Bear Claw Lawman

by Jessica Andersen

  Except he wasn’t grinning at the inside joke. He was staring at her in the mirror with something more than reserve in his expression now. Something that looked an awful lot like guilt.

  The butterflies took a dive. “Nick?”

  He cleared his throat and turned to face her, so those killer eyes were looking down at her, guarded and, yes, guilty as he said, “Listen, Jenn…we need to talk.”

  And all she could think was, Oh, hell.

  * * *

  WE NEED TO TALK. For years now Nick had thought those were the worst words a man could hear, not because of what they meant, but because of what they symbolized—problems, issues, changes… .

  This was the first time, though, that he realized as much as it had sucked him to hear the words, it ripped him up even worse to say them to someone else. Especially someone like Jenn.

  She’d come into the room ready to celebrate, but now the light dimmed in her chocolate-brown eyes and the color drained from her face, making the sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks and nose stand out. “You didn’t ask your bosses to let you stay longer, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. The DEA wants the Investor in custody before he hits any other cities with the Death Stare.”

  “What about you?” she asked. “What do you want?” And damned if her voice didn’t crack a little on the last word.

  “I…” He trailed off, guilt stinging at the sudden sign of vulnerability.

  She wasn’t supposed to be vulnerable, darn it. She was supposed to be gritty, tough and self-reliant—

  he wouldn’t have gone after her in the first place if she hadn’t been. More, she had been totally on board with the no-strings short-term fling that was all he ever offered. Heck, she was the one who’d brought up the ground rules in the first place.

  They’d wound up getting in way deeper than that, though, and from the look in her eyes, the lines had started to blur for her, far more than he’d suspected.

  Nick cursed himself inwardly. He should’ve stuck to his no-overnights policy, should’ve put the brakes on when things first started to slide. He didn’t like that he’d let things go as far as they had, didn’t like how his normal control had slipped. And he hated doing this to her now…but there was no way he could let things keep going the way they had been, or worse, let them go further.

  “I want…” Damn, this was harder than he’d thought it would be, and he’d known it would be hard—that was why he’d kept putting it off, not telling her there was a chance he’d be staying until it was an absolute done deal. He was paying for that now, though. “Tucker found me a two-room apartment around the corner that I can rent by the week. I’m moving in there today.”

  “You’re breaking up with me.” Her voice was a monotone, her face a pale mask.

  When he’d gone over it a hundred times in his head, he’d planned on saying something about how they’d agreed it was just for a couple of weeks, reminding her that they had promised when it was over, that they would walk away with no hard feelings. But they had already gone too far beyond where that would’ve made sense, so he just nodded. “I’m sorry, Jenn. I wish—”

  “Don’t.” She held up a hand, snapping that hard-eyed, determined mask of a poker face back in place. “Just don’t, okay? It’s… It’s like we said—a couple of weeks of fun. It’s been a couple of weeks, and tomorrow would’ve been goodbye, right?”

  He nodded, though he wasn’t sure it had really been a question. “Right.”

  “Then there’s nothing more to say.” She turned away to snag her stuff off the table, then stood there for a moment, shoulders stiff. He couldn’t see her face, didn’t know if she was fighting tears or anger, or both. Her voice was steady, though, when she said, “Don’t worry about any rumors, or seeing me around the station. I can handle it.”

  He winced, but couldn’t think of anything he could say that would make things better, and figured he shouldn’t try. The situation was the situation, and they were both going to have to get through it as best they could until the sting wore off or he went home, whichever came first. “I’ll come by after work and get my things.”

  She nodded, still with her back to him. “Okay. I’ll see you later, then.” She hesitated, but when he didn’t say anything else, she headed for the door without another word.

  He told himself to stay put. Instead, he caught the door on its backswing and stood at the threshold of the interrogation room, watching her walk away.

  Her strides were loose and limber and her shoulders were square beneath her butter-soft leather jacket, and she walked—as she always did—like she was ready to take on the world. That was one of the things he’d first noticed about her, the way she was always up for any challenge, any experience. He’d liked that about her. Hell, he’d liked damn near everything about her.

  “You did it, huh?” Tucker said from farther down the hall.

  Nick exhaled as Jenn took the stairs heading down to the basement, where the crime lab was located, and disappeared from view. Then he glanced over at the big, rangy detective. “Yeah. I did it.”

