The Southern Comfort Series Box Set

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  “Umm… dinnertime, or thereabouts, two nights ago. She was leaving the hospital as I was coming in.” Snickers brushed against Sam’s leg, whimpering slightly, and Sam realized that if Karen hadn’t been home in even half that time the dog was probably starving. She walked into the kitchen and found the stainless steel bowls empty, so she scooped one up and filled it with water from the faucet. Setting it down carefully so as not to splash it onto the floor, Sam moved toward the pantry to see if she could locate some of Snickers’ kibble. “She was supposed to be working nights but there’d been some shift changes due to this virus. So she’d worked a double shift that day and, I think, wasn’t due back till last night. But she didn’t show.”

  “Maybe she started feeling sick and went to stay with a friend. Does she have anyone close to her in the area?”

  Sam pulled open a bag of Iams. “I don’t think so. Most of her family is somewhere in Georgia. But the fact remains, Josh, she wouldn’t leave Snickers alone.” Hearing her name and anticipating eating, the little fuzzball started to bark. Sam bent down and filled the bowl, scratching the dog’s ears again.

  “Do you know what kind of car she drives?”

  Sam thought about it a moment, recalling a light colored SUV. “It’s a… what do you call it – a Rodeo. Silver, I think. Maybe beige.”

  “Okay.” Josh moved away from where he’d been inspecting the windows. “Stay here a minute, try not to touch more than you have to, and I’ll go down to the parking lot to see if her car’s there.”

  “Oh. Uh-oh.” Sam looked guiltily at the faucet.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure there was nothing there for you to mess up.”

  “Right.”

  Josh squeezed her arm before leaving the apartment.

  Sam watched him go, her heart in her throat, the sense of unease she’d been feeling since she couldn’t raise Karen morphing into full-fledged dread. If Josh didn’t want her touching anything, that meant he thought this could be a crime scene. If this was a crime scene, that meant… nothing good for Karen.

  “Oh, God.” She bent down and patted Snickers, trying not to think about something terrible happening to the dog’s owner. Karen was one of the nicest people Sam knew. Who would want to hurt her?

  But then, she knew better than anyone that being nice didn’t preclude you from becoming a target. Some people simply enjoyed other people’s pain.

  She stood when she heard Josh at the door. “Nothing,” he told her, looking exhausted and disappointed. “I called in and requested a unit to do a drive-by over at the hospital to see if her vehicle might be there. Where were you, exactly, when you saw her the other night?”

  “Uh… just getting onto the elevator. Well, I was getting on and she was getting off and we sort of crashed into one another. We talked for a couple minutes and then Karen left and I went to see Donnie.”

  “So you didn’t see her get into her car?”

  “No, I –”

  JOSH watched a series of emotions flutter across Sam’s face as her memory began to kick in. “Sam?”

  “What? Oh, it’s probably nothing.”

  “A lot of times it’s that ‘nothing’ that ends up giving us the lead that breaks the case. People don’t trust their instincts enough. It’s one of the biggest problems I face when I try to talk someone through a composite. Don’t worry about the logic of it; just tell me what you recall.”

  “It was just…” Sam rubbed her fingers across her eyes. “God, it sounds stupid. But I had that feeling again, like someone was watching me, when I got out of my car in the parking lot. But this was the day after someone broke into my apartment, remember, and I was pretty paranoid all day. So like I said, it was probably nothing.”

  Maybe nothing, maybe not. Sam had pretty good instincts. And the coincidence factor, given what had been happening with Sam, wasn’t something he could ignore. He pulled a small pad out of his pocket and started jotting down some notes. “Did you see anyone in the parking lot? Anyone at all?” He wouldn’t lead her down the wrong path by asking if she saw anything out of the ordinary, because sometimes it was the ordinary they were looking for, especially in this kind of case. If rapists and murderers sported horns and forked tails, people could more easily avoid them. But when they looked like the mailman or the pizza delivery guy, they were such an expected part of the everyday landscape that they didn’t draw much attention. And smart criminals knew how to blend in to maintain their anonymity.

