Military Man

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 her career and her knowledge in this specific field, she was low woman on the totem pole around here. It wouldn’t do for her to usurp the physician she’d been assigned to by asking the two men in the room what they were looking for.

But her more-than-healthy dose of curiosity was eating away at her.

Not to mention that she was getting exceedingly uncomfortable because Military Man’s eyes hadn’t left her from the moment she’d looked up. Was he trying to unnerve her for some reason? If he was, he was in for a surprise. She didn’t unnerve easily. Not after the kind of life she’d led.

Luckily for her, Dr. Daniels stepped forward. “Can I help you two gentlemen?” He was all business as he looked from one man to the other, waiting for an answer.

The second of the two visitors replied. “Did you perform the autopsy on that prison transport driver who was killed?”

The inquiry startled her. Talk about coincidences, Lucy thought.

“And you would be…?” Harley pressed, looking from one to the other.

It was evident to Lucy that the doctor was not about to remotely entertain the thought of answering any questions until he had his own answered satisfactorily.

With supreme effort, Collin tore his eyes away from the woman with Paula’s face and focused on the reason they were here. She looked so much like his ex-fiancée that for a moment there he’d felt as if he were coming unglued. Maybe, he told himself, after this was over, if he wasn’t being sent off on another assignment, he was going to take some real time off. He had a feeling he needed it.

“Very interested in finding out information,” Collin concluded the statement that the M.E. had left hanging in the air.

The doctor’s small eyes moved from one man to the other. More questions presented themselves. “How did you get in here?”

Collin merely smiled. “You’d be surprised what the right badge will get you.”

Unable to remain silent any longer—it simply wasn’t in her nature to contain her curiosity or to hold her tongue for long—Lucy spoke up. “So far, we haven’t seen any badges, right ones or wrong ones.”

Damn, even her voice faintly reminded him of Paula’s. Collin tried to quell the almost-jittery reaction he was feeling inside.

It was as if all his inner walls were turning to Jell-O.

Listening closer, he found more differences than similarities between the two cadences. This woman’s voice, he pointed out to himself, was a bit more forceful. Paula’s had always been soft, easygoing, like the woman herself.

Maybe that had been the problem, he thought. Had Paula not been as easygoing as she was, had she made some noise, maybe he would have come to his senses about his course of nonaction and done something before he’d lost her.

Reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket, Collin took out his wallet. He flipped it open and held it up for both of them to see.

“Special Ops?” the doctor read. “Army Rangers.” His eyes went from the title to Collin and back again. Wiping his hands on a nearby towel, he frowned. “Why Special Ops? What is there about this case that would bring out someone like you?”

“Are you with Special Ops, too?” Lucy asked, looking at Emmett.

“FBI,” Emmett corrected, taking out his own ID and showing it to both of them.

He knew he was violating several standard protocols by using his badge to get at information that he hadn’t specifically been assigned to uncover, but there was no way around it. He had always believed in taking the fastest road to get somewhere. And there was no way on earth he was going to back off until he brought Jason to justice.

Besides, he knew that Ryan would never be safe until Jason was back behind bars. The man had told him during his first visit to the Double Crown Ranch that from almost the moment that Jason had escaped, letters threatening his life, his home, his family had begun coming. Letters that announced Jason’s intention to kill Ryan when he least expected it. And then his wife, Lily, had been kidnapped, an event that could have ended tragically if it hadn’t been for Emmett. That was a hell of a lot for a man to endure.

That Ryan Fortune hadn’t gone into hiding was a testimony of the man’s mettle. There was no way he would allow Jason to make good on his threat.

The doctor peered closely at the FBI credentials. “That makes a little more sense,” he commented with a nod. “As a matter of fact, we had to redo the autopsy. Some kind of glitch in the system lost the records for the original so we were forced to exhume the body and perform a second autopsy. We just finished it this morning,” Daniels confessed. As if suddenly making a conscious decision to be friendly, Daniels moved around Lucy and put out his hand. “Dr. Harley Daniels, M.E.” Both Emmett and Collin took turns shaking it. “If you want to talk to the Chief Medical Examiner—”

Collin shook his head at the offer. “In my experience, you find out a lot more by talking to the people in the trenches.”

Trenches. He even talked like a military man, Lucy thought. Once her world had been saturated with military personnel. She’d been away from that world for eight years now. Funny how being around someone she associated with the military brought all the old memories rushing back at her.

