No Escape

That was a horrible thought. Lauren couldn’t bear the idea of Megan lying here in this place of the dead for days without anyone knowing where she was.

The coroner’s voice was lower, softer, and the Southern accent was more pronounced. “I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Cooper. But I’m going to get the guy who did this. For what it’s worth, I can promise you that. He won’t get away with what he’s done.”

The conviction in his voice startled Lauren. It was raw and hoarse. She looked into those gold eyes and saw the stormy intensity of his gaze. She cleared her throat to make her voice work. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name.”

The morgue door opened, and a rotund man in his fifties stepped into the room with a file in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. He wore dark blue scrubs and a matching surgical hat. A mask hung loose around his neck. He gazed heatedly at the coroner standing beside Lauren.

“What are you doing in here, Detective Sawyer?”

The coroner ignored the older man and focused on Lauren. “Are you okay? Can you stand?”

Not knowing what was going on, Lauren drew away from the man.

“Never mind what you’re doing here.” The new coroner set his cup down on the nearby counter and grabbed the door. He pulled it open. “You’re leaving. Get out of here.”

The coroner—Detective Sawyer—looked at Lauren, tried to say something, then shook his head and left.

Lauren watched him go and didn’t understand anything that had happened, but she was going to find out. She headed for the door, hurrying to catch up.

Chapter 2

You’re some piece of work, Sawyer.

Sighing in self-disgust, Heath Sawyer slipped out of the white lab coat as he strode down the hallway from the morgue. His long legs ate up the distance, but he couldn’t get out of the building fast enough.

He’d wanted to see the dead woman’s body himself, to get a feel for her and how she’d died. Whenever he was working a case, he wanted to know as much as he could about the victims. Seeing them at the crime scene or the morgue helped, but the trade-off was demanding. That kind of intimacy was a lodestone for nightmares. Years later, he could still remember the faces of the first case he’d investigated. He hadn’t planned on running into the sister on this one.

But that didn’t stop you from taking advantage of the situation when it presented itself, did it?

A wave of guilt assailed him, but he pushed it away. He’d learned to do that on the job, and he was on the job now, even out of his jurisdiction. Hell, he was out of his country.

Memory of the woman’s perfume teased at his mind. Lauren Cooper was holding herself together better than a lot of grieving relatives Heath had dealt with over the years. In fact, she was holding it together better than he had when he’d found out about Janet.

He dropped the lab coat onto the counter where an older woman talked on the phone and entered data on a computer that had seen better days. A Bob Marley poster hung on the wall beside a calendar that said, Welcome to Jamaica. Have a Nice Day.

The woman narrowed her eyes, and her face pinched into a frown as she watched Heath. “Hey. Hey, you. You come back here and put that where it goes. I’m not your maid.” Her island accent was thick.

Heath ignored her and headed for the stairs because they were faster than taking the elevator. He couldn’t wait to be outside again where he could breathe. The island temperature was cooler than it currently was back in Atlanta, but the humidity was worse. He fished his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and slid them into place.

The area was dangerous, and that woman—Lauren Cooper—didn’t look like someone used to dealing with dangerous situations. She had no business being at the hospital. The State Department should have taken care of the arrangements for getting her sister’s body back to Chicago.

That image of her standing there beside her dead sister was going to haunt him. He felt guilty for having noticed how pretty she was. He didn’t know what it was, but there was some indefinable quality about Lauren Cooper that had caught his attention.

Heath forced himself to keep moving. The woman wasn’t his problem. She wasn’t his responsibility. She couldn’t help him because she didn’t know what had happened to her sister. He was here looking for a murderer.

The man who had killed Janet.

As the pain and loss took him, Heath closed his eyes and tried to push it away. He had work to do, and he’d taken a leave of absence from the P.D. to get it done, to clear the ghosts from his head.

And he knew who his target was. Finally, in the picture of Megan Taylor, he had another link in the chain he intended to hang around Gibson’s neck before he dropped the man into the ocean.

Let’s see him magic his way out of that.

A trio of young nurses came down the stairs. They chattered in English and a smattering of other languages Heath couldn’t identify. And they laughed as they talked about the party they’d gone to last night. He gave way before them and pulled to one side of the narrow stairwell. He nodded a silent greeting.

