Military Man Read online

  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 t
o 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.

  Four

  “Open wide, please. This won’t hurt a bit,” Lucy promised the man she now knew as Emmett Jamison. Her voice was quiet, as if she were trying to steady the nerves of a reluctant patient.

  When he did as he was asked, she took the long stick and carefully swabbed the inside of his left cheek.

  “I wasn’t worried about the pain,” Emmett told her crisply as she placed the swab in a small air-tight plastic container and sealed it.

  Without realizing it, she glanced toward the other man who had stood silently by as she’d taken the necessary sample to run the test.

  He read her glance and obviously took it as a solicitation for some kind of comment from him. “Sorry, he left his manners in his other coat.”

  His words invoked a smile from her. “But you brought yours,” she said, labeling the plastic container with a black laundry marker.

  “Never leave home with them.”

  Collin saw that his words caused Emmett’s brow to furrow slightly. Emmett had always believed in the direct route, which wasn’t necessarily always the polite one. The time his cousin had spent confined within the New Mexico shack that had become his hermitage had stripped him of what little social graces he’d possessed to begin with. Emmett’s manner with strangers had become positively brusque and Collin had a feeling that brusque wasn’t going to get them very far in this venture, especially since they weren’t supposed to be walking along the trail to begin with.

  “How long will the actual test to compare the two DNAs take?” Collin asked.

  “If they rush it,” Lucy told him, “less than a week.”

  It wasn’t the answer he wanted, obviously, as he suppressed a belabored sigh. “That long?”

  Emmett frowned, too. “Doesn’t seem right in this day and age.”

  Taking an empty folder, Lucy made a notation on a sheet and deposited it inside the folder. “Some things don’t change. No matter what progress does, it still takes nine months to have a baby.”

  The second the words were out of her mouth, she stopped. Lucy had no idea where that had come from. Babies were the furthest thing from her mind. Especially since she didn’t intend to marry for a long time and she wasn’t about to be intimate with a man until after there was a ring on her finger. A wedding ring.

  As far as she could calculate, a baby wasn’t going to be in her future for another nine or ten years, if then. It would probably take her that long to settle on a husband.

  Right now there was no one special in her life, which was a good thing because her life was hectic enough without adding emotional conflict to it. The kind of conflict that went on when a man assumed that a relationship would just naturally progress to the next plateau. A plateau she was not about to climb to until after she was married.

  She’d seen firsthand the kind of consequences that resulted when people allowed passion to govern them. She didn’t need that kind of turmoil.

  Lucy wondered suddenly what Military Man would have said if he knew he was in the presence of that rarest of creatures, a twenty-six-year-old virgin. Probably take it as a challenge, she mused.

  It would be one challenge he wasn’t going to win. She was very, very determined to remain in her present state until the right man came along and said the right words: “I do.”

  Since the field she was presently studying dealt exclusively with death, not birth, she had no idea where the analogy that had slipped from her lips had even come from.

  What was more, she had no idea why it embarrassed her. But embarrassed she was, because she could feel the color beginning to creep up her neck, onto her cheeks again, its path heralded by a warmth that preceded it, marking the way.

  Unlike her normal, take-charge self, Lucy suddenly felt hot from head to foot.

  Like an amnesiac slowly becoming aware of her surroundings, she looked down at the plastic container and the cotton swab that was lodged within. Her hand tightened around it.

  “Um, let me get this to the lab. The crime scene investigators already have the scrapings we took from under his fingernails.” She wanted to get out of the area as quickly as possible, until the flush she felt in her cheeks had subsided and her color was back to normal. The way Military Man was looking at her, she knew he would notice. Unless he was utterly color blind.

  Somehow she didn’t think that was the case. She could see his lips curving into a smile as he looked at her. She began to move past him.

  “You’ll let us know the minute you get the results?” he pressed.

  Bent on escape, Lucy began to nod her head, then suddenly stopped. She looked at Collin. “How am I supposed to get in touch with you?”

  Collin grabbed a piece of paper from a desk and jotted his number on it. As he handed it
to her, her fingers brushed up against his.

  He knew it was crazy, but he could have sworn he felt something just then. Something electrical passing through him.

  He dropped his hand to his side, nodding at the paper. “That’s my cell phone number.”

  She glanced at the number before pocketing the white paper, and his name, Collin. “So it is. I’d better, um…”

  Lost for words, for any more of an excuse, she didn’t bother finishing her statement. Instead she quickly crossed the threshold and disappeared down the twisting hallway.

  “And this is my cell phone,” Emmett told Daniels, handing one of his cards to the physician. “We’ll be in touch,” he promised, then turning on his heel, he took the same path out that Lucy had a minute earlier.

  Collin had no choice but to follow. They walked quickly to the elevator bank.

  Emmett’s face remained without expression as he kept it forward, not sparing a glance at his cousin. “Why didn’t you take a picture? It would have lasted longer.”

  Collin suppressed a smile. He didn’t know about that. The mind was an incredible keeper of important details, as well as useless ones. The woman’s face would last in his mind’s eye for approximately the duration of time that he found her likeness pleasing.

  He figured that would fade quickly enough. Lucy Gatling wouldn’t be the first woman he was physically attracted to and she wouldn’t be the last. But he could wait it out. He always had before, successfully avoiding conflicts and complications, both of which were unwanted.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Collin disavowed.

  This time Emmett did look at him. And nearly jeered. “Yeah, right. The only way you could have looked any harder at that woman back there was to have taken out one of your eyeballs and handed it to her.”

  “Now there’s a gross picture.”

  The bell announcing the elevator car’s descent sounded. It arrived a half beat later, opening its doors. There was no one in the car.

  “So is watching you become all slack-jawed over a woman in a white lab coat,” Emmett countered as they walked into the elevator.