Rowe caught her wrist in his hand again. “Can I trust you?” he asked.
“If you’re telling the truth, you don’t have a choice,” she said.
But despite knowing about the scar on the back of her head, was he really telling the truth? If he were actually a DEA agent, wouldn’t he have been able to call someone to get him out of Blackwoods?
He released her wrist and drew in a deep breath as she pushed the drawer closed. But not tight.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Bernard asked.
Macy whirled toward her boss, stepping in front of the door behind which she’d hidden Rowe. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“I thought you’d be gone for the day by now.” The doctor pushed a hand through his thin, gray hair. “I thought I’d be home by now.”
“But you were called out to the prison again.” For another body. Her pulse quickened. Had someone realized Rowe wasn’t dead? And had they realized that Jed had helped him escape? “Wh-who was it…?”
“It was—it was…” His voice cracked with emotion.
God, not Jed…
Dr. Bernard’s hand shook as he pulled it over his face. “It was…Doc.” He expelled a shaky breath. “Doc was killed.”
Again she felt that quick flash of relief, which guilt and regret then chased away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he was a friend of yours.”
“Even if he wasn’t, nobody should die like that.” The older man shuddered.
“Oh, my God—what happened?”
Dr. Bernard sighed. “I can determine cause of death even before I do a full autopsy. Someone beat him to death. What I can’t tell you is—why.”
“I’m sorry….”
His eyes glistened with a sheen of tears. “Why would someone do that to Doc?”
Maybe they had been trying to get information out of him. If they’d forced him to confess to declaring a live man dead, the coroner would probably be called out next for her brother. Her relief fled completely, leaving her tense and anxious.
“Bob’s bringing Doc’s body in, but the warden wants me to do the autopsy on that prisoner who died this morning first,” Dr. Bernard said.
Nerves lifting goose bumps on her skin, Macy stepped away from the drawer. “Wouldn’t the warden be more concerned about Doc?”
“You’d think. I know I am. I just don’t know if I can autopsy him.” Dr. Bernard shook his head, his gray eyes filling with sadness. “Too bad you hadn’t gone to medical school. I could use an extra pair of hands around here.”
“If I’d gone through medical school, you wouldn’t be able to afford me,” she teased, to lighten her boss’s mood, like she always tried to lift Jed’s spirits.
“True. And you’re still my extra hands,” Dr. Bernard said. And as a morgue assistant, she was much cheaper than a doctor. “Did you take a look at the prisoner?”
She nodded. “Cause of death is pretty obvious. Stab wound.”
“So he’s dead?”
She fought the urge to shiver. “I don’t think he would’ve let me shut him in a drawer if he wasn’t.”
“Is that him?” He gestured toward the not-quite-shut drawer.
She shook her head. “No. That’s Mr. Mortimer. The crematorium is coming to pick him up soon.”
“That’s why you’re still here.”
“I’ll wait for Elliot.” Elliot Sutherland worked at his uncle’s crematorium/funeral home, but Elliot wasn’t coming to the morgue. She had agreed to take the body to him, so that he and his band would not have to miss a gig. “And I’ll wait for Bob to bring in Doc’s body from the prison,” she offered. “You go ahead home. The autopsies can wait till morning.”
The coroner ran his hand over his face, etching the lines even deeper. “They’re going to have to. The only cause of death I could figure out tonight would be my own. Exhaustion.”
“Go home,” she urged.
He offered her a halfhearted smile. “You’ve been a godsend, Macy. I’m not sure why you came to Blackwoods, but I’m really glad you did.”
She could only nod. She would have rather been anyplace else. But she’d had no choice; she had to be close to Jed. He had no one else. And neither did she.
SHE HAD LEFT THE DRAWER OPEN a crack, but Rowe couldn’t hear much. Her voice and the coroner’s were muted, as if drifting down to him through six feet of dirt. Despite the coldness of the temperature inside the drawer and of the stainless steel against his bare back, sweat beaded on his skin, leaving it clammy.
