At Close Range Read Free

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. They assumed it had disappeared from the grave, lost to scavengers or spring runoff.
    What if it had been taken instead?
    Varitek said, “It’s 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. “We’re working on it.”
    Truthfully, they’d been swamped by other cases. With Bradford Croft dead and the kidnapped girls home safe, identifying the skeleton had dropped on the priority list.

    Without the skull, all they had to go on was the approximate age, sex and height of the skeleton—late teens, female, around five-six—and the fact that the bones had been in the ground for a decade, give or take. Feeling a sense of empathy for the girl, Cassie had run the database searches and had come up with a handful of missing-person reports in and around Bear Claw during that time period. None of them had panned out, meaning that the next step was to expand the search statewide. That’d give her a couple of hundred names, most of which—if not all—
    would be dead ends.
    With her current caseload, Alissa’s vacation and