Lawman with a Cause

by Delores Fossen

  It was a woman.

  And she was dead.

  Chapter Three

  Egan couldn’t push away the sickening feeling of dread. A woman was dead. And he might have been the one to kill her.

  “There was no ID on the body,” Egan heard Court say from the other end of the line. “We’ll try to match her prints so we can figure out who she is.”

  His brother was at the crime scene with the medical examiner and the CSI team so Court would make sure that everything was done as fast as it could be. Egan had wanted to be there, too, but he also had to make sure Jordan got to the hospital.

  And that she was safe.

  Ironic, since just an hour ago he hadn’t believed she was truly in danger. Well, he sure as heck believed it now. The person in the truck had wanted to kill her. He was certain about that. But the next steps were for Egan to figure out who this dead Jane Doe was and how she fit into what had happened.

  Obviously, Jordan wanted to hear all about that, as well. Even though the doctor was stitching up her shoulder, she was leaning closer to Egan. No doubt trying to hear Court’s every word. When he finished the call, Egan would give her the condensed version, but first he wanted to try to process it himself.

  “Cause of death?” Egan asked Court.

  “Two gunshot wounds to the head. No stippling.”

  Hell.

  Stippling happened when particles of gunpowder embedded into the skin. Since it wasn’t on the victim, Egan knew she probably hadn’t been shot at point-blank range. That meant, she might have still been alive while she was in the truck. Might.

  Egan dreaded this next question, but he had to know. “Did the victim have any organs missing?”

  Court blurted out a single word of bad profanity. “No. Not that I can see. Why would you think that?”

  “I’ll fill you in when you’re back here.” No way did Egan want to get into this over the phone, but it was a relief that the woman seemed to be intact. “Were there exit wounds on the body?” Egan asked.

  “No. The bullets are still in her.”

  As grisly as that sounded, that was actually a good thing. “I want ballistics done ASAP,” Egan reminded his brother.

  Though a reminder really wasn’t necessary. Court was already well aware that was one answer they had to have right away.

  “I’ll get it,” Court assured him. “You do know, though, that even if the shot came from your gun, or Jordan’s, this was an accident? From everything you told me, both of you were aiming at the driver, who was shooting at you. You didn’t even know there was a passenger in the vehicle.”

  Yeah, he knew that in his head. But his gut was having a lot of trouble with it. If the woman had died from his bullet, then the bottom line was that he’d been the one to kill her.

  “Also, I’ve made some calls about the truck the gunman was driving,” Egan continued a moment later. “It had to be custom since the windshield was bullet resistant and the front end had been reinforced. We might get lucky and find out who ordered a vehicle like that.”

  “I can help you with that when I get back to the office,” Court answered. “Might not be for a while, though, since we want to process Jordan’s vehicle, too. How is she, by the way?” Court asked after a pause.

  She had a lot less blood on her than when Egan had first seen her, but she had that stark look in her eyes. The one that told him she was dealing with a serious adrenaline crash and was maybe in shock.

  “Jordan’s, well, Jordan,” Egan settled for saying. Stubborn and driven. Not necessarily a good combination.

  “She really should be in the hospital,” Dr. Lucy Madison said to Egan the moment he was finished with his call.

  Dr. Madison had been working at McCall Canyon Hospital since Egan was a boy. She knew her stuff. And she was right. Jordan should be in the hospital, but when she’d repeatedly refused, Egan had brought her to the sheriff’s office instead and called Dr. Madison to come and check her out.

  “I’d rather not be at the hospital with a killer on the loose,” Jordan grumbled.

  It wasn’t her first grumble about that, either, and Egan could definitely see her side of it. Jordan was a former cop and hadn’t been able to stop the attack, and this thug could just come walking into the hospital to finish what he’d started. At least Egan could control who came in and out of the sheriff’s office, and the gunman would have to be plenty stupid to come into a building with cops.

