Книга - Military Man

Military Man
Marie Ferrarella


A dangerous predator escapes from prison near Red Rock, Texas–and Collin Jamison, CIA Special Operations, is the only person who can get inside the murderer's mind. Just one thing's clouding his concentration–Lucy Gatling.Voluptuous, petite and a med student observer for the coroner's office, Lucy is all business. And she thinks she's got a lead. The police aren't biting, but Collin is–even if it's only to get closer to Lucy.Work turns into one special night and Lucy's convinced Collin is the real deal. But is it right to secretly give him information about the case? Or is it too late? Collin is on a flight back to Virginia and it just might be goodbye for good to a man she can't afford to let get away.









Praise for Marie Ferrarella:


“Ferrarella has penned a guaranteed page-turner!”

—Romantic Times on Internal Affair

“Time and again, Marie Ferrarella demonstrates her gift for storytelling in the romantic suspense genre, and Crime and Passion is no exception.”

—Romantic Times on Crime and Passion

“…the saucy quips will draw a laugh, and the chemistry will make you shiver. Marie Ferrarella does it again!”

—Romantic Times on Mac’s Bedside Manner

“Great romance, excellent plot, grabs you from page one.”

—Affaire de Coeur on In Graywolf’s Hands

“…the pleasure of this journey is in the getting there. Reading about warm, caring people and watching relationships mature under stressful situations is a pleasurable way to spend an afternoon. As usual, Ferrarella’s dialogue is in voice, crisp and moves the story along without ever bogging down in the emotional angst each brings to the relationship. Once a Father is a hearty recommend for a skilled writer.”

—The Romance Reader on Once a Father





Military Man










Marie Ferrarella





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Dear Reader,

No, you are not experiencing déjà vu, this is actually my second time up at bat. I had the privilege of working on Book #2 of this continuity, A Baby Changes Everything, and here I am again, managing the lives of the people in Book #10. This time I’m meeting new people as well as beloved old favorites such as Vanessa Fortune and her father, Ryan.

Doing a continuity is like being invited to become part of a large extended family and finding your place within it. Over the last twenty-two years I’ve written about a lot of heroes, but Lt. Collin Jamison is my very first military man. He’s a dashing, daring army ranger accustomed to risking his life on an almost daily basis. But here, he finds that he is asked to do the most dangerous thing of all—risk his heart. The same is asked of Lucy Gatling, a bright young third-year medical student who is more interested in medicine and forensics than she is venturing out into the real world. She doesn’t want to risk being hurt, either. But the chemistry between them is more than either can deny.

Come with me and watch these two find their way into love, struggling and resisting all the way.

I wish you love,







To Patience Smith and the team we have become.




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Bonus Features




One


“You know I wouldn’t ordinarily be asking you to do this, but…”

Lt. Collin Jamison heard his cousin’s voice awkwardly trail off on the other end of the line. Collin’s lips curved slightly in an understanding smile. That had always been his gift, for as far back as he could remember. Understanding. Although it took no special gift to know where Emmett was coming from.

His cousin had trouble asking people for favors, even from someone he’d once been close to, the way they once had been.

Granted it was a hell of a favor to ask. But at least, since he’d sought him out like this, it meant that Emmett had decided to come back to join the living. That alone would have had Collin saying yes, no matter what the obstacles.

It wasn’t easy for Collin to arrange free time. When you worked as an Army Ranger for CIA Special Operations, specializing in manhunts and intelligence gathering, it wasn’t exactly as if you were just another easily replaceable cog.

But he had a lot of time coming to him, time he’d never bothered using because there hadn’t been anything else he’d rather be doing than his job.

Things could be managed, Collin thought. Things could always be managed.

Collin shifted the receiver to his other ear. He’d barely walked into the small, two-bedroom condo he owned right outside of Langley, Virginia, when the phone had rung, demanding his attention. He’d thought it was a call to come in for a new assignment.

In a way, he supposed it was.

Exchanging quick, perfunctory pleasantries for less than two minutes, Emmett had swiftly filled him in as to why he’d called. Even when they were young, Emmett had never believed in wasting time. Neither did he. That was why they got along so well.

“Yeah, I know,” Collin said in response to his cousin’s awkward pause. “I’ve got to admit, it’s a hell of a surprise, hearing from you. Uncle Blake said that you had gone off somewhere into the mountains in New Mexico to be by yourself.” He recalled the conversation in its entirety. Blake Jamison had been sincerely worried about his youngest son, not knowing if Emmett was going to permanently withdraw from life, or if he just needed time to come to terms with the things he’d witnessed during the course of his work as an FBI special agent.

“I did.”

He heard Emmett sigh quietly on the other end, as if a part of him still wanted to be back there, hidden in the mountains, away from the world. Collin knew how that could be. There were times when he’d thought seriously about just saying the hell with everything and retreating himself. That usually lasted until the next interesting case came along to challenge him. He was no good with free time. Free time made you think.

“I needed some peace and quiet,” Emmett was saying. As always, his cousin was given to understatement.

For a while there Collin had worried about Emmett’s sanity. Everyone thought about running away, but very few ever did it. Those who did generally invited speculation about the state of their mental health.

But now that Emmett was back, Collin breathed a little easier. “Couldn’t find any, huh?” he joked.

His uncle Blake had told Collin that when Emmett’s older brother, Christopher, had turned up murdered, it just intensified Emmett’s desire to stay away from the world. It was only after his father had made the pilgrimage to his shack to tell him that Christopher had been killed by Jason, the brother both he and Christopher had watched descend into madness, that Emmett had snapped out of his depression and left his self-imposed exile to battle the “bad guys” again. This time, the bad guy was his older brother.

“No, it’s not that,” Emmett responded wearily to his cousin’s joke. “The world just won’t let me alone.” He took a deep breath and reiterated his initial plea. “I need your help in finding Jason.”