A vague sense of nostalgia drifted over her.

It almost amused Lucy, seeing as how while she was living the life, she couldn’t wait to put everything associated with the military and its nomadic existence behind her. When she’d been very young, she used to fantasize that her parents would both suddenly decide to quit the military and set up housekeeping in some lovely suburban area. It didn’t matter what part of the country, what mattered was that it was away from any base. She’d envisioned them taking regular nine-to-five jobs and being there with her—for her—at dinnertime.

She’d clung to that fantasy for more than five years. It had never materialized, but at the time, the hope that it would had been what had kept her going.

Why she suddenly found herself missing that period of her life was beyond her. Most likely it was because of the mind’s tendency to romanticize the past and remember only the good.

It was also because that was the time when her mother had still been alive. Though she’d trained herself to be independent years before her mother had met her untimely fate, there were still times when she missed her mother with a fierceness that went straight down to the bone.

She became aware of Daniels looking at her. “Well, that would be us, eh, Luce? In the trenches.” He sounded as if he was savoring the phrase. And then he nodded in her direction. “This is Lucy Gatling, the most promising med student we’ve had around here in a long time.”

So that was her name, Collin said to himself. Lucy. Luce. Luz. The Spanish word for light. It suited her, he thought. He extended his hand to her. The feel of her skin was soft, almost erotic.

“And what is it that you promise?” he heard himself asking, not quite sure where the words, so unlike him, had come from.

Her eyes met his. The word feisty entered his mind. “Not to be flippant and put people in their place unless I really, really have to.”

The response summoned a rare smile from Emmett, who had been looking at Collin as if he’d taken leave of his senses.

“What can you tell us about the autopsy?” Emmett asked, turning his attention to Daniels. “Was there anything unusual?”

“You mean, other than the fact that the driver’s throat was slit so deeply it came close to severing his head clean off?”

Collin exchanged glances with Emmett. It sounded as if Jason had gone over the deep end. But then, since he had killed Christopher, they already knew that. This just reinforced their opinion.

Emmett rolled the action and its motivation over in his head. Finally he said to his new partner, “Maybe he feels he’s meting out justice. Acting like judge and jury.” But even as he uttered the speculation, he shook his head. He was giving Jason too much credit. More than likely, it was just an at-the-moment insane fury that had seized his brother. “I don’t know. He’s a hard man to pin down. Just when I think I know what makes him tick, he throws me another curve.”

Maybe that was the whole point, Collin thought. His cousin was crazy. Crazy like a fox. He looked at the burly medical examiner.

“Do you know if there were any signs of a struggle? Anything at all that we could use?” Collin asked.

He was just fishing now, but you never knew when the most innocent of observations hooked up with another and eventually led somewhere. He’d learned a long time ago not to let anything pass but to examine everything, no matter how time-consuming it was. The answers that were sought could lie with the next small clue.

Daniels thought, then shrugged. “Nothing you could use.”

He was chewing on something, Collin thought. “Why don’t you let us be the judge of that?” he tactfully suggested.

“I haven’t had the dictation transcribed into a report yet…” Daniels began.

“The dead guy had a weakness for sweets,” Lucy interjected. The two men turned to look at her.

Blessed with what seemed like total recall, at least when it came to her work, she didn’t need to listen to the tape recorder to refresh her memory. If it was details they were after, she could give them details.

“The guard’s stomach contents showed that he had consumed several donuts not too long before he was killed.”

“What else did you notice?”

Lucy glanced over her shoulder at Dr. Daniels, waiting for him to say something. She knew that she was speaking out of turn, but he just waved her on.

She didn’t know if she was imagining it, but it looked as if there was a glint of pride in the doctor’s eyes, as if he were a mother bird pushing a hatchling out of the nest and watching it fly for the first time instead of sinking to the ground.

This part she felt wasn’t really important, had nothing to do with the way the transport driver had died, but since she was being asked for additional information, she gave it to them.

“He would have died of liver disease before long. There was evidence of hepatitis.”

The other man, the FBI agent, blew out a breath, shaking his head. “Guy should have been home, getting treatment, not out driving a prison transport,” he commented.

Lucy had always been there for the underdog, maybe because a part of her identified with that role herself. “Maybe he was trying to forget the misery he saw.”