  “Will she be okay?” Egan asked Dr. Madison. It wasn’t a general kind of question, though. He needed to know how soon he could move her to a safe location so he could get on with this investigation.

  “I think she’ll be all right,” the doc answered. “I’d still like to run some tests, but if it’s absolutely necessary for her to be here, it can wait.”

  “It’s necessary,” Jordan assured her.

  Dr. Madison made a suit-yourself sound and gathered up her things. “I’ll call in a script for some pain meds, but something tells me you won’t be taking them.”

  Jordan looked at her. “I won’t be.” And there wasn’t a shred of doubt in her voice.

  The doctor sighed. “Well, just take some over-the-counter stuff if it gets too bad. You’ll have a doozy of a headache for a day or two.”

  Egan figured from the way Jordan kept wincing that it’d gone well past the doozy stage. Still, he didn’t press it. But he would when the doctor was finally out of his office.

  “I will need my immunosuppressant meds, though,” Jordan told the doctor. “They’re at my place in San Antonio, but I haven’t had my dose today.”

  “Immunosuppressant?” Egan asked.

  Jordan dodged his gaze. “For the kidney transplant.” She gave the name of the drugs to the doctor.

  Dr. Madison nodded. “I’ll get you a new script. Will she be here for the next hour or so?” she asked Egan. “Because if so, I can have the pharmacy deliver it to her. Jordan really shouldn’t miss taking it even for a day. It could cause her body to reject the donor kidney.”

  Egan wasn’t sure he’d wanted to know that. It was always hard to think of Jordan having part of Shanna inside her. If that part died, it’d be a little like losing Shanna all over again. That probably didn’t make sense to most people, which was why Egan kept it to himself.

  “Jordan will be here for a while,” Egan assured the doctor. Just how long “a while” was, though, he wouldn’t know until he’d learned more about what was going on.

  “Tell me about the other two living recipients,” Egan said to Jordan once the doctor had left.

  Jordan had already given him the names—Tori Judd and Irene Adair—and while Egan had been making some calls, he’d done internet searches on them, but he hadn’t pulled up much. Irene Adair didn’t even have a driver’s license so there was no DMV photo on her. He had gotten a look at a photo of Tori, but Egan didn’t know if she was a match to the dead woman or not.

  Jordan drew in a deep breath and moved from the corner of his desk where she’d been sitting to the chair across from him. “I have computer files on both of them, but I honestly don’t know if one of them is the dead woman. There was too much blood for me to get a good look at her face.”

  Ditto. But what he had been able to see would be etched in his mind forever. So would some of the details that were eating away at him. “I’m not sure our attacker had enough time to wrap her in a blanket before he dumped her out of the truck.”

  “Yes.” Jordan said it so quickly that she’d probably given it some thought. But then she lifted her shoulder. “Unless she’d already had the blanket draped around her.” She winced again. Hesitated. “Did the woman have a missing heart or pancreas?”

  “No.”

  Egan saw the same relief in her eyes that he’d felt when Court had told him that. Like him, the relief didn’t last long.

 
“It’s possible the gunman had the woman on the seat next to him,” Jordan said, “and he pushed her out only after she’d been shot.”

  Egan had considered that, too. That was why they needed to find the driver of that truck so he could shed some light on this.

  “How long before we have ballistics?” she asked.

  Egan nearly told her there was no “we” in this investigation, but there was. Whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t, Jordan and he were in this together.

  “As soon as the ME can get the bullet out of the Jane Doe, Court can do the comparison with our guns.”

  Egan had gone ahead and sent both his and Jordan’s weapons to the lab. Still, it might be tomorrow before they heard anything. It might be that long as well before they got an ID on the woman. It’d be hell waiting, but it wouldn’t be downtime.

  “I’ve already called Kirk,” Egan continued. “He didn’t answer, but I left a message for him to get in here for questioning.”

  “He won’t like that,” she said under her breath.