Collin didn’t bother saying the obvious, that Emmett had greater resources than him to employ. Or the more obvious, that the FBI was never thrilled having someone from the CIA nosing around. He said, instead, what they both knew to be true.

“Jason’s sick, Emmett. He has been for a long time now.” Jason had been different as a boy, given to hero-worshiping their grandfather to the point that it became a near obsession. All of Farley Jamison’s past history became Jason’s by proxy, to cherish and, more importantly, to vindicate.

“No,” Emmett contradicted, his voice harsh. “He’s evil. You know that.”

Yes, Collin thought, he supposed he did. Accustomed as he was to the ugly underbelly of the world, he still found it hard to pin that label on someone whose blood ran through his own veins.

Pausing, Collin tried to guess at Emmett’s reasons for what he was doing. The brothers had never been particularly close, even as children.

“You afraid the FBI’ll kill Jason if they find him?”

Emmett’s voice was steely as he replied, “No, I’m afraid he’ll wind up killing someone else. He’s my flesh and blood and I don’t want that on my conscience.”

Emmett always had enough conscience for three people, Collin thought. For a man who was only thirty-one, he acted as if he’d been born old. “You’re not your brother’s keeper, Emmett.”

There was another long pause on the other end of the line. Collin wondered if he’d insulted Emmett. After all, he hadn’t seen or spoken to him for a while now and people had a habit of changing.

Everyone but him, he mused.

“Maybe not,” Emmett finally said, “but I’m an FBI agent. What I’m supposed to do is keep the public safe from maniacs like Jason. Frankly, I’m afraid that he’ll surface somewhere and kill Ryan Fortune before I get a chance to take him down.”

Collin was vaguely familiar with Fortune, mainly from newspaper articles. The billionaire rancher was the epitome of generosity, giving to so many charities that the public had lost count. Collin was also aware that there was some sort of a family connection, but he had his own world, his own concerns. The Fortunes were a world apart from him.

“Ryan Fortune? Why?”

In the background, he thought he heard someone call out, “Room Service.” Emmett responded with a crisp, “Later,” before continuing and telling him what he’d pieced together. “Because Grandpa’s stories turned Jason’s mind to the state of an overripe, rotting apple. Because Grandpa blamed the Fortunes for turning him into a pauper and making him live out the rest of his life in that state. Grandpa needed a scapegoat for his problems and an audience to hear about it. Jason adored him and now he thinks he’s bringing some kind of divine justice into play.

“I know him, Collin. Jason’s crazy enough and evil enough to try something desperate. I mean, if he killed Christopher because for some reason Christopher got in the way of his big ‘plans,’ then—”

Collin was quick to stop him. He needed confirmation. “Is that what happened?”

A rare fondness slipped into Emmett’s voice. “You know Christopher. He’s always—” Emmett stopped; Collin could almost feel the other man’s physical pain as he corrected himself “—was always bent on bringing out the best in everyone. He knew Jason was obsessed with avenging Grandpa and followed him down here to Red Rock to talk him out of whatever it was he was planning.” All feeling drained out of his voice. “But nobody messes with Jason. At least, that’s what Jason believes.”

Even as a small boy, Collin remembered, Jason had always been headstrong, always needed to be center stage, or else he was given to destroying the stage.

“So he killed Christopher.” Even though Jason had been arrested and charged with the crime, with most people believing he was guilty, it was still something that Collin found difficult to say.

“And that girl who was posing as his wife,” Emmett interjected. “And that guard who was transporting him to another prison.”

And who knew how many others who hadn’t come to light, Collin couldn’t help thinking.

“Human life means nothing to him,” Emmett said with utter disgust. “And a second transport guard is just barely hanging on.”

“Maybe he can tell you something—” Collin began.

Emmett cut him off. Not because he felt angry or impatient, Collin knew, but because it was the way he was. Clipped and to the point.

Collin knew that was his cousin’s way of keeping everything at bay except for the facts. Emmett was not about to allow his emotions to suck him down to the depths he’d already been pulled to once.

He couldn’t survive a second trip down that far.

“The guard’s in a coma.”

“Oh.” That rather curtailed his ability to talk to the man, Collin thought. “So what exactly do you want from me?”

“I need you to do what you do best,” Emmett told him. “You can get into the mind of a criminal, find him, second guess his next move.”

The words were flattering, but not without foundation. Still, he did that with strangers, getting into their heads, under their skins. But in this case Emmett had an advantage over him. “He’s your brother, shouldn’t you be the one who’s able to—”

Again Emmett cut him short. “Jason’s been a mystery to me from day one. Christopher was the brother I always admired, not Jason.” Collin could hear the pain in his cousin’s voice. “Jason was always evil, always out for just Jason.”

With one notable exception, Collin thought. “Except in the way he felt about your grandfather.”

“I think he saw Grandpa as an extension of himself.” Emmett made his final entreaty. “This is family business, Collin. I need someone on my side.”

It was clear to Collin that even though his cousin was part of the FBI himself, the organization saw them as intruders in this case.

The request was something new for Emmett. Collin knew that his cousin was accustomed to working alone. So much so that the Bureau did not view him as a team player. But Emmett was very good at what he did, which made him a valuable asset to the FBI. Valuable assets were allowed some leeway. So when Emmett had put in for an extended leave of absence, saying he’d needed time to pull himself together, Collin knew the objections had been few. The Bureau did not want to risk having a stressed-out agent amid their number.

For a while there Collin had thought that his cousin’s withdrawal from the world was destined to be a permanent one. And maybe it would have become that eventually, if family honor and Emmett’s own sense of pride hadn’t joined together to pull him out of the tailspin he’d found himself in.

Leaning back, Collin put his feet on his coffee table and formed the only conclusion he could from Emmett’s tone. “I take it our end of the investigation is going to be unofficial.”

Even if it hadn’t been his choice, it would have had to be this way. “You know the Bureau frowns on their operatives handling anything that remotely involves their personal lives.”

