He just shook his head. “No. I…could have. Almost came close…with…Haldyn. But…it just never happened.”
“She’s happy. She’s been by to see Hope earlier.”
He nodded. He’d heard. Jarrod had brought her to check on Hope himself. Two days before Daniel had ended up…here. In Coleson Castle.
With beautiful women wearing silk and lace and tempting a man to sin just bybreathing.“I just want her to be happy. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“So…why not with you? Why haven’t you found someone?”
There was something about the night, about the quiet, and…the hurt…that had him opening up to her. For some reason, it just didn’t feel likethiswoman would judge.
“I just don’t know. The job, mostly. It’s…a harder life than some women are prepared for, I think. My mother certainly wasn’t.” Neither had his ex…before Haldyn. She’d accused him of only caring about the TSP. He’d heard it before. Now…maybe he even believed it. He was almost thirty-eight years old. Wasthisall he really wanted his life to be?
“But if she loves you enough, a woman can handle the job. I did. And I know exactly what it entails. I still do—I feel the fear every time Heather walks out the door, you know. I probably always will. We worry for the ones we love. Even more…now.”
“How is she doing?”
“I was able to sit with her for a few hours. She opened her eyes, Daniel. She opened her eyes. Told me she wanted a milkshake, and then drifted right back out. Heather has always wanted junk food when she’s sick. If I had been able to get her a damned milkshake I would have.” She sniffled. Daniel fought the panic. If she cried, he’d be destroyed. “She is doing okay tonight. It’s going to take a while and she still has fever off and on. I am just telling myself her body is resting. Healing from the trauma.”
They just talked as she ate. Daniel did his best to ignore the beautiful parts of her seriously on display. Then she slipped upstairs to find her bed, on one of the floors upstairs he hadn’t been to yet.
Leaving him sitting there, a piece of chocolate cake in front of him, and questions he wasn’t quite ready to face.
What was it about the women here that made a manhurtso much?
45
Dom stoodover the body of their latest OD victim and swore. He looked at the M.E.’s assistant. Daryn had called him in special for this. Dom had just about been ready to clock out for the day. His dad had requested he stop by for dinner on the way. Dom was going to have to skip that now.
This was another murder. In a city of sixty thousand people, they shouldn’t have these many people being killed. No. One to three people per year was far more reasonable. That would match the national average a bit better. Not double digits.
“What exactly happened?”
“I’m not making any definitive statements yet, Dom, but I wanted to dial you in quickly on this.” Daryn moved around the table a bit awkwardly. He thought she was about halfway through her pregnancy now. Her husband Mike was upstairs going over assault reports for the last fifteen years, looking for connections that they hadn’t found before. It was long, tedious work. Mike hadn’t looked like he was getting anywhere with it either. “It is the similarities to what happened to the Tuell victim really.”
“I thought this was an OD.”
“That was what the report was.”
And Miguel was the one who was supposed to be handling all homicides—along with his team. “Wasn’t MacGregor on tonight?”
Dom was handling half of Daniel’s duties, and was assigned to figure out what in the hell was happening with Grundenman. He wasn’t certain why he had been called in tothisparticular body. “I’m not sure what’s going on here.”
“Commander Rodriguez wanted me to call you in on this,” Daryn said. “He ran upstairs to take a phone call, I think.”
Cell reception in the morgue and lab area of the building wasn’t all that great. Madison had griped about that before. And it made Dom leery. Anything could happen to someone down here. And it had before. They were lucky everyone had survived. Daryn’s sister-in-law almost hadn’t been that lucky. A.J. could have been killed, and she wasn’t much further along than Daryn.
That explained it. If Miguel thought Dom needed to know about this one—then Dom needed to know about it.
Miguel came in, a pissed off expression on his face that told Dom something else had happened. Miguel looked at Daryn. “Tell him what you told me. Then we need to roll. Something’s come up that he’ll want to help me deal with.”
Daryn nodded. “Basically, I’ve seen this kind of wound before. On a teenager who supposedly OD’d. I didn’t do his autopsy. It was Dr. Vawtyer, back then.”
“Who?”
“A teenager named Ricardo Ahumada.”
“That’s a cold case Iinheritedwhen I took over Homicide,” Miguel said. “I’ve been working it when I can. There are several inconsistencies on the TSP end that I do not like.”
