Ricochet

With a nearly feral roar, he lifted an ice-crusted boulder and heaved it aside.

“There!” Cassie yelled. “There she is!” She darted toward a scrap of cloth and a laced boot. “Get down here and help me!”

The others surged forward, but Tucker elbowed them aside. “I’ve got her!” He dropped into the hole and touched the limp body of the woman he was supposed to have been backing up. Who was supposed to have been backing him up.

This was why he didn’t work with a partner. He was no good at teamwork.

He whispered a prayer, or maybe a threat, as he checked her over and found nothing obviously wrong. She was stirring when he lifted her up and out of the hole. His muscles strained, though she couldn’t weigh much more than 110, 120 pounds. He looked down and realized her hand was caught on something. He saw a flash of denim and shouted, “There’s the girl!”

His shout brought a flurry of activity, of renewed digging, but Tucker focused on the woman in his arms. She moaned as he hauled her up and out of the ragged hole and carried her to the side of the canyon, where he could lay her flat as the BCCPD helicopter landed nearby.

She didn’t stay down long. Within moments she was batting at his hands and struggling to sit up. But her attention wasn’t focused on the rescued girl, whose motionless body was being strapped to a backboard for loading into the chopper.

No, Alissa was staring at the place where the kidnapper’s bomb had blown away part of the tributary canyon wall.

“Look!” She pointed to the scarred rock and dirt.

He saw it then, and let out a soft curse at the object that had tumbled from the disturbed earth.

It was a human skull.

ALISSA WAS COLD and sore and scared, but she’d think about it later, when she was alone and nobody could see her lose it.

She’d been buried alive. She deserved some hysterics, but she’d learned to put off the tears long enough to deal with the immediate problem. When she was younger and her mother had been struggling to keep them together, the problem had usually been money—an irate landlord or a cold Denver apartment in January.

Now the immediate problem was a crime scene. Actually, it was two crime scenes, one on top of the other.

Who did the skeleton belong to? How had the person died? How had it come to be buried there? And what were the chances that the rigged explosion would accidentally open another, far older grave?

Very slim, which suggested they had been meant to find the grave. But why?

McDermott touched her arm. “They’ve got Lizzie loaded on the chopper. They’re waiting for you.”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically, though her lungs ached at the words. She moved away from his touch, uncomfortable with how her chilled body yearned to lean into his warmth. She glanced at him and saw that his eyes were as dark as she had remembered, only with irritation, not passion. “Thanks for pulling me out.”

She would never admit that thinking of him had kept her sane in those last few minutes. She’d used him as a mental crutch, that was all. A focus.

Instead of accepting her thanks, he snapped, “I wouldn’t have needed to if you’d waited for me. What were you thinking? Never leave your partner like that.”

Irritation sparked. “If you’ll remember, you left me behind, not the other way around!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, though they both knew it did. “Just get your butt on the chopper.”

She gritted her teeth. “I’m not going to the hospital when there’s a crime scene to work.”

“Let one of the others do it. Isn’t that why the chief hired three of you? So there’d be redundancy in the Forensics Department?”

“No,” Cassie said, neatly stepping between them. “He hired us because our skills complement each other, and because the BCCPD needed an upgrade.” She turned her back on him and locked eyes with Alissa. “You should go with the girl. She’ll need to talk to someone.”

It was ironic that Cassie was playing the mediator. The tall, blond evidence specialist was usually the abrasive one, the sharp-tongued edgy one, who made enemies more easily than friends and never hesitated to express her opinion. If she was toning it down, it meant she’d been worried. Very worried.

Alissa clasped her friend’s hand and smiled. “It’ll be okay, but thanks.” She glanced over and saw a petite, dark-haired figure climb into the helicopter. “Lizzie doesn’t need me right now. Maya will help, and her parents will be waiting at the hospital. I’ll go in later and see if I can get a sketch. For now I’ll stay here and work the scene.” She shot a look at Tucker, who stood nearby, glowering. “You got a problem with that?”

They both knew he did, and he probably had a point. She was tired and sore, and damned if her camera wasn’t down there somewhere, amidst the busted-up ice and rock.

He scowled and turned away. “No problem. I’m not your keeper. Do what you need to do and leave me out of it.”

And he was gone, taking the faint, lingering warmth with him.

Alissa watched him climb to the top of the canyon and work his way toward the back of the blown-out tunnel, where the bomb experts were already congregating. Then she held out a hand to Cassie. “Let me borrow your camera, okay? Mine’s trash.”

Cass cocked her head. “Want to talk about it?” She wasn’t asking about what had happened in the tunnel.

Alissa shook her head. “Nothing to talk about. Let’s do our jobs.”

TUCKER WATCHED the two women work the scene together. There was no doubting they were a team. Cassie handled the evidence collection, having dragooned several task force members into digging, witnessing the collections, starting the chain of evidence and transporting the items back to a waiting vehicle.

Items. It sounded so much neater than bones, but that was what they were uncovering. A skeleton had been buried in a shallow grave at the side of the ice tunnel.

The searchers brought in heaters to melt the frost layer and used hand trowels, then brushes, to uncover the bones. The soil was bagged for sifting, and the bags were carefully labeled with exact coordinates.

Alissa helped when needed, but otherwise stood aside and recorded the process with photographs and detailed notes. She listed where each bone was found, how deep it was buried and how far away from the others. When the exhumation was complete, she could use her notes along with her new computer programs to recreate the scene in its entirety.

Which, Tucker admitted, would be a step up from Fitz’s glossy photographs, and the hand-drawn schematics he used to tack on a flip board for the jury’s view.

It wasn’t that he had anything against progress, Tucker thought, as he watched Alissa record the position of a femur. And it wasn’t as if he missed Fitz all that much. Hell, if the old coot wanted to retire, who was he to complain? It was…

Admit it, he muttered inwardly. It’s Alissa.

She rattled him. Unsettled him. Fascinated him, though he had no business being fascinated with a local when he’d put in for—and been granted—his next transfer. The only thing keeping him in town right now was the task force. Once the girls were found and the kidnapper was in custody, he’d be in the wind.

Growing up, he’d hated the moves from one military base to the next, hated the look on his mother’s face when his father’s next set of orders came through. These days it was the opposite. His parents were happily settled in Arizona, while he was the one skipping around.

But he liked it that way. Liked his freedom. His independence.

As though she sensed his thoughts or his gaze, Alissa lowered the camera and looked across the distance separating them. He felt their eyes lock, felt a click of connection in his chest. He wanted to go to her, to tell her how he’d nearly gone out of his mind digging down to her.

Instead he turned away and focused on the second crime scene, where two members of the bomb squad were excavating what was left of the tunnel. Chief Parry stood nearby with his hands jammed in the pockets of his uniform parka. He frowned as Tucker joined him.

“Bastard rigged a trip wire to Lizzie’s ankle and shoved her into the tunnel. We got a few fragments of the device. Trouper’s taking them.”

Tucker nodded. “Reasonable.” The BCCPD had a good relationship with the feds, particularly the FBI. After the second kidnapping, when it became clear that this was more than a disgruntled teen hitting the road for Vegas or points west, they had called for help and gotten Trouper, a lean, graying agent who’d done his damnedest to help without stepping on toes.

Parry glanced over toward the rapidly emptying grave site. “They find anything with the bones?”

Tucker shrugged. “More bones, maybe a few scraps of cloth. They’re having trouble with the ice.”

The chief grunted, which was his fallback answer to most everything. “The skeleton will go to the ME for a preliminary workup, and then we’ll let Wyatt have the skull. Maybe we can get a recognizable face from it.”