Contrary to what some popular TV shows might portray, only a small fraction of the bodies coming through the ME’s office were instances of foul play. The vast majority was made up of an almost equal balance between natural causes and accidental fatalities. Her current case fell into the former, i.e., a catastrophic cardiac event brought on by a high-risk lifestyle and inconsistently treated hypertension.
As she stripped off her protective gear and headed for her office to finish up the necessary paperwork, Sara found herself wishing that more of her recent cases had been so straightforward. It wasn’t that she wanted her life to be easy or boring, but she’d gone into pathology because she’d grown up a passenger of her parents’ roller-coaster ride of emotions, and she hadn’t wanted the highs and lows of living medicine.
Little had she known she’d wind up in the middle of a terror threat that had the entire city by the throat, and that she’d be far more enmeshed in the case than she would’ve preferred. Granted, the investigation had moved away from her office in the months since the prison riot, but her close ties to members of the task force kept her involved, as did the caseload she’d been forced to assume in the face of a serious manpower shortage.
The lack of staff members in the ME’s office was yet another of Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s unsubtle efforts to get rid of all the young, energetic hires made by his forward-thinking predecessor, who had been disgraced and ousted when damning photographs had surfaced involving the mayor and several girls of questionable age.
That had been too bad as far as Sara was concerned; she didn’t condone the former mayor’s ethical lapses, but she thought he’d been taking the city in a positive direction by bringing fresh blood into the crime scene unit, the ME’s office and several other tech-based divisions of city government. Since the ex-mayor’s departure, Proudfoot had been undoing those advances, piece by piece, making no bones about the fact that he intended to return Bear Claw Creek to the “good old days”—i.e., the days of minimal technology and pay-to-play politics.
Proudfoot’s efforts had been blunted somewhat by the terrorist threat, but his image lurked at the back of Sara’s mind on a daily basis. She knew he was just waiting for her to mess up badly enough that he could get rid of her and return the ME’s office to the age of dinosaurs, with his cronies in charge.
“Which is another thing that belongs in the category of ‘things I don’t want to think about right now,’” she said to herself on a long sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off the headache that always encroached when she thought about all the things she was trying not to think about these days.
The list was long. And frankly, it didn’t leave her much to think about.
“Hey, boss.” The hail came from Stephen, the sole remaining medical examiner beside herself. He was tall, lean and graying, a good ten years older than her own thirty-five, and had worked in the Bear Claw ME’s office for nearly a dozen years. Miraculously, though, he didn’t seem to resent that Sara—young, female, relatively inexperienced—had been hired in above him as his boss. If anything, he seemed happy to let her have the headaches that came with the position.
“Hey yourself.” Sara didn’t ask about the manhunt, didn’t want to know. “You’re headed out early today, right?”
He nodded, a soft smile touching his lips, lighting his usual neutral expression. “Celia and I are bringing Chrissy for a checkup.” Chrissy was the change-of-life baby, nearly twenty years younger than their eldest, who had surprised Stephen and his wife the year before. By all indications, little Chrissy would grow up dearly beloved by their entire extended family, and most likely spoiled rotten.
The quiet joy on the older man’s face squeezed at Sara’s heart. She nodded, forcing herself to feel happy for him rather than sorry for herself. “Tell Celia I said hi.”
“I’ll do that. I can come back after, if you want me to.” He glanced at the wipe board that hung in the hallway opposite their office doors, where the pending cases were listed. “Things are backing up.”
They were, indeed, and a large part of Sara wanted to keep the office running around the clock until they’d cleared the board and gotten ahead of the looming mountains of paperwork. But logic said that Proudfoot wouldn’t be impressed with that show of efficiency. If anything, he’d take it as an indication that she’d manage just fine with an even smaller staff.
She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. Head on home. I’ll clear what I can, and we can start over tomorrow.”
He sent her a long look. “Promise me you won’t stay past normal human quitting time? It is Friday. You know…the weekend?”
She winced. “You got me. We’ll start over on Monday.” Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be in over the next two days. She had abolished the weekend and overnight shifts due to staff constraints, but she still liked to come into the office herself, when everything was relatively quiet.
Two years earlier, it would’ve been easy to promise Stephen she’d leave for the weekend, because she would’ve known there was someone waiting for her at home—someone to cook with, eat with, laugh with, love with.
Even a year ago, having more or less recovered from the catastrophic implosion of that relationship, she would’ve had plans of some sort. She and Chelsea would’ve hooked up with Cassie Dumont-Varitek and Alyssa McDermott, their friends in the BCCPD crime scene unit, and had a girls’ night out. Or maybe they would’ve “double dated,” with Cassie and Alyssa pairing up with their husbands, while Chelsea and Sara hung together.
It wasn’t the same these days with Chelsea gone into the FBI training program on the East Coast, though. Sara had tried going out with the others, and had felt like a fifth wheel. Chelsea had been the glue holding them together. Without her, it felt as if the rest of them were trying too hard. Even when Chelsea and Fax came back to the city, they were most often there on task force business, maybe with a little wedding planning snuck in on the side.
