Chapter 1
Tristan Montgomery walked into the coroner’s office and stopped on the other side of the double doors, staring in through the glass windows. He couldn’t see a whole lot from where he stood, but he was waiting to be let in. He was also waiting for Jasper to join him. When he heard a sound behind him, he turned to see a woman walking straight toward him.
She smiled at him. “May I help you?” she asked politely.
“Yes, I’m here to see a body, but I’m waiting for Jasper to get here.”
“Ah.” She reached out a hand. “I’m Dr. Amarylis Wills,” she announced, with the same brilliant smile.
His eyebrows rose slightly. “Now that’s an unusual name.”
“Not necessarily,” she replied. “My father’s idea. He thought we were the flowers of his garden.”
Tristan grinned at the mocking tone in her voice. “You are a beautiful flower, and I’m sure he’s very proud of you.” She rolled her eyes at the flattery, but he meant it. She was unique, petite, and dark. Her hair was short, almost like a small cap, but it suited her round face and huge expressive eyes. “So, you’re the coroner?”
She nodded. “I am, but I’m relatively new here. You probably want to see Dr. Cox.”
Tristan shrugged. “I don’t care which coroner is on duty,” he stated, with a careless gesture. “I came to see the body.”
Just then Jasper’s voice boomed through the entranceway. “There you are, Amarylis.”
She turned and smiled at him. “So, he’s waiting for you apparently,” she shared, “and here I thought you were never late.”
Jasper laughed. “I try not to be late.” He quickly made the formal introductions, and she nodded at Tristan. “Pleased to meet you,” she murmured. “Now come on in, and I’ll show you what you’re looking for.”
“I was hoping you would have something a little more constructive than just show and tell,” Tristan noted.
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she stated. “However, if you’re expecting results from labs or drug testing, that’ll take longer.”
“It always takes longer than we like,” Jasper reminded him.
Tristan nodded. “We just seem to end up with more bodies than answers, is all.”
“Yeah, and you can knock that off anytime,” declared the man already inside the room, as they walked toward him. “You know I have plenty of work to do here on my own.”
Jasper walked forward and greeted the other coroner. “Dr. Cox, how are you doing?”
“I would be doing better if you quit sending me all these bodies.”
“As you know, it’s not me sending them,” Jasper clarified. “I’m just coming around, asking questions about them.”
Cox nodded. “And yet somehow they still all seem to be associated with you.”
“Oh, I won’t take responsibility for all of them,” Jasper pointed out, with a laugh, “a few maybe—Tristan as well.”
Tristan nodded, as the older coroner glared at him. “What did you want me to do?” Tristan asked, raising his hands in peace. “He was trying to kill me, while they had me locked down in the hospital.” Amarylis gasped at that, and he looked over at her. “I guess you didn’t hear about that one.”
She shook her head. “No. Here in the morgue, we tend to be fairly isolated from those types of stories,” she noted. “I can’t say I’m against it either.”
“Of course not,” Tristan agreed, with a smile. “Plus a woman was with me—who had already been through an awful lot—and he was gonna kill her too. So, when he made his move, I didn’t have a problem popping him.”
“I presume you’re responsible for that guy then,” Dr. Cox said, pointing to the sheet-covered shape of a body on a table nearby.
Tristan shrugged. “No clue who that one is, but if it’s a single bullet wound directly between the eyes,” he declared coolly, “that one’s mine.”
The coroner nodded. “I heard it was a clean shot,” Dr. Cox muttered, staring at him.
“It was a clean shot,” Jasper confirmed, behind him. “As Tristan explained, this guy was set to kill the two of them right there in the Emergency Room.”
“Good Lord.” Amarylis groaned, her face paling. “We deal with the aftermath, not so much with the process.”
“That’s probably a good thing too,” Tristan added. “Now, Dr. Cox, what can you tell me about the other guy?”
