Heroes in Uniform: Soldiers, SEALs, Spies, Rangers and Cops: Sexy Hot Contemporary Alpha Heroes From NY Times and USA Today Bestselling Authors

by Sharon Hamilton

  Everlasting: Chapter Fourteen

  If anyone had asked John to predict the following day’s events, he never in a million years would have come up with this one. He shook his head as he followed Danny through the construction site that would someday be a set of apartment buildings outside of Evers. It was thirty minutes outside of town, but still within John’s county. They stepped over rebar and abandoned tools to the elevator shaft that held Sam Denton’s body. Workers had discovered it at the bottom of the shaft early that morning and had called it in to Berta. It had been far too late to save Sam.

  “Charlie’s on his way out. He was over in Canton Falls at a project but he said he’d leave right away when I talked to him earlier. Should be here soon,” Danny said over his shoulder, then stopped and hung back as though he didn’t want to view the body again.

  John didn’t blame him. This was the worst part of their job. John took the extra few steps to the shaft without Danny and peered in. Two sides were concrete, the other two were made up of metal joists and framework that left the cavity in the middle open for John to see. From the angle of Sam’s neck, it was clear he hadn’t stood a chance. He had likely died on impact. His arms and legs had suffered compound fractures, the bone in one leg protruding angrily from torn pants.

  John looked up through the top of the shaft. Each floor had wood covering the open area leading to the shaft except for one of the openings eight stories up. There were splintered remnants of those wooden barriers hanging off the edge, and John could see what looked like matching pieces lying on the ground around Sam’s body.

  He walked back to Danny and looked at the workmen all standing outside the taped off area Danny had set when he arrived on scene ahead of John.

  “Anyone know what he was doing here last night?” he asked Danny in a low voice.

  “No. I asked them all what time he usually left, and they said it wasn’t unusual for him to stay and work later than the rest of them. He may have been foreman but they said he didn’t have any family to go home to. Sometimes, he’d just putz around a site long after everyone left, not really doing much of anything, they said.” Danny looked down at his notes as he talked.

  “And I take it no one was here with him?”

  “Nope. Everyone else knocked off at five thirty,” he said.

  John had a hard time believing a man with as much experience as Sam Denton would have simply fallen down an elevator shaft. And it struck him as odd that the wood barrier would just give out if Sam hadn’t fallen against it hard. Or been shoved against it by someone else.

  He wondered about suicide. If Sam had killed Caroline, would Katelyn’s return have been enough to drive him to kill himself?

  But what about the broken wood? If he wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t he step over that wood?

  It was possible the wood snapped when Sam tried to step over it, but something seemed off to John. He looked up to see Charlie Hanford rushing toward them from the parking lot. He looked pale and drawn as he came to a stop before them.

  “Is it really Sam?” he asked, as though he were still holding out hope that Danny might have been wrong when he called him that morning.

  “Charlie,” said John, holding his hands out to stop Charlie’s progress toward the body. “I’m sorry. It looks like it happened sometime last night after everyone left.” The coroner's van pulled up as John spoke. “We’ll know more after the coroner issues her report.”

  Charlie stared past John at the spot where Sam lay as the coroner picked her way through the obstacle course leading to the body.

  “I should have pulled him off the job,” he said, his voice heavily laden with regret.

  “Why do you say that, Charlie?” John asked, studying the man’s body language as he waited for an answer. The hair on John’s neck stood on end, a signal he’d learned to listen to a long time ago. Listening to that signal had saved his life more than once in his line of work. He seemed to get that feeling around Charlie a lot, but he couldn’t pinpoint a reason for the feeling. Maybe he’d just picked up on Katelyn’s hesitation about the man, given her feelings toward her father’s best friend.

  Charlie pulled his eyes off the elevator shaft and focused on John. “He was having trouble lately. He’d forget things. I’d find him on a site, disoriented. One night, I came back to a site to pick something up I’d forgotten and he was there. It was midnight, and he was walking around in his boxer shorts. I started talking to him and it was like he thought he was in his own house. He brushed it off, tried to joke about it, told me he’d just had a little too much to drink after everyone went home. The next day he was fine, and I didn’t see any signs of any problems as serious as that again. I...oh hell, I didn’t have the heart to take him off the job. I had him doing less and less. Just supervising things, but not working hands-on with anything.”

  “It’s all right, Charlie,” John said, but in his head he was wondering what Charlie thought would happen if he let someone showing signs of dementia work on a construction site. And John had seen Sam working pretty hands-on only last week at Katelyn’s studio. He’d been hanging drywall and installing lights.

  It took Danny and John about ten more minutes to console Charlie before John was able to get a minute alone with the coroner and Danny. John and Danny climbed down into the elevator shaft with Dr. Catherine Tanner, the county coroner who was also the medical examiner. The dual role was a blessing for the county. Not such a blessing for Cathy, who was paid one salary for fulfilling both sets of duties. John never understood why she hadn’t put her medical training to use doing something that would have earned her more money, but she seemed to be content staying where she was.

  “What can you tell me so far, Cathy?”