The army was the same way. He was going to have to request a leave of absence, Collin thought.

He laughed softly to himself, relishing the image. “So as far as the local law-enforcement officers are concerned, we’re going to be just two pains in the butt for them.”

As always, Emmett put a serious interpretation on the words. “Let me worry about the local law-enforcement officers.”

Swinging his legs off the table, Collin shifted to the edge of the sofa, his attention focused on the nature of Emmett’s words. “You are planning on checking in with them.” He wanted to know.

Emmett was honest with him. Collin knew Emmett could never be anything less than that. “As little as possible and only when necessary. You know that every agency thinks they’re supreme.”

Collin grinned and laughed again, unable to help himself. “When we all know that it’s only true as far as the FBI is concerned.”

The easy give-and-take they’d always enjoyed as boys and then young men was still held somewhat in abeyance. Invoking the memories, he might feel comfortable around Emmett, but there was no sign that Emmett reciprocated the feeling. He seemed to be nothing but all business and as rigid as an iron bar.

“So.” Emmett wanted to know. “Are you in?”

There had never been any question in Collin’s mind from the moment he’d said hello and recognized Emmett’s voice. “I’m in.”

In what, Collin wasn’t altogether sure. But at least this seemed to have drawn Emmett out of seclusion. He’d been seriously worried that his cousin had succumbed to the mind-numbing allure of alcohol to the point that there was no turning back. If trying to find Jason and bring him back to face the consequences of his actions helped dry Emmett out, then he was all for it.

And if it ultimately kept Jason from killing anyone else, that could only be a good thing.

“I’m staying at the Corner Inn in Red Rock,” Emmett said. “Room twelve.”

Collin was stationed in Virginia, where he now hung his hat and called home, but he could be in Texas in a matter of hours once his leave was approved. Because of the nature of his work, he was always semipacked and ready to go at a moment’s notice. He never knew when the next day might find him half a world away.

“I’ll be there by noon tomorrow.” It was a promise he meant to keep.

“Thanks.”

Hanging up, Collin rose from the sofa, prepared to return to the base he’d left less than half an hour ago. Since his case was wrapped up, getting a personal leave shouldn’t be a problem, especially if he cited a family emergency. The colonel was very big on families. So much so that on the occasional times that Collin had been invited to the man’s house for the purpose of socializing, Colonel Eagleton had always had an unattached female in attendance. The man fancied himself a matchmaker. Collin had once commented that his C.O. shouldn’t give up his day job.



“Got another one for you, Luce,” Dr. Harley Daniels announced cheerfully, coming through the rear double doors into the sterile arena where they conducted most of their work. He was pushing a gurney ahead of him. The one with the right rear squeaky wheel that defied any and all attempts to mute it.

Lucy Gatling, third-year med student, braced herself as she looked up from the small desk she occupied. She knew that the medical examiner had to be referring to yet another body upon which he was about to perform an autopsy. As a student observer, she got to watch. Right before her very first autopsy, she’d made up her mind to mentally stand apart, as if what was going on in front of her was just a movie. It helped. Some.

Lucy knew that if she was going to become a doctor worth her salt, she was going to have to get over that initial queasiness that struck every time she was faced with the prospect of looking at a dead body being dissected. There wasn’t too much she could do about the queasiness, but she knew she could control her outer reaction to it.

Because she was so good at masking her emotions, no one ever had a clue as to what she was actually feeling, but that didn’t negate the fact that it felt as if a tidal wave had suddenly been created within her stomach and was wrecking havoc on the coastline.

Dr. Daniels parked the gurney under the overhead lights. He was a big man, brawny and bald, more apt to be mistaken for a professional wrestler than a dedicated doctor bent on uncovering the mysteries of death.

“You know,” he said, “every other student we’ve had here has always spent the first couple of weeks of their stay flinching every time they heard one of the gurneys approaching.” He chuckled, the deep sound echoing in the Spartan-like chamber. “Hell, we had a big burly guy pass out three times before he finally requested a transfer. But you—” there was admiration in his eyes as Lucy felt them pass over her “you’re something else again.”

Lucy took that as a high compliment. She’d heard that Daniels was not free with them. Her mouth curved ever so slightly.

Something else again.

That was the way her father had described her, more than once, always marveling at such stoicism in one so young.

What he hadn’t known, what no one seemed to even guess at, was that her particular brand of stoicism had been put in place to keep back an ocean of tears. If she had permitted herself even the display of a single tear, Lucy knew in her heart she wouldn’t be able to stop crying. Perhaps ever.

At least that was the way she’d felt for a very long time. As the only child of two parents who’d proudly served in the military, her whole life had been a series of leavings and of battling the feeling that she was being abandoned by one or the other of her parents. Sometimes both. When their tours of duty had conflicted with parenting, she’d been shipped off to her grandparents. She’d been a world traveler whose home was anywhere her suitcase went.

The nomadic lifestyle she’d been forced to lead had taught her at a very early age that she could not keep her parents at her side, nor could she remain where newly formed friendships had begun to push tender shoots through the earth and flourish. She certainly could not remain complacent or feel remotely secure because of any outer trappings.

She’d come to the realization early on that if she wanted security, she was going to have to look inward. The same was true of complacency. That only came from depending solely on herself, so that no matter where in the world she woke up or whom she found herself speaking to, she was her own person, secure and confident that she could go on despite whatever curves life suddenly threw her.

Damn but it was wearying at times to know that she was all there was.

Oh, there was her father and now that he had retired and moved close to her, that was a good thing. But strictly speaking, it almost felt as if it was too late. Lucy dearly loved Retired Lieutenant John Gatling, but she wasn’t the little girl she knew he was hoping to resume a relationship with. There was no going back and picking up where they had left off. Those years had long gone. She was a woman now, had become one long before her time.

And she had become so self-reliant that no one had seen her cry when she’d been told of her mother’s mysterious death halfway around the world. All she’d been told, by the military and by her father, who she suspected had no more information than she did, was that her mother had died “in the line of duty.”

