Military Man

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.

It was very nearly true. His work had become his life and vice versa. There was no time, no room, for anything else. By design.

It wasn’t just that the nature of his work took him away from the place where he hung his uniform—a place very much like the one that Emmett was currently in. Collin, like his father before him, had the gift to delve into another person’s mind, to take that person apart, bit by bit and to figure out what made that person act the way he did. Yet Collin had no such gift when it came to himself. Or, more to the point, to the women he interacted with.

Collin had no doubts that if one of the women he dealt with on a day-to-day basis were to show up on the other side of a Wanted poster or an assignment sheet, he would be able figure out her next move with more than some degree of certainty. However, he also knew that if that same woman were sitting at a restaurant table directly opposite him, she’d leave him clueless.

He’d long ago come to the conclusion that he had no knack for personal male-female relationships.

If he’d had, Paula would have stayed.

Hell, he thought as he watched his cousin put his suitcase inside the closet, Paula would have been his wife by now. He would have known enough to make her his wife instead of remaining engaged for six years and somehow just allowing the status quo to continue unchallenged.

But maybe there was a reason for that.

There was so much turmoil packed into his active life that when it came to the personal side of him, he craved peace. Contentment. Something to count on. He supposed wanting that made him seem dull.

And maybe he was.

The thought caused his mouth to quirk in a semi-smile. It always did. Anyone knowing the kind of life he led, a life that took him into unfriendly territory on a regular basis, always walking a tightrope and laboring beneath the constant risk of death, wouldn’t have said that he had a dull bone in his body. But he did, if wanting the kind of peace and quiet he only knew secondhand made him dull. The kind of life his parents had led.

Paula would have given him that kind of life. He’d known that, felt it in his bones. But he’d allowed her to slip right through his fingers.

Not that the slippage was swift. Paula had been nothing if not patient, determined, he now realized, to wait him out. He’d certainly had a lot of time to make known his feelings about their future. The trouble was, it was always something that he’d figured would keep.

For them, he’d felt, there was always tomorrow. Except that when tomorrow finally arrived, it saw her on the arm of his best friend. Saying her vows.

He’d attended the ceremony, wished them both well with all the sincerity he could muster—and then closed up the remaining exposed portion of his heart, mentally declaring himself a failure when it came to relationships.

He didn’t blame Paula. He put the blame squarely where it belonged. On his own shoulders.

And he missed Paula like hell, even years after she’d become Mrs. William Pollack.

Collin roused himself. He had no idea why thoughts of Paula, of their life together before she’d had her fill of empty dreams, was preying on his mind today. It had been a while since he’d thought about her. Not since her anniversary had gone by last month. He supposed maybe it had to do with seeing Emmett again, because Emmett belonged to those days. Days when he had been a lot younger and a lot more hopeful.

And foolish.

“So, where do we start?” he asked as he preceded Emmett into the hallway and his cousin closed and locked the hotel room door behind them, slipping the rectangular key card into his pocket. “Do we check in with the locals?”

Emmett knew that he was referring to the local police and not just the people who might have possibly witnessed something. He shook his dark head. “Not until it’s absolutely necessary.”

Collin understood perfectly. “Meaning, not until they stumble over us.”

“Something like that.” A hint of a smile crossed Emmett’s lips, but then it was gone the very next moment. He led the way out into the parking lot and his car, a beat-up old Chevy that traveled as much on faith as it did on gasoline. “I thought we might go see Ryan Fortune. I want you to meet him. I’ll bring you up to speed on what I know on the way.”

Collin nodded, folding his six-foot frame into the passenger side. “Sounds like the start of a plan.”

The headaches were blinding now.

So much so that Ryan Fortune had been forced to finally admit to Lily that he was going to be felled by a death sentence.

His death sentence.

There’d been no getting around it. His darling Lily was far too much of a loving wife not to notice that something was horribly wrong and had been getting more so now for months. At first she’d suspected that all this secrecy had to do with another woman’s designs on his affections. When he’d discovered that, he’d known it was time to tell her the truth.

So he’d sat her down, taken her hands in his and finally told her, as gently as possible, about the inoperable brain tumor that was stealing him away from his family years before he was ready to go.

