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 she’d asked the chief for help.
Hell, look what she’d gotten during the Canyon kidnapping case, when she’d been forced to accept “help” she hadn’t 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 hadn’t 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 I’ll break your fingers.”
Alissa and Maya were always telling her to be nicer to their new coworkers, but Cassie didn’t see the point. Who cared whether the other cops liked her or not? She wasn’t 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 kit—an orange plastic toolbox containing the basics of her trade—and breathed deeply, steeling herself for the first sight of death.
She hadn’t been raised around police work. Hell, she’d 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 didn’t allow her any time to cut and run. Surprise stopped her just inside the door.
There was a man in the room, and he wasn’t 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 specialist’s 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 eyes—pale green at the center and darker at the edges, surrounded by long, black lashes—softened 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 now—there was no reason for the chief to call federal help before she was even on scene.
Not unless he thought she couldn’t handle things on her own. The frustration rose to clog her throat. She’d 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 hadn’t made much progress, as shown by Exhibit A, who rocked back on his heels, waiting for her response.
She set her teeth. “No. I don’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t traditionally handsome—his features were too strong for that—but when they had worked the Canyon kidnappings, attraction had flared between them, unwanted and unacknowledged.
The physical awareness hadn’t 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 man’s 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 it’s linked to the skeleton we found in the state park, doesn’t 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 bones—the 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.