In the line of duty. It was a phrase that was supposed to cover a myriad of things and explain everything. It covered little and explained nothing, but she’d ceased asking for answers.

At least, answers that had to do with the military. Answers that had to do with medicine and life in general as seen through a microscope were another matter. Her naturally inquisitive mind, her desire to do good, to help, had made her turn to medicine in hopes of allowing her to act upon her good intentions. At least in the field of medicine she had a fighting chance to solve a few of the mysteries, answer a few of the questions.

Maybe, if she was very lucky, they would be the ones that counted.

Now she moved out of the doctor’s way, eager to learn whatever it was that this newest victim had to silently teach her.

“What’s his story?” she asked Dr. Daniels as she glanced down at the corpse. Before the medical examiner could tell her, Lucy answered her own question. “Hey, wait, isn’t that one of the guards who was involved in that prisoner getaway?” She looked at the Y incision that ran the length of his torso. “Didn’t you already do him?”

Looking down at the still face, she recognized the man from the front page of the newspaper. Death had taken away his color and left a pasty gray in its place, but the man’s features had struck her initially because his face was almost a perfect square. Cruel though it was, that was something death hadn’t altered.

“We lost the paperwork. Don’t ask,” Daniels said. Then his brown eyes grew serious. “We might be getting his friend down here any day now. They’re keeping him alive at County, but who knows how long he’s going to hang on?”

She caught an undercurrent in the physician’s voice. Because of the nature of her childhood, she’d learned how to make quick assessments of the people around her. “You really like this job, don’t you?”

He looked surprised that she would make the comment. After all, she was the student, he the teacher. After a moment of stony silence, his rounded cheeks widened in a smile.

“Yes, I do. Dead people don’t talk back. They don’t make comments about how little money you have or how inferior they think you are.”

Given his size and appearance, it wasn’t a stretch for her to visualize him as an adolescent who’d spent his time on the outside of the inner circle. “The right living people don’t, either.”

There was a warm light in his eyes as he looked at her. “You’d be surprised, Lucy. Not everyone has your keen insight.”

She shrugged carelessly. Personal attention always made her uncomfortable. Unlike what she imagined the doctor had been at her age, she liked being the one on the outside. “I’m not that unique.”

“I think you are.”

She raised her eyes to his. For a split second their roles were reversed. “Dr. Daniels—”

He laughed, shaking his head. If he’d entertained any serious thoughts about her at a given point, Lucy knew she’d squelched them by now. “Yes, I know. You don’t go out with people you work with.” He paused before donning his surgical rubber gloves. “Tell me, I’m curious. How are you going to ever find yourself a husband if you keep ruling people out like that?”

Her voice was crisp. It was a question she’d answered before. “I’m not looking for a husband. I’m looking to finish my schooling and then start my career. After that’s established, then I might think about a relationship.”

It was a lie. She wasn’t planning on ever looking into forming a lasting relationship, certainly not the romantic one Daniels was inquiring about. Romantic relationships resided in the land of uncertainty. Math and science were where all the answers were. And forensic medicine, her ultimate field of expertise, dealt in facts once they’d been uncovered.

Relationships, she had learned, both through her parents—who were not stationed in the same state, sometimes not even the same country, for months at a time—and through Jeffrey Underhill, the one boy she’d allowed herself to fall in love with at the tender age of seventeen, were far from certain or even vaguely predictable.

She liked sticking with a sure thing.

“Shall we?” Daniels asked as he slipped on his rubber gloves.

Following his example, Lucy put on her own set. It was time to find out if the guard’s body contained any secrets for them.




Two


Far from being a demonstrative person, Emmett Jamison usually kept his feelings bottled up inside. Very little made him smile or show any sort of outward reaction other than a frown. At best, there were patient expressions. Even so, when he opened his hotel room door and saw Collin, his eyes seemed to light up. Without apparently stopping to think, Emmett threw his arms around him and hugged. Hard.

Surprised to say the least, Collin returned the embrace.

Taking a breath, Emmett stepped back, as if to bring himself under control. “Thanks for coming.”

Collin could hear the barely bridled emotion vibrating in Emmett’s voice.

“How could I not come?” They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. Even when Emmett had gone off to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, from time to time he would make an effort to remain in touch. “Like you said in your phone call, you don’t ask for many favors.” His cousin looked wan, Collin thought, like a man coming out of a cave after a prolonged period of time, which, in a way, he supposed Emmett was. “As a matter of fact, I can’t recall a single time that you ever did.”

Leaning slightly to the side to see around his taller cousin, Collin peered into the room Emmett was occupying. “Still Spartan as ever, I see.” He grinned. “You can take the man out of the hermit, but you can’t take the hermit out of the man.”

Emmett shrugged. “It’s just a room. It suits my purposes.”

Collin nodded. Unlike Jason, Emmett had never been one for creature comforts. He’d never required much. From the time he was old enough to purchase them himself, he owned only a sparse number of things; they never owned him.

Collin set down the single suitcase he’d brought. “I’ll just leave my things here until I get a room of my own.”

He’d come to the hotel in Red Rock straight from the airport. It had taken surprisingly little effort to get here. Tentatively, when he’d gone to his C.O., he’d asked for a two-week leave of absence. Colonel Eagleton had been more than happy to grant it to him.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t have a life outside of the job,” his C.O. had said.

It was very nearly true. His work had become his life and vice versa. There was no time, no room, for anything else. By design.

It wasn’t just that the nature of his work took him away from the place where he hung his uniform—a place very much like the one that Emmett was currently in. Collin, like his father before him, had the gift to delve into another person’s mind, to take that person apart, bit by bit and to figure out what made that person act the way he did. Yet Collin had no such gift when it came to himself. Or, more to the point, to the women he interacted with.

