Page 113 of Cowboy Heat

She doesn’t need another nudge. She goes right back into it.

“He didn’t really retire. He was given the option to leave the job or be fired from it.”

That’s news to me, but I don’t understand why it has Mimi so wound up. She starts to answer my question before I even ask it.

“Dan had a good record at work for years, but the last few jobs he got…weird. Then he was assigned a body that really affected him. He locked himself in the morgue with it and refused help until a doctor at the hospital came down and made him open up. Danhithim, saying he had no business getting intohisbusiness.”

“How did I not hear about this?” The image of the man in the grave isn’t fitting with the memory of the soft-spoken man I’d met a few times. Neither image matches up with a fighter.

“Dan had served the parish for almost thirty years. He was the youngest medical examiner Amant ever had when he started. That’s why he was given a more dignified way out and why the gossip was tightly kept. I didn’t even tell Wyatt until a few minutes ago. I thought Dan deserved some respect after everything he’d done.”

“But you’re telling me now…because he was killed.”

I don’t understand why Mimi, a woman who is usually contained even when she’s frantic, sounds remotely unhinged.

I can even hear her take a breath. When she answers, she’s nearly whispering.

“I’m telling you because the last body he saw to was Ryan King.”

Without coffee, I’m still able to obtain the significance.

“As in Beau’s former foster father, Ryan King?” I ask, just to make sure.

“The one in the same.”

For whatever reason, the conversation feels wrong now. I try to move away from the quickening and walk out to the front porch. Deputy Myers’ cruiser is still parked outside, but I don’t make eye contact with him. Instead I pace myself across the wooden porch.

“Didn’t he die from a heart attack?”

Surely if he hadn’t, Beau would have already brought it up?

“That’s what the paperwork said.” Mimi must be moving too. There’s a rustling of motion on her end of the airwaves. “But, Kissy, the more I think about it…the only other person who even saw Ryan King was the sheriff.”

Mimi and I have never been a couple of ladies who super sleuth TV shows likeNCISorLaw & Order. We never did puzzles or read mystery novels where we try to spot the twist ahead of time. The only question and answering we ever have done together is watchWheel of Fortune, and even then, we’re pretty tame compared to most.

However, right now?

Right now, I’m picking up what she’s putting down.

“You think Dan falsified information about Ryan’s death?”

“He lost a job he loved over a man he didn’t knowanda man who had a heart attack at that. I just think that’s plain weird. Especially now that poor Dan’s been killed.”

My mind starts to race again.

“But what would Dan even do with Ryan’s body and records? Destroy evidence? Falsify his cause of death?”

I picture Mimi shrugging.

“It might not be a thing, but, Kissy, why else would someone kill Dan? He either did something or knew something and that got him in a grave.”

I can offer another maybe. Say we don’t know all of the facts. Talk about coincidences and wonder at the odds.

But then I ask another question.

“If he messed with the evidence, if he falsified records, then could that mean that Ryan King was killed too?”

That thuds heavy against me, but Mimi must have already been thinking it.