Page 22 of A Deeper Darkness

“Dr. Owens?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry you had to go through this, too. Good night.”

Susan hung up the phone, drank some more of her wine. When the glass was empty, she crossed the kitchen to Donovan’s office. It was time to get some answers.

Georgetown

Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam felt her breath hitch in her throat.

Eleanor had fixed up the guest room for her. It felt so strange to be sleeping under this roof again, after all these years. And there was no way the woman could have known that Sam and Donovan had made love for the first time in this very bed, with its hearty scrolled wrought-iron headboard, when Eleanor and Jack Donovan were out of town.

Do beds have memories? Can they recognize the feel of a body that’s been in them before? She’d shied away from lying down, but finally gave that up as foolishness and settled in on the downy white comforter.

Maybe she shouldn’t have had that last bit of scotch.

She sat up and peered into the glass. There was a minuscule drop left over. She upended it and let the musky iodine scent fill her nostrils.

Maybe she should have another.

She slid off the edge of the bed and went to the door. Eleanor was in the other wing, on the other side of the house. She wouldn’t know, much less mind. Though Sam doubted Eleanor dulled her pain with scotch and hand washing.

It was just… She knew it was irrational, but she was afraid that she would infect others with her bad fortune. It seemed to be happening all around her.

It was humiliating. Embarrassing. At work she could easily cover it up—after all, she dealt in blood and flesh and ran a clean shop, so no one blinked twice unless she became frantic about it.

But out here, in the real world, people noticed. Eleanor had watched her like a hawk since she arrived, weighing, assessing. Worrying silently.

Sam needed to get back to Nashville, back to Forensic Medical, where her quirks could be chalked up to legitimate hand cleaning, and the people around her knew when to avert their eyes.

She felt the sweat pop out on her forehead. She had to do it. She had to do it now.

She set the glass on the bureau and went into the bathroom, turned on the water in the sink. It was as if she’d summoned the urge. Summoned it right into her room, into her body.

She scrubbed, and hated herself a little more. She’d have to take the pills soon. Her willpower wasn’t enough when she was out of her routine, out of her element. It was pointless, anyway. The empirical part of her mind knew that. She couldn’t bring them back. Nothing she did would change that.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four.

She stopped counting at forty. Her breathing was back to normal. The ball of pain in her chest eased a bit. Their faces weren’t crowding her eyes.

She turned off the water and dried her hands.

Susan Donovan’s call brought mixed emotions. Overwhelming relief, to start. Then a strange kind of guilt, the pervasive revulsion for her job that had been circling her lately. As obsessed as she’d been with the man’s inner feelings for her, she never thought she’d find herself actually looking inside Donovan.

She grabbed a robe from the bottom of the bed, shrugged into it. She definitely needed another drink.

Chapter Twelve

Washington, D.C.

Dr. Samantha Owens

It was a morgue. That’s about as much as Sam could say about the OCME. It wasn’t shiny and flashy like her office back home, with its beveled skylights, pristine, landscaped acreage and views of downtown Nashville. This morgue was old and dingy, housed in the basement of a redbrick building that had been a part of D.C. General Hospital for years. And, strangely, only a few blocks from where Donovan had been killed.

She was met at the front desk by an extremely tall man with a hitch in his gait. She figured he had some sort of osteoarthritis or a minor congenital dysplasia, something that could be fixed by a total hip arthroplasty, or perhaps even the lesser hemiarthroplasty if one had the time and inclination to be off your feet and away from work for a while. This man didn’t strike her as the sitting-around type.