Chapter Four
Lane Medical wasn’t that bad for a county place.
It had serviced locals from Seven Roads nicely through the years and, since it was located closer to the town than the neighboring city, at any one time it housed people who Price knew.
Staff, patients, visitors. He hadn’t ever visited the hospital without running into someone.
After coming in hot with Rose, he tried to avoid all of the above as he made his way up to the second floor while the deputy was snarled in the emergency room, waiting to talk to the attending doctor.
The surgery ward was an entirely different beast than the general population rooms downstairs.
Everything was shining, bright and smelled like disinfectant.
Even the resident behind the front desk at the mouth of the main hallway had a neater look to her that those battling in the ER below didn’t have the luxury to maintain.
This face was familiar and unavoidable.
Thankfully, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing.
“Deputy Price!”
Lily Ernest was one of those people that slightly skewed Price’s perception of time.
She was the legendary medical examiner Doc Ernest’s eldest daughter, but Price still remembered her as a baby, as a kid and then as a teenager who was only a few years older than Winnie.
Now? It bowled him over how adult she looked in scrubs.
The image clashed with the memories of her toddling around her mother.
It made Price think of Winnie. He still paused on occasion by the growth chart he’d notched into the doorframe of her bedroom at home.
But, just as quickly as he thought of his daughter and how kids never kept, Price reminded himself that he wasn’t there for a social visit. He buttoned up his parental awe and gave Lily a polite but curt nod.
“Hey there, Lily. You doing okay?”
Lily tapped her name tag.
“It’s nice to be on rotation here, I won’t lie. Mom’s a bit disappointed I’m not in with her though.” She pointed down, meaning the morgue in the hospital’s basement. “One day she’ll realize I really have no plan to work below sea level.”
Her little laugh was kind.
It was also gone quickly. Her gaze dropped to where his badge would usually be, and she added a thought in a much lower voice.
“If you’re here to talk to a surgeon, our very best is currently in an emergency surgery. I’m not sure I can help with anything else.”
Lily knew she couldn’t openly talk about a patient, especially to the law without consent. That probably went double for someone not even in uniform. So, she’d given him what he wanted to know without saying it directly.
She was definitely her mother’s daughter.
“If I wanted to wait for the surgery to end, could I do that in the lobby?” Price jerked his thumb over his shoulder and down the hall to the surgery suite’s lobby. He’d only had to wait there twice in his Seven Roads life. If the Good Samaritan was still around, they would be there.
Lily nodded and confirmed his hope.
“Yes. There’s only one other person in there at the moment so it won’t be crowded.”
Price gave the girl a genuine smile.
“I’ll go do that then. Thanks.”
Price followed the hallway through two turns and stepped into the surgery suit’s lobby with a growing fire in him.
He was angry that Josiah had gone from being fine that morning to needing emergency surgery that afternoon.
It also pricked at Price’s guilt. Had he caught the masked man earlier, would this have happened?
It was a what if that he was trying to push aside to focus on getting as much information from the Good Samaritan as possible. They needed to catch who did this to Josiah now.
Not later.
Unlike the emergency room lobby, this one was small and closed in with only one door for guests, one door for staff that led in the opposite direction and one door to the bathroom. The two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs were empty but that last door opened right as Price stepped inside.
He had already teed up several questions for the Good Samaritan, ready to be fast and to the point. However, he stopped short when the person in question caught his eye.
“JJ?”
JJ Shaw was still wearing her summer dress but, this time, it was stained crimson. Still, she managed another smile that took in Price’s attention and whirled it around all at once.
* * *
Fly under the radar, my butt.
“Deputy Collins,” JJ said in greeting.
She didn’t know what else to say past that. The moment she found Josiah she had known she would be talking to McCoy County law enforcement and, yet, she hadn’t thought it would be him.
Wasn’t he off duty?
“Twice in one day,” he said. “We should get a bingo card going.”
Three times, she thought, but who was counting?
Price’s gaze dropped to her body. JJ resisted the urge to cover up. He hadn’t been the only person to stare at the blood on her dress since she’d arrived. If the cotton was on the other foot, she would have done the same.
“It’s not mine,” she assured him. JJ waved her hand over the parts of her dress most stained.
“A few of the emergency staff tried to wrangle me into a room but, like I told them, this belongs to that poor man.” She paused.
“I’m assuming that’s why you’re here? I’m the one who found the man in the field. ”
Price’s gaze was still on her dress. He nodded absently then held up a finger.
“Hey, I need to ask you some questions, but could you give me one second?”
JJ blinked.
“Um, of course. Yeah.”
