Page 30 of A Deeper Darkness

“No gun.”

“Donovan was shot with a .9 mil.”

“Yep.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

His phone buzzed. He hit the speaker button.

“Speak,” he said, briefly amused as he remembered the response from that Southern belle, Dr. Owens. No one had ever barked before.

“Fletch. Chick here to see ya.”

“Dr. Owens,” he corrected. “Send her up.”

He mashed the button to turn the speaker off.

“Who’s Dr. Owens?” Hart asked.

“M.E. from Tennessee.”

“Huh?”

“The carjacking’s mother, remember her? Battle-axe called in a second M.E. to do another post.”

“Why? She doesn’t trust us?”

“Apparently not. Who knows, though. Maybe she was on to something. You know this is starting to look like too much of a coincidence.”

There was a soft knock on the door, and he broke off. Standing in the doorway was a most attractive woman. Willowy, with shoulder-length brown hair, light brown eyes the color of aged scotch from a sherry barrel, a perfect mouth. Jesus, she was inspiring him to poetics and she hadn’t even spoken yet. He felt a ridiculous pull in his groin. She was just his type.

The mouth smiled, pleasant and polite, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She looked at once like a child and a woman, all rolled up into a basket of certainty laced with doubt. Pain. That was pain he saw there. Of course. He should have recognized it immediately. He’d seen enough to last a lifetime.

He was immediately intrigued. Who, or what, had damaged this stunning woman?

“I’m Dr. Owens. You’ll be Detective Fletcher?”

Fletcher nodded once and gestured for her to come in. Hart almost knocked his chair over getting to his feet. He was uncharacteristically tongue-tied. Fletcher threw him a lifeline.

“This is Lonnie Hart, my partner.”

“Good’ta meet’cha,” Hart finally blurted out. Fletcher bit his lip. Hart was a sucker for a Southern accent.

“Thank you,” she said, and sat in the chair across from Fletcher’s desk. “I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice.”

Her voice was soft, cultured, with hints of bougainvillea and sweet tea. Fletcher had been to Nashville before, a long weekend with his son. He’d been struck by how cosmopolitan the city was, while at the same time so very Southern. He’d liked the way they talked, so open and friendly, with those tiny inflections and knowing smiles that screamed:You’re a Yankee, brother, and don’t you forget it.

“Not a problem. Did you find anything interesting on your secondary post?”

“Actually, yes. Sand in the victim’s lungs. Fresh sand.”

Fletcher pulled open the file on Edward Donovan, flipped to the autopsy report. “Says here that’s most likely attributable to the time he served overseas. He was stationed in Iraq for two tours and Afghanistan for one. Stands to reason.”

“That there would be latent sand embedded in his lungs, yes. There was plenty of scar tissue from the old irritant. But this is recent. Like in the past few days. His mother said he hadn’t been overseas. I’m having it tested, we should know more this afternoon. Did anything in your investigation indicate that he’d been lying to everyone about his whereabouts?”

Fletcher felt that familiar zing. Croswell had lied to his family, too.

“No. This looked cut and dried. I’m still not convinced it’s anything other than bad timing, bad luck.”