Ricochet

He wasn’t proud of it, but vacation flings were his stock in trade. He was too much of a nomad for anything more, and at thirty-five was too damn set in his ways to change now. Hell, the one time he’d tried to settle down had been a disaster. He’d hurt a good woman, someone he’d cared about, though he obviously hadn’t cared enough. Since then, he’d stayed carefully away from nesters, from women who wanted more from him than he was able to give.

So he’d danced with the just-in-town-for-a-few-days babe who’d introduced herself as Alissa. He’d reveled in the drape of her long, honey-colored hair as they danced close, then closer still. He’d slid his hands beneath her midriff shirt, riding on the high from closing the Vanzetti case, one too many beers and the gleam of encouragement in her eyes.

They’d kissed on the dance floor, then again in the hall by the phones, moving fast even for him. But the roar of heat had swept away rationality and battered at the small kernel of self-preservation he held close to his soul. They’d stumbled to her rental car wrapped in each other, not sure where they were going but positive they needed to get there quickly, before they proved that spontaneous combustion wasn’t a myth.

Unable to wait for his place or her hotel, he’d pulled her across his lap in the passenger seat. She’d gone willingly, twining around him with arms and tongue until a flaming, pulsing need consumed him—nearly panicked him. It was too much, too soon, but the spark of caution was quickly gone. He fumbled for his wallet, for a condom, and knocked a badge off the center console.

Only it hadn’t been his badge. It had been hers. And it had landed on a real estate printout of a cute house not five miles away from his generic apartment building.

Oh, hell, he remembered thinking when the explanation followed.

She was in town for a few days, all right. But she’d be back soon, and working for the BCCPD. His bosses. He’d excused himself without an explanation and bolted, unnerved by an almost overwhelming desire to stay.

Two weeks later she and her friends had replaced Fitz as part of Chief Parry’s updating of the BCCPD, and she’d been under his skin ever since.

Because the knowledge made him mean, Tucker scowled at the male desk officer, a twenty-something named Pendelton. “This better be good.”

Pendelton gestured at the chest-high counter, which held a plain paper rectangle with “Det. Tucker McDermott” printed in square letters with black ink. “I thought you should see this. It didn’t come in the mail. It just sort of…appeared. One minute it wasn’t there, and the next…” Pendelton snapped his fingers. “There it was on the front desk.” A hint of nerves worked into his voice when he said, “I’m sorry. I went to the can for a minute. Just a minute, I swear. Maybe the dispatchers saw something.” But he didn’t sound hopeful.

Tucker’s gut tightened. “Did you touch it?”

“No. Not on your life.”

It could be a hoax, but instinct told him otherwise. “You got a pair of tweezers and a couple of evidence bags?”

Pendelton trotted off to get the items. For a brief second Tucker thought about calling one of the new evidence techs. Hell, they were just down the hall. He would have if it had been Fitz. But because Fitz had retired—very abruptly—and because Tucker knew the procedure as well as anyone, he took the tweezers himself. Teased the envelope open himself. And read the enclosed note himself.

Dumb cops. Elizabeth is in the canyon, and you’d better hurry. It’s getting cold.

Adrenaline fired through Tucker’s bloodstream. He bolted to the conference room and yanked open the door. The pretty, dark-haired psych expert of the new Forensics Department—he was pretty sure her name was Maya—stood at the front of the room with a string of words listed on the wipe board behind her, things like white male, 20-40 years, and high functioning, followed by a question mark.

Things they didn’t need an abnormal psychology specialist to tell them. They were cops, damn it. They knew the profiles, knew what they should be looking for. They just hadn’t been able to find the bastard yet. They’d needed a break.

Well, maybe they’d just gotten one.

Not caring that he was interrupting, Tucker lifted the note inside its protective evidence bag, blood racing with the thrill of the hunt. “Come on. The first victim is in the canyon.”

Or else the kidnapper wanted them to think she was.

BEAR CLAW CANYON was shallower and narrower than some of the nearby natural wonders, but it had its own dangers, its own treacheries. The crevice was only man height in spots, but the waterway at the bottom meandered and doubled back on itself, breaking off into tributaries and feeder streams without warning.

Because of it, there were thousands of tiny, cracked caverns and overhangs, a hundred places for hikers to lose themselves in the two-thousand-acre Bear Claw State Park.

A hundred places to hide a girl. A body.

Near the snowy spot where they’d parked their official four-wheel-drive vehicles, Alissa curled her hands into fists and fought the urge to run for the canyon, to scream the missing girl’s name. There were procedures to follow, and experience had taught her that protocol beat instinct every time in police work. A gut feel might lead to the perpetrator, but judges and lawyers cared about procedure. Words like intuition could get an important case thrown out, a violent criminal released.

The memory of just such a case soured the back of her throat.

Before the task force headed into the canyon, Chief Parry divided them into pairs. With the way Alissa’s luck had been running, she wasn’t surprised when the chief paired her with McDermott.