He spun on his heel and was out of the room in a flash.
If he wasn’t such an easy man to read, she would have been worried that he’d put two and two together.
That standing there in her flats, she was the same height and relative size as the person he had fought with that morning.
That common sense would make her the top suspect in what had happened to Josiah.
But JJ wasn’t getting the impression that Deputy Collins was ready to bust her.
Still, she decided to keep standing just in case. If he did come back in, cuffs out and accusations flying, she wasn’t just going to stay put.
The houses left on her list could be searched without a backstory or a pleasant smile and a part-time job at a café. Sure, if her cover was blown then it would make things harder. Not impossible, just more complicated.
JJ didn’t need to be JJ Shaw to find her brother.
She was plenty enough, name or no name.
The thought stayed her nerves. She loosened the new tension in her shoulders but made sure not to seem too relaxed. She marveled at the fact that, once again, she had gone from a plan of staying under the radar in Seven Roads to meeting the law three times in one day.
The same man too.
Deputy Collins was back in the lobby in less than five minutes. He came in apologizing for the delay and holding a plastic bag, not cuffs, in his hand.
“Don’t let this make you think you’re going to be here all day or anything, but I thought, no matter how long, you probably don’t want to just be sitting in that.”
It took JJ a second to realize what he meant.
He passed the bag over. She peeked inside.
It was a set of scrubs.
His gaze went to her dress again. He pointed to the bag.
“A friend of mine works here and she seems about your size,” he added. “I figured wearing this would be more comfortable.”
JJ hadn’t expected that.
“Oh, I couldn’t accept this,” she tried. “I’m okay, really.”
Price waved his hand, and the thought, off.
“Think of it this way. This is just as much for the rest of us as it is for you,” he said. “I’m not sure I can hold a conversation without staring. I’m thinking that the rest of the hospital probably isn’t going to let you leave without doing the same.”
He was right, of course.
Her walking around covered in blood wasn’t helping the whole beneath-the-radar thing either.
JJ smiled.
“I guess you’re right. I’ll—I’ll change then. Thank you.”
There he went, waving her off again.
“Here in Seven Roads, we watch out for each other. It’s no big deal.” He dropped into a seat near the door. “Take your time. I’ll be here.”
She bowed a little, went to the bathroom and found herself slowing as she did just that.
There really was a lot of blood, the more she looked at her reflection.
There had been no way to get Josiah to her car and avoid it.
It was a fact she had come to terms with quickly once Josiah had stopped moving.
When he went limp, that had been when she had decided to completely commit to not caring about avoiding the mess.
JJ had pulled him through the field, put him in her car and driven with speed to the hospital.
The attending doctor had told her the time she had saved instead of waiting for an ambulance had probably saved his life.
He hadn’t known that her reasoning behind the move had nothing to do with the man and everything to do with the simple reason that she hadn’t wanted her call to be registered at the sheriff’s department.
That was a trail she couldn’t easily cover up.
JJ looked at her hands. They were stained but clean.
It should have thrown her. It should have made her feel something like sadness or panic or worry.
Instead, she was trying to calculate the possibilities that had led Josiah from his house to that field.
There hadn’t been a lot of blood on the ground where she had first found him.
Not enough to show that he’d been attacked in the immediate area but then again, she hadn’t had time to search either.
His house had been a few miles away but surely he couldn’t have walked like that in the same condition.
Did that mean he’d been attacked in the distance between?
And by who?
Josiah wasn’t her brother. He had an adoption record, sure, but he’d been adopted as a toddler, not a baby. That struck him from her list.
So had what happened to him been just bad timing on her part?
Her search put Josiah in the spotlight but someone else had already planned on fighting with him?
There was no way to know until she got more information. JJ removed her dress and started to put on the green scrubs. She made sure not to look in the mirror as her bare back came into view. The scar was small, but the memory tied to it was better left out of sight.
Maybe that’s why Josiah hadn’t affected her so much.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen something like that.
JJ folded her dress, placed it in the bag and straightened her new clothes. The scrubs fit her nicely.
Price had a good eye.
Well, at least for clothes.
He still had no idea she was the masked person from that morning.
She was going to have to work hard to keep that from happening.
She went back into the lobby to tell him thank you but hesitated before she could say a word.
Like in Josiah’s house that morning, JJ could with absolute sincerity say that Price was a good catch.
Attractive, attentive and as far as she knew from talk around town and knowing Winnie, a good dad too.
There was also a calm about him. He seemed more collected than she would have thought was normal.
He was a good man, most likely.
Probably a good deputy also.
Too bad for him his luck ran out when he met her.