“I understand you want to see if maybe this body is really Drew Honeycutt. Yet we have Drew Honeycutt’s previous autopsy report right here and all the shit that goes with it. So I am doing the autopsy of this body and will compare it to the data on the first Drew Honeycutt. Correct?” Dr. Cox pointed to Jasper, who nodded in acknowledgment. “He also has a single bullet wound to the head.”
Dr. Wills turned and stared at Tristan, with a questioning expression.
He shook his head. “Not me,” he said, with a smile. “That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have popped him too, since we’re pretty sure he’s the one responsible for the sniper attack that dropped Mason.”
She frowned at him. “I did hear about that.… I’ve known Tesla for a long time.”
Jasper confirmed, “We’re pretty sure this Drew guy tried to take out Mason.”
“Lord.” Amarylis shook her head. “And the guy you shot?” She turned to Tristan.
“The cleaner hired to kill all witnesses involved with the same issue regarding Mason,” he replied. “We’re still trying to get to the big boss who hired all these guys. These are all pretty much just pawns in the game.”
“Damn,” Dr. Cox murmured. “I don’t have a whole lot to tell you about this latest body. He was clean too, as far as I can tell. We haven’t got the tox screen back yet, but I’m not expecting to find anything upsetting about it or different. It looks like a clean kill right through the back of the head.”
“Execution style?” Jasper asked.
“That’s what I would have said,” Dr. Cox shared, “but it’s almost impossible to tell until you figure out what the hell is going on here.”
“As far as we know, and according to the blabbermouth over there,” Tristan explained, gesturing to the body of the man he had shot in the hospital, “he was the professional crime-scene cleaner at the house of the woman who was with me at the hospital, that he was so intent on killing too.”
The coroner asked, “Not one of my forensic guys?”
Tristan shook his head. “No, he came after you were done collecting evidence. Yeah, this guy was one of the house cleaning crews we normally hired to clean up the mess left behind from the murders, the blood, and all that.”
“Jeez.” Dr. Wills stared at Tristan. “So, he would have been around there at practically the same time as our forensics people.”
“Where this particular guy is concerned—our professional crime-scene cleaner who moonlights as a professional hit man type of cleaner—I think he was probably lurking around every scene. He was definitely inside when the woman’s house was being professionally rid of blood.” Tristan nodded. “We think he was in the area when the intruder was shot at the woman’s house too. That same woman was at the hospital with me, and this guy wanted to shoot us both because it involved her house.”
Amarylis frowned at him. “There seems to be an awful lot to this story that you’re not telling us.”
“An awful lot is involved leading up to this story,” Jasper noted cautiously, “and honestly? The less you know, the better. Most of it needs to be kept under wraps anyway.”
She shook her head. “It’s awfully hard for us to do our jobs if we don’t get full access to all the information.”
“That’s true,” Jasper conceded, “but, if for any reason the bad guys decide to kidnap you, and they think that you have information they want—or don’t want you to have—wouldn’t you prefer to not know?”
She stared at him, her gaze intent. “That is one theory, but, if I don’t know anything, I have nothing to give them and nothing to save my life with. They will think I do have the information regardless.”
“But, if their belief is all they need in order to take you out,” Jasper shared, “it won’t matter what you say. Can’t argue with them, when killing people solves all their problems, or so they think.”
She shrugged and nodded. “I still would prefer to have the whole story.”
Dr. Cox looked over at her intently, “I have most of it,” he stated, his tone harsh and brash. “I’ll fill you in afterward.”
She nodded. “That would be good.” They continued to discuss the male in front of them, and, when they were done, Tristan looked over at Dr. Cox.
“Now the woman’s body,” Dr. Cox indicated, with a sigh, as he looked over at Amarylis. “That is one of yours.”
“The woman who was brought in this morning?” Amarylis asked.
Dr. Cox nodded. “She is related to this whole mess too.”
“Jeez.” Amarylis quickly walked past several other tables to reach another figure, lying on the far table. “How does she fit into this?”