  No. But then Kirk didn’t care much for anything Egan did. Kirk apparently wasn’t objective enough to figure out the only person to blame for Shanna’s murder was Drew himself.

  “Kirk is obviously a suspect,” Egan went on, “but I have to wonder why he’d wait nearly two years before doing something like this.”

  Jordan gave a frustrated sigh. “Maybe it’s just now sinking in that his brother is going to die on death row. Or Drew could consider this a loose end he wants tied up before he gets that lethal injection. He lost his appeal.”

  True. But there’d be other appeals. Ones that would take a long time. The average inmate in Texas spent over ten years on death row. It didn’t matter that there’d been eyewitnesses to what Drew had done. It didn’t matter that the man wrecked plenty of lives. He would still survive years longer than Shanna. Justice definitely wasn’t a substitute for the havoc that had played out that day.

  “I also need to know if there’s someone else you’ve crossed paths with,” Egan went on. “Someone you ticked off enough to do something like this. Because what happened tonight might not even be related to the two dead recipients.”

  Jordan didn’t argue with that verbally, but she did shake her head. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

  He waited for her to add more. When she didn’t, Egan went with his next question. “How about the cop, Christian Abrams? He said he cared about you a lot.”

  Her mouth tightened. “He thinks I’m crazy. I’m not.”

  Egan was beginning to believe that. “Could something have happened between you two to make him want you dead?”

  “No.” But then she huffed. “We worked together when I was still on the force. Now I do death penalty case reviews for a watchdog group called The Right Verdict. They want to make sure people haven’t been wrongly convicted, and Christian is still my main contact at SAPD. He and I have had a disagreement or two about whether or not someone incarcerated actually got a fair shake at justice. But other than that, nothing.”

  That didn’t seem like much of a red flag to turn a cop into a killer. Still, it was worth checking out. Egan pushed a notepad and pen across the desk toward her. “Give me the names of the cases where you disagreed.”

  The surprise flashed through her eyes. “You don’t really believe Christian could have done this?”

  “I won’t know until I’ve checked him out.” He tipped his head to the notepad. “Names, dates, anything else you have.”

  Jordan hesitated a moment and then wrote down a website address and password. “That will get you into my online storage account. The first file will be everything about the organ recipients. The next two will be the case files I’m working on for my job, the ones where Christian and I didn’t see eye to eye.”

  Good. He put the note with the info in his pocket so he could go through that while he was setting up a safe house for Jordan. He was about to broach that subject with her, but Jordan spoke before he could say anything.

  “One of the calls you made while I was being stitched up was to Alma Lawton. She’s the woman who’d had an affair with your father, Warren.”

  Obviously, Jordan had been keeping tabs on him. Of course, that wouldn’t have been hard to do since his father’s affair had made the newspapers. It had come to light after Warren had been shot and nearly killed. His father had led a double life for over thirty years, and his lover, Alma, had been a suspect. Initially so had her and Warren’s son, Raleigh. Egan’s half brother. But both had since been cleared.

  “Alma has an alibi for tonight,” Egan explained. “And the rangers are monitoring her bank accounts. If she’d withdrawn any money for a hired gun, we would have known about it.”

  “But if you called her, you must have thought she could possibly be involved in this,” Jordan pointed out.

  Egan shrugged. “Just ruling her out. That’s why I’ll check into Christian, the living recipients and the cases you’re reviewing for your job.”

  She looked up and their eyes connected. For just a moment he saw the fear and pain—something she quickly tried to rein in. He saw something else, too. Jordan, the woman. She was attractive. Always had been. And she’d always had a thing for him since way back in high school.

  That “thing” she had for him was apparently still there.

  Egan figured that was because Jordan and he had been each other’s first lovers. That sort of thing created weird bonds between people. But the bond hadn’t kept Jordan in McCall Canyon. She’d always wanted to be a big-city cop and had left Egan behind. It had hurt at the time, but they’d both moved on. And Egan had eventually met Shanna and fallen in love with her.