  “Some hospital personnel, smoking,” she told him, looking skyward as she probed her memory. Her hair was pulled back in a stubby little ponytail that should have looked sloppy but only made her more adorable. Fresh-faced, clad in a bulky sweatshirt she looked about twelve years old. Then his eyes dropped to the way the sweatshirt draped across her breasts and he mentally tacked on about ten years.

  Swallowing, realizing this was not the time or the woman for lascivious thoughts, Josh snapped his eyes back to Sam’s face to find her looking worried. He felt like a total ass and corralled his wayward libido back into its pen. “No one in the parking lot?”

  “Not that I saw. But it was just about time for a shift change, so I imagine the lot would have been getting busy. You might have to ask around at the hospital. I’m sure someone saw Karen leave.”

  Josh’s radio squawked on his hip. He clicked it on, checked in with the unit who’d done a drive through the hospital lot. “No sign of her vehicle,” he told Sam.

  “So what do we do now?”

  He sighed, not liking the answer. “Now we file a missing persons report, and I turn it over to them to handle. I wish I could do more, personally, to help, but this is technically not my department. And there’s this… situation which is about to blow up right now, so I couldn’t give it the attention it deserves.” God, he felt like a heel. And aside from that, he was worried. He knew better than to jump to any conclusions – there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for her friend’s disappearance that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sam. But he didn’t like the timing, and the fact that she’d felt threatened at the hospital. He wished he had nothing on his plate so that he could devote himself to investigating. As much as it grated, he would have to turn this all over to another cop and pray he was simply overreacting.

  But in the meantime, he was going to have a long talk with Sam about safety. “I’m going to call in and have them send somebody over here, to make sure there’s nothing I missed. They’ll probably want to take your statement down at the station. Just tell them everything that you told me.”

  Sam looked down toward the dog – Snickers – who was making short work out of her food, then she glanced at Josh with trepidation. “What do I do with her?”

  Well shit. He guessed the pound was out of the question. Josh wasn’t real big on little yappy dogs, but when he looked into the worried eyes of the woman he loved he guessed he could deal for a while. “Bring it with you. We can dog-sit until they locate your friend.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IF he’d had to choose, Josh mused, between continuing to be slobbered on by a ball of hair and delivering his composite to the lieutenant, Snickers would have won hands down. But alas, Sam had taken charge of the dog and he’d gone and started World War Three. After agreeing that the facial reconstruction of Jane Doe’s skull looked too much like Allie Beaumont to ignore, Lieutenant Cunningham himself had placed the call to the mayor. All hell had broken loose as Charles Beaumont the Fourth then stormed the station like a Confederate general at Gettysburg.

  Those folks lucky enough to not be caught directly in the fray hunkered down behind their battlements and hoped to avoid stray bullets, but since Josh was responsible for The Drawing, he was pretty much cannon fodder. He, Kathleen, and Mac were once again crammed in the lieutenant’s office, though this time it was with the unhappy addition of the mayor, his lawyer and his aide. Mayor Beaumont had to have intuited that he was being called to the station in order to receive bad news, so he had su
rrounded himself with support staff. A support staff that right now was doing nothing to mitigate the man’s anger.

  “You mean to tell me that my… these remains were found three days ago and I’m just hearing about this now?” The mayor’s perpetually tanned face was red with fury, his tie straining against the bulging cords of his neck. “You people were instructed to come to me the minute you had any information.”

  Lieutenant Cunningham was cool under fire. “With all due respect, Mayor Beaumont, we had no reason to suspect that the remains had any sort of connection to your daughter.” Which was a lie, but only a small one. They’d had suspicions, but no real proof. “There was nothing at the scene to offer any hint as to identity. It wasn’t until Detective Harding created that composite that we realized the significance of what we were dealing with. We contacted you the moment we found out.”

  “And what,” the mayor asked, “makes you think that this… woman is my daughter?” He glanced down at the sketch in his hand, disbelief written over his face. “I suppose there’s some bit of resemblance there, but who’s to say it wasn’t just copied from a photograph? This is the sort of thing that someone might pull if he were trying to make a name for himself.”

