When the phone rang, FBI evidence specialist Seth Varitek was sitting in his personal vehicle — a jade-green pickup truck with flare sides and a top-notch sports package — trying to figure out what the hell he was doing parked on the side of the highway.

This was his first weekend off in nearly a month. He should be at home, working on his long-delayed plans to turn the studio into a gym, or kicking back with a beer and a game or something. Instead, he'd found himself in the truck, headed south toward the ski areas with no intention of skiing.

He flipped open the ringing phone. "Varitek here."

"I've got a problem."

Seth instantly recognized the caller's gruff voice. Chief Parry ran the police department in Bear Claw Creek, a smallish city south of Denver, Colorado. The middle-aged man was as sturdy as a bulldog and twice as tenacious, and Seth had learned to respect him during the Canyon kidnapping case earlier in the year. "What kind of a problem, Chief?" Even as he asked the question, Seth glanced overhead and appreciated the irony that he was parked beneath the "Welcome to Bear Claw" sign.

Damned if he knew what had drawn him back to the city two months after the kidnappings had been solved.

No, that wasn't true. He knew exactly what had drawn him, or more precisely who. A quick image of a long-legged blonde snapped into his head. She was all sharp angles and prickly attitude, which was just as well. He wasn't in the market for...well, for anything that was leggy, blond and irritating, that was for sure.

Which still didn't explain what he was doing in her hometown.

"I've got a murder," the chief answered. "I want your opinion on it before I reactivate the task force."

The words wiped all other thoughts out of Seth's brain and brought him upright in his seat.

When three teenage girls had been kidnapped earlier in the year, Chief Parry had set up a task force made up of his best officers, ranging from old-school homicide detectives to the three female techno-jockeys of the new Bear Claw Creek Forensics Department — BCCFD. Three weeks into the investigation, they'd asked the FBI for help and had gotten Seth's coworker out of the Denver office, Lionel Trouper.

When a series of attacks made it clear that the perp had targeted one of the forensic investigators — reconstruction and scene expert Alissa Wyatt — Trouper had called Seth to be a second set of eyes on the gathering forensic evidence.

The Bear Claw Crime Lab's in-house evidence specialist, Cassie Dumont, had taken it badly, but despite the friction — or maybe because of it — the task force had managed to find the girls, identify the kidnapper and close the case.

Or so they had thought.

Sharp interest quivered through Seth's body. "You think it's connected? How? Bradford Croft is dead."

"True," the chief answered, "but remember how he talked about 'the plan," and how he didn't fit all of the evidence? We've kept an eye out, just in case there was a partner." Parry's voice dropped. "I'm afraid this might be proof positive. When can you get here? I've already cleared it with Trouper."

Seth glanced at the sign overhead. "As chance would have it, I'm about five minutes from the station house. I was..." He shook his head. "Never mind. I'll see you soon."

WHEN SHE REACHED her crime scene, Cassie Dumont paused on the sidewalk and scanned the area, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood and the people.

The actual scene was inside a dingy apartment building, one of many built in the late seventies to handle the influx when the skiers discovered Bear Claw. The rear parking lot was peppered with older trucks and SUV's, most boasting four-wheel drive, a requirement for spring in Colorado. Closer to the back entrance, a pair of BCCPD vehicles and a couple of uniformed officers blocked the growing crowd.

Knowing the crowd would only get worse, Cassie pushed her way through and nodded at the uniforms. "Dumont. Crime scene."

The grim-faced men let her through, but they didn't say anything, didn't give her an update on the situation or a "hey, how's it going?"

Their silence didn't bother her. She told herself she was used to it as she entered the dingy building.

The Bear Claw P.D. had mourned the abrupt retirement of their former evidence wizard, Fitzroy O'Malley, and they'd made life hell for the three women hired to replace him — scene specialist Alissa Wyatt, psych specialist Maya Cooper and Cassie, who worked the lab and the evidence.

Over the six months the women had been in Bear Claw, the other cops had softened toward Alissa, partly because she'd made nice, and partly because she'd hooked up with Tucker McDermott, a renegade homicide detective who seemed to have gotten partway domesticated in the past few months. But if the Bear Claw cops liked Alissa and tolerated quiet, reserved Maya because she did her work and didn't cause a stir, they had no such feelings of amnesty for Cassie.

