LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      WWJBD? Chelsea Swan asked herself as she headed out to the loading dock of the medical examiner’s office of Bear Claw, Colorado. The e-speak stood for What Would James Bond Do? and served as her mantra, though some days she replaced 007’s name with some of her other favorite fictional spies: Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, Jack Bauer and the like.

      Regardless of who she was trying to channel on a given day, the mantra meant one thing: don’t be a wuss. On the scale of fight or flight, Chelsea fell squarely in the “flight” category, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if another part of her didn’t long for adventure, for the sort of danger she read about and watched on TV, and experienced secondhand through her bevy of cop friends.

      She’d gone into pathology because she’d wanted to be near police work without actually carrying a gun, and because she liked medicine, but didn’t want to be responsible for another human being’s life. She was good at fitting together the clues she found during an autopsy, and turning them into a cause of death. She liked the puzzles, and the knowledge that her work sometimes helped the families understand why and how their loved one had died. Occasionally she’d even even assisted the Bear Claw Creek Police Department in finding a killer, and the success had given her a serious buzz.

      Most days the job was rewarding without being actively frightening. Then there were days like today, when even James Bond might’ve hesitated. Chelsea figured she was entitled to some nerves, though, because while she was certainly no stranger to death, today was different. The dead were different.

      The four incoming bodies belonged to terrorists, mass murderers who’d been incarcerated in the ARX Supermax prison two hours north of Bear Claw, and who’d died there under suspicious circumstances. The knowledge that she’d be autopsying their bodies in under an hour gave Chelsea a serious case of the willies as she headed out to meet the prison transport van. No matter how many times she told herself the dead deserved justice, she couldn’t talk herself into believing it in this case.

      Besides, the bodies came with major political baggage, which meant the ME’s office would be under microscopic scrutiny.

      Unfortunately, they didn’t have a choice in the matter.

      Three of the men, who went by the names of al-Jihad, Muhammad Feyd and Lee Mawadi, were international-level terrorists who’d been convicted of the Santa Bombings that had rocked the Bear Claw region three years earlier. The fourth, Jonah Fairfax, had tortured and murdered two federal agents in the days leading up to a bloody government raid on a militant anarchists’ compound up in northern Montana, and had apparently hooked up with the terrorists inside the prison, despite being in 24/7 solitary confinement. The four were seriously bad news.

      Chelsea, who usually managed to find the upside of any situation, wished the prison had stuck to its standard procedure of handling everything internally, including autopsies. Unfortunately, budget cuts had forced Warden Pollard to pare back his medical staff. When the four prisoners had died of unknown causes within an hour of one another, Pollard had requested an outside autopsy and the state had turfed the bodies to Bear Claw.

      “Lucky us,” Chelsea muttered as she pushed through the doors leading to the loading dock, which opened onto a narrow alley separating the two big buildings that housed the ME’s office and the main station house of the Bear Claw Creek Police Department.

      Two other members of the ME’s office were already waiting on the loading ramp: Chelsea’s boss and friend, Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney, and their newly hired assistant, Jerry Osage. Under normal circumstances there wouldn’t have been a welcoming committee for the bodies, but these were far from normal circumstances. The deaths had gained national media attention at a time the ME’s office would’ve strongly preferred otherwise.

      That worry was in Sara’s eyes as she turned to Chelsea, but her voice held its normal brisk, businesslike tone when she said, “I’m glad you’re here. Chief Mendoza wants me to come out front and say a few words for the cameras so we can sneak the van in the back way while the newsies are distracted.” Sara slipped out of her fall-weight wool jacket and held it out, revealing a jade-toned skirt suit that perfectly complemented her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair and arresting amber eyes. “Take this in case you’re waiting long.”

      The mid-October day was unusually cool, thanks to a sharp breeze that brought frigid air down from the snow-covered Rockies. It was just another change in the unusually unpredictable weather they’d been having lately. The mix of snow squalls and torrential downpours had triggered landslides in Bear Claw Canyon as well as the hills west of the city, taking out roads and at one point even prompting evacuation of the Bear Claw Ski Resort, which was just starting to gear up for the winter season.

      For

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