“She’s the one who clubbed me over the head,” Tristan declared, his voice turning harsh, “putting me in the hospital. Then the same guy who tried to take me out at the hospital is probably the same one who took her out beforehand. He’s cleaning up loose ends.”
“Nice world you guys live in,” Amarylis muttered.
“No, not at all,” Jasper argued, “but Mason’s case is the world we have to deal with right now, so we don’t have a whole lot of options.”
“I get it,” she admitted, while scrunching up her nose. They quickly went over the details on the dead woman. “Honestly, this one died long before her time. She was in her mid-fifties, in good shape. She was healthy, no sign of any disease in her body. She was a nonsmoker, and everything looked good, except for the bullet wound to the side of her head,” Amarylis shared, looking back over at Tristan.
“I didn’t shoot her. However, just in case you’re worried,” Tristan teased, “a bullet between the eyes is standard practice for any of us who were trained to shoot properly. If you don’t know how to shoot, then you aim for a chest shot. That way you’re more likely to hit your target and to bring them down. You can always finish them off after that.” Amarylis gave a stifled groan, but Tristan kept going. “Yet those of us who can shoot and can hit our target, we take them out with a head shot. It’s faster and cleaner.”
She winced and nodded. “So, you’re not the only pros on this one. But she likely moved right as he shot.”
He smirked, wondering how a coroner could have qualms about all this. “Considering you probably don’t understand a job done by a rookie versus a pro in this context,” he noted, giving her a boyish smile, “you’re right.”
“What did I say wrong?” she asked in confusion.
“What we’re dealing with in this case,” Jasper jumped in, “are actual mercenaries.”
“Ah.” She shook her head. “That’s even uglier, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” Tristan agreed. “It is ugly when somebody hired these guys to try to take out Mason, and some of these bad guys probably knew Mason on a personal basis, particularly Drew here,” he added, pointing back at the cadaver they’d just been looking at. “Drew was military and had worked on this base for many years. No way he wouldn’t have come into contact with Mason at some point.”
Amarylis frowned and suggested, “Maybe that’s the source of the unrest?”
“Maybe, but there’s just not enough of an evidence trail to show that,” Tristan replied. “What I do need is everything you can tell me about the female. She appears to be the weak link here.”
“In what way?” Amarylis challenged.
“She left me alive, for one,” Tristan responded, looking at Amarylis directly. “So she’s not as bloodthirsty as the rest of her team. However, that reason alone got her killed for her deemed failure on the job.”
“God,” Amarylis muttered, shaking her head. “Okay, fine. I don’t have a whole lot on her though, but I’ll run you a copy of what I have.”
“Send it to my email, please,” Tristan stated.
“I’ll send it to all of us via email,” she muttered. She looked over at the head coroner, and he just nodded.
“You do that,” Dr. Cox confirmed, with a nod. “Everything that’s just been discussed here is otherwise under wraps,” he added. “So we don’t talk about it with anybody else but the approved military investigators.”
“Unless of course we’re brought in for questioning over it,” she added.
Dr. Cox added, “In which case these guys will be there too.”
“Good enough,” she said cheerfully. She headed out of the main area of the morgue, and Tristan watched as she went into a small room off to the side.
Dr. Cox smiled. “Dr. Amarylis is new, but she’s sharp as a tack.”
“She appears to be,” Jasper noted.
“She doesn’t necessarily know how things work when you guys come around, though,” Dr. Cox noted.
Tristan gave him a hard smile.
Dr. Cox shook his head. “That’s okay. She’ll learn.”
Tristan burst out laughing at that. “Does this mean that you’re leaving us, Doc?”
“No,” Dr. Cox declared. “It’s just that you guys keep bringing me more than enough business, and I needed some help. I did have another doctor doing his practicum here, and we were looking to keep him on, but he decided, well, he didn’t want to work here with me.” Dr. Cox shrugged.
“Sorry about that,” Tristan replied. “It’s always tough when you can’t find decent staff.”
“It is, indeed.” Then Dr. Cox smiled. “Lucky for me, Dr. Amarylis came along.”
*