speaking, it almost felt as if it was too late. Lucy dearly loved Retired Lieutenant John Gatling, but she wasn’t the little girl she knew he was hoping to resume a relationship with. There was no going back and picking up where they had left off. Those years had long gone. She was a woman now, had become one long before her time.
And she had become so self-reliant that no one had seen her cry when she’d been told of her mother’s mysterious death halfway around the world. All she’d been told, by the military and by her father, who she suspected had no more information than she did, was that her mother had died “in the line of duty.”
In the line of duty. It was a phrase that was supposed to cover a myriad of things and explain everything. It covered little and explained nothing, but she’d ceased asking for answers.
At least, answers that had to do with the military. Answers that had to do with medicine and life in general as seen through a microscope were another matter. Her naturally inquisitive mind, her desire to do good, to help, had made her turn to medicine in hopes of allowing her to act upon her good intentions. At least in the field of medicine she had a fighting chance to solve a few of the mysteries, answer a few of the questions.
Maybe, if she was very lucky, they would be the ones that counted.
Now she moved out of the doctor’s way, eager to learn whatever it was that this newest victim had to silently teach her.
“What’s his story?” she asked Dr. Daniels as she glanced down at the corpse. Before the medical examiner could tell her, Lucy answered her own question. “Hey, wait, isn’t that one of the guards who was involved in that prisoner getaway?” She looked at the Y incision that ran the length of his torso. “Didn’t you already do him?”
Looking down at the still face, she recognized the man from the front page of the newspaper. Death had taken away his color and left a pasty gray in its place, but the man’s features had struck her initially because his face was almost a perfect square. Cruel though it was, that was something death hadn’t altered.
“We lost the paperwork. Don’t ask,” Daniels said. Then his brown eyes grew serious. “We might be getting his friend down here any day now. They’re keeping him alive at County, but who knows how long he’s going to hang on?”
She caught an undercurrent in the physician’s voice. Because of the nature of her childhood, she’d learned how to make quick assessments of the people around her. “You really like this job, don’t you?”
He looked surprised that she would make the comment. After all, she was the student, he the teacher. After a moment of stony silence, his rounded cheeks widened in a smile.
“Yes, I do. Dead people don’t talk back. They don’t make comments about how little money you have or how inferior they think you are.”
Given his size and appearance, it wasn’t a stretch for her to visualize him as an adolescent who’d spent his time on the outside of the inner circle. “The right living people don’t, either.”
There was a warm light in his eyes as he looked at her. “You’d be surprised, Lucy. Not everyone has your keen insight.”
She shrugged carelessly. Personal attention always made her uncomfortable. Unlike what she imagined the doctor had been at her age, she liked being the one on the outside. “I’m not that unique.”
“I think you are.”
She raised her eyes to his. For a split second their roles were reversed. “Dr. Daniels—”
He laughed, shaking his head. If he’d entertained any serious thoughts about her at a given point, Lucy knew she’d squelched them by now. “Yes, I know. You don’t go out with people you work with.” He paused before donning his surgical rubber gloves. “Tell me, I’m curious. How are you going to ever find yourself a husband if you keep ruling people out like that?”
Her voice was crisp. It was a question she’d answered before. “I’m not looking for a husband. I’m looking to finish my schooling and then start my career. After that’s established, then I might think about a relationship.”
It was a lie. She wasn’t planning on ever looking into forming a lasting relationship, certainly not the romantic one Daniels was inquiring about. Romantic relationships resided in the land of uncertainty. Math and science were where all the answers were. And forensic medicine, her ultimate field of expertise, dealt in facts once they’d been uncovered.
Relationships, she had learned, both through her parents—who were not stationed in the same state, sometimes not even the same country, for months at a time—and through Jeffrey Underhill, the one boy she’d allowed herself to fall in love with at the tender age of seventeen, were far from certain or even vaguely predictable.
She liked sticking with a sure thing.
“Shall we?” Daniels asked as he slipped on his rubber gloves.
Following his example, Lucy put on her own set. It was time to find out if the guard’s body contained any secrets for them.
Two
Far from being a demonstrative person, Emmett Jamison usually kept his feelings bottled up inside. Very little made him smile or show any sort of outward reaction other than a frown. At best, there were patient expressions. Even so, when he opened his hotel room door and saw Collin, his eyes seemed to light up. Without apparently stopping to think, Emmett threw his arms around him and hugged. Hard.
Surprised to say the least, Collin returned the embrace.
Taking a breath, Emmett stepped back, as if to bring himself under control. “Thanks for coming.”
Collin could hear the barely bridled emotion vibrating in Emmett’s voice.
“How could I not come?” They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. Even when Emmett had gone off to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, from time to time he would make an effort to remain in touch. “Like you said in your phone call, you don’t ask for many favors.” His cousin looked wan, Collin thought, like a man coming out of a cave after a prolonged period of time, which, in a way, he supposed Emmett was. “As a matter of fact, I can’t recall a single time that you ever did.”
Leaning slightly to the side to see around his taller cousin, Collin peered into the room Emmett was occupying. “Still Spartan as ever, I see.” He grinned. “You can take the man out of the hermit, but you can’t take the hermit out of the man.”
Emmett shrugged. “It’s just a room. It suits my purposes.”
Collin nodded. Unlike Jason, Emmett had never been one for creature comforts. He’d never required much. From the time he was old enough to purchase them himself, he owned only a sparse number of things; they never owned him.
Collin set down the single suitcase he’d brought. “I’ll just leave my things here until I get a room of my own.”
He’d come to the hotel in Red Rock straight from the airport. It had taken surprisingly little effort to get here. Tentatively, when he’d gone to his C.O., he’d asked for a two-week leave of absence. Colonel Eagleton had been more than happy to grant it to him.
“I was beginning to think you didn’t have a life outside of the job,” his C.O. had said.
