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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.
Knowing it, she steeled herself to follow him down the canyon, toward the sound of other searchers’voices calling for the missing girl.
Lizzy…Li-zzzy. The cries overlapped in mournful echoes, making the canyon seem alive. Making it seem as though something—or someone—was out there. Waiting. Watching.
Alissa held back a shiver, knowing that it wasn’t even certain the girl was nearby. The note could be nothing more than a hoax.
Or a trap.
The feeling of watching eyes intensified, and Alissa scrambled to catch up. As though sensing the same scrutiny, McDermott glanced back over his shoulder. “Hurry up, partner.”
She ignored his tone and quickened her step—
And she saw it.
She couldn’t have said why the crevice caught her attention, but something about it seemed off. Some might call it instinct, but she preferred to think of it as a highly developed sense of color and shape. Something was wrong with this picture.
She stopped dead and stared at a shadowy, snow-shrouded cleft in the canyon wall. Her mind took a snapshot of the scene. Then she did one better. She pulled out her slick camera and took a few shots, carefully overlapping them so she could reassemble the panorama later on her computer.
“You see something?” McDermott asked, but his voice seemed distant as she walked toward the cleft, her every instinct on alert.
It was a tunnel of sorts, an ice-and-snow overhang undercut by the trickle of a sluggish tributary that had long since frozen over. Totally focused on the scene, on her job, she snapped several pictures, then drew a small flashlight from her pocket. She crouched down and shone the light into the forbidding darkness.
At the furthest reaches of the yellow illumination, she saw a bare, motionless foot and the ragged hem of wrinkled blue jeans.
Excitement slapped through her, mixed with apprehension that the foot wasn’t moving. “I see her!”
Alissa heard Tucker shout something, but she couldn’t wait for him. Her heart thundered in her chest. If Lizzie was alive, every second could be vital. That was the protocol—administer necessary aid first, then protect the crime scene.
Nearly shaking with anticipation, Alissa pulled off her gloves and shucked off her bulky parka so she could fit into the narrow tunnel without disturbing evidence. She jammed the small flashlight in her mouth to leave her hands free and dove in headfirst.
Tucker shouted, “Wyatt, wait!”
“I’m fine,” she called back, her flashlight-muffled words bouncing back from the ice and snow. “I’ve almost got her!”
Blood pumping, she crawled forward, careful to avoid a line of scuffs and boot prints preserved in the blown snow near the edge of the tunnel. Almost there! The girl’s bare ankle looked more gray than flesh toned, except where raw places stood out in bloody slashes. She was curled on her side facing away from the tunnel entrance. She wasn’t moving.
Alissa said a quick prayer, reached out and touched the motionless ankle. She felt the faintest hint of warmth. The flutter of a pulse.
“She’s alive!” she shouted. “Get the MedVac helicopter down! I’m going to pull her out. When you see my feet, give a yank!” She reached forward and felt for the girl’s other foot. There was something tied to it, maybe a length of the rope she’d been bound with.
Alissa yanked on the twine.
A bright white light flashed. An earsplitting crack reverberated through her skull.
And the tunnel collapsed on top of her.
Chapter Two
Ice, snow and dirt landed atop Alissa, pressing her down, squeezing the breath out of her. She screamed and tried to scramble back, but her arms and legs were pinned. Panic clawed at her throat, and her heart hammered in her ears. The weight increased, as though the whole canyon had come down on top of her.
She thrashed, squirmed and cried out with what was left of her breath. “Help! Help me!”
The tiny flashlight fell from her mouth, illuminating a small air pocket that had formed around her head. She saw dirt and ice six inches from her on all sides. Saw it shift a little closer as the cave-in settled.
“Help!” she whispered when she ran out of breath to scream. Cold, salty tears streamed down her face and ran into her mouth, and all she could hear was the pounding of her heart.
Calm down, she told herself. She had to calm down. Think! She tried to count her breaths, but she couldn’t breathe, so instead she counted her heartbeat, which was too loud, too fast.
McDermott had been right behind her. He would get her out.
But what if he can’t? asked a scared little voice in her soul. What if he’s too late?
The panic crested again, and she moaned, wishing she could be anywhere else. Out with the girls for a round of Friday-night drinks. Visiting her mother, even. They weren’t really close anymore, hadn’t been since Alissa’s father had left and her mother’s middle name had become Bitter. In that moment Alissa wished she could see her mother now and say she was sorry for having been a snotty teenager and a distant adult. Sorry for having blamed her mother because her father had never come back for that promised visit. And in a crazy way, she was sorry she’d never searched for him, if only to tell him that he was a rotten jerk.
Her tears dried to cool wet tracks on her cheeks. The air inside the small pocket warmed and grew stale. She thought she heard a shout and dull thuds, but they were too far away. And she was all alone.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said aloud, her voice strengthening as the debris allowed her an inch of breathing room. “They’re going to get you out of here.”
She felt a hint of movement beneath her outstretched hand. Not shifting soil this time, but living flesh. Then she remembered. She was holding the girl’s ankle!
“Elizabeth? Lizzie, is that you?” she called, not knowing whether her voice would carry far enough, but devastatingly grateful that the girl was alive. “If you can hear me, wiggle your foot a little.”
The foot moved.
“Okay. Hold on for me, okay? They’re going to get us out of here.” Alissa bit her lower lip and forced her voice to be even. “I want you to stay calm and relaxed, okay? I’m a police officer, and my friends are digging us out right now.”
She’d meant Cassie and Maya, who had been on the search team farther up the canyon and who must be frantic with worry. But her brain fixed on a picture of McDermott. She pictured him digging down toward her, eyes as dark as they’d been when the two of them danced.
Incredibly, the image brought a measure of calm.
Alissa drew a shallow breath to keep talking, more for her own sake than the girl’s, but her words were cut off by a roaring shift of dirt. A far-away shout of panic.
The air pocket collapsed. Icy cold weight bore down on her.
And she couldn’t breathe at all.
FASTER. HE HAD TO DIG faster, spurred by the knowledge that it had been a damn trap all along. The anger of it burned through Tucker’s gut as exertion flamed in his muscles. He got his fingers around a chunk of rock and frozen soil and heaved it aside.
He cursed as he worked, cursed Alissa for not waiting for backup, cursed himself for not being close enough to stop her. Cursed the bastard who’d left a note with his name on it, then ambushed an officer.
A female officer.
Her sex shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. Or maybe it wasn’t just that she was a woman. Maybe it was this particular woman. Ever since that night at the bar, she’d been at the edges of his mind, tempting him to forget his own rules.
“It’s settling!” shouted a tall blond woman he recognized as one of Alissa’s friends. Cassie something. The other searchers had all converged on the spot, drawn by the small, deadly explosion and Tucker’s bellow of shock and rage.
“We’ve got to get them out of there.” Chief Parry scraped at the snow and dirt with gloved hands. “There can’t be much air!”
Alissa’s image flooded Tucker’s mind, all honey-colored hair and warm blue eyes. Her remembered taste lingered on his tongue, though he’d told himself to forget it.