  Josh resisted the urge to take offense, realizing the man was simply lashing out in denial. “Actually, sir, I did copy this from a photograph, but not the type of photograph you mean. Two-dimensional facial reconstruction is as much a scientific as an artistic process, involving the overlaying of flesh and defining facial characteristics to photographs of the actual skull.” He paused when the mayor flinched. “I build the composite from the bone up, working within fairly specific parameters, and while there might be some room for artistic interpretation as far as hairstyle or eye color, the framework beneath those things never changes. If the composite resembles your daughter, sir, it’s because the skull of the woman we found at that construction site bears the same basic characteristics. And it would be more of a career buster as opposed to a career maker to create a reconstruction that was patently false. Especially if it involves the mayor’s daughter. Sir.”

  The mayor paled as he stared at the composite. Sometimes being confronted with the naked truth was the only way to break through the denial.

  And since he was already on the hot seat, Josh figured he might as well take one for the team. “The postmortem on the remains also showed evidence of cosmetic surgery and a number of healed fractures.” Here was the mayor’s chance to either offer another rebuttal or to buckle down to reality, because they all knew who the remains belonged to.

  And as Josh and the others watched, Charles Beaumont – a man renowned for his mega-watt smile and polished personal demeanor – began to crumple before their eyes. Josh’s heart went out in empathy. He may not like the mayor personally and certainly didn’t approve of his behavior toward the department during this whole debacle, but he couldn’t begrudge the man his sorrow. Beaumont’s lawyer leaned over to murmur something in the other man’s ear, laying a hand on his shoulder as the mayor nodded.

  Beaumont turned to address Josh. “Allie had some fancy dental work done about three or four years ago. Is that what you were referring to? The cosmetic dentistry?”

  Josh nodded, his expression somber. “Several molars had been replaced with implants.”

  A sob caught in the mayor’s throat.

  “About the fractures,” Kathleen jumped in, obviously hoping to get through this as quickly as possible. “Was your daughter ever injured in such a way that she might have broken any bones?”

  Mayor Beaumont’s eyes snapped toward her, seemingly startled to realize she was there. “Uh… her leg. She fell out of a tree in the backyard, when she was about eight, I think. I built her a tree house against my wife’s wishes – said I’d turn her into a tomboy – and Allie fell out the very first day. Caught hell for that one.” A ghost of a smile appeared.

  “Just the one leg?” Kathleen asked.

  “Yes.” The mayor nodded. “I think one was bad enough.”

  Kathleen shot a look at Josh, then caught the eye of the lieutenant. “There were no other broken bones that you know of?” Cunningham asked.

  “No.” Mayor Beaumont caught the drift of their questions and straightened in his seat. Hope brightened his watery eyes. “Did… this woman have other fractures? Is that what you’re saying?” He looked at them each in turn, his gaze settling on Josh. “Then maybe she’s not Allie.”

  Josh thought it was far more likely that Allie Beaumont had simply broken a bone that her father wasn’t aware of – something they’d have to look into – and he wasn’t sure whether it would be crueler of him to tell the man that now or let him cling to hope for just a bit longer. “We’ll need your daughter’s medical records,” he told him. “And dental x-rays.” There might be enough teeth left to make a match. “But we’ll hold off on positive identification until we get the results of the DNA. We’ll, uh, need to take a sample from your wife.”

  “My wife?” He looked blank. “Don’t you need a sample from me as well?”

  Lieutenant Cunningham quietly explained. “Most of the nuclear DNA – the DNA found in bodily fluids and hair follicles – was degraded to the point of not being useful. We’ll have to make a match based on the mitochondrial DNA found in bone marrow, which is passed down through the mother’s genes. I’m sorry. I know you wanted to spare your wife as long as you could.”

  “But there’s still hope, right? I can tell her it’s… just routine.”

  In the silence that followed, the hope began an obvious fade. “You think it’s her, don’t you?”

  “I could soft soap this, but…Yes sir,” Cunningham said honestly. “We do.”

