At Close Range by Jessica Andersen Page A

of scenery.
    She’d winked as she said it.
    The roads and walkways were dry this time, the mounds of dirty snow nearly gone.
    Still, he watched for the melting piles as he followed the stone pathway around to her door, wanting to leave no footprint, no clue.
    The Bear Claw cops would have to work with the evidence he chose to leave them.
    She had locked the door this time, but left it unbolted, as though inviting him in with one hand but using the other to punish him for making her wait.
    He smiled in anticipation. He knew about punishment. About waiting. Soon, she would, too.
    He dealt with the lock and eased the door open with no more caution than he’d used before. He was that confident in her.
    Sure enough, she lay perfectly still in her narrow bed. The heat was up in the basement room, making the air steamy and too warm. She had solved the issue by kicking the covers away to reveal stocking-clad legs beneath a high-slit skirt. His keen dark vision showed him that her white shirt was rucked up past her lacy bra, revealing a smoothly toned young stomach defiled with a belly button ring.

    Anger stirred in his gut at the sight of her, at the wanton sprawl of arms and legs and the faint snore that escaped from between her painted lips.
    He stepped closer, hands clenched into fists. An empty glass on the bed stand suggested that she was not so much asleep as passed out. She’d drowned her sorrows when he didn’t come for her on time. Bitch. Slut. Whore.
    The anger rose within him, pure and perfect and cleansing, and he reached for her, wanting to—
    Stick with the plan, the voice whispered inside his head, or maybe from behind him, through the open door that was letting the heat out into the yard.
    Yes, right. The plan. The hunter forced himself to take a deep breath and go through the steps in his mind. He wouldn’t be sloppy. Sloppiness had killed Croft.
    Sloppiness and the cops, that is. But he was smarter than the cops. Hadn’t he already proven that? He was better than the police in this city.
    You’re not better than anyone! a deep voice bellowed in his head, making him cringe even though he knew the memories couldn’t hurt him. They were just that.
    Memories. The owner of the voice was gone.
    And buried.
    He relaxed his fingers and forced himself to breathe in and out, in and out, until his heartbeat leveled and he was back in control. This was no place for temper and passion. Not here, not now.
    That would come later, once he had her where she belonged.

    Proud of his control, he stepped toward the bed and eased his arms beneath her, until she was cradled against his chest by her neck and knees. The power flowed through his body when he lifted her, making the dead weight seem like nothing.
    She murmured softly and curled into him, her breath smelling of alcohol, her muscles lax and compliant.
    “I’ve got you,” he murmured against her temple as he carried her from the room and shut the door behind, to keep in the heat. “Everything will be perfect now, don’t worry. I’ve got you.”
    AFTER SETH LEFT Cassie and her friends down in the crime lab, he appropriated an upstairs conference room and spent the wee hours of the morning riding his team to process the scene at Cassie’s house as quickly as possible. When his techs stopped answering the phone, he focused on searching the databanks for comparable murders. Similar patterns. Anything.
    Through it all, he wished like hell he’d never come back to Bear Claw.
    “You want to talk about it?” Tucker asked from the doorway just as dawn stained the sky outside.
    Seth grimaced. “Nothing to talk about, really. We’ll have Cassie’s place processed in another hour or so—they’re not finding much of anything—and we’ll be back to spinning our wheels over the boy’s murder.”
    Tucker dropped into a nearby chair. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
    Seth stared at his laptop screen for a moment, as though focusing on it would force the databank to