At Close Range by Jessica Andersen Page A

arrived, he forced himself to meet the chief halfway across the street, which was rapidly filling with neighbors. “Everyone’s out of the house. Cassie’s rooms are full of gas and she was inside, unconscious. I’m betting she was either knocked out or drugged.” He took a deep breath of clean, cold air and felt his stomach pitch with the aftereffects. “There’s a detonator in the basement, but it didn’t go off.
    Must’ve been a dud.”
    Even saying the word made his head spin. He’d been so sure of the explosion. So certain of death as those numbers had ticked down in his brain.
    The chief barked orders as new sirens joined the melee. Sawyer and his bomb squad arrived on the heels of the ambulance, while the Bear Claw cops ushered the crowd back and cleared out the surrounding houses, just in case the structure blew.

    Seth stood aside and looked over to where the paramedics worked on Cassie. In the flashing lights of the rescue vehicles, her skin carried the waxy blue cast of a corpse.
    If he had gone upstairs to his hotel room instead of turning back around, she would have died. The knowledge fisted in his chest with a pressure unlike anything he’d felt in a long, long time.
    Knowing it, hating the emotion and fearing it at the same time, he gritted his teeth, turned away and stalked to where the chief was conferring with Sawyer at the back of the bomb squad van.
    “We can’t send in the remote because of the terrain,” Sawyer said. Whip-thin and bald beneath his BCCPD baseball cap, the bomb squad captain was known for his quick mind and long, agile fingers. Now, those fingers tugged at the brim of the navy and yellow cap, and frustration narrowed his brown eyes. “The technology just isn’t good enough to get the robot up a flight of stairs, through the house, through a door and down into the basement. It’ll have to be one of my men.”
    They quickly discussed and discarded several other plans including fiber optics and sound wave technology. In the end, Sawyer went in himself, wearing a flak jacket, shield and respirator, which seemed like pitiful protection against the possible blast force.
    A tense five minutes later, he radioed in. “There’s a detonator, but Varitek’s right.
    It’s a dud. The readout is in the minus digits by ten-plus minutes, but it looks like the charge fizzled.”
    Ten minutes, Seth thought. He and Cassie should have died. He couldn’t really get his mind around the concept, couldn’t find anything inside except cold numbness.
    Then a spurt of anger.

    It was true. The killer had targeted Cassie.
    “I’m disconnecting it now,” Sawyer’s voice reported. There was a pause, then, “It’s disarmed. If it was ever armed in the first place. This is a damn crude setup compared to the pieces we recovered from the canyon and the lab. You sure it’s the same guy?”
    “We’re not sure of a damn thing,” Chief Parry responded, but he kept his voice low enough that the nearby civilians couldn’t hear. “What’s the deal with the gas?”
    There was a pause, then Sawyer said, “The line to her side of the two-family was patched over to the forced hot air ducts. Sloppy but effective.”
    And that very sloppiness was a problem, Seth thought. The explosive devices used against Alissa Wyatt during the kidnapping case had been sophisticated designs.
    Not sloppy. But what did that mean? Had Croft planted the earlier devices? Was this a different perpetrator, not a partner?
    Seth scowled and grabbed the radio. “Don’t disturb anything more than necessary.
    We’ll need to get in there and process the scene.”
    The scene. He wasn’t sure whether it helped or hurt to think of Cassie’s home as a crime scene. On one level it helped distance him, helped remind him that this was the job. But on another level it rattled him to think of how close she had come to death.
    How close they both had.
    “What have we got?” Cassie’s voice spoke at his shoulder, making him