They plain didn't like her. Maybe it was because she wasn't the sort to play nice, or because she'd shredded all of Fitz's evidence report forms — which had to be twenty years old if they were a day — and computerized the filing system. Maybe it was because she bawled out anyone who messed with her evidence, from senior detectives down to the greenest rookie. Maybe the other cops feared change. Maybe they just hated her guts. Hell, who knew?

"Who cares?" she said aloud, and the words echoed in the dreary hallway. The walls were faintly gray, as though the white paint had given up all hope of brightness, and the carpet smelled musty with years of melted snow, rock salt and other things she probably didn't want to think about. The elevator was posted with an

"Out of Order" sign that was furred with dust.

"Nice place," she murmured. "Wonder if they've got vacancies."

Well, odds were they would have one soon. The chief's message had said it was a single corpse, male, presumed murdered.

The word brought a shiver to the back of Cassie's neck as she climbed the stairs to the third floor. Her imagination played tricks on her, creating the ghosts of other footfalls as though her normal partners flanked her. But Alissa was away with Tucker on very unofficial business rumored to involve a topless beach and mai tais, and Maya Cooper was off at a conference, leaving Cassie to man the crime lab alone.

That was okay. Being alone was far better than being with the wrong partner, which is what she would have gotten if she'd asked the chief for help.

Hell, look what she'd gotten during the Canyon kidnapping case, when she'd been forced to accept "help" she hadn't needed or wanted.

A faint wash of anger swept away the hallway ghosts as Cassie paused at a doorway marked with police tape. She was faintly surprised that the chief hadn't left someone at the door. Technically, he should have. But maybe it was a sign that the other cops were finally believing it when she said, "stay the hell out of my crime scene unless you have a damn good reason to be there," or "touch that and I'll break your fingers."

Alissa and Maya were always telling her to be nicer to their new coworkers, but Cassie didn't see the point. Who cared whether the other cops liked her or not? She wasn't in the job to make friends.

She was in it to do the job.

Thinking it was time to do just that, she paused for a moment to cover her shoes in a pair of oh-so-sexy paper booties she pulled from her evidence kit. She drew on powder-free gloves, snapped the lid on her kit — an orange plastic toolbox containing the basics of her trade — and breathed deeply, steeling herself for the first sight of death.

She hadn't been raised around police work. Hell, she'd started life as a chemist, and found her way into forensics after some emotional bumps and bruises. She loved the challenges of her job, the opportunity to fight for justice.

But God, she hated dead bodies.

She was always struck by the fundamental wrongness of a corpse, by the way her mind tried to animate the features, tried to imagine the person still breathing and moving around. No matter how many crime scenes she worked, that first moment of shock was always the same.

But the weakness was her secret. Nobody knew about it, not even Alissa and Maya.

She took another breath, told herself not to be a weenie, and then twisted the knob, opened the door and stepped inside, all in one smooth motion that didn't allow her any time to cut and run. Surprise stopped her just inside the door.

There was a man in the room, and he wasn't dead. An impossibly large figure crouched beside a sofa bed. His wide shoulders and thick muscular legs were outlined in the dim light that filtered through a set of cheap curtains.

Between one heartbeat and the next, training kicked in. Cassie drew the weapon tucked at the small of her back and leveled it at the intruder. "Freeze! Police!"

The moment hung in the balance of friend or foe, safe or unsafe. Adrenaline was a quick shot of fight or flight, along with the knowledge that even at five-foot-ten and a hundred-thirty pounds, she was puny in comparison to this guy.

Then he turned his face into a strip of filtered light and her stomach dropped to her toes.

She jammed her weapon back in its holster. "Damn it, Varitek! What are you doing in my crime scene?"

The light from the window shadowed the FBI evidence specialist's rough-hewn features, turning his aquiline nose into a study of light and dark against the flat blades of his cheeks and the strong line of his jaw. His hair was black and buzzed, doing nothing to soften the rough edges. His eyes — pale green at the center and darker at the edges, surrounded by long, black lashes — softened the sum total of his features, but did nothing to blunt the annoyance on his face.

"Still territorial as a pit bull, I see, Officer Dumont." His voice was as dark as his looks, deep, rough and no- nonsense. He glanced up at her. "Your chief called and I happened to be in the area.You got a problem with that?"

Cassie nearly bared her teeth. Hell, yes, she had a problem. The BCCPD had its own forensics department now — there was no reason for the chief to call federal help before she was even on scene.