we have to assume she went with whoever did this to her.”
Lauren looked down at her sister and shook her head. “No. Megan would never go with anyone that would do something like this.”
“Then she didn’t know what the guy she was with was capable of.”
“How do you know it was a guy?”
The coroner held up his hands. “Her killer had big hands.”
An image of someone’s hands around Megan’s neck squeezing the life out of her nearly brought Lauren to her knees. She thought she was going to be sick. The room spun around her.
A strong hand took her by the elbow and lent her strength. “Easy. Just keep breathing.”
Lauren did. She forced her legs to hold her up and concentrated on the door on the other side of the room till the room stopped spinning. “Did you find out where this man was when Megan went missing?”
“He was with friends. Iron-clad alibi.”
Iron-clad alibi? What coroner talked like that? Obviously he had been watching too many cop shows. “If the police knew Megan was missing, why didn’t they do something?”
“Adults come down to Jamaica to go missing all the time. There were no signs of foul play in her room. The police checked. She just didn’t come back to her room that night.”
Because she was dead.
“Normally three days have to pass before an adult is presumed missing.” The coroner’s voice was flat, but she knew he was trying to help her understand what had happened. “Since there was no evidence that she was abducted, the police kept on the lookout for her.” He hesitated. “Things happen down in the islands. The police know that, too. Because they were looking, they knew who she was when they found her. Otherwise she could have been here in the morgue for days before anyone knew who she was.”
That was a horrible thought. Lauren couldn’t bear the idea of Megan lying here in this place of the dead for days without anyone knowing where she was.
The coroner’s voice was lower, softer, and the Southern accent was more pronounced. “I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Cooper. But I’m going to get the guy who did this. For what it’s worth, I can promise you that. He won’t get away with what he’s done.”
The conviction in his voice startled Lauren. It was raw and hoarse. She looked into those gold eyes and saw the stormy intensity of his gaze. She cleared her throat to make her voice work. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name.”
The morgue door opened, and a rotund man in his fifties stepped into the room with a file in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. He wore dark blue scrubs and a matching surgical hat. A mask hung loose around his neck. He gazed heatedly at the coroner standing beside Lauren.
“What are you doing in here, Detective Sawyer?”
The coroner ignored the older man and focused on Lauren. “Are you okay? Can you stand?”
Not knowing what was going on, Lauren drew away from the man.
“Never mind what you’re doing here.” The new coroner set his cup down on the nearby counter and grabbed the door. He pulled it open. “You’re leaving. Get out of here.”
The coroner—Detective Sawyer—looked at Lauren, tried to say something, then shook his head and left.
Lauren watched him go and didn’t understand anything that had happened, but she was going to find out. She headed for the door, hurrying to catch up.
Chapter 2
You’re some piece of work, Sawyer.
Sighing in self-disgust, Heath Sawyer slipped out of the white lab coat as he strode down the hallway from the morgue. His long legs ate up the distance, but he couldn’t get out of the building fast enough.
He’d wanted to see the dead woman’s body himself, to get a feel for her and how she’d died. Whenever he was working a case, he wanted to know as much as he could about the victims. Seeing them at the crime scene or the morgue helped, but the trade-off was demanding. That kind of intimacy was a lodestone for nightmares. Years later, he could still remember the faces of the first case he’d investigated. He hadn’t planned on running into the sister on this one.
But that didn’t stop you from taking advantage of the situation when it presented itself, did it?
A wave of guilt assailed him, but he pushed it away. He’d learned to do that on the job, and he was on the job now, even out of his jurisdiction. Hell, he was out of his country.
Memory of the woman’s perfume teased at his mind. Lauren Cooper was holding herself together better than a lot of grieving relatives Heath had dealt with over the years. In fact, she was holding it together better than he had when he’d found out about Janet.
He dropped the lab coat onto the counter where an older woman talked on the phone and entered data on a computer that had seen better days. A Bob Marley poster hung on the wall beside a calendar that said, Welcome to Jamaica. Have a Nice Day.
The woman narrowed her eyes, and her face pinched into a frown as she watched Heath. “Hey. Hey, you. You come back here and put that where it goes. I’m not your maid.” Her island accent was thick.
Heath ignored her and headed for the stairs because they were faster than taking the elevator. He couldn’t wait to be outside again where he could breathe. The island temperature was cooler than it currently was back in Atlanta, but the humidity was worse. He fished his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and slid them into place.
The area was dangerous, and that woman—Lauren Cooper—didn’t look like someone used to dealing with dangerous situations. She had no business being at the hospital. The State Department should have taken care of the arrangements for getting her sister’s body back to Chicago.
That image of her standing there beside her dead sister was going to haunt him. He felt guilty for having noticed how pretty she was. He didn’t know what it was, but there was some indefinable quality about Lauren Cooper that had caught his attention.
Heath forced himself to keep moving. The woman wasn’t his problem. She wasn’t his responsibility. She couldn’t help him because she didn’t know what had happened to her sister. He was here looking for a murderer.
The man who had killed Janet.
As the pain and loss took him, Heath closed his eyes and tried to push it away. He had work to do, and he’d taken a leave of absence from the P.D. to get it done, to clear the ghosts from his head.
And he knew who his target was. Finally, in the picture of Megan Taylor, he had another link in the chain he intended to hang around Gibson’s neck before he dropped the man into the ocean.
Let’s see him magic his way out of that.
A trio of young nurses came down the stairs. They chattered in English and a smattering of other languages Heath couldn’t identify. And they laughed as they talked about the party they’d gone to last night. He gave way before
