At Close Range. Jessica Andersen

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      CASSIE POUNDED DOWN to the basement crime lab, nearly vibrating with fury.

      Maybe she should be used to being underestimated by now, but it still stung. How long would she have to fight the fragile female stereotype? How many heads did she have to bite off, how many testosterone-laden men was she going to have to chase away from her territory before they’d believe that she was smart enough, tough enough and street-savvy enough to do the job she’d been hired to do?

      In all honesty, Varitek probably wasn’t trying to be a jerk. There was some logic to his words. It had been a tense, ugly situation when Croft had targeted Alissa. But she wasn’t Alissa, and this wasn’t the same situation. Cassie couldn’t afford to be coddled, and she’d be damned if he shoved her to the side of another investigation.

      She glared around the lab, part of her wishing for someone to fight with, part of her glad to be alone in the one space that made her feel truly welcome. The banks of machines didn’t care what she looked like or whether she peed sitting down. They answered the questions she asked, using the information she gave them. She could load in two DNA samples and be confident that the next morning, the fluorescent peaks and valleys on the computer printout would tell her whether she had a match or not. Whether she had a mixed sample or not.

      The evidence didn’t care who she was.

      She let her fingertips drift over the stereomicroscope she used to examine fiber, hair and dirt samples. She glanced at the logged evidence from the apartment murder scene, the jacket and hat from the bastard who’d rigged her truck. But though she was tempted to dive in, she knew better.

      She was too ticked off to work effectively, too distracted. Her thoughts were jammed with Seth Varitek. She was all tangled up with the sound of his deep, masculine voice, and the feel of being pressed up against the wall of a crummy apartment building. He’d invaded her senses until she swore she could taste him on her lips, which was impossible.

      Cursing, she strode out of the lab and into her small office, where she threw herself into her desk chair and slapped her computer mouse to wake the machine from its screen saver.

      Then she stared blankly at the glowing icons.

      “Stop taking this so personally,” she said aloud, hoping the words would help put the scene upstairs into perspective. “He wasn’t saying you couldn’t take care of yourself. He was just saying to watch out.”

      Only he’d said more than that. He’d agreed to “watch her back,” which she translated as “keep her in the lab while I work the field.” He was an excellent evidence tech, but so was she. And she was the one who’d be staying in Bear Claw once this was over. She was the one who lost status in her coworkers’ eyes every time she let the FBI take over a crime scene.

      She lost. Not him.

      So, yeah, it was personal. Maybe not to him, but it sure as hell was to her. With Alissa and Maya out of town, it was up to her to defend the value of the new forensics department. It was up to her to make herself indispensable to the BCCPD, so the other cops would finally realize that she was worth something to the department.

      That she was worth something at all.

      Lee’s voice whispered around the edges of her mind, telling her it wasn’t enough, that it would never be enough. Gritting her teeth against a press of anger, she clicked over to her favorite Web search engine. She typed two words into the query box.

      Seth Varitek.

      If this was going to be a battle for control of the Bear Claw Forensics Department, it made sense for her to know her enemy, to know his weak spots, if there were any. And though public records might not give her the insight she needed, the Web was a good place to start. She didn’t need to be a full detective to know that.

      She avoided his public profile on the FBI field office Web site. She’d checked it out a few weeks after he’d left Bear Claw, just out of curiosity, and had been unsettled by the hot rush that had punched through her when she’d seen his official photo. In the picture, his dark hair was buzzed close to his skull and his pale green eyes seemed to stare directly at her. It was by no means a glamor shot, it was too rugged for that, too fierce. But it had encapsulated what she remembered of the man, and it had left her far warmer than she’d liked.

      “So we’ll skip that site,” she muttered to herself. “We’ll stipulate that he’s relatively hot and move on to the important stuff—figuring out what makes him tick.”

      She kept one eye on the door as she clicked through lists of the papers he’d authored in recent years. He’d come looking for her sooner or later—to gloat if nothing else—and it wouldn’t do for him to find her prying. Wouldn’t do for him to know that she was interested, if only in the context of defending her territory.

      The search results were sorted by date, so it took her ten minutes or so to work through the past couple of years’ worth of information on Varitek, mostly notations of meetings he’d attended or spoken at, research he’d done on computer simulation models and methods for integrating the various criminology databases.

      “No wonder he has all those cutting-edge programs to work with,” she said, impressed in spite of herself. “He developed some of them.”

      That also explained why he was a generalized evidence guru when so many of the FBI forensics experts specialized in one field, whether it be hair or paint chips or DNA. But that didn’t really help her. She needed something more. Something personal. Then she clicked on the next screen worth of information and hit pay dirt.

      Only it wasn’t the sort of dirt she’d wanted to find.

      It was far worse.

      The newspaper articles were from the major Denver papers. The headlines jumped out at her, highlighted one-line summaries that told a terrible story.

      She sucked in a breath and moved to blank the screen, but a hint of movement and a low curse from the doorway warned that she was already too late. She spun in her chair and saw that Varitek stood in the doorway of her small office, close enough to read the damning words over her shoulder.

      His eyes were dark, his expression closed. “Find what you needed, Officer?”

      Her stomach knotted and she stood, unwilling to let him loom over her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”

      He didn’t nod, didn’t smile, didn’t let her off the hook. Instead, he said, “No, you shouldn’t have. It’s none of your business.” He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to be breathing, though she knew that was an illusion. “How much did you read?”

      “Not much,” she answered quickly. “Just the headlines.”

      Headlines like Woman Murdered Returning Home From Art Show, and Cop Husband Vows Revenge Against Diablo Brothers.

      “Then what else do you want to know?” he said, voice dark with an emotion that didn’t show in his face. “Should I tell you that Robyn and I fought about that damned art show? She wanted people to know how run-down the schools were in that section of town, wanted to help improve them. She moved her paintings down there and planned a party, a grand opening for God’s sake.” Grief deepened the lines beside his mouth and the muscles at his jaw bunched with tension. “I made her promise not to go out there without me. Then I let her down because I got a call. A break in the СКАЧАТЬ