Delores Fossen - Lawman With A Cause

It wasn’t her first grumble about that, either, and Egan could definitely see her side of it. Jordan was a former cop and hadn’t been able to stop the attack, and this thug could just come walking into the hospital to finish what he’d started. At least Egan could control who came in and out of the sheriff’s office, and the gunman would have to be plenty stupid to come into a building with cops.

“Will she be okay?” Egan asked Dr. Madison. It wasn’t a general kind of question, though. He needed to know how soon he could move her to a safe location so he could get on with this investigation.

“I think she’ll be all right,” the doc answered. “I’d still like to run some tests, but if it’s absolutely necessary for her to be here, it can wait.”

“It’s necessary,” Jordan assured her.

Dr. Madison made a suit-yourself sound and gathered up her things. “I’ll call in a script for some pain meds, but something tells me you won’t be taking them.”

Jordan looked at her. “I won’t be.” And there wasn’t a shred of doubt in her voice.

The doctor sighed. “Well, just take some over-the-counter stuff if it gets too bad. You’ll have a doozy of a headache for a day or two.”

Egan figured from the way Jordan kept wincing that it’d gone well past the doozy stage. Still, he didn’t press it. But he would when the doctor was finally out of his office.

“I will need my immunosuppressant meds, though,” Jordan told the doctor. “They’re at my place in San Antonio, but I haven’t had my dose today.”

“Immunosuppressant?” Egan asked.

Jordan dodged his gaze. “For the kidney transplant.” She gave the name of the drugs to the doctor.

Dr. Madison nodded. “I’ll get you a new script. Will she be here for the next hour or so?” she asked Egan. “Because if so, I can have the pharmacy deliver it to her. Jordan really shouldn’t miss taking it even for a day. It could cause her body to reject the donor kidney.”

Egan wasn’t sure he’d wanted to know that. It was always hard to think of Jordan having part of Shanna inside her. If that part died, it’d be a little like losing Shanna all over again. That probably didn’t make sense to most people, which was why Egan kept it to himself.

“Jordan will be here for a while,” Egan assured the doctor. Just how long “a while” was, though, he wouldn’t know until he’d learned more about what was going on.

“Tell me about the other two living recipients,” Egan said to Jordan once the doctor had left.

Jordan had already given him the names—Tori Judd and Irene Adair—and while Egan had been making some calls, he’d done internet searches on them, but he hadn’t pulled up much. Irene Adair didn’t even have a driver’s license so there was no DMV photo on her. He had gotten a look at a photo of Tori, but Egan didn’t know if she was a match to the dead woman or not.

Jordan drew in a deep breath and moved from the corner of his desk where she’d been sitting to the chair across from him. “I have computer files on both of them, but I honestly don’t know if one of them is the dead woman. There was too much blood for me to get a good look at her face.”

Ditto. But what he had been able to see would be etched in his mind forever. So would some of the details that were eating away at him. “I’m not sure our attacker had enough time to wrap her in a blanket before he dumped her out of the truck.”

“Yes.” Jordan said it so quickly that she’d probably given it some thought. But then she lifted her shoulder. “Unless she’d already had the blanket draped around her.” She winced again. Hesitated. “Did the woman have a missing heart or pancreas?”

“No.”

Egan saw the same relief in her eyes that he’d felt when Court had told him that. Like him, the relief didn’t last long.

“It’s possible the gunman had the woman on the seat next to him,” Jordan said, “and he pushed her out only after she’d been shot.”

Egan had considered that, too. That was why they needed to find the driver of that truck so he could shed some light on this.

“How long before we have ballistics?” she asked.

Egan nearly told her there was no “we” in this investigation, but there was. Whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t, Jordan and he were in this together.

“As soon as the ME can get the bullet out of the Jane Doe, Court can do the comparison with our guns.”

Egan had gone ahead and sent both his and Jordan’s weapons to the lab. Still, it might be tomorrow before they heard anything. It might be that long as well before they got an ID on the woman. It’d be hell waiting, but it wouldn’t be downtime.

“I’ve already called Kirk,” Egan continued. “He didn’t answer, but I left a message for him to get in here for questioning.”

“He won’t like that,” she said under her breath.

No. But then Kirk didn’t care much for anything Egan did. Kirk apparently wasn’t objective enough to figure out the only person to blame for Shanna’s murder was Drew himself.

“Kirk is obviously a suspect,” Egan went on, “but I have to wonder why he’d wait nearly two years before doing something like this.”

Jordan gave a frustrated sigh. “Maybe it’s just now sinking in that his brother is going to die on death row. Or Drew could consider this a loose end he wants tied up before he gets that lethal injection. He lost his appeal.”

True. But there’d be other appeals. Ones that would take a long time. The average inmate in Texas spent over ten years on death row. It didn’t matter that there’d been eyewitnesses to what Drew had done. It didn’t matter that the man wrecked plenty of lives. He would still survive years longer than Shanna. Justice definitely wasn’t a substitute for the havoc that had played out that day.

“I also need to know if there’s someone else you’ve crossed paths with,” Egan went on. “Someone you ticked off enough to do something like this. Because what happened tonight might not even be related to the two dead recipients.”

Jordan didn’t argue with that verbally, but she did shake her head. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

He waited for her to add more. When she didn’t, Egan went with his next question. “How about the cop, Christian Abrams? He said he cared about you a lot .”

Her mouth tightened. “He thinks I’m crazy. I’m not.”

Egan was beginning to believe that. “Could something have happened between you two to make him want you dead?”

“No.” But then she huffed. “We worked together when I was still on the force. Now I do death penalty case reviews for a watchdog group called The Right Verdict. They want to make sure people haven’t been wrongly convicted, and Christian is still my main contact at SAPD. He and I have had a disagreement or two about whether or not someone incarcerated actually got a fair shake at justice. But other than that, nothing.”

That didn’t seem like much of a red flag to turn a cop into a killer. Still, it was worth checking out. Egan pushed a notepad and pen across the desk toward her. “Give me the names of the cases where you disagreed.”

The surprise flashed through her eyes. “You don’t really believe Christian could have done this?”

“I won’t know until I’ve checked him out.” He tipped his head to the notepad. “Names, dates, anything else you have.”

Jordan hesitated a moment and then wrote down a website address and password. “That will get you into my online storage account. The first file will be everything about the organ recipients. The next two will be the case files I’m working on for my job, the ones where Christian and I didn’t see eye to eye.”