They’d held each other and cried. There was nothing else to be done.

Sixty was old when you were in your twenties. But from where he was standing, it was way too young to call it a day. Or a life.

But Ryan had no power, no say in the matter. He could only make what was left of it as meaningful as was humanly possible. For himself and, far more importantly, for those he loved.

The irony of it made him smile.

He’d stand a lot better chance of succeeding in his goal if these damn headaches didn’t keep insisting on interfering. Of course, if there had been no headaches, there would have been no tumor and no need to press on with such fervor to see that certain things were completed before his end. Such as his charity work.

And so he pushed on, taking life on like a contender and trying to make it all seem as if it was business as usual. Which meant not putting anything off until tomorrow, because tomorrow, for him, might not even exist.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. Daily.

Thinking himself past the pain, Ryan tried valiantly to concentrate on what Emmett Jamison was asking him. He’d only known the young man a short time, but was extremely impressed with Emmett, not to mention extremely grateful. It was Emmett who had put his life on the line, saving Lily from what he now knew had to have been certain death. His Lily had been kidnapped not for money, but to torment him. And the ultimate torment would have meant losing her forever. He might have done just that, if it hadn’t been for Emmett. He owed the man a great deal. More than he could ever hope to repay. He wished he could do something to help Emmett find his remaining brother and bring him to justice. But there wasn’t much he could do.

“I really don’t know what more I can tell you, Emmett. I never knew Christopher, couldn’t even help to identify his body when they dragged it from Lake Mondo.”

He addressed his words to both Emmett and the cousin he’d brought with him. The latter was a tall, muscular young man of about thirty-five or so, if he was any judge. The man’s weather-roughened face only added to his rugged appearance.

Ryan hadn’t been surprised when Emmett told him that his cousin was a career military man. Collin looked the type. It took very little imagination to envision him sliding down a rope out of the sky like some sort of commando.

He was familiar with the bearing. The young man was quiet, polite, but there was an air of immortality about him. Navy SEALs, the Rangers, all those Special Ops people had the same air. They had to. If they began to believe in their own mortality, in their own demise, they couldn’t accomplish the incredible missions they undertook or face death the way they did, with bravado and a go-to-hell attitude.

Who knew, Ryan mused, if life had turned out differently for him, maybe he would have gone into that sort of work himself.

With all his heart, he certainly wished he could tell death to go to hell at the present moment.

“I realize that, sir,” Collin said politely, his voice soft, in direct contrast to the swiftness with which he could mete out punishment when called upon to do so. “But my cousin—” he nodded toward Emmett “—tells me that you had several dealings with Jason. And it’s Jason we’re tracking.”

Collin wasn’t giving away any secrets. Jason, the cold-blooded killer of his own brother and the woman who had been posing as his wife, needed to be brought back to face the justice he thought he’d eluded. Jason had used his inherent cunning to take advantage of whatever situation had presented itself to him, whether it involved talking one or both of the two men driving him to the maximum security prison into lowering their guard, or perhaps believing him when he offered to bribe one or both. Collin didn’t know what had happened. No one did, because the only three people who could provide the answers were either dead, missing or in a coma.

So right now Collin was pinning his hopes on Ryan Fortune, the unwitting target of Jason’s unspent wrath.

“Jason,” Ryan repeated, shaking his head.

Collin exchanged glances with Emmett, not certain how to read the older man’s expression. There was no fear in Ryan’s voice and no anger, both of which were emotions that he would have expected. Instead there was sorrow, something he didn’t quite grasp in this context.

A self-deprecating smile slid along Ryan’s lips. He thought of the poor young woman, Melissa, who’d made a rather embarrassing and shameless play for his affections. As if he’d ever leave his Lily after what he’d gone through to finally marry her. Melissa’s far-from-innocent flirtation, he told himself, should have been his first clue, his first warning that something was decidedly wrong with Jason. But even so, a man couldn’t be blamed for what his wife did, and vice versa. And Ryan had always liked to believe the best of everyone. But sometimes, it appeared, a person had no best.