  She pulled her soiled gloves off, loosening each finger by the tip as she spoke. “Time of death was approximately eight pm to midnight last night. Cause of death is clear. Broken neck. I suspect the trauma to his spinal cord would have been significant enough to cause immediate spinal shock and a very quick death, but I can’t confirm that until I do the autopsy, if you want one.”

  John glanced around and then nodded his head. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Sam Denton had grown up on construction sites with his father. He’d been foreman for at least twenty-five years. It seemed as if avoiding an accident like this would be second nature to him. And, John wasn’t willing to believe this was a coincidence. Any connection he’d begun to make between Sam Denton and Caroline Bowden’s murder was a loose one—hell, it was full of holes—but something told him there was a whole lot more going on here than a construction site accident.

  “I do. Let’s do a full autopsy. Also, run a tox screen. I want to know why he went through those boards up there. It’s possible this was an accident. Charlie Hanford described some behavior…episodes…that might explain him going through them on his own. That’s most likely what happened, but let’s just check and recheck everything so we can be sure about that before we sign off on this one.”

  John glanced up and angled his body away from the crowd of onlookers, making sure only Danny and the coroner could hear him. “We’re going to treat this as a suspicious death, but I want that information kept quiet for now. I don’t want anyone to know that we think this is more than just an accident.”

  If this crime scene had anything to do with Caroline Bowden’s murderer, John wanted to be sure they didn’t chase the killer right back into hiding. May Bishop was right. The more active this killer became, the more likely a screw-up was going to happen. And John planned to be there when this killer made a mistake.

  “You got it,” Cathy said, her trademark commitment to thoroughness no doubt making it easy for her to agree with John. “Labs’ll take a week or more. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “What do you want me to do, boss?” Danny asked.

  Danny’s eager-young-pup demeanor would come in handy here. “Check on the pieces of wood down here and up above to be sure there aren�
�t any signs they’ve been tampered with. And I want you to continue to ask all the guys working under Sam about his behavior lately. See if they saw anything like Charlie described. But let them think you’re just checking off the routine boxes on an accident investigation. Heck, for all we know, that’s what this is. If you have to, gripe about me making you do busy work. Just be sure no one thinks this is us trying to take this to a higher level of investigation, got it?”

  “You got it, boss.”

  * * *

  Katelyn walked into the kitchen just as John was starting the coffee brewing. As she reached into the cabinet to pull down two mugs, his arms came around her from behind, pulling her into him and immediately setting her body ablaze. John seemed to be taking things slow with her, not pushing her to have sex yet, and she appreciated that. His sleeping on the couch could have too easily turned into an excuse for them to jump right into more. That didn’t mean his simple act of holding her didn’t start an ache for something more racing through her body. It was getting harder to ignore that ache.

  “I love waking up to find you here with me,” he said, nuzzling the side of her face and neck with his mouth.

  Katelyn laughed. “It’s my kitchen. Where else would you find me?”

  “Oh yeah,” John said, pulling back and turning her so she faced him, then caging her against the counter with his arms.

  Katelyn smiled. “I like waking up to find you here,” she said, her hands running over his chest. She liked that he hadn’t pressured her to share her bed yet. He slept on the couch every night, despite the fact that it was likely the most uncomfortable contraption ever made and at least four inches too short for his legs. It was nice.

  Really nice, now that she thought of it. She knew he was as turned on by her as she was by him—he couldn’t actually hide that—but she didn’t feel any pressure to have sex with him yet. He was incredibly different from Devan in that way. For Devan, as it turned out, his whole motivation was sex. Apparently, with a newborn at home, he’d decided he had to go elsewhere and she’d been the elsewhere.

  With John, she knew it wasn’t just about getting in her pants. Or her bed.

  “What are you smiling at?” John asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  Katelyn shook her head. “Just happy, that’s all.”

  John released her with a grin as he reached around her for the now-full coffee pot and filled their cups.

  “Hey, how did things go with that boy? That one you’re trying to help? Did he come in to talk to you like you asked or was he a no-show again?” she asked.

  “Trent? He checked himself into rehab. I’ve got a couple of people in town who said they’d give him a job when he gets out, and he seemed pretty motivated to make it through the program. He’s got thirty days in there and then, we’ll see what happens.” He shrugged as though he didn’t care, but she knew he did. A lot.

  “You did a good thing.”

  He grunted. “Maybe. We’ll see if it makes a difference. I can’t turn my back on it again if I catch him drinking. He’s underage. Luckily for him, a lot of people in this town want to see him get out from under his dad’s thumb and make it. He’s got people willing to help him.”

  “I have a feeling they’re willing to help you and by extension they’ll help him. It’s the fact that you’re going out on a limb to help him that’s making the difference,” Katelyn said.

  She saw a tiny telltale pink tinge beneath John’s tan and decided she’d let him off the hook. She changed the subject. “Do you like running?”

  “Hate it,” he said. “It’s my least favorite form of exercise. Why?”

  Katelyn frowned. “Oh. Never mind.”

  John gave her his look again and pulled her into his arms, tipping her chin up so she had no choice but to look at him.

  “Why, Kate?”

  “Katelyn.” She said into his chest, burying her head again. She loved the smell of him.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted you to run with me. I don’t want to go alone.”