Rowe fought the panic, just as he’d had to fight it while zipped inside the body bag. Jedidiah Kleyn’s plan, to stab him deep enough to make it look fatal and convince the prison doctor to declare Rowe dead, had kept him alive but that damn plastic bag had nearly killed him.
Even though Doc had left it unzipped enough that he’d been able to draw some air, he’d had to force himself not to gasp. But then Macy Kleyn had unzipped him.
For a moment he’d thought she was an angel. She was so beautiful with her warm brown eyes and dark hair curling around a ponytail clip. Maybe she was an angel—a fallen one who’d brought him straight to hell when she’d shut him inside the drawer.
Although probably only minutes passed, it felt like hours. Then finally metal ground as the drawer opened and the sheet lifted from his face. He stared up—again—into those warm brown eyes. Rowe’s stomach lurched. He shouldn’t have let her shut him in the drawer where he hadn’t been able to hear what she’d said to the coroner. Had she told her boss that the prisoner was alive? Were the warden and some of his guards about to burst into the morgue and drag him back to hell?
He reached out, grabbed the side of the metal wall and pulled out the drawer all the way. Then he sat up and swung one leg over the side. The ding of the elevator doors drifted back from the hall and had his every muscle clenching. At this hour, the morgue shouldn’t be so busy. Employees wouldn’t be coming and going. And no loved ones were coming to claim his body. She must have given him up for being alive—which was the same as giving him up for dead.
Rowe had been betrayed. Again.
Chapter Three
“Jed told me I could trust you,” he said. Rowe had been a fool to believe a killer. But what choice had he had? His flimsy shiv hadn’t even fazed the muscular giant, neither had any of the trick moves he’d learned growing up on the streets of Detroit.
He grimaced, his body aching from the well-placed blows Jed had used to subdue him. And the stab wound throbbed in spite of, or maybe because of, Macy’s additional stitches.
If Rowe hadn’t trusted the man, he would have wound up dead—at Jed’s hands or another prisoner’s. But still he shook his head in self-disgust. Someone in his own office must have betrayed him. So trusting a stranger, even though he hadn’t really had any option, had been crazy.
“I should have known better than to believe a prisoner professing his innocence,” he berated himself.
“Jed is innocent, and you can trust me,” she assured him. Then she swung his leg back onto the tray and shoved him down.
“Get back in the drawer,” she whispered, as footsteps approached with the squeak of rubber wheels rolling over tile.
“I’ll be trapped in there,” he said, the panic rushing over him again.
She shoved the drawer, sending it—and him—inside the cool cabinet. He hooked his toe so it wouldn’t close all the way. But she must have been satisfied, because she scrambled into the hall. The wheels ground to a halt as she breathlessly told someone, “I got it.”
What? Him?
Through the crack the drawer was left open, he studied the morgue, determining his escape route in case she had told the coroner the truth. But she walked back in alone—pushing a gurney.
He waited a moment, making sure no one else followed her. As if she had forgotten all about him, she just stood there and stared down at the body bag on the gurney. Breathing hard, he planted his palms against the top of the drawer and propelled the tray out the door
.
“You okay?”
Her face pale and eyes wide and dark, she just shook her head. “No.”
Son of a bitch…
Not her brother. Even if Jedidiah Kleyn wasn’t innocent as he claimed, he didn’t deserve to die like this just because he had helped Rowe instead of killing him.
“No…” he murmured, a knot of dread moving from his stomach to his chest. He jumped out of the drawer and walked over to the gurney. Then he reached for the zipper of the body bag and pulled it down, over the battered face of the man who had helped him.
But it wasn’t Jed. It was the other man, the one who had been scared but agreeable to aiding Rowe’s escape. Rowe stared down at the bruised and broken body of the gray-haired prison doctor.
“Son of a bitch…” he cursed low and harshly. “I did this….”
As if rousing herself from a nightmare, Macy shook her head. “You were already on your way here in a body bag when this happened.”