“A man hates to discover this late in the game that he is such a poor judge of character,” Ryan confessed to the two strapping young men in his living room. “Jason, I’m afraid, is the perfect chameleon, being everything I thought the job needed. A go-getter from the second he walked into a room.”

It had all been a ploy, a weapon Jason Jamison, who’d called himself Wilkes at the time, had used to get close to him. The intricacy of the plot overwhelmed Ryan now that he looked back at it. It was something he’d expect to find in an entertaining movie, not something he’d actually discover himself living through.

“I thought he was the perfect executive in training for my nephew’s company,” he continued. Ryan still found it difficult to refer to Fortune TX, Ltd. as Logan’s, though his nephew had succeeded him as CEO. Ryan now acted in an advisory capacity. That was how his path had crossed Jason’s. And all by Jason’s design. “All the times I talked to him—and there were more than a few—I never once saw anything in his eyes to indicate that he hated me so much.”

“He’s a textbook sociopath, sir,” Collin told him kindly. “He didn’t intend for you to see. Until he’s within the reach of his goal, a sociopath can be anything he needs to be. It’s the nature of the beast.”

Collin suppressed a sigh. This was his cousin he was talking about. Someone he’d grown up knowing. More than that, he was Emmett’s brother. But one glance toward his cousin told him that Emmett felt no more kinship toward Jason than he would a rattlesnake.

Ryan cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the conversation. With his own lack of perception in the case. He looked at Emmett who had lost so much and would lose more.

Did Emmett secretly blame him, as well? Ryan would have said no, but his faith in his own abilities to read people had been badly shaken. The ache in his temples grew. “I swear I had nothing to do with your grandfather’s impoverished state. I knew nothing about—”

Emmett held his hand up, curtailing any further apology. He wasn’t here to erode Ryan Fortune’s pride or to foster any false sense of guilt. He wasn’t his grandfather’s champion, because in his estimation his grandfather and no one else was responsible for his own fate.

“Everyone knows how generous you are, Ryan,” Emmett said. “News of your largesse even reaches shacks at the base of the Sandia Mountains.” Emmett had never had the rapport that Jason had had with their grandfather. Maybe because he’d seen the old man for what he was. A bitter man who needed someone to blame for his lack of accomplishments, for his failures. “Grandpa’s mind left him a long time ago.”

“There are men who can never take responsibility for their own misfortunes,” Collin commented. His mouth quirked at the unwitting use of the word. “No pun intended, sir.”

Ryan nodded, forcing a smile to his lips. The pain at the back of his skull was getting worse again. He wasn’t certain how much longer he could stay on his feet here, talking as if he didn’t feel as though he was being beaten down to his knees.

“None taken,” he told Collin, slowly meting out each word.

Noting the pained look on the older man’s face, Collin backed off. He didn’t want to push or pry, not when Ryan appeared to be unwell.

“Maybe we can stop by the medical examiner’s office and see if they’ve discovered anything that might give us a lead.” Collin knew that finding out anything was going to take a great deal of finesse. Information wasn’t just released to anyone, especially not in this day and age. If he flashed his credentials, it would be assumed that he was there in an official capacity, and he wasn’t comfortable lying outright. But maybe, if the examiner should “accidentally” glimpse his credentials in his wallet as he went to take out something, then that would convey an official air without his having to actually state the fact.

He intended to try.

He rose from his seat and Ryan followed his lead. “You think Jason’s still in the area?” the older man asked.

Collin gave him a pointed look. “You still are—and you’re his prime target.”

As they’d approached the house earlier, Collin had surveyed the area and had seen no security. But then, good bodyguards, the kind that Ryan needed, wouldn’t have been out in plain sight. He sincerely hoped the man was smart enough to avail himself of that kind of protection.

As they walked to the living room door, Ryan turned toward Emmett. “Would you mind if I had a word with you?” Glancing at Collin, he added, “This’ll only take a minute.”

“Take all the time you need,” Collin told him. “I’ll be right outside.” He indicated the hallway beyond the living room, then stepped out, giving them the privacy that was required.

Turning from the doorway, Ryan looked at the younger man with him. He saw beyond the rigid features. Emmett looked worn and yet ready to snap. A gun cocked to fire. Jason had done more damage to his own family than he’d ever done to the 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.