of shame that she was small enough to care about her turf when there were victims to worry about.

She’d used her badge to pass through to the gate area. When she’d seen a tall, broad-shouldered man duck through the door as though he was used to banging his head, her first thought had been wow. Her second thought had been, Oh, hell.

That’s got to be Varitek. His dark, commanding presence matched the voice she’d already heard on the phone, as it had barked commands and tossed off demands as though she should be happy for the help.

And perhaps she should’ve been, but she wasn’t, and she was even less pleased to learn that the owner of that deep, dark voice wasn’t five-foot-six, as she had secretly hoped. At five-ten, she topped a good many men, much to their annoyance, but she doubted too many people had ever topped Varitek. Worse, she doubted he even cared, an impression that had been reinforced as he’d hefted his field kit and walked in her direction, as though he’d made her for a cop without a second’s hesitation.

“Officer Dumont,” he’d said in greeting, and she’d been insulted by how fast his eyes had skimmed over her and passed on, as though she had been registered and dismissed that quickly.

“Varitek,” she’d acknowledged, consciously leaving off his Special Agent status as though she didn’t give a hoot. “Let’s get one thing straight. I didn’t invite you and I don’t want you here. The Bear Claw crime lab can handle this just fine without the FBI sticking its nose into the case.”

His eyes, a pale green surrounded by incongruously long dark lashes, had returned to her, this time locking on as though he was actually seeing her. He’d raised one dark eyebrow to an inquisitive line, but said, “If you could handle the case, your chief wouldn’t have asked for my help.”