Collin had no doubts that if one of the women he dealt with on a day-to-day basis were to show up on the other side of a Wanted poster or an assignment sheet, he would be able figure out her next move with more than some degree of certainty. However, he also knew that if that same woman were sitting at a restaurant table directly opposite him, she’d leave him clueless.

He’d long ago come to the conclusion that he had no knack for personal male-female relationships.

If he’d had, Paula would have stayed.

Hell, he thought as he watched his cousin put his suitcase inside the closet, Paula would have been his wife by now. He would have known enough to make her his wife instead of remaining engaged for six years and somehow just allowing the status quo to continue unchallenged.

But maybe there was a reason for that.

There was so much turmoil packed into his active life that when it came to the personal side of him, he craved peace. Contentment. Something to count on. He supposed wanting that made him seem dull.

And maybe he was.

The thought caused his mouth to quirk in a semi-smile. It always did. Anyone knowing the kind of life he led, a life that took him into unfriendly territory on a regular basis, always walking a tightrope and laboring beneath the constant risk of death, wouldn’t have said that he had a dull bone in his body. But he did, if wanting the kind of peace and quiet he only knew secondhand made him dull. The kind of life his parents had led.

Paula would have given him that kind of life. He’d known that, felt it in his bones. But he’d allowed her to slip right through his fingers.

Not that the slippage was swift. Paula had been nothing if not patient, determined, he now realized, to wait him out. He’d certainly had a lot of time to make known his feelings about their future. The trouble was, it was always something that he’d figured would keep.

For them, he’d felt, there was always tomorrow. Except that when tomorrow finally arrived, it saw her on the arm of his best friend. Saying her vows.

He’d attended the ceremony, wished them both well with all the sincerity he could muster—and then closed up the remaining exposed portion of his heart, mentally declaring himself a failure when it came to relationships.

He didn’t blame Paula. He put the blame squarely where it belonged. On his own shoulders.

And he missed Paula like hell, even years after she’d become Mrs. William Pollack.

Collin roused himself. He had no idea why thoughts of Paula, of their life together before she’d had her fill of empty dreams, was preying on his mind today. It had been a while since he’d thought about her. Not since her anniversary had gone by last month. He supposed maybe it had to do with seeing Emmett again, because Emmett belonged to those days. Days when he had been a lot younger and a lot more hopeful.

And foolish.

“So, where do we start?” he asked as he preceded Emmett into the hallway and his cousin closed and locked the hotel room door behind them, slipping the rectangular key card into his pocket. “Do we check in with the locals?”

Emmett knew that he was referring to the local police and not just the people who might have possibly witnessed something. He shook his dark head. “Not until it’s absolutely necessary.”

Collin understood perfectly. “Meaning, not until they stumble over us.”

“Something like that.” A hint of a smile crossed Emmett’s lips, but then it was gone the very next moment. He led the way out into the parking lot and his car, a beat-up old Chevy that traveled as much on faith as it did on gasoline. “I thought we might go see Ryan Fortune. I want you to meet him. I’ll bring you up to speed on what I know on the way.”

Collin nodded, folding his six-foot frame into the passenger side. “Sounds like the start of a plan.”



The headaches were blinding now.

So much so that Ryan Fortune had been forced to finally admit to Lily that he was going to be felled by a death sentence.

His death sentence.

There’d been no getting around it. His darling Lily was far too much of a loving wife not to notice that something was horribly wrong and had been getting more so now for months. At first she’d suspected that all this secrecy had to do with another woman’s designs on his affections. When he’d discovered that, he’d known it was time to tell her the truth.

So he’d sat her down, taken her hands in his and finally told her, as gently as possible, about the inoperable brain tumor that was stealing him away from his family years before he was ready to go.

They’d held each other and cried. There was nothing else to be done.

Sixty was old when you were in your twenties. But from where he was standing, it was way too young to call it a day. Or a life.

But Ryan had no power, no say in the matter. He could only make what was left of it as meaningful as was humanly possible. For himself and, far more importantly, for those he loved.

The irony of it made him smile.

He’d stand a lot better chance of succeeding in his goal if these damn headaches didn’t keep insisting on interfering. Of course, if there had been no headaches, there would have been no tumor and no need to press on with such fervor to see that certain things were completed before his end. Such as his charity work.

And so he pushed on, taking life on like a contender and trying to make it all seem as if it was business as usual. Which meant not putting anything off until tomorrow, because tomorrow, for him, might not even exist.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. Daily.

Thinking himself past the pain, Ryan tried valiantly to concentrate on what Emmett Jamison was asking him. He’d only known the young man a short time, but was extremely impressed with Emmett, not to mention extremely grateful. It was Emmett who had put his life on the line, saving Lily from what he now knew had to have been certain death. His Lily had been kidnapped not for money, but to torment him. And the ultimate torment would have meant losing her forever. He might have done just that, if it hadn’t been for Emmett. He owed the man a great deal. More than he could ever hope to repay. He wished he could do something to help Emmett find his remaining brother and bring him to justice. But there wasn’t much he could do.

“I really don’t know what more I can tell you, Emmett. I never knew Christopher, couldn’t even help to identify his body when they dragged it from Lake Mondo.”

He addressed his words to both Emmett and the cousin he’d brought with him. The latter was a tall, muscular young man of about thirty-five or so, if he was any judge. The man’s weather-roughened face only added to his rugged appearance.

Ryan hadn’t been surprised when Emmett told him that his cousin was a career military man. Collin looked the type. It took very little imagination to envision him sliding down a rope out of the sky like some sort of commando.

He was familiar with the bearing. The young man was quiet, polite, but there was an air of immortality about him. Navy SEALs, the Rangers, all those Special Ops people had the same air. They had to. If they began to believe in their own mortality, in their own demise, they couldn’t accomplish the incredible missions they undertook or face death the way they did, with bravado and a go-to-hell attitude.

Who knew, Ryan mused, if life had turned out differently for him, maybe he would have gone into that sort of work himself.