  “I said I hate running, not that I don’t do it. It’s sort of a requirement when you’re a cop. Gotta keep in shape. Besides, I won’t mind running with you,” he said as his mouth began to trail over her shoulder, sending heat and shivers through her in a delicious combination.

  “Why?” she asked, hearing the way her breath caught as his mouth ran up her neck and he explored the soft spot behind her ear. Her heart sped up and her mind began to wander to her bedroom, wondering why they hadn’t slept together yet. Maybe—

  “Because I’ll just stay behind you. I have a feeling I’m gonna love running behind you, Katelyn,” he said, drawing her name out with the sexy huskiness that told her he was as affected by what he was doing as she was, as one hand traveled down to cup her backside.

  All thoughts of running and exercise and fear of leaving the house alone left her brain, just skittered right on out of her head as John and his kisses took over.

  Everlasting: Chapter Fifteen

  John kept Katelyn close to him over the next few days. If he wasn’t with her, one of his men was. She visited her father in the hospital every day despite the fact that he had more and more days where he wasn’t coherent. John could see Alan was slipping away from them. He and Katelyn both wanted to bring Alan home, but with everything going on, John was nervous about having him at the house. It seemed safer to leave him at the hospital where he was surrounded by staff 24/7.

  With Sam Denton’s death, construction on Katelyn’s studio slowed for a few days, but Charlie promised he’d have a new foreman in place by the end of the week to get things up and running. Rumors about Sam’s strange behavior seemed to surface overnight and filled conversations in the Two Sisters’ booths. What bothered John most about that is that no one had mentioned any of this before his death, and all of the stories sounded like one reiteration or another of the ones Charlie had told John. John was willing to bet if he dug hard enough, he’d find that all of those stories led back to one source.

  All of these things ate at the back of John’s mind as he followed the long dirt road out to Holland Barnett’s farm and took the cutoff he knew would take him around the back to the old barn and pond. Holland didn’t farm his land anymore and he hadn’t had any children to take it over. He’d sold off some parcels of the once-large piece of property to the surrounding farms, but kept the land that held his barn and house.

  John had a vague memory of hearing that the county’s search and rescue team ran drills on Holland’s land, but he hadn’t expected to get a call from them like the one he’d had this morning. He parked his cruiser behind one of the search and rescue trucks and got out. Adam Dean greeted him almost immediately, while the rest of the search team stayed back with their dogs either sitting by their sides or in dog crates in the back of SUVs parked around Holland’s old barn.

  “Hey, Adam,” John said, shaking the search team leader’s hand. “Tell me again what you told Berta. She was all up in arms about dead bodies in Holland’s pond.”

  “Well,” Adam said, rubbing the back of his neck as he spoke. “She’s probably overreacting. Heck, we all probably are, but I figured I should call it in.”

  “Okay,” John said slowly, looking at the rest of the team then back to Adam.

  “We usually use this location to work our live find dogs, but this morning we were running our newer cadaver dogs out here. They’re trained to detect human remains,” Adam said. John nodded. He was familiar with search and rescue dogs. A live find dog is trained to find any live human in a given area. Cadaver dogs were just the opposite. They’d alert on any human remains—tissue, blood, placental or fetal tissue, teeth, bone. They’d occasionally used cadaver dogs for finding evidence like a blood trail when he was a cop in New York City.

  “We weren’t working the pond, but one of the dogs went off in that direction on her own and we didn’t stop her. She gave an alert on the water.”

  That was new to John.

/>   “They can do that? Smell human remains under water?” he asked. He knew they were good, but that seemed miraculous.

  “Sometimes, especially with such a small body of water. If there are human remains in the water, the vegetation all around the pond will have the scent of the remains growing right in them. We don’t start cadaver dogs out with anything as complicated as a water find, but when our dogs get more experienced, we work them on water. She’s a green dog so she wasn’t working water yet and the alert was weak. But, I brought another dog over to the area to have them run it just out of curiosity.” Adam looked almost apologetic as he spoke, and John had a bad feeling about what this was leading up to.

  “And?” He was almost afraid to ask. He could see Holland walking toward them from the house, and the last thing he wanted to deal with was telling Holland Barnett they had reason to believe there was a dead body on his property.

  “He alerted also. I called in two of our experienced cadaver dogs to check it before calling you. All four dogs have alerted on the pond.”

  Before John could respond, Holland joined them, seemingly unconcerned that John was there.

  “Hey, John, I was fixin’ to come out and get you earlier in the week, but I hadn’t gotten around to it,” Holland said, holding a key out to John, apparently thinking nothing of the fact that John was out there. John quickly eliminated Holland off any mental suspect list. The man wouldn’t have let the search team or anyone else run around on his property if he’d known there was a body in the pond.

  John looked down at the key Holland had put in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

  Holland jerked his head toward the barn. “Key to the barn. Sam Denton rented it from me for the last twenty-five years.”

  John frowned. He hadn’t realized it had been that long since Holland had farmed this land, but it made sense. The man was well into his eighties, and he’d been injured in an accident sometime before John had moved to Evers. He got around surprisingly well, but farming would have been more than he could do.