The FBI agent frowned. “Nobody held a gun to his head to make him take the job.”

“No,” Lucy agreed, “but someone ultimately held a knife to his back.”

Collin admired her grit. But it was apparently annoying Emmett. “Anything else you can recall?” Collin asked.

She nodded, having saved the best—and strangest in this case, since death had been by execution. “The oddest thing was that there was skin under his nails.”

“Like he fought back?” the CIA agent asked.

“More like he tried to grab someone,” Dr. Daniels put in. “Can’t be sure.”

“Someone,” Collin echoed. Use of the word, rather than specifying Jason, pointed away from his cousin. His dark eyebrows narrowed into a single line over his nose. “You mean that the skin didn’t belong to Jason?”

“That we don’t know,” Daniels admitted. “We don’t have Jamison’s DNA on file so there’s no way for us to determine a match.” He nodded in Lucy’s direction. “She already tried.”

Emmett paused, trying to remember some information he’d recently come across. Laboratory findings were not within his realm of expertise. He was a field agent. “But if you matched the skin against the DNA of, say, a blood relative, you could determine whether or not the initial DNA was in the same gene pool, right?”

“Yes,” Daniels responded, “but we don’t have—”

“There’s that body they found in Lake Mondo,” Lucy interrupted, excitement shining in her eyes, making them seem even brighter.

She hadn’t been in the M.E.’s office at the time the body had surfaced, but she’d read about it. Devoured every scrap of the story. Read, too, when they had finally identified the dead man. When Jason Wilkes was captured and his true identity had come to light, the sheriff’s office had tied the killer not only to Melissa Alderson’s murder but also to the murder of the man who’d been found on the shores of the lake, as well.

Lucy remembered feeling sick to her stomach when she’d read that the man in custody had turned out to be the dead man’s brother. That was when she’d known that Jason Jamison was a cold-blooded killer. He made her own blood run cold.

Dr. Daniels discounted her suggestion with uncertainty. “The body was pretty badly decomposed,” he reminded her. There was another complication in the way, Lucy knew. The body had already been claimed and a funeral had been held. “And we would have to obtain an exhumation order from the court to dig him up before we could get any DNA to use for a test,” the doctor went on. “The court doesn’t exactly like issuing those.”

Emmett’s voice was solemn as he interrupted the discussion. “You don’t have to go through anything as elaborate as having the body exhumed.”

Lucy asked, “Then how…?”

Emmett’s green eyes shifted in her direction. It was as if he was speaking only to her. “You can take a sample of my DNA.”

Collin watched first surprise, then suspicion pass over the medical student’s almost-perfect face. She was probably thinking that they were here for some ulterior purpose.

He couldn’t blame her, he supposed. In her place, his mind would have probably worked the same way. But this was a time when the line about truth being stranger than fiction applied.

Lucy’s eyes widened. “You’re related to the escapee?” She tried to see a family resemblance, but could detect none. But then, she’d only seen one newspaper photograph of Jason Jamison.

The man barely nodded his head. “He’s my brother.”

Lucy’s mouth nearly dropped open. She would have never guessed the two men were brothers. Talk about night and day, she thought.

Accustomed to fending for herself for a long time now, she momentarily forgot that Daniels was even in the room and that it was his place to ask the questions. “Could I see your badge again?”

Collin laughed as Emmett dug into his pocket once again. “Relax, we’re not here to taint any evidence. All we want to do is find Jason and bring him in.”

Putting her hand on the wallet, she looked carefully at the ID the agent provided before releasing it again. When she did, she turned toward the other man, letting her curiosity get the better of her.

“If he’s the fugitive’s brother, how do you figure into all this? You his sister?” She never cracked a smile.

Collin’s eyes shifted toward where Daniels was standing. “She’s got a flip mouth.”

The doctor only laughed, his large belly shaking beneath his lab coat like a tremor building in momentum to become a major quake.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.” But there was nothing but fondness in his eyes as he looked at the young woman. “Lucky for her she’s top notch at what she does.” And then his expression sobered just a touch as the M.E. looked intently at Lucy. “You never heard me say that.”

Her face was the soul of innocence as she asked, “Say what?”

“See?” Daniels looked at Collin. “What did I tell you? Top notch.”

That, Collin thought, was exactly the term he would use to describe her, too.

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