Military Man

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.”