Drop Dead Gorgeous

But he’s not all ‘good boy’.

Oh, no, I heard him talking shit with the other teams, dishing it out just as hard as Heather, and that’s saying something.

And I noticed how he automatically laid his arm on my chair as soon as we sat down. It made me feel protected, something I’d deny needing or wanting, but in that moment, with a roomful of people looking at me, I welcomed Blake’s strength at my side.

My nerves had been screaming, reminding me to not get too close, to not spill the beer pitcher and set off a chain reaction where someone slipped in the liquid, fell, and hit their head, and to definitely not mention what I do for a living so nobody got grossed out and gave me that look of horror.

I hate that wide-eyed, mouth gaping look of disgust.

But I’d also realized that while Blake was tuned in to my jangling nerves and doing that arm-wrap thing for me, he was also doing it for himself. He was warning off the other guys and ready to defend me if the evening went the way it did at the beer barn.

Yeah, he’s good, but he’s also this wholesome version of alpha.

And I like it, which is dangerous.

I also liked the good morning texts he’s sent me the last two days, and the completely wrong, but somehow funny, memes he sent, one about iZombie and one about Survivor, accompanied by a note that they made him think of me.

So yeah, my dead, dark heart is threatening to come to life, and that’s a bad thing for us both.

Distraction? I need a big one.

As if I conjured it, the requested distraction magically appears. Not in my morgue office but in my email with a happy little alert ding. Seems the state lab finally got around to my blood tests. I open up the results of Richard Horne’s second blood tests, reading each line carefully and mentally comparing them to the previous report.

I was expecting them to be different, confirming some sort of contamination in the sample or error in the processing, but these results are nearly identical to the previous ones, with only slight variations that can be accounted for by the use of a different machine.

For all intents and purposes, they’re the same. Which means that Richard Horne had oddly high levels of heavy metals in his body when he died. And that’s weird, even for me.

“Hmm,” I ponder out loud, knowing there’s no one to hear me, as I spin in my chair. “What causes heavy metal levels and a heart attack?”

My mind is racing ahead, already contemplating possibilities and dismissing them in rapid-fire succession. I stare at the report until the black numbers blur and my eyes unfocus, which is how Jeff and Alver find me—frozenly staring off into space.

“Zoey?” Jeff says, and I startle, jumping and making a squeaking sound.

“Oh, shit, Jeff. You scared me.”

Jeff looks to Alver, who shrugs in answer like he’s seen me do weirder things before. Truthfully, he has. Though he hasn’t said a single word about catching Blake and me in that oddly questionable position, and I certainly haven’t had the guts to explain.

“You didn’t hear the door?” Jeff asks.

I look past him as though I’ve never seen the door before and shake my head. “No . . . I was thinking.”

He looks dubious, his mustache twitching as he purses his lips. “That’s what we’re calling daydreaming now?”

Alver snickers but covers it with a cough, and my spine finds some steel. As if either of them has the right to complain about that. Jeff’s the sheriff, and more than once, I’ve caught him ‘pondering’ a case in his office. And Alver sometimes likes to ‘give something a good think’ with his eyes closed and his hands laced over his stomach.

I won’t call them on it yet, though. “What’s up, Jeff?”

He catches the change in tone and seems almost thankful for the return to a more professional vibe where he doesn’t have to pretend to care whether I’m okay or not.

“I wanted to talk to you about something . . . uh . . .” Jeff stumbles over his words and looks to Alver, who recoils at the attention. “I mean, we’ve received a report about some concerning after-hours activity down here. And I wanted to follow up to make sure you’re aware that there are rules, especially where the bodies are concerned—”

“What the hell?” I say a little too loudly, and both men flinch.

Jeff’s hand even reflexively reaches for his gun, which is thankfully holstered with the snap in place. Are they shitting me? Alver told on me. He didn’t have the guts to talk to me himself and instead went over my head to Jeff.

Wait . . . did Jeff say bodies? What the hell did Alver say he saw?