Then someone’s hand dropped onto his elbow and yanked him around. He almost slipped on the narrow stairs, but his left arm came around, hand turning and curling over his assailant’s wrist. The move broke the grip at once.

His right hand curled into a fist at his side, and his weight shifted on his knees as he prepared to throw a punch. The response was automatic, drummed into him from years spent on Peachtree and other violent streets in Atlanta while he learned his tradecraft in law enforcement. Mostly, he’d learned how to stay alive. And truth to tell, some of that willingness to hit came out of his Waycross, Georgia, roots, as well.

The identity of the person who had grabbed him surprised him.

Lauren Cooper no longer looked vulnerable and confused. Her dark eyes blazed with fury. Her black hair was cut close and followed the shape of her head down to her jawline and stopped just short of touching her shoulders. He remembered the style was called a bob, something he’d had to learn while taking witness statements.

She was beautiful. He’d noticed that when he’d talked to her in the morgue. Her sleeveless navy blue dress hugged every curve. Tiny silver hoops glinted at her ears, and a small silver cat pendant hung on the slope of just a hint of cleavage. Her mouth was generous, full-lipped, and her chin was strong and fierce. He hadn’t noticed earlier, but there was a small spatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She wore short, black leather boots with buckles, and she looked as if she wanted to plant one of those boots where it would hurt.

As soon as that thought struck him, Heath turned sideways just a little, enough to hopefully allow him to block anything she might throw at him. He held up his hands in surrender. In his rumpled suit, one of the charcoal pinstriped numbers he wore on the job, he felt overdressed for the coming fight, but it had been enough to get him through the morgue staff.

“Who do you think you are?” Lauren reached out and grabbed him with both hands.

Pain ripped through Heath as he realized she’d grabbed shirt and chest hair, and he was pretty sure that was what she’d intended to do. “Hey, take it easy.”

“Don’t you tell me to take it easy. You just lied to me back there. Do you get off on doing that?”

Heath grabbed her wrists and tried to disengage her. “Look, I’m sorry. You don’t know what’s going on here.”

“No. And you’re going to tell me.” Lauren set herself and shook him. It wasn’t hard to do. On the stairs he was off-balance, and there was the added problem of him not wanting to hurt her.

Heath scrambled to keep his balance, but one foot slid off the step, and he had to shift quickly to stop himself from falling. The woman was prepared for that. As soon as he moved, she yanked again, pulling him into her and backing into the stairwell railing. He knew her next move was to set herself again, twist and shove him down the steps. It was what he would have done. If he’d allowed himself to get in so close to a perp.

So he did the only thing he could do under the circumstances: he let go of her wrists and wrapped his arms around her, holding on tight. Her muscular body tensed against him, and he was surprised at her strength. She was five feet eight inches tall without the boots, and the low heels pushed her up another couple inches. She smelled sweet, a hint of vanilla and something else, some kind of berry. He was pretty sure of that, but his senses were swimming.

“Hey. Hey. Hold on.”

“No.” She pushed against him, but he held on tightly. She tried to knee him, but he turned the blow aside with his thigh.

He put on his cop voice. “Miss Cooper, you need to calm down.”

“I am calm.” She pushed against him, harder. Her short-cropped hair flicked in his face as she struggled. An inarticulate scream ripped from her throat. Then she lifted her boot and drove the heel down his shin and into the top of his foot.

Pain burned the length of Heath’s shin, but he held on to her, afraid that she was going to fall down the staircase and get hurt.

Two heavyset orderlies in hospital scrubs raced down the hallway. The woman at the desk urged them on, speaking in French or Chinese for all Heath knew. He was pretty sure it wasn’t Spanish. He knew Spanish and Spanglish from the streets.

One of the orderlies grabbed Heath by the shoulders. “Let go of the woman, mon. Let her go now or I’m gonna mess you up.”

The other man grabbed Lauren Cooper and pulled her back.

Heath released the woman, then shifted his arm under the arm of the man holding him and forced the man’s grip over his head. The guy scrambled and tried for a new hold, but Heath spun around behind him, caught the guy’s hand, and twisted it into an armlock behind the man’s back. He held the orderly between him and Lauren like a shield. Pain drove the man up onto his toes.