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 SUVs, 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 didnt say anything, didnt give her an update on the situation or a hey, hows it going?
Their silence didnt 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 OMalley, and theyd made life hell for the three women hired to replace himscene 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 shed made nice, and partly because shed 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 didnt cause a stir, they had no such feelings of amnesty for Cassie.
They plain didnt like her. Maybe it was because she wasnt the sort to play nice, or because shed shredded all of Fitzs evidence report formswhich had to be twenty years old if they were a dayand 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 didnt 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 theyve got vacancies.
Well, odds were they would have one soon. The chiefs message had said it was a single corpse, male, presumed murdered.
The word brought a shiver to the back of Cassies 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 shed asked the chief for help.
Hell, look what shed gotten during the Canyon kidnapping case, when shed been forced to accept help she hadnt 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 hadnt 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 Ill break your fingers.
Alissa and Maya were always telling her to be nicer to their new coworkers, but Cassie didnt see the point. Who cared whether the other cops liked her or not? She wasnt 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 kitan orange plastic toolbox containing the basics of her tradeand breathed deeply, steeling herself for the first sight of death.
She hadnt been raised around police work. Hell, shed 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 didnt allow her any time to cut and run. Surprise stopped her just inside the door.
There was a man in the room, and he wasnt 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 specialists 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 eyespale green at the center and darker at the edges, surrounded by long, black lashessoftened 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 nowthere was no reason for the chief to call federal help before she was even on scene.
Not unless he thought she couldnt handle things on her own. The frustration rose to clog her throat. Shed been trying to fit in, trying to make a place for herself in the Bear Claw force by proving that she was good enough and smart enough to be one of them.
So far she hadnt made much progress, as shown by Exhibit A, who rocked back on his heels, waiting for her response.
She set her teeth. No. I dont have a problem with you.
Varitek raised one dark eyebrow, but let the lie pass. He inclined his head toward the back wall of the single-room apartment. What do you think?
Until that moment, she had managed not to look at the body, had managed to block the smell of blood from her nostrils and the aura of death from her consciousness. But now she swallowed and focused on the corpse.
The young man was posed naked on a pullout sofa bed, propped up against the cushioned backrest with his legs spread-eagled beneath a white bedsheet. His arms were stretched out and his head was tipped back as though he were napping, but his chest didnt rise and fall. He was utterly still, his skin cast with a waxy, bluish sheen.
The faint burn of ligature marks at the base of his throat spoke of murder, the pose suggested a ritual. A symbol. But of what?
She glanced over at the FBI specialist. Why did the chief call you in? Why didnt he wait for me to run the scene?
Varitek rose to his feet in one powerful movement, more graceful than his bulk suggested. He topped her by a good six inches and seventy pounds or so, and she was acutely conscious of the solidity and warmth that radiated from his body. He wasnt traditionally handsomehis features were too strong for thatbut when they had worked the Canyon kidnappings, attraction had flared between them, unwanted and unacknowledged.
The physical awareness hadnt faded with time apart, Cassie realized with sudden electric shock. If anything, it had gotten worse.
Unsettled, she nearly stepped back, but that would be retreating, so she held her ground and looked up at him, waiting for an answer.
He gestured to the body. Look at his hands.
The young mans right hand was intact, draped halfway off the sofa bed backrest. But his left hand
Oh, hell, Cassie breathed on a wash of shock. The tip of his index finger is missing. She glanced at Varitek. The chief thinks its linked to the skeleton we found in the state park, doesnt he?
During the Canyon kidnappings, the perp had booby-trapped a side crevice of Bear Claw Canyon and set bait for the cops. The explosion and collapse had almost killed Alissa. She had lived, but the rescuers had uncovered an older grave when they dug her out.
The skeleton had been recovered intact save for two missing bonesthe skull and the first bone of one index finger were unavailable. The skull had been destroyed when the kidnapper bombed the forensics department, wiping out their new equipment and most of their bona fides within the P.D., and the finger bone had never been recovered. They assumed it had disappeared from the grave, lost to scavengers or spring runoff.
What if it had been taken instead?
Varitek said, Its a possibility, especially given the suspicions that Croft might not have worked alone. He glanced at the body, then back to her. Has your department made any progress on identifying the remains from the canyon?
Cassie stiffened. Were working on it.
Truthfully, theyd been swamped by other cases. With Bradford Croft dead and the kidnapped girls home safe, identifying the skeleton had dropped on the priority list.