The detective didn’t argue. He merely scowled and jerked his head toward their search area, a multibranched point where the waterway widened and slowed. “Come on.” He dropped down into the canyon, which was nine or ten feet deep, where their search was to begin. When Alissa paused at the edge, he frowned. “You want me to catch you?”

She shook her head. “No.” Hell, no. “Just give me a minute. I want to get a feel for the scene.”

Though skeletal analysis and reconstruction was her specialty, her official title in the BCCFD was Crime Scene Analyst. Captain Parry was counting on her to see, and record, the details others missed.

Sometimes the smallest detail could make or break a collar. A conviction.

She stood on an open expanse of rocky ground, half a mile from the main entrance to Bear Claw State Park. They had driven in, but parked well back from the lip of the canyon, which was maybe forty feet across at this point.

She saw no other tire tracks in the week-old snow. No footprints beyond those of the searchers. “He would have needed an ATV to get in here, a snowmobile or a four-wheeler,” she said to herself. “Unless he carried her in.”

If the girl was even in the canyon. The note could just as easily be an ugly prank.

Alissa let her eyes drop lower, to the crumbling canyon edge and the bare, frozen dirt nearby, where the wind had swept the area clean and drifted snow beside the ice-strewn waterway. It was a pretty scene, a coldly brutal one that reminded her of the frigid power of a mountain winter. But it told her very little about the crime or the perpetrator.

Satisfied, she sat at the edge of the canyon and ignored McDermott’s offered hand to drop lightly to the frozen ground below.

“Fitz took pictures,” he said, voice dark with challenge. “Photographs are reliable evidence. Sketches aren’t. Memories aren’t.”

“You think I don’t know that?” She pulled her gloves out of her pockets and shoved her hands into them, though it didn’t lessen the chill. She was tired of the BCCPD’s attitude, annoyed by the closed-mindedness of the other cops. Fitz did it this way. “I’m not Fitz, but I’m damn good at my job. Don’t lecture me.”

“I’m not,” he fired back, eyes dark with temper, and maybe something else. “It’s just…” He blew out a breath. “Hell, I don’t know what it is.”

Except he did. They both did. The memory of that night at the dance club shimmered between them like a living reminder of passion. Of heat.

She slanted him a look and decided to tackle it head-on. “This doesn’t need to be a thing, you know. We danced. No big deal.”

Except that was a lie. It had almost been a very big deal for her.

She’d gone to the club that night with Maya and Cassie. The girls had been split up by their assignments after the academy, and though they’d kept in touch with calls and visits in the six years since, it hadn’t been the same. They’d often talked about working together, so when they heard rumors of Fitz O’Malley’s unexpected retirement, they’d put in a proposal and three transfer requests. A month later it was official. They were the new BCCFD.

They had met in Bear Claw that weekend to look at apartments, and had gone out for a celebratory drink after. One drink had turned into three over a couple of hours, along with food. Not enough to get Alissa blitzed, but enough that when the music started, she was right in the mix, bumping and grinding along with the dancers while Cassie and Maya cheered from their table.

Alissa had noticed the man’s eyes first, dark and intense as he’d stood at the edge of the crowd. He wore casual jeans and an open-necked shirt, covering a tight, honed body that spoke of strength and the outdoors. She saw him shake off an invitation from a shaggy-haired blonde and another from a slick brunette, but his eyes never left hers. When she crooked a finger, he’d met her halfway.

As they had danced, she reminded herself she didn’t do bar pickups. Hell, she hadn’t done much of anything in the past year, since her supposedly serious boyfriend had taken a job out of state. He’d buggered off with barely a goodbye, making him no better than her father, who’d at least pretended he was going to keep in touch.

“It’s not about what did—or didn’t—happen that night,” McDermott said, interrupting old, sour memories that deserved interrupting. “My only concern is finding these girls and catching the bastard who’s taken them. I have nothing against you except that I work alone. I don’t want a partner, so stay behind me and let me do my job.”

He strode off without waiting for an answer, leaving her to fume, as old and new irritations battered her heart.

“Let him do his job,” she muttered, still standing where they’d dropped down into the canyon. “Great. Another cowboy. Maybe he’ll get the guy, but the guy won’t stay gotten, will he? He’ll walk, just like Ferguson did.”

At her last posting, a serial rapist had been preying on college girls, and the Tecumseh Springs PD had formed a task force similar to the one she was in now. They’d gotten the guy—a punk named Johnny Ferguson, who lived with his mother and hated the world—but there had been a glitch in the chain of evidence, a cowboy moment when the lead cop had gone on instinct rather than procedure and blown the case to hell.

Since then, she had valued precision over gut feel, evidence over emotion. It was an odd contradiction—an artist who didn’t venture outside the box—but it worked for her. And that was yet another reason she should stay far away from Tucker McDermott, who had the reputation of being all about instinct, sometimes at the expense of procedure.