Jessica Andersen - Bear Claw Lawman

Tucker glanced back in the direction Jenn had gone. “You want me to give Alyssa the heads-up, ask her to make sure she’s okay?”

Nick told himself to leave it alone. Instead, he nodded. “Yeah. But don’t tell her why I did it.”

Tucker sent him a sidelong look. “You sure?”

“Leave it alone.” Nick inhaled, trying to fill the empty spaces. “She’s better off without me.”

“What about you? Are you going to be better off?”

“That’s not a priority. I’m just here to help close the case.”

Tucker didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged and held out a sticky note. “Then you’re going to want this.”

Nick took the paper and skimmed the address written on it. “What’s the deal?”

“That’s what I need you to figure out. Looks like we found one of the lieutenants…or what’s left of him.”

Chapter Two

One month later…

“This one looks even worse than the first two,” Jenn commented from the doorway, breathing through her mouth and doing her best to see the scene in terms of the evidence it might provide, rather than what it said about the victim’s last hours of life.

The ME’s office had collected Chuckie Dennison’s corpse, but what was left behind was plenty gruesome in its own right. Everything from the dining room chair—which had ropes sagging off it and a series of fingernail scrapes where the victim had struggled to free himself—to the array of kitchen utensils and small hand tools meticulously spread out on the stained burgundy tablecloth, said that the victim had been brutally tortured.

Gigi, who had gotten there first and started methodically photographing the scene, let the camera hang at her side as she took a look around and grimaced. “We’ll need the autopsy to be sure. But, yeah, it’s bad. And, yeah, I think you’re right that it fits the pattern. Odds are that it’s the Investor again.”

That was the word on the street, anyway. The rumors said it was the mastermind himself who had hunted down two—now three—of his former lieutenants in the Ghost Militia. The men had been found tortured to death, with the scenes showing every sign of an ordered, organized and ruthlessly self-controlled killer. Nobody knew whether the Investor was disposing of potential witnesses, getting revenge, or what… . Or if they knew, they weren’t telling.

Which meant that the task force was dealing with three bodies, three crime scenes and lots of evidence, but they still didn’t have a name or description of the Investor, and no idea when or where he would strike next. The former members of the Ghost Militia weren’t the type to ask for police protection; in fact, the last few remaining higher-ups had gone even deeper underground after the killings started.

“You don’t think it’s a vigilante?” Jenn asked as she set down her field kit, gloved up and got to work on the chair, which Gigi had already photographed.

That was the other theory the cops were working on, that it wasn’t the Investor at all, but instead, a local who was hunting and killing the remaining members of the Ghost Militia. Unfortunately, the list of people with possible motives was all too long—eighty-three people had died from Death Stare overdoses, and another dozen innocent bystanders had been killed during the Militia’s last desperate struggle to escape from the crackdown. Although many of the dead drug users had been among the city’s homeless, meaning that some had been tagged with just a first name, or sometimes not even that much, others had been ID’d. Which meant there were hundreds of bereaved family members out there, even more grieving friends…some of whom might be inclined to take matters into their own hands.

But Gigi shook her head. “It’s a plausible theory, sure, but I’m going with the word on the street. Nick…um, the task force’s connections have a pretty good track record so far.”

Jenn’s cheeks heated, but she made herself concentrate on the ropes that had been used to bind the victim, photographing them from even more angles before cutting them free and bagging them. After a moment, she said, “You can say his name, you know. It’s not like I don’t see him around.”

The dubious look Gigi shot her spoke volumes about just how bad Jenn had been at camouflaging her disbelief and unhappiness for those first couple of weeks after Nick dumped her. Or, at least, how bad she’d been at hiding it from Gigi and her other friends down in the crime lab. As far as anyone else knew—she hoped—it hadn’t been at all obvious that she had been hurting.

She was damn good at making it look as if everything was okay, after all. And in the fine tradition of “fake it until you make it,” eventually the sting really had worn off.

“I’m fine, really. I’m over it.” Jenn sealed a bag and signed her name on the first line of the label, starting the evidence chain. “It wasn’t even about him, really…it was everything.” She filed the bag in her kit, then rocked back on her bootie-covered heels to look over at her friend.

She hadn’t really talked about the breakup, even with Gigi, partly because she’d needed to work it out for herself, and partly because she’d hoped it would quickly become old news.

It didn’t seem to be, though—Gigi and the other analysts still looked at her with pity in their eyes every time Nick’s name came up or, worse, when they crossed paths. Which wasn’t that often, granted, but when they did, she knew that the others were watching her, waiting to see how she would react, as if she hadn’t been a hundred percent professional the last dozen times it had happened.

Not that she was counting.

“Everything?” Gigi nudged. Finished with the photographs, she was using a laser device to measure the room and the big pieces of furniture.

Those details, along with the photos and other notes, would go into one of the computers back in the lab to make a rendering. It wasn’t quite the kind of high tech used by the crime scene shows on TV—those were largely a combination of science fiction and reality, anyway—but it was more than most local police departments could boast.

Unfortunately, even the money Matt was funneling into the crime lab couldn’t force the case to break.

Jenn hesitated, then shook her head and got back to work, donning fresh gloves and getting ready to start swabbing the gruesome stains on the chair. Odds were that it all belonged to the victim, but it was still worth doing the work. That was the name of the game with crime scene analysis: ninety-nine percent drudgery and one percent eureka.

She worked methodically, swabbing each spot, retracting the swab into its sterile sheath and stoppering and labeling the tube, so if—or rather, when—the Investor made it into court, there wouldn’t be any chance of the evidence getting thrown out.

Not this time, she thought grimly, all too aware that over the past month, the case had gotten very personal for her, both as a way to prove herself, and a way to make amends for some of her past mistakes. Including the one she’d made with Nick, letting herself get distracted from what was really important by something that they had both agreed from the very beginning would only be a passing thing.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault but her own that she’d let herself forget that part.

Aware that Gigi was waiting for an answer, Jenn finally said, “Nick wasn’t the first guy I’ve dated since Terry died…but he was the first one who made an impact. He was the first one I was excited to see, the first one I missed when we were apart, the first one—” She broke off. “Anyway, even though it’s been almost three years since Terry was killed, Nick was my rebound. I jumped in too far too fast, and clung too hard to something that wasn’t real, mostly because I was so damn excited to finally feel something.”