“What type of suicide attempt would leave bruising around his neck?”
“Hanging.”
My eyes bulged. “No way,” I said, immediately, shaking my head adamantly. I turned to face Micah square on. “My grandfather was born in 1950. He grew up in east Texas. He told me stories of some of the horrors he saw during the civil rights movement and Jim Crow error. He despised some of his childhood. When he married my grandmother, most of his family disowned him. He said fuck it and moved them to central Texas to get away from his family and their racism.”
Micah looked at me with lifted eyebrows.
“There’s no way he would’ve hung himself.” I shook my head. “He saw a lynching as a young boy, and it still ate at him as an adult. He would never use a rope to kill himself. I don’t give a shit what this report says or that ME thinks.” I flicked the papers of the report with my hand, almost slapping it out of Micah’s hands.
“I believe you,” he finally said, in that firm, reassuring manner of his. His free hand moved to the small of my back, massaging it. “You don’t have to convince me of a damn thing.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Internally, my body still vibrated with anger.
“This has to be some kind of setup. Maybe the ME is in on it?”
He gave me a look.
“You already thought of that, didn’t you?”
A slow smile emerged.
“Of course you did.”
“Have an appointment with him down at the sheriff’s department tomorrow afternoon.”
“Good. We can—”
“We?There is no we.Iwill be meeting with the medical examiner tomorrow.”
“Great. AndIwill be there right along with you,” I declared.
“The hell you will.”
“The hell I won’t. I’m not about to sit this out.”
His eyebrows furrowed, and a deep wrinkle crossed his forehead. My nipples hardened in the face of his anger.
“This isn’t a fucking baseball game. You’ll keep your ass here while I do the work you hired me to do,” he announced, standing and tossing the autopsy report down onto the coffee table, before snatching the plates we’d eaten off of.
I wasn’t about to let him get away so quickly. “You’re right as hell. This isn’t a game. It’s my grandfather’s life. And possibly the life of a teenage girl, who’s involved in all of this somehow. I didn’t bring my ass down here from New York to sit on the sidelines,” I declared with my hands on my hips as I stood behind him in the kitchen. I shook when he slammed the plates into the sink, causing a loud banging sound.
He turned to me with flared nostrils and a tightening around his eyes.
“I’m not backing down from this,” I insisted, but my voice carried a touch less crispness than it had when we first entered the kitchen. I found myself backing up as Micah slowly crowded my space.
“You’re not?” he questioned, the same tightness around his eyes, but there was a shining in his pupils that belied his anger.
That look called to the center of me. My core began weeping in between my legs.
I inhaled, stepping back again, and met the hard surface of the wall. Micah’s arms lifted as he planted his hands against the wall above my head. Suddenly, it felt like I was in the middle of a game of cat and mouse, but I couldn’t tell who was the damn cat and who was playing mouse.
I didn’t have time to figure it out either when his lips stole against mine.
Fucking insane.
That’s how she made me feel. Totally and completely out of control, and needy. So fucking needy. She was far from my typical client. I never let someone who hired me to solve their case dictate to me how and when shit needed investigating or looked into. I wouldn’t have a client who followed me around town or wherever as I investigated their case, either. I damn sure hadn’t invited one to stay in my house.
Jodi was different from the rest.