Things had changed. The others had moved on, leaving Sara behind.
Summoning a smile, she waved Stephen away. “Go on, get moving. You wouldn’t want to keep your women waiting.”
But he didn’t move. Instead, he gave her a long, intense look. “I’ll do the agents when they come in, if you’d like. I can be here tomorrow morning, assuming they release the bodies that early.”
He was talking about the manhunt, the men who’d died. She closed her eyes, feeling guilty over the stab of relief brought by the offer. “Have they announced the names?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, knowing that even though she hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, the knowledge of the deaths, and the echoes it brought, had permeated her. “I’ll let you know.” Which was as close as she was going to get to confessing that she couldn’t handle how close the terrorists were hitting, and how much it bothered her that things seemed to be ramping up rather than settling down these days. It was hard not to wonder where it would all stop, and how many would die in the attack most of the task force members thought was imminent.
Her mother and father were in rare agreement that she should give notice and get the hell out of Bear Claw Creek. Sara had seriously considered the option…for about thirty seconds before coming to the realization that she couldn’t do it. This was her home; she wasn’t giving up on it. And what was more, she wasn’t walking away from her job or her remaining staff members.
This was her department, damn it. She might be going down, but she was going down fighting.
After another long look, Stephen headed out. Telling herself she appreciated his concern, that it didn’t make her feel even lonelier than she had before, Sara completed the necessary paperwork on the cases she’d autopsied so far that day, then suited back up and returned to work.
She processed three more routine cases over the remainder of the day and did her best to tune out the news bulletins when she passed through the break room, or got near Della’s desk, where the fiftysomething ad
min assistant had a police band radio turned low. Still, Sara couldn’t avoid knowing that the senior agents had called off the op, that the search dogs had followed two different trails ascribed to the terrorists, both of which had dead-ended in vehicle tracks heading for the main roads.
It seemed that the op had been a quick scramble into the state forest, based on intel that several of al-Jihad’s people were holed up in a remote cabin, strategizing. Sara didn’t want to know but couldn’t help hearing that the two agents had lost their lives in pursuit of a small knot of men who appeared to have been carrying bodies, while a lone man had escaped in the opposite direction, and vanished into the wind. She didn’t want to know that the cabin had been stripped bare, and had burst into flames within minutes of the terrorists’ escape, torched by a hidden incendiary device.
As usual, al-Jihad’s people had been well prepared. Sara wasn’t sure what the op had aimed to do, or what the terrorists had planned or accomplished in the forest, but she knew the names of the dead men now, whether she wanted to or not. Both FBI agents, they weren’t among her friends or acquaintances, but they’d had their own friends and families, their own loved ones who’d been cruelly left behind. More bereaved to add to the list that had grown over the past ten months.
Sadness beat through Sara as she kept working, starting another case because it wasn’t as though she had any pressing reason to go home, Friday night or not.
Della and Bradley clocked out around five-thirty and left arm in arm. Bradley had been mooning after Della—who was a good decade his senior and the mother of two grown children—for as long as he’d been working there. Sara smiled, her heart warming at seeing them so obviously together, though she found herself wondering how she’d missed that change in relationship status. Then she had to remind herself not to dwell on the fact that everyone around her seemed to be pairing up these days. Everyone but her.
Biting back a sigh, she got back to work. By the time she called it a night, around 7:00 p.m., her shoulders, back and neck were burning from the strain. She would’ve killed for a massage, or at least an hour in a whirlpool, but she couldn’t bring herself to hit the gym this late on a Friday.
There was a fine line between being single and being pathetic.
Consoling herself with the thought of a long, hot bath, she collected her hybrid from the parking lot, which was located between the BCCPD’s main station house and the connected building that held the ME’s office.
The twenty-minute drive home was an easy one, and the sight of the small stone-faced house eased something inside her, even in the darkness.
She’d fallen in love with the place on her first drive through the city. The cottagelike house had been way out of her budget, but she’d taken an uncharacteristic leap and bought it on an adjustable mortgage, then switched over to a fixed loan as soon as she was able to afford the higher payments. These days she was managing the expenses, though there wasn’t much left over at the end of the month for extras or savings. She didn’t regret the purchase for a second, though. It was her home, plain and simple.
The house was easily big enough for two people—hell, for a small family—but she’d resisted the option of taking on a roommate because she liked to keep her space the way she liked it, with none of the rapid changes she’d endured during childhood. The one person she’d shared her home with—albeit for only a few months—had fit into her world so seamlessly, despite their obvious differences, that she’d thought it would last. It hadn’t, of course. And the final words between them had been angry ones.
“Stop it,” she told herself as she parked the hybrid near the house, then gathered her bag and coat to head for the kitchen door.
She didn’t know why her ex was so much in her mind lately, but enough was enough. He wasn’t coming back, and they hadn’t been together for the year prior to the prison riot that had taken his life. His death had been tragic, but it didn’t magically erase his sins, didn’t erase his betrayal. Not by a long shot.