“But it’s my fault,” he said. “They beat him to death because of me.”
Damn it. Damn it. If only there had been another way to get out…a way that hadn’t involved an innocent man winding up dead.
“What if he told them you’re not dead?” she asked, her voice cracking with fear. “Will my brother be coming here in the next body bag?”
“Macy—”
Anger flushed her face. “How could you use him like this? You put him in danger.”
Just getting sentenced to Blackwoods had put Jedidiah Kleyn in mortal danger. More prisoners left like he had, in body bags, than on parole. That was part of the reason he’d been given his undercover assignment at the penitentiary. The other part of the reason had been the drugs that moved more freely than the bodies in and out of the prison.
“You have to help my brother,” she pleaded. “You have to get him out before he winds up dead, too.”
Rowe glanced down at Doc’s battered face. If the elderly physician had talked, it was probably already too late for him to save Kleyn. The elevator dinged again, and Rowe groaned. Was this one her brother, just as she feared?
“I don’t know who that is,” Macy murmured, horror and dread glistening in her dark eyes. “It can’t be…”
“It’s not,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, and jerked her head in a nod that had her ponytail bouncing. “The van didn’t have time to get to the prison and back again. It’s not Jed.”
Yet.
“Then it’s someone you’re not expecting.”
She cursed and bit her lip. With a ragged sigh, she reached for the instrument tray and grabbed up a scalpel. She studied him a moment, as if she had just realized that the easiest way to save her brother was to prove that he had really killed the undercover DEA agent. Rowe’s dead body would be all the proof she needed.
“I can’t help your brother if I’m dead,” Rowe pointed out.
“Get on a gurney,” she whispered.
He hesitated a moment, wondering if she intended to plunge the scalpel into his chest the minute he lay down.
“Please,” she murmured. “You have to—your life isn’t the only one at risk now.”
Hers was, too, just as Jedidiah Kleyn had worried would happen when Macy helped Rowe get out of the morgue. The only promise the prisoner had extracted in exchange for helping Rowe was that the DEA agent keep his little sister safe.
The sound of heavy footsteps echoing down the corridor compelled him to move. Whoever had come down to the morgue had not come alone. He had no more than jumped on a stretcher than Macy draped a sheet over him and pushed him into the hall. As she drew the morgue door shut behind them, the click of a lock echoed with finality. Through the sheet, he glimpsed shadows—several of them—walking toward the stretcher and Macy.
“Good evening, Warden James,” she murmured. “How can I help you?”
By turning over the only man who had ever escaped Blackwoods Penitentiary and the corrupt warden’s reign of terror?
MACY BIT HER LIP AND WISHED back her greeting. But the warden didn’t react to her recognizing him. Everyone in Blackwoods County knew who Warden James was, so he probably would have reacted more had she pretended not to know him.
She held the scalpel beneath the edge of the gurney she clutched and realized how ineffectual the weapon was as she stared up at the broad-shouldered prison warden. With his bald head and big build, the fifty-something-year-old was an intimidating man. He didn’t need the muscle he had brought with him, but four heavily muscled and armed guards stood behind him.
If they wanted to see the body under the sheet, she wouldn’t be able to stop them, even with the scalpel. Her heart pounded hard and fast with fear that she had made a horrible mistake. She would have been smarter to lock her and the prisoner inside the morgue, rather than out of it.
“Get Dr. Bernard out here,” Warden James said. The man was obviously used to everyone jumping to obey his commands.
If he had really ordered her brother to kill an undercover agent, Jed would not survive his show of disobedience.
She swallowed hard and replied, “He left for the evening.”
“Then you need to call him and get him back down here. Now,” the warden insisted, a jagged vein standing out on his forehead as he barely contained his rage.
“I don’t have the doctor’s private numbers, and I’m not sure where he is, sir,” she murmured, barely able to hear her own voice over the furious beating of her heart. Now she understood why everyone in Blackwoods County feared Warden Jefferson James whether they were confined in his prison or not.