  He closed his eyes against the sharp stab of truth, but then visibly pulled himself together. “That construction site where she was found… I shut that project down, you know.”

  Josh and the others sat at attention. This was definitely a place to start. “The Historical Society was on my ass about it, and they have enough clout in this city to make things uncomfortable for a man in my position. There were several developers who weren’t very happy when I made sure they were inundated in red tape. They waded through it, eventually, but I know it cost them a bundle.” The gleam of sorrow in his eye forged into steel, and Josh realized this was not a man to mess with. “You find who did this to my daughter,” he said, fury threading through his grief. “You find who did this to my daughter and I will personally see to it that they pay.”

  SAM did her best to keep Snickers quiet as she slipped her key into Josh’s door, but the poor little dog had been cooped up in a combination of car, crate and storage room for most of the day and was now in a frenzy of squirming, licking enthusiasm. But it was late, and Sam knew that Josh needed his sleep. And the fact that he’d agreed to take in Karen’s dog when he clearly wasn’t crazy about the idea weighed heavily on Sam’s conscience. Since they’d run into each other so unexpectedly, it seemed his condo had become a repository for strays – four-legged and otherwise. Despite all his noises about wanting to help – and she realized he truly did – she should probably look into finding herself another place, for his sake as well as hers. Who knew how long it would be before they had word on Karen, or if any of the other woman’s relatives would even be willing to take her dog. And there was no need to turn his life upside down just because her own was so topsy-turvy.

  “Shh,” she hissed at Snickers, grimacing as the dog licked her face. Some well-meaning fool at the Roadhouse had fed her scraps from a bean burrito. For an animal who was accustomed to only the finest of nutritionally-appropriate kibble, it had been a real low-class treat. Unfortunately it had also resulted in some troublesome digestive issues, and now she smelled like vomit. Those burritos were bad enough the first time around, but regurgitated, they were pretty much toxic.

  Snickers yelped, a quivering ball of doggy nerves, and Sam hoped Josh was a sound sleeper. She jostled the animal to the crook of one arm, fre
eing a hand to set the alarm. There was no denying that having her apartment tossed and her friend go missing all within the space of a few days had given her a good case of the willies.

  “Hey.”

  “Oh!” Sam jumped three feet if she jumped an inch. She almost dropped Snickers in the process but managed to snatch her at the last instant. Whirling, the heart that had just stopped dead in its tracks started chugging like a steam engine.

  Well… damn.

  “I’m sorry.” Josh scrubbed a hand through his tousled hair – yes, tousled, although on him it looked artfully arranged – and then ran it over his bare chest. Sam blinked, then dropped her gaze, scoping out the scene just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. But he was just as semi-naked as she thought.

  Yessirree, that man was not wearing a shirt.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he continued from his position on the sofa, oblivious to the fact that he was a god. “I guess I fell asleep watching TV.”

  Sure enough, Sam now noticed the flickering bluish glow, but had no idea what was on the screen. Her vision had pretty much tunneled. Then Josh stood and stretched, sending a whole array of muscles into action, and Sam went perfectly still.

  Except for her rioting hormones, which were staging a violent coup. It was biological chaos. Even Snickers stopped her struggling long enough to appreciate the view.

  Apparently, the process of natural selection wasn’t totally exclusive with regards to species. This here was primo mate material, capable of ensuring the continuity of the race. Any race.

  Several of Sam’s eggs popped off her ovaries just from looking at him.

  Then Snickers whimpered, and Sam knew exactly how she felt. Nature had one twisted sense of humor.

  “You didn’t have to keep her with you all day.” Josh donned a CPD T-shirt.

  Sam watched wistfully as gray cotton slid over golden skin, but given the fact that her IQ had dropped ten points since she’d walked in, figured it was for the best. “I didn’t want her to bother you,” she told him, relieved that she could speak at all. Snickers squirmed harder, stubby little legs pedaling, so Sam sat her down on the wood floor where she promptly took off toward Josh. He looked alarmed for an instant, eyes going wide over all that flying fur, but then he surprised her by patting the seat beside him, where Snickers didn’t hesitate to jump.