Muttering under her breath, she fished in her bag for her keys, unlocked the door and let herself through. Two steps into the kitchen, with the door swinging shut at her back, she stopped dead as the smell of blood tickled her nostrils. It was a familiar odor, of course, but it wasn’t one that belonged in her house.
She stayed frozen for a moment, adrenaline kicking her heart into overdrive.
Logic said she should get out of the house, get somewhere safe and call for help. But something she couldn’t name—anger at the growing suspicion that an intruder had broken in, maybe, or a complete and utter lapse of her usual good judgment—had her flicking on the lights and moving farther into the house.
She didn’t see anything out of place in her pretty kitchen, but the back of her neck prickled, warning her that someone had been there who shouldn’t have been. Holding her breath, she eased through the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living room. And froze in horror.
A man lay on the floor beside her sofa, blood soaking the carpet beneath him.
Sara stifled a scream, swallowing it in a bubble of hysteria. Her saner self said, Run! Get the hell out of here! But something had her stalling in place as her heart hammered in her chest.
Her brain racked up impressions in quick succession: the big man lay motionless, but he was breathing. He wore jeans, a dark blue jacket and boots with soil and gravel embedded in the treads. She could see their bottoms because he lay on his face, hands outstretched, one nearly touching a pen and notepad as though he’d dropped them when he fell.
Her panicked brain replayed info from the radio bulletins: a group of men had disappeared in one direction, carrying a couple of bodies. A single man had gone off alone. Having spent the day listening to snippets about the dead agents and the unsuccessful manhunt in the forests of Bear Claw Canyon State Park, Sara knew damn well she should be running for her life, screaming her head off, doing something, anything other than standing there, gaping. But she didn’t move. She stayed rooted in place, staring at the notepad.
She knew that writing.
Emotion grabbed her by the throat, choking her and making her heart race even as logic told her it was impossible. That wasn’t his writing. Couldn’t be. The man lying there, bleeding, was a stranger. A danger. Get out of the house, she told herself. You’re imagining things.
But she didn’t run. She edged around the man and leaned down to read the note. It said: Nobody can know that I’m here. Life or death.
Sara reached for the notepad, then stopped herself. Her hand was shaking and tears tracked down her cheeks unheeded.
“No,” she whispered, the single word hanging longer than it should have in the silence. “He’s dead.”
But she knew that writing, had seen it on countless notes tucked under her coffee mug, or left beside the phone, telling her where he was going, when he’d be back, or that he’d pick up dinner on the way. Love notes, she’d liked to think them, even though he’d never said those exact words.
Hope battered against what she knew to be true. He’s dead, she thought. I went to his funeral.
Yet she reached out trembling fingers to touch thick, wavy black hair that was suddenly, achingly familiar. And stopped herself.
All rational thought said she should call for help. The note, though, said not to. She wouldn’t have hesitated, except for the damn writing. It was shaky, but it was his. She’d swear to it.
She could turn him over and prove it one way or the other. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere fast. He was out cold, his back rising and falling in breaths so shallow they were almost invisible. Blood soaked the rug beneath him; the smell of it surrounded him.
Sara’s inner medical professional sent a stab of warning as she dithered on one level, assessed his injuries on another. He’s pale, probably shocky. If you don’t do something soon, it won’t matter who he is because he’ll be dead.
“Call 9–1–1,” she told herself. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Instead,
she reached out and touched him—his stubble-roughened cheek first, then the pulse at his throat. As she did so, she tried to get a sense of his profile, tried to see if it was—
No. It couldn’t be.
Yet her heart sped up, her head spun and her breath went thin in her lungs as she debated between checking his spine—which was the proper thing to do before moving him—and turning his face so she could see, so she’d know for sure.
Then he groaned—a low, rough sound—and said something unintelligible in a voice that was achingly familiar. Heat raced through her. Hope.
He moved his right arm and let out another groan of pain. Then, as though sensing that she was there, he shifted, snaking out his left hand to grab her ankle—not hard, more looping his fingers around her, touching but not restricting her.
Sara squeaked and would have jerked away, but once again she was frozen in place, paralyzed by the memory of a lover who’d kept a careful distance between them when awake, but in sleep had always wanted some part of him touching some part of her, as though reassuring himself she was still there.
“Romo?” she whispered. The single word burned her lips and hurt her chest.
Then he shifted again, this time turning his face toward her, so she saw him in profile against the bloodied carpet.
Her throat closed on a noise that might’ve been a cross between a scream and a moan if it had made it past the lump jamming her windpipe. As it was, the cry reverberated in her head.
She knew that profile—the clean planes of his nose and brow; the dark, elegant eyebrows; the angular jaw. If he was awake and smiling—or snarling, for that matter—at her, she would’ve known his square, regular teeth and the glint in his dark green eyes. It was really him, she realized, her chest aching with the force of holding back the sobs.
Internal Affairs Page 2