Brian and Rafe were both in foul moods when they finally sat at their desks in the investigation bureau around ten a.m on Wednesday. Their joint raid on a warehouse, six hours earlier, with the DEA and Dare County Police Department, hadn’t gone as smoothly as anyone would’ve liked. Shots were fired between law enforcement and some mid-level drug dealers who’d been using the abandoned building to funnel the drugs they received from a Colombian cartel out onto the streets. Three of the bad guys had been killed, with two more in surgery. Five others were relatively unscathed and under arrest. Meanwhile, a DEA agent had been shot clean through the thigh, and one of the Dare County sheriff’s deputies had taken a round in his elbow. The latter could be a career-ending injury, and the rest of the deputies, agents, and troopers were praying it wasn’t as bad as it’d looked.
Before Brian could begin his detailed report on the incident, his cell phone rang. It was Sean, and Brian knew better than not to answer it. He connected the call and brought the device to his ear while leaning back in his chair. “Hey, bro, I’m fine.”
“Glad to hear it, although I would’ve appreciated a call sooner. The DEA and deputies both took hits?”
“Yeah. Grossman from DCS might be out permanently, but it’s too early to tell.”
“Shit, that sucks.” It most certainly did. “Uncle Dan called me a little while ago, and I told him you were probably fine, since I hadn’t heard of any staties being injured, but give him a quick ring, will ya? The news is just reporting two LEOs were shot.”
Brian let out a heavy sigh. That was the one thing about his siblings and him being in law enforcement or the military. There was always the chance that the others and Uncle Dan would get a knock on their doors one day to learn a Malone brother had been killed on the job.
“I’ll call him after I hang up with you.”
“Good.” Sean paused. “So, how’re Tess and her brother doing in the beach house?”
“Fine, I guess.” That is, as long as Brian stayed away from the pretty woman he suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about. He had no idea what’d come over him the other night. One minute he’d been drying dishes, and the next he was kissing her.
“Brian.”
“Huh?” Apparently, he’d missed part of the conversation. He wished it were entirely because of his thoughts of Tess, but his brain also kept replaying the earlier gunfight. He refused to tell his family how he’d nearly gotten shot. A bullet had whizzed past his ear, close enough to heat the air, before thudding into a wooden crate stacked behind him. At the time, his adrenaline forced him to ignore it because there were still bad guys standing and shooting. But thatwhizandthudechoed in his mind ever since the melee ended and the smoke cleared.
His brother snorted. “I said, Grace and Bonnie are going to swing by later to see if they need anything.”
“Oh, good.”
“Uh-huh. You sound distracted—I’ll let you get back to work. Talk to you later.”
It took a few moments for Brian to realize his brother had disconnected the call. There was nothing like a brush with death to remind you that you weren’t immortal. He’d been a mere inch or two from becoming another law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty that year.
After a quick call to Uncle Dan and a text to KC to let them both know he was fine, he set the cell phone on his desk and absentmindedly spun it in circles. The weird thing was, he wanted to call Tess just to hear her voice. He’d felt alive when he kissed her before realizing it was a shitty thing to do—hitting on a woman whose world had been turned upside down, and not forthe first time in her young life. And yet, he wanted to feel that way again—alive.
“I just gotta get laid,” he murmured to himself. A one-night stand with some chick who wouldn’t expect a phone call the next day should do the trick.
“What’d ya say?” Rafe asked from the desk across from Brian’s.
He shook his head. “Nothing.” Pushing all thoughts of the shooting and a warm, soft woman who looked exactly like Tess Bingham from his mind, he booted up his computer.
As he typed his employee number and password, Assistant Director Wanda Marsh exited her office, stopped beside Brian’s desk, and addressed the entire bullpen. “Sorry, everyone, but your reports will have to wait. Throw your tactical uniforms on. A mob descended on DCS headquarters over this shooting. They need all hands on deck.”
Just when Brian thought his day couldn’t get any shittier, the powers that be proved him wrong.
Tess readied the second body they’d received from a police raid that morning for the postmortem as Dr. Hansen dictated the last of his findings on the previous one into his recorder. Nothing like a busy day at the coroner’s office to put her thoughts of Agent Brian Malone on the back burner. In addition to the threedrug dealers that needed processing, they had two unattended deaths, two victims from a car accident, and a thirty-two-year-old patient from a local hospital who died of cardiac arrest from unknown causes. Dr. Hansen was handling the drug dealers, while Dr. Winiecke and Dr. Mendez were assigned to perform the other autopsies with their respective assistants.
From what Patty had told Tess, a DEA agent and a local deputy had been shot during the raid, but both were expected to survive. Thank God. She always cringed when she heard an LEO had been hurt or killed in the line of duty, and not just from the Dare County area. It was a kick in the gut when any member of law enforcement around the world died while on the job. Maybe Brian had been right—she did feel like the men and women in blue were family. Especially the ones she saw regularly. Tess just prayed she would never have to assist during an autopsy on one of them. Although it wouldn’t be the first time she’d been present for a post-mortem on someone she knew.
About a year after she started working with Dr. Hansen, a guy from her high school class had committed suicide. Even though she hadn’t seen Erik Milford in years, it still upset her. Dr. Hansen had paused his external examination after noticing a few tears rolling down Tess’s cheeks. He’d instructed her to swap assignments with Clark, who’d been the other assistant that day. Afterward, the head coroner told her that, in the future, she should let him know if she wasacquainted with a decedent so he could assign the case to another ME/assistant team. Dr. Hansen preferred not to perform an autopsy on someone he knew personally and didn’t expect her or any of his staff to do so either, unless there were no alternatives—which did happen on rare occasions.
Before she dropped Andy off at his school that morning, Tess reminded him to take the afternoon bus as he normally did, then go to the Carbones’ house for an hour until she could join him. A contractor would stop by Tess and Andy’s house during the day and meet her there after her shift ended to give an estimate on the extensive repairs needed. Tess wasn’t naive, though. She had two more contractors who would do the same thing later that week, before she decided which one to go with.
One of the first things she’d learned after her parents died was how dumb many plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and other service people thought young women were. They tended to inflate their prices, thinking their female clients wouldn’t know any better. Thankfully, Tess had been smart enough to consult with her male neighbors before having any work done on the house or her car. The first few times she’d needed to hire someone, she’d been approached with estimates that had been five to ten times more than what the jobs should’ve cost. After that, she created a fictional husband with whom she had to consult before signinganything, allegedly, when he got home in the evening. Of course, her “betrothed” had really been Frank Carbone or Al Reynolds, whom she checked with before agreeing to any work that needed to be done.
Tess hadn’t been ready to take on all the responsibilities that came with owning a house and raising a teenager, but thanks to those who stood by her, she learned quickly. Budgets, property taxes, utilities, repairs, school registration, parent/teacher conferences, and everything else she had never given a second thought about while their parents had been alive were, suddenly, at the top of her list of things to worry about. Up until the tree had landed on top of their house, everything else had paled in comparison.
“Okay, Tess, let’s start on number two.” Dr. Hansen stepped up to the autopsy table, pulling on a new pair of latex gloves. “Any word on the two officers shot?”
“I don’t know the extent of their injuries, but last I heard, they’ll both survive.”
“Good. I hate it when members of law enforcement end up as our guests here. Did I ever tell you my father was an FBI agent, stationed in D.C.?”