With all his heart, he certainly wished he could tell death to go to hell at the present moment.

“I realize that, sir,” Collin said politely, his voice soft, in direct contrast to the swiftness with which he could mete out punishment when called upon to do so. “But my cousin—” he nodded toward Emmett “—tells me that you had several dealings with Jason. And it’s Jason we’re tracking.”

Collin wasn’t giving away any secrets. Jason, the cold-blooded killer of his own brother and the woman who had been posing as his wife, needed to be brought back to face the justice he thought he’d eluded. Jason had used his inherent cunning to take advantage of whatever situation had presented itself to him, whether it involved talking one or both of the two men driving him to the maximum security prison into lowering their guard, or perhaps believing him when he offered to bribe one or both. Collin didn’t know what had happened. No one did, because the only three people who could provide the answers were either dead, missing or in a coma.

So right now Collin was pinning his hopes on Ryan Fortune, the unwitting target of Jason’s unspent wrath.

“Jason,” Ryan repeated, shaking his head.

Collin exchanged glances with Emmett, not certain how to read the older man’s expression. There was no fear in Ryan’s voice and no anger, both of which were emotions that he would have expected. Instead there was sorrow, something he didn’t quite grasp in this context.

A self-deprecating smile slid along Ryan’s lips. He thought of the poor young woman, Melissa, who’d made a rather embarrassing and shameless play for his affections. As if he’d ever leave his Lily after what he’d gone through to finally marry her. Melissa’s far-from-innocent flirtation, he told himself, should have been his first clue, his first warning that something was decidedly wrong with Jason. But even so, a man couldn’t be blamed for what his wife did, and vice versa. And Ryan had always liked to believe the best of everyone. But sometimes, it appeared, a person had no best.

“A man hates to discover this late in the game that he is such a poor judge of character,” Ryan confessed to the two strapping young men in his living room. “Jason, I’m afraid, is the perfect chameleon, being everything I thought the job needed. A go-getter from the second he walked into a room.”

It had all been a ploy, a weapon Jason Jamison, who’d called himself Wilkes at the time, had used to get close to him. The intricacy of the plot overwhelmed Ryan now that he looked back at it. It was something he’d expect to find in an entertaining movie, not something he’d actually discover himself living through.

“I thought he was the perfect executive in training for my nephew’s company,” he continued. Ryan still found it difficult to refer to Fortune TX, Ltd. as Logan’s, though his nephew had succeeded him as CEO. Ryan now acted in an advisory capacity. That was how his path had crossed Jason’s. And all by Jason’s design. “All the times I talked to him—and there were more than a few—I never once saw anything in his eyes to indicate that he hated me so much.”

“He’s a textbook sociopath, sir,” Collin told him kindly. “He didn’t intend for you to see. Until he’s within the reach of his goal, a sociopath can be anything he needs to be. It’s the nature of the beast.”

Collin suppressed a sigh. This was his cousin he was talking about. Someone he’d grown up knowing. More than that, he was Emmett’s brother. But one glance toward his cousin told him that Emmett felt no more kinship toward Jason than he would a rattlesnake.

Ryan cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the conversation. With his own lack of perception in the case. He looked at Emmett who had lost so much and would lose more.

Did Emmett secretly blame him, as well? Ryan would have said no, but his faith in his own abilities to read people had been badly shaken. The ache in his temples grew. “I swear I had nothing to do with your grandfather’s impoverished state. I knew nothing about—”

Emmett held his hand up, curtailing any further apology. He wasn’t here to erode Ryan Fortune’s pride or to foster any false sense of guilt. He wasn’t his grandfather’s champion, because in his estimation his grandfather and no one else was responsible for his own fate.

“Everyone knows how generous you are, Ryan,” Emmett said. “News of your largesse even reaches shacks at the base of the Sandia Mountains.” Emmett had never had the rapport that Jason had had with their grandfather. Maybe because he’d seen the old man for what he was. A bitter man who needed someone to blame for his lack of accomplishments, for his failures. “Grandpa’s mind left him a long time ago.”

“There are men who can never take responsibility for their own misfortunes,” Collin commented. His mouth quirked at the unwitting use of the word. “No pun intended, sir.”

Ryan nodded, forcing a smile to his lips. The pain at the back of his skull was getting worse again. He wasn’t certain how much longer he could stay on his feet here, talking as if he didn’t feel as though he was being beaten down to his knees.

“None taken,” he told Collin, slowly meting out each word.

Noting the pained look on the older man’s face, Collin backed off. He didn’t want to push or pry, not when Ryan appeared to be unwell.

“Maybe we can stop by the medical examiner’s office and see if they’ve discovered anything that might give us a lead.” Collin knew that finding out anything was going to take a great deal of finesse. Information wasn’t just released to anyone, especially not in this day and age. If he flashed his credentials, it would be assumed that he was there in an official capacity, and he wasn’t comfortable lying outright. But maybe, if the examiner should “accidentally” glimpse his credentials in his wallet as he went to take out something, then that would convey an official air without his having to actually state the fact.

He intended to try.

He rose from his seat and Ryan followed his lead. “You think Jason’s still in the area?” the older man asked.

Collin gave him a pointed look. “You still are—and you’re his prime target.”

As they’d approached the house earlier, Collin had surveyed the area and had seen no security. But then, good bodyguards, the kind that Ryan needed, wouldn’t have been out in plain sight. He sincerely hoped the man was smart enough to avail himself of that kind of protection.

As they walked to the living room door, Ryan turned toward Emmett. “Would you mind if I had a word with you?” Glancing at Collin, he added, “This’ll only take a minute.”

“Take all the time you need,” Collin told him. “I’ll be right outside.” He indicated the hallway beyond the living room, then stepped out, giving them the privacy that was required.

Turning from the doorway, Ryan looked at the younger man with him. He saw beyond the rigid features. Emmett looked worn and yet ready to snap. A gun cocked to fire. Jason had done more damage to his own family than he’d ever done to the Fortunes he despised.