  During the time he’d been with Shanna, Egan hadn’t felt the old attraction for Jordan. But he darn sure felt it now. Felt it and shoved it aside as fast as he could. It wasn’t hard to do because of the voice he heard in the squad room. Apparently, it was a voice Jordan recognized, too, because she pulled back her shoulders and slowly got to her feet.

  Their visitor was Leeroy Sullivan, Shanna’s father.

  As Egan usually did when it came to Leeroy, he gathered his breath and got ready for battle. Leeroy would never just pay him a casual visit, and since it was well past normal duty hours, something must be wrong. Of course, often the only thing that was wrong was that Leeroy was drunk and wanted to vent. However, Egan didn’t see any signs of drunkenness tonight.

  Simply put, Leeroy had not aged well. He was in his early fifties, but looked ten years older than that. And he’d let himself go, too. Once he’d been a big college football star and careful about keeping in shape. All of that had gone by the wayside, though, when he’d lost his only child. Shanna had been the center of his life.

  “Egan,” Leeroy greeted. It wasn’t friendly. Never was when it came to Leeroy. He blamed Egan for Shanna’s dying. But judging from the glare he shot Jordan, she had top dibs in the blame department.

  “I heard you were here,” Leeroy said to her. He spared a glance at the bruise on her head.

  “How’d you hear that?” Egan asked.

  “My wife was in the ER with a stomach bug, and I heard the nurses talking about Doc Madison having to come over here and stitch up Jordan. The gossip is that someone attacked her.” Leeroy didn’t sound choked up about that.

  “Someone did,” Jordan said, but she had to clear her throat and repeat it to give it some sound. Obviously, she didn’t like dealing with Shanna’s father any more than Egan did. “The person shot at Egan, too.”

  Definitely not choked up about that, either. Leeroy’s scowl stayed in place.

  Since Egan wasn’t in the mood for getting into a scowling match with Leeroy, Egan just laid it all out there. “If you were hoping Jordan and I would be killed, you didn’t get your wish.”

  Leeroy didn’t jump to deny that was indeed his wish. And it
might be.

  “I came to tell Jordan that I don’t want any more visits from her cop friend,” Leeroy finally said. “In fact, I don’t want anything to do with her or anyone else who considers her a friend.”

  Leeroy let his scowl linger a bit on Egan, probably because he likely thought that friendship label applied to him simply because he was standing next to Jordan.

  Jordan shook her head. “What cop visited you?” she asked Leeroy.

  “Christian Abrams.”

  Egan looked at her to see if she’d known about that, but she obviously hadn’t. He definitely didn’t like the way the cop’s name had come up twice now.

  “What did Christian want?” she pressed.

  “To tell me some cockamamie story about the folks that got Shanna’s organs, that somebody was killing them off. He didn’t believe it. Neither do I. But he said he was worried about you going off the deep end over it. I told him I didn’t give a rat whether you went crazy or not.”

  Later Egan would find out why Christian would make a visit like that to Shanna’s father, but for now, he wanted to address the pure venom he’d just heard in Leeroy’s voice.

  “You hate Jordan that much,” Egan commented.

  “I hate you just as much.” Leeroy’s face was tight with anger, but he seemed to be blinking back tears, too. “If it hadn’t been for you two, my baby would be alive. You two let her get killed.” His attention slashed back to Jordan. “Shanna took a shot that was meant for you. That bullet should have gone into you.”

  “A bullet did go into Jordan,” Egan reminded the man. Even though it did feel strange defending Jordan. Still, she wasn’t defending herself. “It damaged both of her kidneys, remember?”

  “I remember,” Leeroy spat out. “But Jordan got the easy bullet. My baby took the one that should have killed Jordan instead. And she died. My baby died. Jordan lived because she got a part of Shanna. So did those other people, and it’s not right.”

  Egan latched right on to that. “Are you saying the recipients should have died, too?”