“I’m just waiting for a funeral home pickup.” Forcing away her nerves, she gestured with a steady hand toward the gurney.
“So you have a key to the morgue?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t really a lie since she wasn’t supposed to have a key to the morgue. “No. Dr. Bernard left me in the hall here, waiting. The funeral home’s driver is late.” Her friend wasn’t actually going to show at all, but hopefully the warden wouldn’t check her story.
“Who does have a key?” James persisted.
Despite the tension quivering in her muscles, she managed a shrug. “Maybe the hospital director?”
“Can you call him down here?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir, the phones don’t even ring down here after hours. And I can’t leave this body unattended until the funeral home gets here.”
“Why not?” Warden James asked, his already beady eyes narrowing with suspicion. “It’s not like he’s going to walk off.”
A couple of his goons uttered nervous chuckles of amusement.
“Is it?” the warden asked. Now he focused on the DEA agent’s sheet-covered body.
Macy willed the sheet not to move with Rowe’s heartbeats or his breathing. “Of course not, sir. It’s protocol for the hospital and the state that a body never be left unattended outside the morgue. I might lose my job if I leave.” And her life if she stayed and the warden lifted that sheet. If he was willing to kill an undercover DEA agent, he would have no problem killing her. And then her brother…
Her eyes widened as she imagined the sheet shifting a bit as if sliding off Rowe’s body, and she accidentally bumped into the gurney so that the wheels lurched a couple of inches across the linoleum floor. The sheet moved, too, but didn’t slide off any farther. Nothing of Rowe was visible beneath it but the outline of his long, muscular body.
The warden stepped back with a slight shudder of revulsion. How could a man who was so often around death be unnerved by it? “I don’t give a damn about protocol,” he said. “I need to talk to your boss right now.”
“If you go to the main desk upstairs, they can help you,” she said. “They’ll be able to reach Dr. Bernard at home and have him come back to the morgue.”
The warden glared at her before turning and heading toward the elevator. Like devoted dogs at his heels, the guards followed him. Macy waited until the doors closed on him and h
is henchmen; then she exhaled the breath she’d held and her knees weakened. She stumbled against the gurney and sent the wheels rolling forward a few feet this time.
Still covered with the sheet, the body rose, like a ghost rising from the dead. Then Rowe shrugged off the shroud and turned to her. He expelled a ragged sigh as if he’d been holding his breath. “That was close.”
“That was crazy,” she said, trembling in reaction to the confrontation. “I thought for sure he was going to lift the sheet. You were moving.” She reached out to smack him, as she would have her brother, but this man wasn’t her brother. He was a potentially dangerous stranger, so she snatched back her hand before she could connect with his bare skin and muscle.
“I wasn’t moving,” he said, his already impressive chest expanding as he filled his lungs. “I wasn’t even breathing.”
In her fear, she had only imagined the sheet slipping then. “The warden kept staring at you like he knew I was lying….”
Thank God he had not called her on that lie.
“I thought your brother was lying,” Rowe admitted.
“About his innocence?” She bristled with indignation. “He is innocent.”
“I thought he was lying, or at least exaggerating about you,” he said, as he slid off the gurney, “but you are really smart. You think faster on your feet than some agents with years of experience on the job.”
“I feel like a fool,” she said, because he was probably playing her for one. “I should have called the police, or at least told Dr. Bernard about you.” She could have trusted her boss to help her; he had treated her very well the past three years.
“You’ll get me and your brother killed,” Cusack warned her.
“I only have your word that will happen,” she pointed out. And she had been stupid to take his word for anything.
“Remember what happened to Doc,” he advised her. “Why do you think he died?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could have had nothing to do with you. A prisoner could have freaked out on him.” So many ODs came to the morgue from the prison, the inmates overdosing on controlled substances to which they never should have had access. It was very plausible and overdue for the DEA to investigate the drug problem at Blackwoods Penitentiary.
Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs Page 3
