Julie Miller - Tactical Advantage

Gasping at his firm, yet light, touch, Annie was stunned into silence. Nick Fensom had never touched her before, other than an accidental brush of contact as they passed each other in a crowded room or handed off a file folder at a meeting. And now he was holding her hands and instilling warmth as if he had some proprietary claim to do so.

The gentle massage of Nick’s bigger fingers over hers was almost painful as the blood began to warm her heat-deprived extremities. A little hiss of pain brought his gaze up to hers. “Easy, slugger. You’re okay.”

“Slugger?” A baseball reference?

He glanced up at the blue-and-white KC on the cuff of her stocking cap. “Looks like you’re a Royals fan.”

“I am.”

“Me, too. Who’d have thought you and I had something in common?”

“Yeah.” Witty comeback. But her thoughts were shifting from shock into the critical observations that usually filled her mind.

Sensation returned to her hands and Annie began to feel every supple movement of his fingertips, every callus that marked his broad palm. She could feel the heat radiating from his body, from his skin into hers.

Nick Fensom was being nice? On purpose? Where were the wisecracks that forced her to stay on her mental toes? The annoying arguments that threatened to undermine her investigative expertise? The heat he rubbed into her once-numb hands was blossoming elsewhere inside her, too. Her cheeks began to thaw with the traitorous flush of her physical response.

Up close like this, Annie noticed just how blue Nick’s eyes were. Their dark cobalt color was emphasized by the shadows between them, yet there was a sparkle of energy there, a light that gave them a sharp contrast to the coffee-brown darkness of his hair. And maybe it was just the close proximity she wasn’t accustomed to—or the thickness of his insulated leather jacket—that distorted the dimensions of his body. She knew he hadn’t grown any taller, and yet his shoulders and chest were broader than she remembered. They were wide enough to block the worst of the wind and snow and allow the air between them to warm and fill with the scents of the sterile solutions she used, along with the leather and faint garlicky deliciousness emanating from him.

“You’re like a furnace,” she noted, drawing her focus back to the reviving heat of his fingers around hers. Was he feeling this unexpected jolt of awareness, too? “Why are you doing this?”

“Speeding the process so I can get out of here before dawn. Your hands are like ice.”

“Oh.” So she’d been analyzing the color of his eyes and wondering if the dark stubble dusting the angles of his face would be sandpapery or soft to the touch while he’d simply wanted to get out of here sooner. Awkward. He probably had a hot date he’d left in a snug apartment somewhere, and Annie’s poky thoroughness was keeping him from getting back to her. With plenty of embarrassment to infuse her blood and keep her warm now, Annie jerked her hands from his and grabbed a fresh pair of gloves from her kit. “I’m fine. You can stop.”

“I don’t mind.” She flexed her fingers and reached up to extricate her flashlight from the net pocket in her CSI vest where Nick had stuck it. But her hands were chilling again and he’d jammed it in there good and why the heck couldn’t she manage her own equipment? Nick plucked the flashlight from her vest and pressed it into her palm. “Here. We’re part of a team, right? We have to help each other out.”

“Right.” Go ahead and be practical and coordinated and temptingly warm, she accused him silently, pushing to her feet and feeling about as graceful and misguided as a teenage girl who’d just had a run-in with her high school crush. She must be suffering from hypothermia to have hallucinated any sort of fascination with Nick Fensom. “I’m almost done. The path of blood droplets I was following has tapered off considerably.”

“O...kay.” He drawled out the word, clearly questioning her abrupt retreat. Nick pulled on his black leather gloves and straightened beside her. “By the way, you’re welcome.”

Annie lifted her gaze from the void of snow on the bricks behind the Dumpster. “Sorry.” Rubbing her hands truly had been a nice gesture, which was certainly more observant of her discomfort and more considerate than she’d given the burly detective credit for being. “You didn’t have to do that, but I appreciate it. I’ll do my best to get done before daylight, so we can both get someplace warm.”

And so she could find some time to herself to remember that Nick was just a cop she worked with, a streetwise pain in the posterior she frequently butted heads with—not the man who had suddenly blipped onto her sexual-awareness radar with his big shoulders and blue eyes and surprising consideration.

“Sounds like a temporary truce to me.”

Annie nodded her agreement, savoring the cold slap of wind on her face that brought her thoughts back into focus. She bent closer to the bricks as the bare spot took shape. It was a handprint, dotted with a few weeping trickles of blood. There was another handprint, another smear of red, climbing up the wall to where the falling snow clung to the bricks above the Dumpster and covered up the rest of the pattern. “This has been moved. Our vic got to her feet and pulled herself up along the wall here. And...something else.”

Nick waited for Annie’s nod before putting his shoulder to the Dumpster and shoving it aside a couple of feet. Then the beam from his flashlight joined hers. “That second handprint’s bigger. Looks like a scuffle to me. Two people fell against the wall—caught themselves. But this can’t be where she was killed. There isn’t enough blood.”

“That blood pool is farther back in the alley. She had her head bashed in back by where the alleys cross, beyond any line of sight from the street—with the brick I bagged up in my kit, I’m guessing. These are something different.” With her sterile gloves still in place, she tested one crimson spot with her fingertip. “The drops here aren’t as tacky. They’ve been here longer. This may be the initial attack site.”

“Where he first abducted her and hauled her away to a secondary location to rape her.” Nick’s shoulder nudged hers as he came in for a closer look. “Maybe this one got a look at her attacker, and they struggled. Could that be our perp’s handprint?”

Nudging him back out of her way, Annie focused the camera hanging around her neck and snapped a photograph. “I doubt we’ll get any fingerprints from our unsub—the lines are blurred enough that I’m sure both were wearing gloves. Wait a minute.”

“Did you see something?”

Before Nick could finish his question, Annie grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand in front of the prints on the wall. “Hold that right there.”

Before he could voice another question, she’d snapped another picture.

“Now take your glove off and hold it up there.”

She didn’t miss the dubious arching of his brow, but Nick did as she asked. “And my hand is photogenic because?”

“It’s a comparison shot.” Next, she photographed her own hand in front of the bloody prints on the wall before stooping down to pull a tape measure from her kit. “The smaller prints are about the size of my hand, so I’m guessing they belong to the victim. We can verify that once I talk with the medical examiner. But the other print is considerably larger.”

“Man-size hands.” Nick regloved and stepped to the side, clearing out of her work space. “The rapist’s?”

“Possibly.” She recorded the exact measurements in her notebook and stuffed it back into her coat pocket. “It’s something we can compare if we find handprints at other locations, or we bring a suspect into custody.”