Marie Ferrarella - Military Man

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?”