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.”
Tucker stuck his hands in his pockets. “Fitz said there was no way to reconstruct a face from a skull.”
“Fitz also wasn’t a big fan of blood-spatter trajectories and DNA. If it wasn’t a fingerprint, he didn’t want to know about it,” Parry said with uncharacteristic asperity. “And I wish you guys would get off the Fitz kick already. You know as well as I do that he was a pain in the ass and long past retirement. Yeah, he cleared a hell of a lot of cases, but he was a damned dinosaur. You should be kissing these girls’ butts for bringing in new techniques, not bitching because they do things differently. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have hired them!”
The chief kept his voice low so they wouldn’t be overheard, but there was no question that he was serious.
And knowing that the chief had a valid point, Tucker felt a low burn of shame. “But, Chief—”
“No buts. I want you with me on this.” Parry leveled a finger at Tucker. “If you lead, the others will follow. I want you to give those women a break, particularly Wyatt.”
Tucker shifted uneasily. “I don’t have anything against Wyatt.”
The captain grunted. “Baloney. You glare any time you’re within fifty feet of her, and you do a damn good job of not letting that happen too often. Since you’re usually a pretty level guy, I figure there’s one of two reasons for that. Either you’re hot for her or you hate her guts. Which is it?”
The chief’s question hung on the air between them as the cold day dimmed toward a colder dusk. Tucker hid the wince—or tried to—and said, “Neither. I’m just not sure she’s the right cop for the job. She’s awfully young—” and tiny, delicate, breakable “—to be in charge of evidence collection.”
“She’s older than you were when you took the oath, McDermott. She has eight years on the job in Tecumseh, and more training than Fitz ever bothered to get.” Parry shot him a look. “So what’s your real problem with her?”
Knowing he wasn’t going to win, Tucker set his teeth. “No problem, Chief.”