“I won’t keep you…” Ryan began. As he spoke, he slipped his arm around Emmett’s shoulders. “I just want you to know again how sorry I am about Christopher.”

Emmett nodded, not knowing what to say. He wanted to be flippant, to say something blasé. But it wasn’t in him. Not about Christopher. Christopher deserved better at his hands, even if he hadn’t received it at Jason’s.

“He was always the good guy in the family,” Emmett remembered, a distant fondness entering his voice. “The white sheep.”

Ryan thought of his own brother, gone so many years. “I know what it’s like to lose a brother. They leave behind an emptiness nothing can quite fill.”

Emmett’s expression hardened. “Jason won’t leave behind an emptiness when he’s gone.” He laughed shortly, a bitter taste in his mouth. “I plan to go on a three-day drinking binge to celebrate the fact that he’s no longer a blot on our family name.”

Ryan had no idea if that was just talk or if Emmett intended to carry out his words. He was aware of the younger man’s recent self-imposed exile and the extent to which it went.

“Don’t let revenge eat you up, Emmett,” he warned. “That would be Jason’s final triumph, turning you into a bitter man.”

Emmett had become that long before Jason’s path had taken him to murder their brother and that woman, as well as the guard and who knew who else. The cases he’d handled had seen to that. Lives cut down in their prime for no reason. Emmett knew that had all contributed to making him the man he was now. But Jason’s actions had certainly been the proverbial icing on the cake.

And yet, in a way, they had pulled him out of the depression he’d fallen into, given his life a focus, a purpose that merely returning to work for work’s sake never could have.

The irony of it made him smile as he looked at Ryan, touched by the man’s concern. “Too late.”

Ryan had another opinion. “We’re put on this earth to help one another, Emmett.”

The similarity jarred him. “You sound like Christopher.”

“Then he was a wise man,” Ryan told him, his smile widening despite the force of the pain assaulting his temples. “Christopher wouldn’t want you to let revenge govern your life. If you let it do that, then you’ll be just like Jason.”

It wasn’t a new thought for him. It had crossed his mind more than once. But Emmett shrugged. “Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.” And then, before Ryan could say anything further, Emmett added, “Don’t worry. I’m an FBI agent. My job is to make sure the bad guys are separated from the good guys before they can do any harm.”

Ryan remained unconvinced, although he wanted to be. “Just as long as it remains your job and you don’t make it personal.”

“It already is personal,” Emmett said quietly. Shaking Ryan’s hand, he tried to smile. “I’ll give your words a lot of thought,” he promised.

“That’s all I ask,” Ryan replied.



Collin stopped dead.

He and Emmett had made their way into the bowels of the three-story building where the chief medical examiner had both his office and the three austere, sterile rooms where the various autopsies were performed. It was lunchtime and most of the personnel were gone, or at least out of sight. The entire area was eerie, the way only a place that housed the dead and their secrets could be.

But it wasn’t the dead that had caused him to all but freeze in his place. In his line of work, he’d grown accustomed to seeing the dead.

The living were the ones that carried surprises with them.

And he was surprised now.

Framed in the doorway of the second autopsy room, he felt as if he’d just been catapulted back across a sea of years. Back to when he’d first walked into his bio lab in high school and had first laid eyes on her.

On Paula.

The woman in the white lab coat looked so much like Paula, for a moment he forgot to breathe. She was as petite as Paula, who’d stood no taller than five foot four. And her coloring was almost exactly the same.

From this distance, he couldn’t tell the color of her eyes, only that her hair was the same honey-brown, with reddish highlights. The woman in the room had her hair pulled back, away from her face. The last time he’d seen Paula, her hair had been long and looked as if it was in the middle of a storm. A sensuous storm that sent her hair curling in every conceivable direction.

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.




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.

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emmett ignored the denial. Instead he looked at Collin, a light dawning. “Is it my imagination, or did she look a little like Paula?”

Collin felt himself stiffening the way he did just before a battle, just before the adrenaline went pumping through his veins. “Paula?”

If that was meant to be an innocent tone, it had failed miserably. They’d been friends far too long for him to be fooled by his cousin. Emmett knew, perhaps better than anyone, what Paula’s walking out on him had done to Collin. Nothing messed with a man’s mind more than a woman did.

“Yeah, Paula. You remember, six-years-engaged-to-you Paula,” he said sarcastically, knowing that nothing more was needed than that. But just in case, he added, “The one who married someone you called your best friend.”

“He was my best friend,” Collin confirmed quietly as they stepped out of the elevator again and began to walk toward the front entrance. “He took care of Paula every time I was away on assignments. Couldn’t expect her to sit home four, five weeks at a time while I was taking care of business.”

Taking care of business. It was a euphemistic way of describing what he’d done for a living. What he still did. Infiltrating drug cultures in South America, crossing borders in European countries that were so close together they could have been opposite walls of a medium-size closet, all while tracking down a fugitive who was increasingly becoming desperate.

Not unlike what he was setting out to do now, he thought.

“Paula was young.” He continued his defense of the woman he figured he was always destined to remain in love with. “She wanted a good time.”

Emmett laughed shortly. There was no sign of humor on his mouth and his eyes were flat. In this case, he took umbrage for his cousin even if Collin wouldn’t take it for himself. “And good old William certainly gave it to her, didn’t he?”

Collin refused to think about that. Going there served no purpose. She was married and that was that. “Bottom line, he made her happy. I didn’t.”

Emmett’s frown became deep enough to bury pirate treasure in. “Don’t act like it doesn’t bother you, Collin.”

“It did,” he admitted, then shrugged good-naturedly, wanting the subject to be dropped, “but it’s over and I learned a lesson from it.”

Emmett spared him a side glance as they walked to the car. “Which was?”

“That I’m not cut out to maintain something that needs constant care, constant watching. Constant nurturing.” And that was what marriage was, something that needed continuous work. He was never around long enough to put in the hours.

