Fortunes he despised.
“I won’t keep you…” Ryan began. As he spoke, he slipped his arm around Emmett’s shoulders. “I just want you to know again how sorry I am about Christopher.”
Emmett nodded, not knowing what to say. He wanted to be flippant, to say something blasé. But it wasn’t in him. Not about Christopher. Christopher deserved better at his hands, even if he hadn’t received it at Jason’s.
“He was always the good guy in the family,” Emmett remembered, a distant fondness entering his voice. “The white sheep.”
Ryan thought of his own brother, gone so many years. “I know what it’s like to lose a brother. They leave behind an emptiness nothing can quite fill.”
Emmett’s expression hardened. “Jason won’t leave behind an emptiness when he’s gone.” He laughed shortly, a bitter taste in his mouth. “I plan to go on a three-day drinking binge to celebrate the fact that he’s no longer a blot on our family name.”
Ryan had no idea if that was just talk or if Emmett intended to carry out his words. He was aware of the younger man’s recent self-imposed exile and the extent to which it went.
“Don’t let revenge eat you up, Emmett,” he warned. “That would be Jason’s final triumph, turning you into a bitter man.”
Emmett had become that long before Jason’s path had taken him to murder their brother and that woman, as well as the guard and who knew who else. The cases he’d handled had seen to that. Lives cut down in their prime for no reason. Emmett knew that had all contributed to making him the man he was now. But Jason’s actions had certainly been the proverbial icing on the cake.
And yet, in a way, they had pulled him out of the depression he’d fallen into, given his life a focus, a purpose that merely returning to work for work’s sake never could have.
The irony of it made him smile as he looked at Ryan, touched by the man’s concern. “Too late.”
Ryan had another opinion. “We’re put on this earth to help one another, Emmett.”
The similarity jarred him. “You sound like Christopher.”
“Then he was a wise man,” Ryan told him, his smile widening despite the force of the pain assaulting his temples. “Christopher wouldn’t want you to let revenge govern your life. If you let it do that, then you’ll be just like Jason.”
It wasn’t a new thought for him. It had crossed his mind more than once. But Emmett shrugged. “Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.” And then, before Ryan could say anything further, Emmett added, “Don’t worry. I’m an FBI agent. My job is to make sure the bad guys are separated from the good guys before they can do any harm.”
Ryan remained unconvinced, although he wanted to be. “Just as long as it remains your job and you don’t make it personal.”
“It already is personal,” Emmett said quietly. Shaking Ryan’s hand, he tried to smile. “I’ll give your words a lot of thought,” he promised.
“That’s all I ask,” Ryan replied.
Collin stopped dead.
He and Emmett had made their way into the bowels of the three-story building where the chief medical examiner had both his office and the three austere, sterile rooms where the various autopsies were performed. It was lunchtime and most of the personnel were gone, or at least out of sight. The entire area was eerie, the way only a place that housed the dead and their secrets could be.
But it wasn’t the dead that had caused him to all but freeze in his place. In his line of work, he’d grown accustomed to seeing the dead.
The living were the ones that carried surprises with them.
And he was surprised now.
Framed in the doorway of the second autopsy room, he felt as if he’d just been catapulted back across a sea of years. Back to when he’d first walked into his bio lab in high school and had first laid eyes on her.
On Paula.
The woman in the white lab coat looked so much like Paula, for a moment he forgot to breathe. She was as petite as Paula, who’d stood no taller than five foot four. And her coloring was almost exactly the same.
From this distance, he couldn’t tell the color of her eyes, only that her hair was the same honey-brown, with reddish highlights. The woman in the room had her hair pulled back, away from her face. The last time he’d seen Paula, her hair had been long and looked as if it was in the middle of a storm. A sensuous storm that sent her hair curling in every conceivable direction.
As if sensing his presence, the woman raised her eyes and looked directly at him.
They were green.
Her eyes were green.
Like Paula’s.
Three
Lucy had just made her way into the autopsy room through the rear entrance, pushing another gurney, empty this time. The gurney’s last occupant, the second of the morning, had been stitched back together as reverently as possible and deposited in a steel, life-size drawer, to remain there like so much discarded memorabilia until a mortuary vehicle was dispatched to claim him. Death had been ruled accidental. The deceased was ready to go to his final resting place.
The realization that she and Dr. Daniels were not the only two breathing occupants of the room suddenly struck her.
Dr. Daniels apparently noticed it, too. Sidling up beside her, his eyes on the man in the doorway, Daniels leaned in until he had Lucy’s ear and whispered, “Is it just me, or is that guy looking at you as if you were the last tall glass of cool water available to him before he has to go on a fifty-mile march?”
She wouldn’t have put it that way, but now that Dr. Daniels had, Lucy had to admit that was exactly the way the man in the doorway was looking at her.
She felt a warmth creeping up her sides, adding color to her face. It took effort to halt its progress, but she managed. She always managed. It was a matter of pride with her.
The man in the doorway was dressed in civilian clothing, but there was something about his bearing that seemed to fairly shout “military” at her. Maybe it was because she’d been around so many soldiers when she was growing up, she felt she could spot a man who had military in his blood a mile away.
Now was no exception.
His dark hair was cut short and he was wearing a black leather jacket, but even so, she could see that he had shoulders so broad, they could have each served as a diving board. From what she could see, the man’s waist was small, his hips taut. G.I. Joe come to life, looking as if he could fulfill every woman’s fantasy.
But not hers.
The thought whispered along the perimeter of her consciousness, as if to remind her of who and what she was. And what she’d been through.
Squaring her own shoulders, Lucy stood in silence, waiting for someone else to speak. After all, eager though she was to advance both
