At Close Range (7 page)

“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 far 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?”

“Okay.” His voice was gravelly and pulled at something deep inside her.

She swallowed hard and stepped inside the narrow bathroom, with its waist-high counter, double sink and soft piles of folded towels.

And began to strip.

HE HEARD A ZIPPER slide down, and the soft sound of shoes being kicked aside, and focused his attention on the parking lot, which was lit with orange sodium lights.

There was no sign of a watching presence, but one prickled along his nerve endings like a warning. A threat. He scanned the area again, looking for a misplaced shadow, a telltale hint of motion, a—

Cloth rasped against cloth, derailing him. No matter how hard he stared out the window, he was too aware of Cassie in the bathroom, taking off her clothes, piece by piece.

Leaving her naked.

“You got a paper bag for this stuff?” she asked suddenly, her voice as loud as if she’d been standing beside him.

A faint quiver in her tone betrayed…what? Nerves? Excitement?

No, he told himself with a mental curse. Call it what it was. Stress. For God’s sake, in the space of two days she’d been involved in a foot pursuit, had her brakes sabotaged and nearly been killed in her own home. Now she was being forced to strip in front of—or behind—a near stranger. There was no way she found this titillating.

The fact that he did was, frankly, a little disturbing. But he was ultra-aware of her every motion within the small bathroom, hypersensitive to each rustle of cloth, each small noise. He pictured her removing her shirt, imagined her unfastening her jeans and sliding them down over the long, sleek lines of her legs.

He had to clear his throat before he said, “I didn’t bring my kit up,” which just went to show that he was off-stride. He never went anywhere official without the toolbox full of evidence collection basics. “There are paper bags for the dry cleaners in the closet. That should do.”

A good evidence tech learned to improvise.

“Can you pass me one?”

“Sure.” Seth forced himself to cross the room with a measured pace and reach inside the closet casually, as though this were a normal evidence collection.

As though he wasn’t picturing Cassie naked, sitting on the marble counter between the double sinks, knees parted slightly in invitation.

“Get a grip,” he muttered. He scrubbed a hand across his face and felt stubble rasp. It had been a long day, that was all. His anti-Cassie defenses were low.

“Varitek? The bag?” Her voice wrapped around the corner between the closet and the bath, making it all too clear that she was mere feet away.

“Here.” He hooked his arm through the bathroom door and shoved the bag in her direction, then returned to his window. He pressed his palms against the cool glass and summoned up a memory of Robyn’s face, not as he’d last seen her, bloodied and dying, but as he’d known her in life, sassy and snappy and always ready to stir up trouble.

In that, she and Cassie were alike, he realized, and was faintly disturbed to find himself comparing the two as he struggled to ignore another rasp of cloth from the bathroom. It wasn’t going to happen between him and Cassie. He wouldn’t let it happen. He wasn’t ready for a new relationship, and was pretty sure he’d never be ready for someone like Cassie.

She was too much damn effort, like Robyn.

He and Robyn had worked on their marriage, sometimes harder than it seemed like they should have. When he looked at his sister’s marriage, it seemed like CeeCee and Jack glided effortlessly through the years and the children. In contrast, he and Robyn had busted their butts to get along. They’d gone through three counselors and two sets of mediation sessions, but they had refused to give up, even when things were at their worst. Seth because he believed in one marriage for life. Robyn because she didn’t mind fighting. Hell, sometimes she seemed to enjoy it.

And when you came down to it, they’d stayed together because while they hadn’t always liked each other, they had loved each other.

“All set,” Cassie’s voice said at his shoulder. He turned to find her standing there with one hand clutching a bulging dry cleaner’s bag and the other holding her robe shut.

A faint blush stained her cheeks and he could see the pulse at her throat. It beat fast, as though she were nervous.

He took the bag. “I’ll enter this into evidence and have someone from my team pick it up as soon as they get into town.” When her eyes darkened, he sighed and said, “I know you don’t like my people being involved, but what other option do we have? Call Fitz back?”