The denial sounded too pat to Emmett. “Is that what was going through your head while you were looking at Ms. Med Student and drooling?”

The image of himself as a lovesick puppy was enough to almost make him laugh out loud. “No drooling was involved. I was just surprised that there could be two women who looked so much alike.”

“Looks, yeah,” Emmett conceded, “but once she opened her mouth, that woman was no Paula. This one’s got a head on her shoulders.”

They went down another row of cars. “It’d be better if it was on her neck.”

Emmett shook his head, a smile peeling back his lips. “You always were the only one who could ever make me laugh.”

“I was the only one who ever tried,” Collin pointed out. He stopped to look around and finally spotted Emmett’s car two aisles over. He motioned the man to follow him as he lengthened his stride. “Let’s go to the hospital and see if the other driver is back among the living yet.”

Emmett nodded. He’d already decided on that course of action himself. “That’s why we work so well together, Collin. We think alike.”

“No, we don’t,” Collin denied, reaching the vehicle first. He waited for Emmett to unlock it. “You just like to take the credit for my ideas.”

Putting his key in the lock, Emmett laughed. It was good being around Collin again. He’d forgotten what it felt like to interact with his cousin. Forgotten what it was like to feel human again.

Or as close to human as he could manage, under the circumstances.



The policeman whose job it was to guard the comatose prison transport driver looked as if he’d sent his brain out for the afternoon so as not to succumb to the mind-numbing task. He sat on a chair, tilting the rear legs so that the front ones were off the floor, his chair balanced against the wall. An unread magazine was spread over his lap and the officer was staring off into oblivion when they came on the floor.

The sound of footsteps had him turning around and nearly pitching off his chair. He recovered himself at the last moment, rising to his feet.

“You can’t go in there,” he announced, his voice a great deal deeper than would have been expected, given his shallow physique. Collin suspected that the man was lowering it for effect and didn’t normally speak in that timbre.

Emmett gave the policeman a dark look and then flashed his credentials. He glanced toward Collin, who followed suit. The policeman read both with great interest. Collin could almost hear him saying, “Wow.”

The officer’s Adam’s apple, rather prominent, danced a little as it went up and down. He nodded his head at both IDs almost as if he was paying homage to them.

“I’m sorry, no one told me you were coming to see the driver.”

Emmett awarded him with one of his frostier looks. “Why should they?”

“Um, that is…” The officer’s voice trailed off as he looked completely at a loss for words or any sort of an adequate reply.

“Taking no prisoners today?” Collin asked his cousin as they walked into the room.

“Not today,” Emmett confirmed. There was nothing he detested more than incompetence, even if it worked in his favor.

Collin eased the door closed behind them.

The small, single-bed room looked not unlike a mini-intensive care unit with machines surrounding the comatose transporter’s bed. There was a constant hum in the room so that no one entering it would, even for a moment, forget the existence of the various machines and how much they were needed to keep the man hooked up to them alive. For now.

Collin approached the bed, studying the face of the man he’d hoped had regained consciousness by now. The transporter, a man for whom the term “average” might have been coined if describing his hair, height and appearance, now sported a pasty complexion. He looked like a man who’d been on the brink of death and was even now still very much tottering on the edge. His fate, despite the noble efforts of a team of surgeons who’d kept him under for five hours, working feverishly in hopes of negating the damage that had been done by the stab wounds, had not yet been decided.

They could lose him at any minute.

Collin willed the victim’s eyes to open.

They didn’t.

Feeling unusually frustrated, he looked at the machine that monitored the patient’s vital signs. His pulse, blood pressure and respiration gauges were all making the appropriate, comforting beeping noises. Across the screen colorful wavy lines snaked their way from one end to the other, sometimes uniformly, sometimes jaggedly, with a regularity that provided the information that the man was still hanging on. Still fighting.

He should have been dead. Like his partner. And yet, he wasn’t.

Collin picked up the chart that was already full and glanced over it. He knew enough medical terminology to get by as long as it didn’t get too involved.

“Human spirit’s an incredible thing,” he commented, flipping the pages back again. “According to this—” he indicated the chart that he replaced at the foot of the driver’s bed “—this man should have been dead. The knife obviously had a long blade. It went through his back and was inches shy of his lungs. If it had been just a little over, he would have already been six feet in the ground.”

Emmett studied the man in silence for a moment, looking beyond the inert figure. Visualizing the scene that might have taken place in the transport vehicle. Had they hit a ditch, causing the driver to lose control of the bus? There’d been no blowout, so that wasn’t the cause of the change of fortune within the vehicle.

What had happened inside the van to turn the prisoner into the jailer?

Without fully realizing it, he voiced his thoughts out loud. “Wonder if he turned and made a run for it at the last second, not like the guy in the coroner’s office who was caught by surprise.”

Collin hadn’t made up his mind yet; there wasn’t enough evidence to spin a theory. “Well, something’s different about him, or else he’d be in a steel drawer, right next to his buddy.” He rolled the last word around in his mouth. “Think they were friends?” He raised his eyes to Emmett, answering his own question when his cousin made no response. “I guess that depends on if they worked together on a regular basis. Most people usually develop some kind of relationship if they work together.” Unless they were in his line of work, he added silently. In the field, there was never enough time to do anything except think about staying alive.

“I don’t,” Emmett retorted crisply.

“I said ‘most.’” He laughed shortly. “You’re not like most people, Emmett. Most people, if they get fed up with their job, take a vacation. They don’t take a powder and retreat from the world the way you did.”

As Collin spoke, his tone deceptively light, he continued studying the unconscious man in the bed. Trying to see himself in his skin. Had he felt panic at the last moment? Had he looked down the blade of the knife as it had gone in? Seen his partner die? He wondered if there was a way he could get inside the transport vehicle and look around. “You were that type that Thoreau used to write about, the one who marches to a different drummer.”





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