  He hadn’t meant to bring Tucker into things, but they had been friends a long time. Tucker had been the one who’d recruited him into the case, and he’d been the one who dropped the “congrats, you’re staying in Bear Claw until we catch the Investor” bombshell the other day…so he was the one who’d gotten the whole story—or most of it, anyway.

  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.”

  “The thing between you and Nick was just a rebound, huh?” Gigi’s tone didn’t quite call her a liar. But it was close. “And now you’re over him. You sure about that?”

  “One hundred percent.” Not just because she needed to be, but because she was seeing him for who he really was these days. Over the past month, without the blinders of lust and admiration dimming her view, she had realized that the man she had known—the one she had thought she knew so intimately—was just one part of the real Nick Lang…and she wasn’t sure she liked the other parts of him.

  With her, he had been charming and courteous, but with an edge of wicked and earthy humor that had jibed with her own, along with a down-to-earth streak she’d loved. He’d made goofy faces at Amber, the K9 who’d taken up desk duty at the P.D., along with her injured human partner, Kelsey Meyers. He’d gone running in the rain with Jenn and he’d used her shampoo without caring that it made him smell like flowers. And when she’d gotten up in the middle of the night to pace or stare out into the darkness, when she came back to bed, he’d always stirred and reached for her in his sleep.

  She might not have known where he grew up or what kind of music he liked, but she had thought she knew what kind of man he was. That is, until she started watching him more objectively and realized that while he was sometimes the guy she’d gotten to know, he could also be any number of other guys, depending on the situation.

  With the other cops, he was a cop, which made sense. But she had also watched a couple of tapes of him interrogating some of the jailed militiamen. And what she’d seen had startled the heck out of her, because he hadn’t just been talking with them, he’d become one of them—not just with a few quick changes of clothing, but with his body language, his speech… . Even his face had been different, though she couldn’t have said how. More, she’d seen him do the same thing on other tapes, with witnesses. He’d been the perfect gentleman with a nervous grandmother and a midrange escort, but toughened up fast when facing a trio of teens who’d thought they were more badass than him and very quickly learned they were wrong.

  She’d watched the tapes in order to get a different context for her evidence, in the hopes of adding to the case. Instead, she had learned more than she’d really wanted to about Nick.

  He was a chameleon, the kind of guy who could slip into any situation and make himself indispensable. He’d even said as much, though not in so many words, when he’d told her that his greatest skill as an undercover agent was his ability to slip into any group, any situation. But what worked for busting drug rings

  really didn’t work for her.

  That wasn’t resentment talking, either, or an effort to make herself feel better about the breakup. If anything, it had made her feel worse to realize that she’d come very close to once again falling for a manipulator.

  Her instincts, it seemed, still sucked.

  “Anyway,” she said, realizing the conversation had lagged, though she’d
kept swabbing at the bloodstains, capping and labeling the tubes with automatic precision, “I’m grateful for what happened, in a way. At least I know that part of me isn’t gone for good. Getting involved with Nick showed me that I can feel those feelings again. I’ll just have to make sure I use better judgment and next time around find myself someone who’s really available and not just passing through.”

  “Does that mean you’ll let me set you up?”

  Jenn winced. “Look, I’m sure the bird man is a great guy—”

  “He’s an ornithologist, not to mention Matt’s best friend. He’s really cute in an intense yet geeky sort of way, and I think you guys could have some fun together… .” Gigi trailed off hopefully.

  “I…well, not right now, okay?”

  “When?”

  Seeing that Gigi wasn’t going to give it up—she was still in that slightly sickening, more than slightly annoying “everyone should be as happy as me” phase of her relationship—Jenn blew out a breath. “After the Death Stare case is closed. Until then, I want to stay focused on this.” Her gesture took in the scene and the spatter, and for a moment the smell intruded, bringing a stab of pity for a man who probably didn’t deserve it, followed by a sting of guilt that she was letting Nick distract her again, and he wasn’t even in the room. Or her life.

  Gigi sent her a long look. “You know what I think? I think that—” Her phone chimed, interrupting with the two-note tone that said it was incoming info from Dispatch. Jenn let out a sigh of relief as Gigi answered with, “Go for Gigi.” She listened for a moment, then nodded. “I’m on my way.”

  “Please tell me it’s not another torture victim.” The Investor—or whoever was doing this—had never hit twice in one night before…but he’d also never shed this much blood before, or used his makeshift weapons with such vicious abandon.